George Lawson, 19, a student at Warwick University, won’t comply. Invited to a I Heart Consent workshop via Facebook to discuss sexual consent, Lawson wrote:
Why I don’t need consent lessons
He held up a sign declaring:
‘This is not what a rapist looks like’.
Lawson says the invite felt like “‘a massive, painful, bitchy slap in the face”.
“It implies I have an insufficient understanding of what does and does not constitute consent and that’s incredibly hurtful. I don’t have to be taught to not be a rapist. That much comes naturally to me, as I am sure it does to the overwhelming majority of people you and I know. Brand me a bigot, a misogynist, a rape apologist, I don’t care. I stand by that.”
“I know a rapist can look like me. A rapist can be white. A rapist can be attending a Russell Group University and a rapist can be young. But the photo was supposed to be satirical. It was me playing on the ‘this is what x looks like’ trend and people didn’t get that. That was a massive faux pas.”
Adding:
“There is sexual assault and rape among students, but they’re blaming the wrong people. It’s a massive broadside against everybody. If you’re going to commit rape you’re not going to go to one of the lectures. They’re trying to help, so I support that. I just don’t think its the best way to help people. I think it’s wasted efforts.”
What he wrote was:
I want to call the people leading the charge behind these classes admirable, I want to call them heroic, but I’m afraid they’re not. There are countless other more useful things they could be doing with their time. They could be making a difference by actually going out and campaigning, volunteering and caring for other people. Instead they selfishly make themselves feel better by indulging in the delusion that all that’s needed to save the vulnerable from foul predators is to point out the blindingly obvious.
Self-appointed teachers of consent: get off your fucking high horse. I don’t need your help to understand basic human interaction. Secondly, go and do something. Real people need your help and they deserve better than you. Next time you consider inviting me or anyone else to another bullshit event like this, have a little respect for the intelligence and decency of your peers. You might find that’s a more effective solution than accusing them of being vile rapists-in-waiting who can only be taught otherwise by a smug, righteous, self-congratulatory intervention.
Jose Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, has been fined £50,000 and threatened with a stadium ban for criticising referees. Yep, just 50 grand. Jose Mourinho is a profitable business for the FA. They must hope he stays in the job and keeps talking and talking. His offence was to say referees are “afraid” to award penalties to his team, following a 3-1 home defeat by Southampton. The FA’s fine system is pretty opaque, but we can reveal that if Mourinho calls the referee a “scaredy-cat” the FA can order new silk carpets for their Zanzibar beach office.
At a press conference to launch his new book, Mourinho invited the media “to get deep” into the workings of the FA disciplinary department.
“You should get deep.You should go. You should be honest. You shouldn’t be afraid to write, you won’t be punished. Every word I say is a risk. I am happy I don’t have an electronic tag. I think it’s not far from that. I also think that £50,000 in the world where we live today is an absolute disgrace. An absolute disgrace. And I also think that the possibility of getting a stadium ban is also something absolutely astonishing. But more difficult for me to understand is when I compare different people with different behaviours or with similar behaviours, with different words or with similar words.”
He means Arsene Wenger, of course, the Arsenal manger who seems to occupy a place deep below Mourinho’s skin. Wenger called Mike Dean “weak and naive” when the weak and confused referee made a complete hash of this season’s Chelsea v Arsenal match, sending off the wrong player and letting the right player who should have seen red stay on the pitch. No fine for Wenger. “The difference is £50,000 and one-match stadium ban,” says Mourinho.
“The word ‘afraid’ is a punishment, and a hard punishment. But to say the referee was ‘weak and naive’, referring to one of the top referees in this country and in Europe, we can do. Weak and naive, you can use. And in this country, a word [afraid] is more important than aggression. So now we know. We can push people in the technical area, no problem.”
That’s a reference to when Mourinho and Wenger had a tiff at pitch-side.
We can only wonder what would happen should the FA offer its legal services to hairdressers, tabloid columnists or religionists. As Craig Brown notes:
One of the cattiest memoirs of recent years was the preeningly titled Know The Truth by George Carey, the spud-faced former Archbishop of Canterbury…
Carey took sideways digs at no fewer than three of his fellow Bishops, among them the Bishop of Peterborough (‘popular with the media . . . but he worried me by his tendency to pour doubt on all diocesan efforts to raise funds or enthusiasm’), the Bishop of Durham (‘his concerns were not always grounded in real life’) and the Bishop of Sheffield (‘another whose eloquence was often unintentionally destructive’).
Nor did he withdraw his claws from those of other denominations. At one point, he described a meeting between the Queen, to whom Carey is, of course, always unctuous, and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, who had, he noted, a ‘menacing beard’. The Queen, he wrote, ‘patiently endured the Patriarch’s rather lengthy answers’. Miaow!
If the FA ran the Church of England disciplinary committees, a bankrupted Carey would be living off donations.
Israel and Palestinian viral death of the day: Ahmed Manasrah, 13, was shot in East Jerusalem.
Israeli police say Manasreh and his 15-year-old cousin stabbed and seriously wounded two Israelis and then ran away before being shot.
Manasrah’s family denies he attacked Israelis.
Mansrah’s 15-year-old cousin died. The Palestinian presidency said his death was “execution … in front of the media” and a “heinous crime.”
Israel’s President Netanyahu says:
“An Arab boy fatally wounds a Jewish child and after that the security forces stop him and prevent him from continuing on a stabbing spree and he becomes a martyr supposedly executed unjustly? First of all, he is not dead, he is alive. Secondly, he was not executed; he was attempting to execute others. He tried to kill and murder, but the exact opposite is presented in a distorted and outrageous manner.”
A video by AJPlus, part of the Al Jazeera Media Network appears on the web:
Called Wounded Palestinian Boy Taunted by Onlookers, the video portrays the boys as the victim.
Facebook comments are many:
On Facebook Mohamed Zeyara has a video. He’s a “Humanitarian Activist”:
Israeli Zionists curse a dying Palestinian child as Israeli Police watch.
“Two Palestinian children aging 12 and 13 were shot in cold blood north of Jerusalem today. Medical assistance was not offered, which led to the older child’s death. His name was Ahmad Manasra and his last moments were documented in this video.”
Comments are many:
The Times of Israel reports:
The report:
Israel Police identified the two Palestinian teenagers who stabbed and seriously injured two Israelis in Jerusalem on Monday afternoon as cousins, 13 and 15 years old, from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina. The older teen was shot dead by police when fleeing the scene of the terror attack, while his cousin was struck by a car and seriously injured.
The cousins attacked a 13-year-old Israeli boy and a man, 25, gravely injuring them, in the third attack to hit the capital in a single day. The incident took place in the northern neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev, adjacent to a light rail station.
The boy was stabbed multiple times as he rode his bike.
“It was horrifying,” Asi Gabay, a family friend of the younger victim recounted to Channel 2. “The boy ran to me and shouted, ‘Asi, help me! Asi, help me!’
“I had a mop with me and we put it on him as a tourniquet,” Gabay said. “Within a few seconds the kid lost consciousness, was completely white and was lying on the ground.”
The boy was hospitalized in critical condition. Doctors at the Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus said he suffered multiple stab wounds to his upper body, and underwent emergency surgery.
According to police, the 13-year-old attacker stabbed the boy as he was riding his bike. When eyewitnesses began to run toward the scene of the attack, the assailants fled. While escaping, the younger one was hit by a car and seriously injured.
And:
A video posted on social media appeared to show the younger of the two teens writhing in a pool of blood on the tracks of the Jerusalem Light Rail, surrounded by police. The video was filmed by an Israeli passerby who shouted “Die! Die, you son of a whore” repeatedly at the teen before he was administered first aid from Magen David Adom paramedics. Police ordered the man to leave the scene.
The pro-Israel group Stand With Us has its own video. It shows the two Palestinian boys with knives. It shows an attack on a boy coming out of a sweet shop. It shows an armed boy (knife) running at armed police (guns).
The officers did not shoot him, but left him bleeding with head injuries, broken legs and other serious injuries on the ground. The boy was able to raise his head a few times, but the police officers kicked him back down until he bled to death.
The slain Palestinian child has been identified as Hasan Khaled Manasra, 15 years of age, while his cousin Ahmad Saleh Manasra, 13, suffered a serious injury. They are both from Beit Hanina, in Jerusalem.
In an apparent bid to refute claims by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that Israel carries out “field executions” against Palestinian youths, officials in Israel released a photograph of a 13-year-old Palestinian assailant from the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Jebl Mukaber who took part in a stabbing attack in the capital earlier this week.
Ahmed Manasrah, who is listed in light-to-moderate condition, was one of two Palestinians who stabbed two Israelis, one of them also a 13-year-old boy, in the Pisgat Ze’ev quarter of the capital on Monday.
Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem disseminated a picture of Manasrah to the press on Thursday in order to debunk Palestinian claims that Israel “executes” young Palestinians who commit knifing attacks.
The Manasrah case has become the focal point of a propaganda war between Jerusalem and Ramallah, particularly after Abbas’ incendiary remarks in a speech broadcast to Palestinian homes.
“We will not give up to the logic of brute force, policies of occupation and aggression practiced by the Israeli government and the herd of settlers who are engaged in terrorism against our people, our holy places, our homes, our trees and the execution of our children in cold blood as they did with the child Ahmed Manasrah and other children from Jerusalem,” Abbas said in an address which aired on Palestine TV.
Death Becomes Viral: Israelis and Palestinians Embrace a New Hobby – Snuff Films
Asheer Schechter:
This week, for instance, two videos in particular triggered global outrage: One showed a bleeding 13-year-old Palestinian boy named Ahmed Manasrah, who along with a 15-year-old cousin, stabbed a number of people in Jerusalem. In the video, the injured boy is seen writhing and squirming on the ground, his legs bent in an unnatural angle, while bystanders hurl insults at him. The second video, equally horrifying, is a security-cam footage showing a terror attack in Jerusalem’s Malchei Yisrael Street earlier this week: The Palestinian terrorist, a resident of East Jerusalem and employee of Israel’s telecom company Bezeq, is shown ramming his car into bystanders, then proceeding to attack them with an axe (murdering a Jewish orthodox rabbi) before being shot dead.
Pro-Palestinians (and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas) used the video of Manasrah to demonstrate the crimes of Zionism, without mentioning the context of the event (namely, that Manasrah had just stabbed and critically injured two people). Pro-Israelis used the video of the attack to display the barbarism of the Palestinians.
Each used the videos for their own purposes, but in effect they did the same thing – they traded videos of slaughtered people to prove a point.
Gutterdämmerung looks fantastic. Here’s the pitch:
The film is set in a world where God has saved the world from sin by taking from mankind the Devil’s ‘Grail of Sin’…..the Evil Guitar. The Earth has now turned into a puritan world where there is no room for sex, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.
From up on high in heaven a “punk-angel”, Vicious (portrayed by Iggy Pop), looks upon the world with weary bored eyes. Behind God’s back, Vicious sends the Devil’s guitar back to earth and sin in all its forms returns to mankind.
An evil puritan priest (Henry Rollins) manipulates a naive girl to retrieve the guitar and destroy it. On her quest to find the Devil’s Grail Of Sin, the girl is forced to face the world’s most evil rock and roll bastards. Throughout her journey, she has a rival in the form of a rock chick determined to stop her from destroying the instrument.
Lou Reed wasn’t everyone’s best pal. A new biography by Howard Sounes labels Reed a racist, a sexist and a wife-beater. Reed was a man “with so little personal charm he would be regularly discharged from private gatherings.
“I loved his music, but you have to go where the story goes. The obituaries were a bit too kind, he was really a very unpleasant man. A monster really; I think truly the word monster is applicable.”
Israel: a round-up of news on trouble in Israel in the papers. Every death tops the news cycle. The Western media feasts of the names of the dead and injured. We don’t get to know the names of all the dead when bombs kill scores of civilians in Turkey. But every death in Israel is the story of an individual. Today we look at reporting on Israa Jaabis and the ‘car bomb’.
The Times: “Woman bomber strikes in new wave of violence”
Why is a woman bomber different to being a simple bomber?
A car bombing by a Palestinian woman and a deadly Israeli airstrike in Gaza brought a serious escalation to weeks of unrest in the Holy Land.
The Holy Land? Where are they in the FIFA rankings?
Police stopped Israa Jaabis, 31, the would-be bomber, as she drove on a highway between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. She shouted “Allah Akbar” (God is the greatest) before detonating her bomb.
Then what?
One police officer was slightly injured. Jaabis suffered burns to 40 per cent of her body and was taken to a Jerusalem hospital. Shin Bet, the internal security agency, said Jaabis had tried to ignite a gas cylinder and was carrying leaflets in support of Palestinians killed in clashes with Israeli forces.
A bomber with leaflets? A novel way of delivering them? We learn that she is 31-year-old and a resident of east Jerusalem.
Palestinians disputed the official account, saying that an electrical fire in the car was mistaken for an explosion.
…an Israeli police officer suffered light burns when a Palestinian woman allegedly detonated a bomb at a checkpoint near Maaleh Adumim, east of Jerusalem. Officials said the policeman had flagged down a suspicious car for inspection when the driver detonated a bomb.
Sappers checking the vehicle for further explosives found a gas canister, and police officials speculated that the car was intended to explode in Jerusalem. The driver, later identified as a 31-year-old resident of east Jerusalem, was seriously injured in the blast and taken to a Jerusalem hospital. Palestinian media disputed the Israeli version, saying the woman was alarmed by an electric short in the car.
Early on Sunday, Israeli police believe they foiled an attack after stopping a woman driver near another West Bank settlement, Maale Adumim. As she walked toward police officers, there was an explosion in the vehicle.
Meanwhile, on a West Bank road leading to Jerusalem, police pulled over a car driven by a Palestinian woman who they said shouted ‘God is great’, and detonated an explosive when approached by officers.
Both the woman and the officer were injured in the explosion.
‘We foiled a car bomb attack,’ said police commander Rafi Cohen. ‘We have no doubt the woman terrorist who drove the vehicle intended to reach Jerusalem.’ Cohen added that there were more explosives still inside the vehicle. Although he gave no more detaisl, Army Radio reported that gas canisters were found inside.
The wave of violence also saw an Israeli police officer wounded on Sunday in a car explosion at an Israeli checkpoint when a Palestinian woman allegedly detonated explosives in her car near the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli police said officers noticed a “suspicious vehicle” being driven toward Jerusalem in a public transport-only lane approaching a checkpoint.
The injured police officer, Moshe Chen, said he gestured for her to stop the car and she then yelled “Allahu Akbar”, a phrase in Arabic meaning “God is great” and sometimes used by Islamic protesters, and detonated a bomb in her car.
TheHuff Posthas little more on the alleged bomber:
The security agency says handwritten letters were found on her person that praised Palestinian “martyrs.” It says the woman is a resident of east Jerusalem but lives part of the time in the West Bank.
The Jerusalem Post: “Police officer injured in attack near Ma’aleh Adumim: I told bystanders not to shoot terrorist”
We hear from Moshe Chen, the police officer at the centre of the story.
“You always hear of terrorist attacks and suddenly I was in one, boom, that’s how it is,” the lightly wounded police offer told reporters as he lay in a hospital bed in Sha’are Tzedek Medical Center.
The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) said the woman attempted to ignite a gas tank in her car with flammable materials and then tried to exit the vehicle. Other than the gas tank, there was no explosive device in her vehicle.
Why was the woman suspicious?
Chen said he first noted her vehicle as he drove toward the A-Zaim junction outside the Ma’aleh Adumim settlement and thought it seemed suspicious. A woman sat in the driver’s seat, but there were no other passengers in the car, even though she was driving in the commuter lane, which is designated for buses or groups of three or more people, he said.
Chen said he continued to drive but her car moved closer and closer to his vehicle, as if to catch up with it, in a way that made him nervous.
“I felt that something was wrong,” Chen said.
He stopped. He approached her car. He says:
“As luck would have it, I was wearing a flak jacket. I told her that she had violated a traffic regulation, but she seemed not to understand what was happening. She spoke in Arabic and then she said, ‘Allahu Akbar’ and I saw that some smoke was coming out of the car,” Chen said.
Initially, he said he thought something had possibly caught fire in the car and contemplated getting a fire extinguisher to put it out, when there was an explosion.
“It was then that I understood she was a terrorist. People tried to offer help. I asked them to stay away because there was a terrorist. Some of them had weapons and I told them not to shoot at the woman. She was wounded and did not pose a danger. I called for more police and security forces to come to the scene.”
Chen’s call for backup is played:
“I am on the road in the direction of the A-Zaim junction from the Adumim junction. A woman drove alone in the public transportation lane. I saw her acting suspiciously, she yelled ‘Allahu akbar’ [‘God is great’]. It seems as if she has set off a device. I am lightly wounded, the terrorist is on the ground, the car is burnt, it was going to burn, someone there put out the fire with a fire extinguisher. I don’t know if I am lightly wounded, I am in shock, I have suffered some burns. The device went off, she detonated the device.”
The injuries:
The terrorist was seriously injured in the attack and was evacuated to hospital in Jerusalem with burns to her entire body, Magen David Adom said. The police officer suffered burns to his upper body and was evacuated to hospital with light injuries and in stable condition.
In the hospital, Chen told reporters,“I could have died, but I am here, healthy and whole. I am very emotional… I lived through the first intifada and the second intifada and now this one. I hope it ends soon.”
We also hear the Palestinian version of events:
Adnan Damiri, spokesman for the Palestinian Authority security forces, however, accused the Israel Police of “fabricating” the story about the car. He said an official investigation conducted by the PA showed that the woman’s car had been intercepted by an Israeli police vehicle.
“When the woman stopped the car, the airbag in front of the driver’s seat suddenly went off,” Damiri claimed. “The policeman saw this as an excuse to open fire at the woman when she tried to get out of the car. That’s why the Israel Police fabricated the story, which is a lie and misleading.”
A 20 year old woman was critically injured, and an IOF police officer was lightly injured following an explosion in a car near the settlement of Maale Adumin, in the occupied West Bank at 7.15 am this morning (Sunday).
IOF? She’s 20?
The incident was initially reported as an attempted suicide bombing but Micky Rosenfeld, the Israeli Police’s official spokesman, said the explosion had happened after the woman had left the car.
No. He didn’t.
The Israeli Occupation officer is not thought to be lightly hurt.
He did?
Conflicting accounts of the incident have emerged, with pro-Jewish websites claiming it was an attempted suicide bombing and others claiming the woman threw an explosive device.
Pro-Jewish? Or pro-Israeli? We’ve not seen any report that the device was tossed.
Nadiya Jamir Hussain won the Great British Bake Off, a BBC TV show for competitive amateur cake makers. The BBC presents as news. But it’s even more than that. It’s a moral lesson. Nadiya wears a scarf on her head. It’s not new kind of apron or a teflon-coated chef’s hat. It’s a head scarf, as worn by some Muslim women, of which she is one.
The Mail sees the look:
Nadiya is already a heroine in her home town of Luton where she’s seen as a glowing role model for young Muslims at a time when the immigrant community is struggling to shake off the dark spectre of Islamic extremism.
Put down your bombs, your spliffs and your iPads. Pick up your lemons.
‘I was a bit nervous that perhaps people would look at me, a Muslim in a headscarf, and wonder if I could bake,’ she says. ‘But I hope that people have realised that I can — and just because I’m not a stereotypical British person, it doesn’t mean that I am not into bunting, cake and tea.’
Cake and spite. It’s he British staple diet. It’s won wars.
‘I’m just as British as anyone else, and I hope I have proved that.’
Who needs to find a token ethnic face for the BBC to pat on the head when Nadiya is so willing to place her cakes at the vanguard of Britishness.
Still, the Mail manages to up the stakes. Get a load of this utter balls:
More sugary balls, modom?
As a liberal Muslim woman myself, I admit that I was also initially put off by Nadiya’s headscarf and severe look. Yet by winning the show with such grace, humour and dignity, Nadiya has done more to further the cause of Asian women — and men — than countless government policies, think-tanks, initiatives and councils put together have achieved in the past half-century.
It’s a Nadiya and me story.
Of course, we have many other Muslim role models — Mo Farah, Olympic gold medallist, Moeen Ali, the England cricketer, Mishal Hussain, presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Rageh Omaar, TV reporter, Sajid Javid, the Business Secretary, and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.
She’s not a role model. She’s a woman who entered an amateur TV cooking show who happens to Muslim. Islam played no part in her baking , or did we miss the bit where she makes a chocolate prayer mat? Are Muslims who enter other telly shows – Mastermind, Big Brother, Pointless – doing it for their God?
But it is Nadiya, baker of beautiful cakes, who has, in my view, turned the image of British Muslims upon its head.
Who knew they could work an oven?
Muslims who are burning with anger or, at the least, disillusioned with life in Britain should learn from Nadiya. I know I have.
Don’t burn with anger – turn down the temperature and simmer. And Yasmin, are your sponge fingers better than Before Nadiya (BN)?
And – hold on – is this a parody? Is that you, Craig Brown?
I once wrote about good Muslim men, among them some uncles and cousins who treasured their wives and encouraged them in their education and ambitions. Afterwards Sadiq Khan, Labour candidate for the London Mayoral election, wrote and thanked me for my article.
Haha. Who knew Muslim women could do satire so well? Haha.
We all owe Nadiya a debt of gratitude, not just for entertaining us with her pastries and sponges, but for teaching us what it is to be British in 2015.
In 1942, GIs in England were given a handbook. It instructed the visitors how to behave and consider their hosts. Fast forward to 2015, and Scott Waters, a 66-year-old from St Augustine, Florida, is on his fourth trip to England for the fourth time. He went on Facebook and wrote his own guide:
There are no guns. No quite. there are guns. It’s just that they not a rite of passage. And you have to wonder where he went to find no mixer taps? And the trick with trains is not to rely on them. But, still, nice one, Scott.
British home sectretary Leon Brittan visits a prison on January 11, 1984. (Photo by Mike Moore/Express/Getty Images)
The VIP paedophile story unravels by the day. Today the Times reports on the man who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the dead former home secretary and Tory MP Leon Brittan.
The man is known only as “David”. He told the BBC’s Panorama programme that he only realised Lord Brittan of Spennithorne had molested him when a “campaigner” showed him the peer’s photo and suggested a number of names to him.
David says:
“It were just done as a joke suggestion to start with but that suggestion became reality. I just went along with it. I identified him with a photograph.”
A joke?
“But there again, he’s a well-known MP and I might have seen him on TV through the years and stuff and I might just have been confused.”
Do you blur reality with fiction? Do you think EastEnders is a documentary? Are you the kind of idiot who writes letters to your MP demanding Deirdre be freed for prison?
Surrey Comet, 10th August 1990:
The Times then notes the police reaction. The self-serving police have been trawling for victims. The PR-police have hounded celebrities, turning their arrest into TV entertainment.
The Metropolitan Police hit back last night, saying that it had serious concerns about the conduct of some BBC journalists who had shown photographs to a key witness in another abuse investigation. Such actions, the Met said, “could compromise the evidential chain should a case ever proceed to court”.
These journalists have saved the country the expense of a lengthy and expensive trial, one in which the accused is a corpse. They have got to the crux of a complaint against a Westminster face and exposed the machinations behind it. The BBC said it was “important and fair investigative journalism“.
“What we’ve found while we’ve been making this Panorama is a concern that all those big institutions – the police, press and politicians – are so determined to atone for the sins of the past that they’re in danger of inventing whole new categories of mistakes. The motivation may be good, but the outcome can be awful. What has emerged is a story which, arguably, says as much about how some of this country’s most important institutions are behaving now as it does about child abuse more than 30 years ago.”
Private Eye, 26th June 1984
A police spokesman replies:
“We have not yet completed our work. There are still lines of inquiry to pursue which are not in the public domain and we will not reach a judgment until that work is completed.”
The police reach a judgement? No. That’s the work of the courts. Their job is to gather evidence and present it to the CPS.
A Met spokesman adds:
“We are worried that this programme and other recent [media] reporting will deter victims and witnesses from coming forward in future. Seeing an individual make allegations and then be targeted by the media is not going to encourage others to speak out.”
The story of VIP peadophiles is rooted in many claims that the police ignored alleged victims when they first complained of abuse. The media does not prevent claims. The media amplifies them. The media drives through the police cu-de-sac. Well, it can do. As the cuttings on this page show, the media also loves a good scandal, wafting the pong into a stench fog. When it clears, however, there can be little of substance to see.
Panorama also criticised Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, who raised the prospect of “a powerful paedophile network linked to parliament and No 10” in the Commons in 2012.
The Guardian, 27th June 1984
Watson’s the MP who played a game of Knock Down Paedo. You ring the bell, shout ‘Paedo’, give the crowd the side-eyes and saunter off. He stood in the House of Commons and suggested the existence of a “powerful paedophile network linked to parliament and No 10”. He named no names.
The programme said that he had written to the director of public prosecutions demanding a full review of allegations against Lord Brittan, and his letter prompted police to interview the peer at a time when he was gravely ill. Mr Watson told the BBC in a statement that his motivation had been to help the victims. He added: “It was clear to me very early on that some testimony would prove to be unreliable, yet not all of it.”
Er…?
David Aaronovitch notes:
On January 21 this year Leon Brittan, the former home secretary, died after suffering for a long time with cancer. His family mourned and on Twitter his former cabinet colleague John Gummer expressed sadness at the news. Noting Gummer’s comments, Tom Watson, the MP and now Labour deputy leader, wrote the single word: “Hmm”.
My condolences go to the family and friends of Lord Brittan. They are grieving for someone they loved very much. I don’t want to add to their grief, but what I am about to say will distress them greatly. For that I am truly sorry.
Many have urged me over the past two years to reveal allegations against Brittan using parliamentary privilege. This allows MPs to say things that are not subject to libel laws. Some will ask why I’ve waited until his death to speak out. The reason is simple. I didn’t want to prejudice any jury trial he might one day face…
…it’s a travesty that Brittan will never be asked the truth. To answer questions about his conduct under oath at a public inquiry. It’s possible to spend a lot of time with a person yet know nothing of their true nature…
Daily Express, 27th June 1984
I’ve spoken to a woman who said he raped her in 1967. And I’ve spoken to a man who was a child when he says Brittan raped him. And I know of two others who have made similar claims of abuse…
Today, one survivor said to me that Brittan “showed me no kindness or warmth.” That Brittan was “as close to evil as a human being could get in my view”. This survivor said that Brittan and the others “took my childhood, they took the very essence of who I was and finally he’s taken away my right to see justice done.”
It is not for me to judge whether the claims made against Brittan are true.
It’s for the police to investigate these claims as they continue to do. But I believe the people I’ve spoken to are sincere…
All the glowing tributes reminded me of the media coverage immediately after Jimmy Savile’s death. How those journalists who wrote tributes to Savile must regret them now…
Former Home Secretary Leon Brittan stands accused of multiple child rape. Many others knew of these allegations and chose to remain silent. I will not. The police must continue their investigations.
…three main strands of claim remained, two at least of them featuring in Mr Watson’s repetition of claims about Brittan. The first was the story, repeated now in many newspapers, in documentaries, in books, interviews and speeches, that a private guesthouse in southwest London — the Elm Guest House — had, during the 1980s, been a place where boys from a nearby children’s home had been trafficked and sexually abused by a whole series of celebrities and politicians, one of whom was supposedly Brittan. This story had been on the edges of the internet for years (I came across it on a site run by a follower of the bizarre David Icke cult), but was now given credibility by a police operation set up to examine allegations.
Almost everything to do with Elm Guest House originates with a man called Chris Fay. Once a social worker in the area and then a Labour councillor, it is Fay who claims to have been given the list of “attendees” by the now deceased owner; Fay who claims to have spoken to many boys who were trafficked and Fay who “saw” photographs of Brittan at the guesthouse abusing under-age boys — photos now missing.
On last night’s Panorama, reporters spoke to one boy who Fay claimed was at the guesthouse and who said clearly that he was not there. Panorama also found a man who acted as a gay masseur in the house, who said that though sexual activity certainly went on, he never saw anyone famous or any children. Fay, it should be noted, is a convicted fraudster who went to prison in 2011.
The second strand of the accusations against Brittan concerned the supposed happenings at Dolphin Square in London in the early Eighties. Again this place had been the subject of internet rumours for years, but in the end the hard evidence boiled down to the testimony— most of it obtained by the Exaro news agency and then elsewhere — of three “survivors”: “Nick”, “Darren” and “Andrew”. Nick’s account even made it as the top item of the BBC’s Six O’Clock News last year.
Panorama chased down one of the key claims from Nick”, that he witnessed the hit-and-run murder of a schoolboy in Kingston, committed as a warning to him from his abusers. They established that no such accident happened and that no child was killed in this way in that location and timeframe.
9th August, 1982 – The Sun
If that murder didn’t happen, then a huge doubt must exist about his other stories, the most lurid of which (involving Edward Heath and a knife) were itemised by Harvey Proctor in a press conference last month where he protested his innocence and accused police of a witch-hunt.
Furthermore, the supposed corroboration from Darren was also highly dubious, since he is a convicted bomb-hoaxer and has been classified as delusional. The third witness, Andrew, told Panorama that he felt pressured into saying he was at Dolphin Square by Fay and the Exaro team.
Then there is the accusation of (unusually for a supposed homosexual paedophile) heterosexual rape. “Jane” contacted Mr Watson through a fellow Labour MP and claimed to have been raped by Brittan in 1967.
When the police investigated her claim a number of problems quickly arose. She said he had taken her to his basement flat, but at the time he had lived on the third floor. And friends of hers who she said could corroborate parts of her story flatly contradicted it. Finally, what she was alleging didn’t match the criteria for rape. The police concluded that they had no grounds for interviewing or arresting Brittan, who was obviously terminally ill.
And then Mr Watson wrote a remarkable letter to the DPP, in effect demanding that Brittan be interviewed and citing in addition to the case of Jane some of the other spurious allegations against him. The DPP leant on the police. The subsequent interview of the dying man resulted in Brittan’s name becoming public. In my opinion this was partly a deliberate ploy to try to “flush out” other complainants.
In 1978 Penthouse magazine investigated the future of sex.
The October 1978 issue of Penthouse magazine zooms in on Science and the Future. This feature served as an intro to OMNI, “a magazine of science, science fiction and the future”, run by Kathy Keeton, future wife of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione.
SPACE: the final, full-frontal frontier… the last hurrah… to go where no man has ever gone before, the forbidden and yet insidiously alluring planet of NYMPHON in the second quadrant of PHI DELTA PUBIS, hard by the tumescent moons of GLUTEON MAXIMUS. It was here that I said good-bye to an intrepid friend, a great lady, whose heaving decks and smoldering afterburners had served me well — the Yenta Prize, peripatetic mistress of the cosmic seas. I beamed down… down into the swirling, choking vapors that envelop NYMPHON, down to the very floor of this curious planet where, unused to the dense, jellylike atmosphere, I passed out.
Star Wars robot R2-D@ packed a little ambulatory pal:
Chelsea lose at home to Southampton and the Press being talk of Jose Mourinho getting the sack. Having seen his team defeated, Mourinho spoke with the Sky Sports, as he must. The Daily Mailsays Mourinho spat out a “seven-minute rant”.
Rant? Nothing of it. The man is measured. Here’s what he said in full:
Look, I think you know me and I think I don’t run away from responsibilities. I think, first of all I want to say that because we are in such a bad moment I think you shouldn’t be afraid to be also honest because when we are in the top there is quite a big pleasure in put us down but when we are so down I think it’s time to be a little bit honest and to say clearly that referees are afraid to give decisions for Chelsea.
Jose loves to establish the siege mentality. It’s Chelsea against the world. A for referees favouring Chelsea, well, they did beat Arsenal thanks to the kind of refereeing support that had Gunners fans looking for a Chelsea tattoo on Mike Dean’s throat.
The result 1-1 is a huge penalty and once more we don’t get and a penalty is a crucial moment in the game with the result at 1-1, and I repeat that if FA wants to punish me they can punish me they don’t punish other managers but they punish me, it’s not a problem for me.
Jose, as ever, tries to put the ME in TEAM. He employs an exemplum – an example that backs up his argument.
But I want to repeat because I think that my players deserve it, Chelsea fans deserve it. I am a Chelsea fan too and I want to say it again. Referees are afraid to give decisions for Chelsea. Why? Because when they give there’s always a question mark from you, there’s always a question there’s always a critique.
Quibbling. And dash of Metonymy, which takes one aspect of one thing and makes it stand for the entire. Of course, Chelsea have not had every decision go in their favour. No team has. But Mourinho wants us to believe that every error epitomises a wider conspiracy. But decisions don’t win games, goals and fine play does.
So you are always punished, we are punished because Diego Costa is suspended with images, in other matches we see the same thing and it doesn’t happen. Clear penalties are not given and it’s one and one and one and one and even in Champions League in a match you lose 2-1, even in the Champions League which is a game which is not three officials but with five you are not given a penalty in last minute and this penalty in this game today is more than crucial do you know why? Because for my team in this moment the first negative thing that happen, my team collapse.
The team mentally, psychologically, the team is unbelievable down it looks like good players are bad players and the first half was a game where we didn’t show our quality but we were in control, we were more than in control, and one mistake and lack of concentration, one goal and when you are having a good time.
In normal circumstances you come to the second half and you do your game, I told the players at half time no panic we are not losing 4-0 it’s 1-1, no panic, the team comes out with a good spirit we have a penalty and the penalty is a giant penalty and he is afraid to give like everybody is afraid to give so no penalty and after that the team lost even more confidence and you know that their second goal is an individual mistake, their third goal is another individual mistake. The team mentally, they try, they try, they try, they are in such a low moment that they collapse.
What Jose’s doing, of course, is dictating the conversation, or trying to. He tells you what to think. He tells you what to look out for. He is employing a rhetorical strategy. Jose wants us to take him out of the picture. His is disinterested in his own fate. This, he hopes, will encourage the audience to trust his opinions. His is the passive voice framing the terms of the argument. You may have seen no controversy at all in Diego Costa being banned after the match for slapping an Arsenal player in the face or the referee not giving Chelsea a penalty. But he seeks to sow doubt. He wants it to lead to consensus.
I can also know what you are thinking, what you are saying in studio, what people imagine, what is is going to happen, what is not going to happen, I want to let it clear. One, I not run away. Two, if the club wants to sack me they have to sack me because I’m not running away from my responsibilities from my team and from my convictions. That, be champions is obviously very difficult because the distance is considerable but I’m more than convinced that we finish top four, and when the season is so bad if you finish top four it is OK.
More rhetoric.
Third even more important than first and second, I think this is a crucial moment in the history of this club. Do you know why? Because if the club sacks me they sack the best manager that this club have, and secondly the message is again the message of bad result, the manager is guilty and this is the message that not just these players but the other ones before they got during a decade.
This looks like enthymeme. The enthymeme makers a claim and then bases it on commonly accepted opinion. Jose argument is filled with emotion but he pulls out his logic pack and flourishes it.
I think this is a moment for everybody to assume responsibility, I assume my responsibility I think the players should assume their responsibility and there are other people in the club that they should also assume their responsibilities and to stick together. And this is what I want.
The players they still have to play until the end of the season with the gold champions thing in their shirt and I want to work always, you know, I consider myself, I have a big self-esteem, a big ego, I consider myself the best, living the worst period of my career and worst results of my career, doing that as a professional hurts me a lot, doing it at Chelsea hurts me twice because it hurts me as a professional and hurts me because I like this club very, very much and was because of that that I come back so I want to carry on, I want to carry on no doubt, no doubt and I assume my responsibilities but I think it’s time for everybody to assume their responsibilities because when you go down to so many individual mistakes and fear to play, they have their responsibilities, they are players that are performing really, really bad individually, I can not come here and say you, and you, and you, and you, it’s not my job but I think it’s clear that we are being punished by too many individual mistakes and as I was saying sadness brings sadness, bad results they attract bad results, that first mistake is just the first because after that comes another one.
Jose is using a paromologia (Greek for “agree with”), conceding a point in order to make a stronger one.
This team needs to win the first-half two or three nil with the fears disappearing coming to play in the second half and play with a free brain, a free spirit. This is what this team needs and unfortunately for them this is not happening and again I repeat so I want to make it clear again, because I not want to be offensive, I don’t want to be none-polite I don’t want to put in cause the dignity of the people, but I repeat that the referees they are afraid to give the decision when you are top you want to see people come down when people is down give us a break and be honest and be loyal with us because the penalty is clear and 2-1 is a completely different story, thank you.
“I’m a bald man,” says Yann Marcotte, a swimmer at a pool in the Sainte-Julie suburb of Montreal, . “When I swim [with a cap on] it’s very, very hot … It’s very uncomfortable. I’m not a criminal. But it is not the law. It is just a pool rule.”
Those pool rules state that all swimmers must wear a cap in the water. Marcotte has thrice been thrown out of the pool for going bareheaded. The police have been called to escort him off the premises.
“There are more and more bald people,” says pool spokesman Éric Hervieux. “There are two types … those that I call the ‘real bald’ and the ‘false bald.’ The real bald are those that have naturally lost their hair. The false bald are those that shave their heads … When their hair starts to grow back, it becomes problematic. They’re used to not wearing the bathing cap – but then their hair comes back. It’s unhygienic.
Marcotte, ‘real bald‘ wonders why the man who swims in lane next to his can swim with a beard “like Fidel Castro’s” and not have to cover his face. Furthermore, women can wear loose-fitting shower caps, as long as they don’t dunk their heads in the water. And a boy with autism whose disability means he is uncomfortable in a tight-fitting cap is allowed in the pool without one.
“I think the only thing I can do now is a legal proceeding,” says Marcotte. “It’s like David versus Goliath.”
Brian Reade has penned a defence of Manchester United and England captain Wayne Rooney.
Class snobs who try to keep council-estate-kid sports stars down and revel in their failings at it again before a new documentary on the striker, says Brian Reade
Welcome to the Brook Estate in Eltham, south east London. The breeding ground of four of the five men accused of stabbing Stephen Lawrence to death as he waited for a bus a short walk away on the eve of St George’s Day six years ago.
Five products of a twisted philosophy drummed into them from birth. “If they’re black, stab ’em in the back.”…
A way of life passed down from father to son. You see the link emerge in the fading white graffiti sprayed 30 years ago on the walls of the old railway bridges around the estate, written by the last generation of Eltham Boyz. In three feet high letters: “SKINHEADS.”…
Give me the father and I’ll give you the son who will give you the son who will abuse, persecute and even kill another human being for committing the heinous crime of not being born white.
Racism was inherited. Get the killers and purge the land.
This is White Man’s Gulch… This is E-reg Escort-land.
So much for the snobbery. What else does Reade know about Rooney?
Gary Lineker is letting it be known that next Monday’s documentary on Wayne Rooney is so touching it will radically change the nation’s perception of him. That’s why the BBC released previews about how Rooney is a sensitive soul who writes poetry for his wife.
Cue would-be satirists’ rhyming couplets running over as they imagine the literary outpourings of someone it has been assumed can barely write a cheque.
Would-be satirists like the, er, Daily Mirror’s Polly Hudson, who opines:
Depriving the public of enjoying these Rooney masterpieces is basically a crime… so it’s lucky that I’ve managed to get my hands on Wayne’s notebook…
Have snarked at Rooney, Hudson offers:
By Wayne Rooney, age 29 and 7/8
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
You are well hot.
So you’re probably more like a summer’s day abroad then,
Cos the weather here is usually rubbish.
So much for the satire.
Reade adds:
It’s not that he’s a multi-title winner with a century of caps who has broken England’s all-time goalscoring record and become an extremely wealthy man. It’s that he has survived, and flourished, against all the odds in a class-obsessed country which loves nothing better than seeing council-estate kids who make good, very publicly self-destruct.
We get examples:
Think of George Best, Paul Gascoigne and Alex Higgins and how certain sections of our society have taken pleasure in pointing at them in the gutter and warning other working-class talents that serious life-enhancement should be left to their betters.
Would that be the same Paul Gascoigne whose phone the Daily Mirror hacked? Gazza told the High Court:
“I knew I was getting hacked by the Mirror. This continued for ages. Phone calls to my father and family were getting blocked so I changed my mobile. It happened again so I kept on changing mobiles, five or six times a month… I couldn’t speak to anybody, I was scared to speak to anybody… my parents, my family and kids, it was just horrendous. And people can’t understand why I became an alcoholic…. At the time I was going through a bad time because I knew I was getting hacked, 110 per cent. Of course (people) wouldn’t believe it – my family and Mr McKeown (therapist Johnny McKeown). As I was speaking to him on the phone, it clicked again. He told me I was paranoid, I was going through a mental disorder. I said ‘No, there’s fuck-all wrong with me’. I knew, I knew. I put the phone down… I’ve never told a lie, nothing to lie about, nothing. Disgusting. Crap… I have waited 15 years to be sat here so I am disgusted, really. I would like to trade my mobile phone in for a coffin because these guys have ruined my life. I have no life.”
In May the ex-England footballer was awarded £188,250 in damages.
Back to Reade:
Rooney came up across horrendous snobbery right from the off.
And back to Polly Hudson in the Mirror:
As celebrity adulteries go, this one is particularly bad, even by footballers’ standards. Coleen was pregnant at the time. But the only reason Wayne and his hooker didn’t get it on at the Rooney marital home was because SHE thought it out of order. When a prostitute has better morals than you, it’s probably time to worry.
Wayne may be known for being completely thick but his recent actions still beggar belief.
And Fiona Phillips in the Mirror:
Almost overnight, Coleen the innocent A-level student disappeared and Coleen the Queen of Chav arrived. It was disappointing
Chav? Yeah, that’s what the Mirror has called Coleen over and over
THE style bible of the fashionistas, Vogue, has asked Coleen McLoughlin to be a cover girl.
I don’t know what thrills me more. The idea of the curvy, chav girlfriend of Wayne Rooney on the cover of the world’s poshest magazine. Or the thought of Victoria Beckham’s face when she heard the news.
The Mirror told readers what a chav is:
YOU may know them as Kevs, Slappers, Neds, Townies or Scallies – but a new Internet website has branded them Chavs, from an old gypsy word for child…
Female Chav: When not wearing her baseball cap, you will notice her DIY facelift: badly-dyed hair scraped back into the tightest bun possible. She loves denim and shops at New Look, Pilot or her local market stall. Top Shop is too sophisticated. The classy female Chav wears t-shirts with slogans she finds witty – “Friendly when drunk”, French Connection’s FCUK or the “F*** You” one Britney Spears made famous. Her skirt is more like a belt, barely covering her mottled blue thighs and flabby midriff.
And they are thick:
For most of us cinema is an art form which enriches our lives. For Chavs it’s the place to text your mate and snog your bint. They love sequels because an original idea is something to be feared. Any flicks with an R&B star such as 50 cent, Aaliyah or Ice T is almost enough to make a Chav wet their pants in excitement. A good example is Romeo Must Die featuring Aaliyah and DMX. Don’t try telling them the plot is influenced by Romeo and Juliet. You’ll get a blank look.
Oh, and Wayne is also a chav:
For girls it’s Chelsea, Chardonnay, Kayleigh, Crystal or Britney. Boys are Jay, Wayne, Jake, Romeo or Dean.
But Reade makes no mention of his own paper in any of this snobbery. He just points the finger at a rival:
In a Daily Mail article which suggested he could be Gazza Mark II, a leading commentator asked: “Is there some hidden vice, some secret in Rooney’s psyche, which is yet to emerge? Drink, drugs, wife-beating?” It was a perfect summation of a country which judges people on their accent and background without getting to know their character.”
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says he’s not an anti-Semite, but some people he’s associated with are. Happily for Corbyn, Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger has accepted the invitation to join his cabinet of all the boxes ticked. Corbyn had floated the sinister idea of a “shadow minster for Jews”, a Judenrat to help the State deal with any little Jewish problems. That hideous plan was dropped. Instead Corbyn looked round and offered a ministerial post to Berger.
And she accepted the role of shadow mental health spokeswoman.
In other news, Corbyn’s all-inclusive Labour Party could well welcome former LibDem MP Baroness Jenny Tonge. Tongue told the Sunday Times:
“I know that lots of Lib Dems are contemplating supporting Jeremy Corbyn, including me. I like and admire Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell (the shadow chancellor). I think they are some of the most honest people you could come across. On defence and foreign policy, Palestine and the bomb I agree with them and they are very green. I am not sure on Europe. I think the rich should be paying for the recession.”
“I have met Hamas leaders both in Damascus and in Gaza. So has Jeremy Corbyn. We were all favorably impressed by those people. We all feel it was very very important to listen to their point of view. They said a lot of wise things.”
Ambushed with the news on the Today programme, [Labour Deputy leader] Tom Watson said the woman deemed too beyond the pale to remain in the LibDems is “welcome” to join Labour.
Here are a few “wise words” from the Hamas Covenant:
Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised…
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
The BBC says of Hezbollah:
The party’s rhetoric calls for the destruction of the state of Israel. It views the Jewish state as occupied Muslim land and it argues that Israel has no right to exist. The party was long supported by Iran, which provided it with arms and money…
The HuffPost:
Hezbollah’s aim is not to “end the occupation of Palestine,” or even to “liberate all of Palestine.” Its goal is to kill the world’s Jews. Listen to the words of its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah: “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” (NY Times, May 23, 2004, p. 15, section 2, column 1.)
As for Tongue, she lost credibility with the LibDems for a few comments of her own:
Tonge resigned as party whip of the Liberal Democrats in early 2012 after saying that Israel would not survive for long in its present form.
Tonge’s remarks, made at a meeting at Middlesex University, included the observation that the American people would soon “get sick” of the billions their government sends annually “to support what I call America’s aircraft carrier in the Middle East — that is Israel.” Party leader Nick Clegg called on Tonge to apologize, but Tonge refused and resigned instead.
Tonge has a well-known history of making inflammatory comments about Israel. In 2004, as a member of Parliament, she was fired as the children’s spokeswomen of the Liberal Democrats after she said she might consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were forced to endure the same conditions as Palestinians.
In 2006, she said, “The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips.” That comment also was condemned by the party leadership.
She was sacked as a health spokeswoman in 2010 after she claimed Israeli troops sent to Haiti after the earthquake there were trafficking organs.
The JC:
Baroness Tonge, the Liberal peer, said this week that Israel should set up an inquiry to disprove allegations that its medical teams in Haiti “harvested” organs of earthquake victims for use in transplants.
Her call has been sharply criticised by fellow LibDems, but party leader Nick Clegg has refused to act against her.
The organ theft claims were published last week in the Palestine Telegraph, an online journal based in Gaza of which Baroness Tonge is a patron.
In a statement to the JC, she said the Israel Defence Forces were “to be commended for their fantastic response to the Haitian earthquake”. But she added: “To prevent allegations such as these — which have already been posted on YouTube — going any further, the IDF and the Israeli Medical Association should establish an independent inquiry immediately to clear the names of the team in Haiti.”
If she joins the Labour Party, what will Berger do?
Bone defended those who attacked the Cereal Killer Cafe with paint bombs and graffiti because they had helped publicise the movement across the globe. “Everyone on that march, who are so pissed off with the lot they’ve got in life, was fighting back. I totally understand and support it,” said Bone, who founded Class War in 1982.
So you hit the Honey Monster’s pals? You attack people who set up a legal business? Is the Cereal Cafe the epitome of the rich’s taunt to the poor? The huddled masses have been so very quiet as the government reduces their paltry incomes to a pittance. But is larking about in central London, rather than Sunderland, Blackpool or Knowsley, about class war or adolescent priapism. Look at the demo’s name. Surely it should be the ‘Fucked Parade’, but what cool kids keen to run about with their genitals flapping around would come to a mobile Glastonbury come down?
The Guardian adds:
He promised the movement, which has so far organised three Fuck Parade protests in London, would seek to expand. He said: “They’re going to take place all around Britain. I’m going up to Scotland now to talk to some people in Glasgow and Edinburgh about possible ones there.”
Bone was asked about attacking independent businesses. He replied:
“We’d be mad to go for Pret a Manger and Foxtons. A broken window at Foxtons isn’t going to get any publicity at all, whereas we’ve seen what happens with independent shops. We’d be stupid not to.”
So much for ideology, vision and anarchy. It only matters if the Fourth Estate take notice. This is class war with a black hoddie doffed to middle-class stability and nostalgia.
Bone’s Parade had been protesting against 1 Commercial Street, a new block of luxury flats:
“We were campaigning outside 1 Commercial Street for 10 months last year, which is quite funny when people are now saying we should concentrate on property developers. There’s was lots of stuff going on there – arrests, burning effigies – and not a peep in the press. Then someone throws a couple of bags of paint at a cereal cafe and it’s in the newspapers from Italy to New Zealand.”
The Cereal Killer Cafe… You attacked a cafe selling cereal. Was that planned?
“No, it’s just what happened. The way the Fuck Parade works, people are there and then they wander off. It’s 1,000 or so anarchists and other people – it’s very hard to tell them to do anything. We just happened to be going past it. Anyway, I must have been one amongst many people astounded to see a cafe flogging cereal open at nine o’clock at night. If I’d have put money on us going for anything it would have been Foxtons, and it wasn’t.”
No. You picked the softest target you could find.
“Everyone keeps saying: ‘Wrong target, you should have done the City, you should have done parliament, you should have done Pret a Manger, Foxtons.’ It doesn’t work. You don’t get any publicity. We had a riot virtually every night outside 1 Commercial Street, and it doesn’t get a dicky bird.”
But it wasn’t a riot, was it. It was drums, whistles and shouting at bricks and glass.
“We wouldn’t have got any publicity if it hadn’t been for the cereal cafe. But I give those two brothers their credit. They’ve milked this brilliantly. They’ve run a masterful campaign. I salute them for that.”
Milked it? Is that a joke? Is that the intentionally funny bit?
Police and miners at a demonstration at Orgreave Colliery, South Yorkshire, during the miners’ strike, 2nd June 1984. (Photo by Steve Eason/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
If you want a class war, you need to look back at the minsters’ strike, when the State smashed the organised working class.
…the striking miners were not just victims. They were fighters. The problem was that they were not organised enough for the Battle of Orgreave, not properly prepared to meet the police army’s force with force. Their leaders saw the mass picket at Orgreave as a symbolic stand. The other side saw it, in Thatcher’s words, as ‘mob rule’, and acted accordingly to smash it. Many of the miners did fight back, and hard, but it was too little too late. The BBC news infamously edited its film of Orgreave to make it appear that the miners charged the police lines first, rather than waiting to be attacked. Some might think, if only they had…
So to today’s moralising class warriors, taking on the all-day cereal business in the fight for a global ideology.
Happy Traveler “all Natural” calming chews reduces your nervous or anxious cat or dog. What’s in this “all-natural herbal calming formula for stressed, nervous, or anxious pets?” And where can we get some?
Active Ingredients:
Valerian
German Chamomile
L-Tryptophan
St. Johns Wort
The Sun wants readers to know that BBC DJ Steve Wright is not slim. The paper’s Bizarre columns notes:
RADIO 2 favourite Steve Wright appears to have increased the bandwidth of his trousers again.
Look, everyone, it’s Steve Wright from the show Steve Wright In The Afternoon, aka the Sun’s…
It’s Steve Wright CHIN the afternoon
Not too long ago the Sun’s “Head of Showbiz” Dan Wootton – read him every day in Bizarre – was cheering on his ‘No More Skinny’ drive, calling for fatter models and the end to the skinny obsession “madness” that does “so much damage to our body-conscious youngsters”.
Wootton wanted to end the cult of skinny models. He invited not-skinny reality TV star Gemma Collins to tell his readers:
“Encouraging girls to be thin is no way to produce a generation of confident healthy women”
Singer Alexandra Burke added:
Beauty should not be defined by waist inches.
The Sun told us that what went for women was true for men:
Around 15-20 per cent of those affected by eating disorders are male. Over 300,000 men were hospitalised with an eating disorder last year. For help and support, visit Men Get Eating Disorders Too at Mengetedstoo.co.uk.
Despite being a Sun man through and through, I’m also about as far from the tabloid stereotype as you can get. I only moved to the UK from my homeland of New Zealand when I was an adult. I’m also gay – something I’ve been open about since my first job on Fleet Street when I was 23.
I’ve also very openly struggled with my weight for the last decade, with fluctuations of up to four stone across a 12-month period pretty normal for me. As a result, when I became a showbiz columnist I made it a policy to never comment negatively on the weight of a celebrity. This was a sea change from previous male showbiz columnists who didn’t have the same background as me.
So why does the Sun’s showbiz teamthink it fine to mock Steve Wright?
You can The Mary Tyler Moore Masturbation Society, the group created by James J. Kagel of Cleveland, Ohio. Proving our theory that any weirdness you’ve thought of someone else has formed a group for, Kagel invites other fans of Mary Tyler Moore’s “beautifully curved, ever so shapely, silken, creamy smooth, seductive, velvety soft, long, lean, graceful, tantilizing [sic], erotic, sinuously sexy LEGS” to join him in a tribute toss.
Kagel’s interest in MTM began when he watched The Dick Van Dyke Show as a lad.
There’s chance, of course, that you already know all this, being as you are a member of MTM Legs(“for your jacking pleasure”).
A poster for a series of church services is displayed opposite BBC Broadcasting House on October 22, 2012 in London, England. A BBC1 ‘Panorama’ documentary contains new allegations about the handling by BBC2 programme ‘Newsnight’ concerning claims of sexual abuse allegedly carried out by former BBC television presenter, Jimmy Savile, the transmission of which was subsequently dropped.
Jimmy Savile’s rotting corpse continues to bob around the news. Today the Sun has news of “BBC boss Yentob and the Savile cover-up.”
We know the BBC failed to investigate claims their favourite uncle was a paedophile. Liz MacKean, the excellent reporter who wanted to reveal the story on Newsnight, was quashed. She is no longer on the hard-hitting (it says here) news show, which somehow managed to survive the scandal.
But what else? The Sun’s Harry Cole writes in what the Sun calls an “Exclusive“:
BEEB boss Alan Yentob said the journalists who exposed the cover- up of the Jimmy Savile scandal were “traitors to the BBC”, one of them has sensationally claimed.
And:
Respected former producer Meirion Jones claims the remark about him was made to another employee after he contributed to Panorama’s exposé “Savile — What The BBC Knew”.
Jones worked with MacKean on Newsnight. He no longer works on the show.
Mr Yentob, 68, strongly denies making the comment. The film by Mr Jones and colleague Liz MacKean revealed the corporation’s bids to stop Newsnight exposing Savile as a predatory paedophile who struck on BBC premises.
They can’t both be right. Maybe one them has misspoken or mis-remebered or whatever modish PR-made word covers this wort of thing?
In an article for Spectator Life magazine, Mr Jones said: “A BBC colleague abused as a child wrote to Tony Hall [director general] to complain about the Savile affair. In his email he says he approached Yentob just after Panorama broadcast a film about whether or not there had been a cover-up at the BBC. He claims that Yentob denounced us. ‘Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones are traitors to the BBC,’ Yentob told him.”
…I heard Alan Yentob had been seen prowling the corridors, leaning on Newsnight, haranguing the reporter Lucy Manning and escorting Camila Batmanghelidjh into the Today studio. After Savile, it should have been abundantly clear that managers shouldn’t interfere with investigations close to home, but here was Yentob trying to influence the Batmangate probe into the charity he chaired. It also felt a bit like the Panorama investigation in 2013 into Comic Relief’s dodgy investments. That was delayed after celebrities appealed to the great and the good in the BBC.
…
A BBC colleague of mine who had been abused as a child wrote to Tony Hall to complain about the Savile affair. In his email (copied to me) he says he approached Yentob just after Panorama broadcast a film about whether or not there had been a cover-up at the BBC (the film included clips of Liz MacKean and me talking about what the BBC knew). He claims that Yentob denounced us. ‘Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones are traitors to the BBC,’ Yentob told him. He strongly denies saying this, but it wouldn’t be the first time he had complained about people breaking the BBC’s code of omertà.
Keith ‘Cheggers’ Chegwin is a man for hire. Anyone seeking mates and funsters for a Stag Do can hire the former children’s telly entertainer:
He’s been at the top of his game since he first burst energetically onto the screen in Swap Shop and remains one of the nation’s favourite stars.
DJ, presenter, host, actor singer and raconteur, Cheggers is one of life’s natural performers and a top bloke to have as part of your stag party. His boundless energy, quick fire gags and fearless attitude make him the perfect guest at any gathering. He also has a reputation as something of a party animal and will fit in happily as ‘one of the lads’.
Why? It’s utterly bizarre, no? I love star spotting. If saw Cheggers in the supermarket or pub I’d nudge whoever I was with are invite them to share my enthusiasm. But to actually have him come over and sit with you, play games and lark about is weird and desperate. It might work if you all get Keith Chegwin masks, including him.
You decide your activity, tell us your destination and we’ll check availability to include Cheggers as a surprise guest to join in one of our great stag challenges such as;
Bubble Football Go Karting Quad Biking Rage Buggies Inflatable Games Somerset Challenge Welsh Games Wrestling School Paintball Clay Pigeon Shooting You can line up for action alongside this TV icon and set Cheggers as you [sic] target of excellence, those that score more than Keith or post a faster time are safe, but anyone who gets beaten by Keith has to pay a Stag Forfeit.
Beaten By Keith. Now there’s a Stag Do TV-shirt. As for Keith’s own love-life, you can see his wedding to Maggie Phibin here. It ended in divorce.
The story that three children were murdered by VIP child abusers in Westminster is based on the words of ‘Nick’, a man who says that he had witnessed the sadistic abuse.
The Metropolitan police said the stories of a cabal of wealthy and powerful perverts raping and killing children for sport were “credible and true”. Circumspection and all other barriers to guilt were done away with. The police were on the side of the angels. The conspiracy was fact.
The Met’s spokesman has now reduced the temperature:
“We acknowledge that describing the allegations as ‘credible and true’ suggested we were pre-empting the outcome of the investigation.”
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) recognises the media’s and the public’s interest in its historic child abuse investigations, and in particular, in Operation Midland. The focus of this investigation is on allegations of the homicide of three young boys. There are also allegations of sexual abuse but the MPS has made clear from the outset that this is, and remains, a murder investigation.
No bodies. No evidence. No proof. But that’s not to say no crime was committed.
The historic nature of the allegations means this is a complex case where the normal avenues of evidence-gathering from CCTV, DNA and telephone data, are not open to us. These cases take time, but the public can have confidence that allegations from witnesses will be investigated thoroughly. We can all see the legacy that has been created by police and other authorities who appeared not to take allegations seriously in the past and the impact that has had on the confidence of victims to come forward.
Appeared not to have been taken seriously by police in the past. Now the accused appear to be guilty.
There are particular challenges where details of the allegations and those facing accusations are in the public domain. This can create potential conflicts between media and criminal investigations, and have an impact on vulnerable witnesses and those accused. This has been especially true in Operation Midland, and we wish to highlight to the media and to the public the risks that our investigation may be compromised. We raised this concern when we initially appealed for more witnesses and it continues to be an issue. We also need to clarify our investigative stance in cases of this kind
When you go looking for victims – advertising for them – the investigation becomes a trawl.
Our starting point with allegations of child sexual abuse or serious sexual assault is to believe the victim until we identify reasonable cause to believe otherwise.
It is now. It was for long the police’s position to disbelieve the victim. What we want is for the alleged victim to be treated in an even-handed manner. Accepting a claim as fact is as wrong as to dismiss it as a lie.
That is why, at the point at which we launched our initial appeal on Midland, after the witness had been interviewed for several days by detectives specialising in homicide and child abuse investigations, our senior investigating officer stated that he believed our key witness and felt him to be ‘credible’. Had he not made that considered, professional judgment, we would not have investigated in the way we have.
But considered and professional judgements have not always been correct. It was a considered a professional judgement not to investigate Cyril Smith. It was a considered a professional judgement to investigate Jim Davidson, nicking the entertainer as he flew INTO Heathrow Airport. And there’s Paul Gambaccini, the BBC DJ falsely accused of sexually abusing two boys between 1978 and 1984. He was arrested and locked in a cell. That was a considered and professional judgement.
“I was accused of having sex with two males, whom I have never known in my life, in the decade before I started having sex with males,” he says. “It was completely absurd and yet I lived under the jackboot of the Metropolitan police for a year…The Metropolitan police, which we must now expand to include several British police forces, and the Crown Prosecution Service, have reduced our beloved country to the moral equivalent of Russia.”
The Met continues:
We must add that whilst we start from a position of believing the witness, our stance then is to investigate without fear or favour, in a thorough, professional and impartial fashion, and to go where the evidence takes us without prejudging the truth of the allegations. That is exactly what has happened in this case.
Rubbish. The police have an agenda. Just ask Paul Gambaccini. And why have no police been interviewed under caution?
The integrity of our investigation is paramount, and the public can have confidence that allegations of homicide are being investigated thoroughly. Our officers have the resources to test all the evidence, and we have not yet completed this task. It is then for the Crown Prosecution Service to make a decision on whether to prosecute. More significantly, only a jury can decide on the truth of allegations after hearing all the evidence.
What about if the accused is dead?
We should always reflect that in our language and we acknowledge that describing the allegations as ‘credible and true’ suggested we were pre-empting the outcome of the investigation. We were not. We always retain an open mind as we have demonstrated by conducting a thorough investigation.
What utter drivel.
In this respect, our approach in Operation Midland is the same as if we were investigating a contemporary rape allegation.
If that’s right, God help us all.
Anyone familiar with the history of child abuse and rape investigations will recall that for many years, the first instinct of investigators appeared to be to disbelieve those making the allegations, which had a negative impact on people’s confidence to report to the police or other authorities. This undoubtedly led to crimes going unreported and un-investigated, and we do not want to return to that situation.
And now it’s the total reverse. The police are still biased but in a much improved way.
The media has shown in recent years how important they are in bringing issues concerning historic abuse to public notice and has been both challenging and supportive of the way in which police and the criminal justice system have adapted our approach.
Reporting has also rightly questioned the official response to allegations. The media is also valuable in witness appeals and to show possible victims that they can have confidence their claims will be investigated.
Always good when the police tell the media what their job is. Not in the least bit chilling.
What can be overlooked, at times, is that those making allegations are very often vulnerable individuals. A useful definition of ‘vulnerable people’ is set out in the Ofcom code for broadcasters (8.22). It is important to note that the police must take account of this vulnerability at all stages, irrespective of whether the allegations can be substantiated or not. We ask the media and those asked to comment to do likewise. We also think the press should consider following Ofcom’s approach by amending its code to recognise that vulnerability in reporting of crime is not just a matter of the age of witnesses or victims.
From praising the media the police now want the media brought to heel.
Our other main concern is the risk that media investigations will affect the process of gathering and testing evidence in our criminal investigation. In recent weeks, one journalist reporting on Operation Midland has shown the purported real identity of someone making an allegation of sexual assault to a person who has disclosed that they have been questioned by police concerning those allegations. This action has a number of potential impacts.
Note to police: do you recall arresting Jim Davidson in the full glare of the TV cameras?
First, for those who have made allegations of sexual abuse, it is extremely distressing to discover that their identity might have been given to anyone else, particularly if that is to someone who may be involved in the case. Secondly, possible victims or witnesses reading the article may believe their identities could be revealed as well, which could deter them from coming forward. Ultimately, that could make it harder for allegations to be proved or disproved.
Yes. there are laws that cover that sort of thing.
This might not just deter those who could provide information for this investigation but also concern anyone thinking of coming forward with sexual abuse allegations. Finally, the potential disclosure by a journalist of a name may possibly hamper an investigation. Names will be disclosed by police to those involved in the case, but that will be at the appropriate time for the investigation depending on how those lines of enquiry progress.
Yes, yes. This we all know.
We do understand that there are occasions when people making allegations of crime – including sexual abuse – disclose their own identity to the media and disclose facts associated with the case. Again, we ask that the media exercise care and caution when these are the circumstances and recognise our earlier point about vulnerability.
Again the police portray themselves of guardians of right.
We would also like to make it clear that the Metropolitan Police Service does not name or confirm names of those arrested or interviewed. That is our clear policy. We will be as open as we can be about policing activity – for example confirming arrest activity – but not confirming the names of individuals. If a police employee revealed the name that would be a clear breach of policy and dealt with in the appropriate manner. Moreover, the Commissioner told the Home Affairs Select Committee in March that he supports the proposal for granting accused people anonymity until charge.
Nick-Nick.
We expect the challenges for media and police alike to continue once witnesses start to give evidence to the Goddard Inquiry. We think it is important, therefore, to offer this context now so that journalists and police officers can continue to do their job, and pursue a shared interest in justice for victims and fairness to those facing allegations.
In other words: the PR exercise goes on.
The Times adds:
Operation Midland has drawn criticism since police forces leapt on unsubstantiated abuse claims against Edward Heath, and the former MP Harvey Proctor condemned as preposterous the allegations of torture and abuse put to him by officers. The home of Lord Bramall, 91, a former chief of the defence staff, has also been searched by officers working on Operation Midland. He has described the accusations put to him as “a load of rubbish”…
There are known to be big internal concerns at the Met that the £1 million Dolphin Square investigation is based on flimsy evidence, is being pursued partly because of external pressure, and is diverting homicide detectives away from frontline inquiries.
Midland is one of a number of inquiries that began after Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, said in the House of Commons in 2012 that there had been “a powerful paedophile network linked to parliament and No 10”.
Well, Watson’s now the Labour Party’s deputy leader. The conspiracy theorist has a bigger chair.
“Nick” approached police last year after speaking to the Exaro News website. He said he had been abused by a group of people after being taken to Dolphin Square and had witnessed three boys being killed. One was said to have been stabbed with a penknife and another run down with a car. The witness is understood to have given some 70 hours of videotaped interviews over several days to detectives. Many of his claims have since appeared in the newspapers and the BBC has broadcast an interview with him. It is thought, however, that police have not identified any likely victims of the alleged murders nor searched for bodies. The account of another witness who initially seemed to corroborate Nick’s account has since been ruled out.
Lest we only highlight the police’s PR-driven purge on paedos, it;s worth recalling Theresa May’s response to news of a conspiracy: “There might have been a cover-up.”
Helen Mirren has been talking with Bella Blissett for the Daily Mail. When not selling Rubber Gloves, Dame Helen works for anyone company. Can you guess which one it is – and, no, the Mail didn’t see fit to label it’s article an ‘advertorial’:
The 70-year-old actress has four Emmy awards, five Baftas and two Golden Globes to her name, and received a damehood in 2003. In sum, she’s the epitome of a ‘national treasure’…
In sum, she’s the epitome of a ‘national treasure’…
Ok, we get it. Move on…
“I’m pretty laissez faire about my beauty routine… Yesterday, I whacked on L’Oréal Paris Excellence Age Perfect Hair Colour in Light Beige Blonde [shade 9.31] for 25 minutes, then washed it off – job done.’
Who is her ‘beauty hero”?
“I love cleansers and body creams that make me feel clean and fresh, but my absolute favourite is L’Oréal Paris Age Perfect Classic Night Cream.
Blissett reveals the answer to our question:
Helen is a spokesperson for L’Oréal Paris Excellence Age Perfect Hair Colour, available nationwide
“I’m a bald man,” says Yann Marcotte, a swimmer at a pool in the Sainte-Julie suburb of Montreal, . “When I swim [with a cap on] it’s very, very hot … It’s very uncomfortable. I’m not a criminal. But it is not the law. It is just a pool rule.”
The Sun wants readers to know that BBC DJ Steve Wright is not slim. The paper’s Bizarre columns notes:
