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Yet another assault of freedom of expression by the forces of repression. Sometimes it comes from priggish intolerant ‘Daily Mail Right’ and sometimes from the thuggish and profoundly intolerant ‘Thought Police Left.
Shops could face legal action over ‘lads’ mags’. Magazines on shelves Campaigners say shops stocking lads’ mags could be in breach of the Equality Act 2010. Retailers are being warned they could face legal action if they continue to sell magazines showing naked and semi-naked images of women. Pressure groups and lawyers say displaying the magazines or requiring staff to handle them could amount to sexual harassment or discrimination […] UK Feminista director Kat Banyard said so-called lads’ mags fuelled sexist attitudes and behaviour by portraying women as “sex objects”. She told the BBC the images caused “real harm”.
Well I regard any attempt to threaten people from selling magazines as “real harm. So perhaps it is time to pass some laws that threaten people who do that with the violence backed hammer of law. Sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander and tolerance for people who wish to use force to impose their intolerance is both cowardice and ultimately suicidal.
And lets get rid of the Equality Act 2010 while we are at it.
Journalist Piers Hernu retorted:
“…no “right-minded individual” would consider the content of these magazines pornographic.
What we have here is a very deeply sinister and disturbing attempt by a group of fundamentalist, fanatical feminists trying to rope in some lawyers in order to bully the supermarkets into removing lads mags’ from the shelves by alerting both staff and customers that they may be able to win a court case”
Whilst I like his accurate characterisation of these thugs, he makes one very serious error. So what if the magazines are ‘pornographic’? Once you accept that as a legitimate reason to pass laws against a magazine, the enemies of liberty just start redefining what ‘pornography’ means until they get what they want.
Never people to let a nice atrocity go to waste, the recent murder of a British solider in London is being used by the ruling classes to renew the push for more state surveillance.
Never mind that the two perpetrators were already known to the security services, somehow the non sequitur that a more panoptic state could have stopped a pair of low tech islamic psychopaths carrying out an outrage that required perhaps ten minutes of prior planning (drive to an area with a lot of soldiers, grab one, murder him in broad daylight in front of witnesses) is being run up the flagpole to see how many people salute it.
Pure and utter bullshit.
Just remember this when some idiot holds up Boris Johnson as someone preferable to the ghastly David Cameron when (rather than if) Cameron gets the heave ho from the Tory party leadership as they start to feel Nigel Farage’s breath on the back of their necks.
…Because a backbiting and disingenuous woman has got her comeuppance.
High Court: Sally Bercow’s Lord McAlpine tweet was libel
A tweet published by Sally Bercow about Tory peer Lord McAlpine was libellous, the High Court has ruled.
The wife of Commons Speaker John Bercow tweeted two days after BBC Newsnight wrongly linked a “leading Conservative politician” to sex abuse claims.
Amid widespread speculation about his identity, she wrote: “Why is Lord McAlpine trending. *innocent face*.”
Her claim that this blatant innuendo was merely a factual enquiry was always an insult to the intelligence of anyone who heard it. But should there be an offence of libel at all?
“I feel I am one of them” Cameron bleats, regarding the hilariously named “Loongate” incident that has set the UK media atwitter.
How many people actually buy this crap I wonder? Precious few I suspect. Cameron is so remote from the Tory grass roots, who are ever more rapidly becoming the UKIP grass roots, that I very much doubt he has more than the vaguest idea who “they” actually are.
Rape, enslavement, child prostitution go unpunished for years. The victims’ complaints are dismissed by social services. The accusations are not seriously investigated by the police. With a few honourable exceptions the politicians and the media won’t even discuss the issue.
No one disputes that the crimes themselves are the responsibility of the criminals, but who is to blame for the conspiracy of silence?
Why, the first man to break it, of course!
In the comments to my earlier post, Jaded Voluntaryist pointed out an article by Sean Thomas in the Telegraph “…which blamed Nick Griffin for the events in Oxford, since by talking about this issue no-one wants to talk about way back in 2004, he made it impossible for anyone else to talk about it seriously. Yes, I’m sure if he had kept schtum it would have all been sorted out years ago…”
Here is said article: Oxford gang rape: did people ignore this sort of scandal because racist Nick Griffin was the first to mention them?
Mr Thomas has wisely opted not to allow comments. They would be radioactive.
He wrote,
As long ago as 2001, Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was making claims about Asian grooming gangs. In 2004 he repeated these allegations in a speech clandestinely recorded by the BBC for a TV documentary, Secret Agent. He was arrested and charged with inciting racial hatred.
Which is exactly what he was doing, of course. He was making his allegations to stir up ethnic strife. Right-thinking people, aware of the BNP’s record as liars, presumed that these stories were just racist demagoguery. No doubt Griffin feels vindicated today: for telling the truth before anyone else. And yet it was thanks in part to his thuggish intervention that society felt able to ignore the scandal. And thus the abuse continued.
[UPDATE 17 MAY 09.45: As those viewing Samizdata on the morning of 17 May will have seen, I tried to edit a minor error in the post and somehow deleted the text from this point onwards. A kind person has emailed me the lost text, which now follows. I will gradually reinsert the links. Apologies for this interruption – NS]
Some background on “the events in Oxford” here.
…a jury at the Old Bailey convicted seven men responsible for running an underworld child sex abuse ring in the Cowley area of Oxford of 43 charges of rape, child prostitution, trafficking and procuring a backstreet abortion. Six victims gave harrowing evidence during the three-and-a-half month trial, but police believe the number of girls recruited by the gang and abused numbers more than 50.
The gang – who were of Asian and north African descent – targeted extremely vulnerable white girls as young as 11 on the streets of Cowley and sold them for £600 a time to be raped and violently abused over an eight-year period. Two other men were cleared by the jury.
A litany of failings by police and social services had allowed the men between 2004 and 2012 to groom young, vulnerable girls they met on the streets, outside schools and in cafes, entice them with the promise of alcohol and trinkets, and subject them over years to sexual atrocities and torture.
“Asian” generally means Pakistani background, although two of the perpetrators here were Eritrean. All the abusers were Muslim. None of their victims were. This was not coincidence. The men generally targeted girls from children’s homes and disrupted family backgrounds. The abusers saw their victims as promiscuous white trash, in an utterly different category from their own wives and daughters. This is the latest of a string of such cases, all following the same pattern, such that a report produced by the police-staffed Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre “found that more than a quarter (26 per cent) of suspects reported to Ceop were of Asian origin, and the majority of groups identified were Asian”. There have been other trials of similar “Asian” (specifically British Pakistani) grooming gangs in Rochdale, Rotherham, Derby, Telford and Keighley.
Keighley, as it happened, was where Nick Griffin made one of the speeches that got him prosecuted. In that speech, Griffin said,
“These 18, 19, and 25-year-old Asian Muslims who are seducing and raping white girls in this town right now are not particularly good Muslims, they drink and all the rest of it, but still part of what they are doing comes from what they are taught is acceptable.”
It will be a cold day in hell before I vote for the Holocaust denier Nick Griffin’s literally fascist party, but I rather think that if Griffin feels vindicated that is because he has been vindicated.
Thug he may be, but his “thuggish intervention” in this case consisted of stating the truth when almost nobody else would – and being prosecuted for it. The charges covered many things said by Griffin, but the opening speech by the prosecuting counsel specifically featured his claims of “paedophile drug rape” in Keighley. (The prosecution was unsuccessful. Two juries acquitted Griffin and another defendant in two separate trials.)
Society did not just “feel able to ignore the scandal”, society – in the form of police chiefs, social workers, and the media – actively, cravenly dodged saying anything about it. Why? Because they were all afraid of being branded racist. As one of the few exceptions to the media silence, the documentary-maker Anna Hall, wrote, “…a senior children’s services manager said: “The men are Asian, Anna, but you’ll never get anyone on the record to say that.”” Or as Tim Loughton, the former Children’s Minister admitted, “There are clear cultural sensitivities around these cases that too often meant the relevant agencies were reluctant to intervene properly”. Or as retired police Superintendent Mick Gradwell said, “There is a problem with some members of the Pakistani community targeting young women in this way […] In the past there have been major fears of being seen as racist, especially after the Stephen Lawrence inquiry at the Met police said the force was institutionally racist.” (H/T: Laban Tall at UK Commentators, who has followed this story for years.) Note how Gradwell described the former Home Secretary Jack Straw as “brave” for speaking out as late as 2011. He was, too, even though his fellow Labour MP Ann Cryer had been much braver in speaking out back in 2004 when she was MP for Keighley. Bravery was required to speak out because bad things were likely to happen to the careers of those who did, particularly if they did not have Cryer’s or Straw’s Parliamentary privilege.
And thus the abuse continued, Mr Thomas.
Incidentally, the police “requested” that Anna Hall’s documentary “Edge of the City” be postponed until the 2004 local elections were over, for fear it would send votes to the BNP. I thought the police were meant to be politically impartial.
There is a grain of truth in what Sean Thomas has written. When I first saw reports that the BNP claimed that Asian gangs were grooming white girls, my eyes skated over them because claims that “their” men are seducing, corrupting and raping “our” girls have been a staple of racist propaganda through the ages. Thus far, Mr Thomas was right. But to attempt to shift the blame for even a fraction of years of sustained, repeated evasion of their duties on the part of every organ of the establishment onto Nick Griffin is… inventive. Were the social services departments of multiple British towns really listening that hard to Nick Griffin? Did the chief constables of several different police authorities check that the chairman of the British National Party hadn’t spoilt the atmosphere before giving the go-ahead to investigate? Should we assume that the fact that in the last couple of years the Crown Prosecution Service has finally started to actively prosecute these gangs (following the initiative taken by Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England Nazir Afzal, himself of Pakistani heritage, please note) is because the CPS lawyers have finally got over their sulk at Griffin making them look bad?
A question for the mainstream media: aren’t you ashamed that the British National Party reported what you dared not?
A question for the politicians, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service: do you now regret the prosecution of Nick Griffin and Mark Collett on charges of using words or behaviour likely to stir up racial hatred, specifically including his claims about Keighley? Do you acknowledge that your action in attempting to curtail and punish his free speech, in part for saying this type of crime was happening at a time and a place when it was, will certainly have deterred others from speaking out?
David Cameron’s position is that he is trying to persuade the Golf Club to play tennis, but that if they refuse, he will continue to play golf.
– Michael Forsyth, on Daily Politics today, describing the posture of the Prime Minister with regard to the European Union.
It is hard to know where to begin. This story has everything. Facepalm-inducing levels of stupidity; obviously unworkable policies; nannying; doctors who would rather control people than patch them up; meaningless statistics; government interference in minutiae; this old chestnut:
Ministers have suggested that if companies fail to sign up to the Responsibility Deal voluntarily the government could legislate to force them to act.
So far these are plans “seen by The Telegraph” to introduce more control over food by, say, making biscuits smaller. In a sane world it will never happen but it is an insight into the direction that those in power would like to see things go. I have noticed how quickly what once would have seemed unbelievable can become normal: would a smoker on a plane in 1998 have believed it would be banned in pubs nine years later?
A week ago, a friend of mine, a retired journalist now living in France, stayed with me for a couple of nights, kipping down on my living room sofa-bed. He arrived on Sunday, and on Monday he journeyed forth at midday, to have lunch, with a big gaggle of his old journo pals. The lunch was quite liquid and very prolonged. Although I should add that when he got back to my place around midnight he behaved impeccably, his only slight infringement of good manners being a tendency toward repetition.
All of which got me a-googling the phenomenon of Lunchtime O’Booze, that being the soubriquet that was bestowed upon journalists of a certain vintage by Private Eye. The words explain themselves.
This caused me to encounter some bang-up-to-date observations about the Lunchtime O’Booze generation of journos, and the disdain with which they are now often treated, in a piece entitled In Defence of Lunchtime O’Booze, by John Dale.
In characteristic journo style (from which I dare say I could learn) Dale gets straight to his point:
Alcohol is a truth drug. Reporters use it as the weapon of choice to breach the carapace of lies erected by prime ministers, politicians, police and anyone else tempted to become tinpot Hitlers.
With drink you don’t hack with a keyboard. You hack with the clink of a glass and then download your personal malware and intellectual trojans directly into someone else’s brain.
Occasionally you get inside their heart as well, which is a cruel bonus. Alcohol, when applied by good reporters, brings the powerful and the pompous crashing to earth, face down in the gutter right in front of the paps shooting for posterity at 40 frames a second.
Next morning the prototype tyrant wakes up a nicer, gentler human being. …
And now for the bang-up-to-date bit:
… So, for me, the most alarming feature of the Leveson Inquiry was that it turned anti-alcohol, as if coveting the pulpit at a temperance meeting.
Any moment I expected Leveson to raise a placard saying: ‘Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.’
Leveson’s point is that the Police should beware getting too pally with journos, and especially of drinking with them too much. But Dale’s point is that although the Police would be wise to shun alcohol, journos who do the same are missing a big trick. Journos taking it in turns to tell Leveson that they abjure the demon drink should instead, says Dale, be willing to stand up, as best they can, and defend alcohol as a vital tool of their trade.
Dale follows with a character sketch of one Noel Botham, with a photo of Botham holding a drink and involving a drink-lubricated interview:
He raises his glass, giving it a tilt as if it were a journalistic rapier. …
A youthful 72, Botham is relevant because he is a lifelong bon viveur who has used his taste for the high life to pursue a form of free-range journalism which is the antithesis of that promoted by most Leveson witnesses, the reborn PCC and various journo professors. He’s the last cavalier in a world of roundheads. He symbolises free range against the battery farms of Canary Wharf and other media plantations.
But drink has not now stopped working its truthful magic, despite what Dale says. Botham is not actually the “last cavalier” by any means.
Guido Fawkes is often talked about as a challenge to traditional journalism. But when it comes to drinking and as a result learning stuff, Guido is no challenge to regular journalistic ways. He is booze and business as usual.
We appear to find ourselves in something of a Catch 22 situation. Nobody will invest in the new generating capacity that the government wants because nobody believes that the government policy of institutionalised insanity will last – taxpayers will not bear the kind of price rises that Davey wants to impose on everyone. But while the government is insisting that insanity is the way forward, nobody is going to invest in the UK energy industry at all.
– Here. From one of a number of recent Bishop Hill postings on the insanity of UK energy policy.
The UK version of the Huffington Post reports that Ukip’s ‘NRA-Esque’ Gun Control Comments Described As ‘Inaccurate Upsetting Drivel’. Furthermore, advises the author of the piece, Felicity A Morse,
Farage’s support for relaxed gun control is particularly controversial given there is a cross-party consensus that restricting firearms helps reduce gun crime and protects communities.
Emphasis added. Consider yourselves warned.
An unexpected pleasure, leftists chocking at the sight of people celebrating Margaret Thatcher, has just got even better.
The Daily Mail informs us that the “Thatcher haircut” is the rage in central London, with one salon claiming to be overwhelmed by demand.
Italian-born Christina Bellucci, 37, a digital consultant, said she felt the look reflected a modern attitude.
‘This is a strong style and gives me authority,’ she said.
‘When I walk out the door I feel a few inches taller, it gives me power without sacrificing any of my femininity.’
When I read this…
A supermarket chain has withdrawn bags of nuts – after failing to declare they may contain peanuts. The Food Standards Agency issued an allergy alert saying the presence of peanuts was not declared on Booths’ own brand packets of monkey nuts. […] Booths technical manager Waheed Hassan said: “It is our responsibility as retailers to accurately record allergy advice. […] In a statement, the supermarket said it had identified the labelling error and issued a warning to customers.
“If you have an allergy to peanuts, please do not consume this product and return it to your local store for a full refund. No other products are affected by this issue and we sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.”
So the packets of nuts labelled as… nuts… are being recalled for not telling people allergic to nuts not to eat the nuts.
I would have much preferred if Mr. Waheed Hassan had instead issued the following statement:
“If you are allergic to nuts, do not buy anything labelled as… nuts. And if you do, then either you are illiterate or cannot read English, in which case an additional label telling you not to eat the nuts that you are allergic to from this packet labelled as… nuts… would not help.
But then again, anyone suffering from a nut allergy eating from a packet labelled… nuts… and which, when you open them and see them prior to stuffing them into your gaping maw, look exactly like the… nuts… that you are allergic to, well, such a person is so stupid that we feel that we are providing a public service assisting with their choice to remove themselves from the gene pool. No need to thank us and remember to always shop at Booths! Kthxby.”
But sadly, he did not say that.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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