Following hot on the heels of the Jonathan Isaby’s gaff in publishing what he claimed were unofficial vote tallies taken by a member of the Tory Campaign team in Ealing Southall during the verification of postal ballots, a second national newspaper appears to have repeated Isaby’s gaff.

Visit in the Independent on-line this morning, and you’ll find its lead by-election story for Ealing Southall is the on-going police investigation into Isaby’s blog post, which appeared on the Telegraph’s website at 6pm yesterday evening.

Ealing Southall: Police to investigate Tories over leaked postal by-election results

By Ben Russell, Political Correspondent
Published: 19 July 2007

The Conservative Party found itself at the centre of a police investigation last night after allegations a “Tory source” had leaked results of a postal ballot of today’s Ealing Southall by-election.

Scotland Yard confirmed it was looking into the case and a police spokesman, when asked about the claims, said: “We’ve received allegations of possible electoral offences in relation to the Ealing Southall by-election. We take it very seriously and appropriate action will be taken.” The spokesman declined to be drawn on who had made the allegations or how the Conservatives had reacted.

The Daily Telegraph diarist Jonathan Isaby, known for his connections with the Conservative party, posted details of the postal ballot on his blog last night. He wrote: “[A] source inside the Tory campaign [in Ealing] reports that it was looking incredibly close, with them calculating the main parties’ tallies as follows: …”

The blog then listed the early results. Soon afterwards, the posting was removed from the website.

Before going on to note that:

By law, political parties are allowed representatives to oversee the validation process, however any release of an indication of how the vote is going is strictly prohibited on the grounds that it could influence subsequent votes. The offence is punishable by up to six months in prison.

However, pick up the print edition of this morning’s Independent and turn to page 10 and you’ll find a article entitled ‘Divided electorate attracts party heavyweights for last ditch appeal’, also bylined as the work of political correspondent, Ben Russell, in which it states the following:

“Postal voting returns presented to Mr Cameron yesterday were said to show Labour with XX percent of the vote … XX per cent for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats on XX per cent”

The actual figures given by Russell have, for obvious reasons, been redacted.

As this screen shot from Google’s News Search shows, the article by Russell in which he sites postal ballot figures as having been ‘presented to David Cameron’ was posted to the Indy’s website last night - and the link returned by Google is identical to that of this morning’s story about the Telegraph’s gaff, which shows the the Indy have attempted to cover their tracks by overwriting their original story on the same URL.

There seem to be be possible explanations for Russell’s print edition story. Either these figures were being circulated more widely to and amongst journalists than was first thought, which may hint that there may be some truth to Isaby’s claim to have been given the numbers by a source in the Tory Party, or Russell has lifted the numbers from Isaby’s blog post and filed the first story while unaware of Isaby’s alleged breach of electoral law.

While the Telegraph may be in a position to draw some small crumbs of comfort from their gaff having taken place only on Isaby’s blog, the Indy have gone the whole hog and placed this information into print, which is an altogether more difficult thing to worm your way out of.

UPDATE

There appears to be a discrepancy between the figures cited by Isaby and those given by Russell, so its not at all clear where he sourced his figures from. There was a fair bit of chatter last night on Political Betting and few other sites, with several different sets of figures being floated once posts repeating Isaby’s figures had been removed as news of the police investigation spread.

The Groan have got the skinny on the Beeb’s plans for its autumn schedules…

BBC1 has secured a series of interviews with former prime minister Tony Blair in which he will look back over the major events of his 10-years in office.

In what the BBC has billed as a “number of open and candid” interviews, Mr Blair will talk about his experiences in Number 10 as well as the “challenges of governing a democracy”.

The series, which will be made by independent production company Juniper, will be made along the lines of previous series such as The Major Years and The Thatcher Years, and will see Mr Blair and other political players reflect on his time in office.

All of which, one suspects, will be of considerably less interest to most people than this item from later in the same article:

Four classic fairy tales, made popular by The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson and Charles Perrault, will be given a modern take by Cutting It writer Debbie Horsfield.

Denise Van Outen stars in The Empress’s New Clothes…

I should imagine that Iain Dale will be pleased with Andrew Marr’s account of the Thatcher years in his ‘History’ of Modern Britain - and yes I have got the quotation marks in the right place - not least for his slavish adherence to popular myth surrounding the sinking of the General Belgrano, even in the face of the existence of numerous painstakingly and verifiably accurate accounts of the exact events leading to its sinking.

So, for the record - a concept that rather escaped Marr in putting this programme together - the Falklands Conflict did not begin with the sinking of the Belgrano on May 2nd 1982.

If you want an actual starting point for hostilities you can take your choice of the sinking of the Argentinan submarine, the Sante Fe, by a Lynx helicopter from HMS Antrim and three Westland Wasp helicopters from HMS Plymouth and HMS Endurance on 25th April 1982, which immediately preceded the recapture of South Georgia on the same day - this is the occasion on which Thatcher famously instructed the press to ‘Just rejoice at that news’.

Or, if you prefer to stick rigidly to just the Falkland Islands themselves, then your start date is actually May 1st 1982, the date on which the airfield at Port Stanley was bombed first by an Avro Vulcan flying from Ascension Island, and then, along with the airstrip a Goose Green, by Sea Harriers from HMS Hermes - this is the occasion on which Brian Hanrahan famously commented, “I counted them all out and I counted them all back.”

Both events took place, of course, before the sinking of the Belgrano.

Similarly, Margaret Thatcher did not ‘order’ the sinking of the Belgrano, as Marr also claimed. The decision to sink the Belgrano was taken in the field by the commander of the Surface Task Force, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, who in doing so unilaterally took command of the submarine - prior to this point Britain’s submarine forces were officially designated as a separate taskforce any were not, strictly speaking, Woodward’s to command.

What Thatcher did do, acting on the advice of the Admiralty and Naval Command at Northfleet, who were notified of by Woodward of his decision, was put her political authority behind Woodward’s decision, altering the Taskforce’s terms of engagement in such a way as to permit the Belgrano’s sinking. For purely logistical reasons relating to submarine communications, neither Woodward, Thatcher or any other member of the Cabinet were aware of the Belgrano’s course change prior to its sinking.

Woodward, as commander in the field, took a ‘battlefield decision’ and Thatcher, sensibly, followed the advice of the Admiralty and back the ‘man on the spot’ - had she not done so then Woodward could, hypothetically, have been court-marshalled for breaking the authorised chain of command.

All this was well documented, after the fact, by several reliable sources not least amongst which is Woodward himself, who later wrote:

The speed and direction of an enemy ship can be irrelevant, because both can change quickly. What counts is his position, his capability and what I believe to be his intention.

Whatever one thinks of her handling of the Falklands Conflict, Thatcher was a politician and not a military commander and should be evaluated on those terms. The false notion that she ‘ordered’ the sinking of the Belgrano is not a historical fact but a piece of political myth-making contrived to cast Thatcher in the heroic mould of Sir Winston Churchill who, unlike Thatcher, did possess the background and experience to direct operations in such a manner.

I suppose that if there is a silver lining in any of this, its that for once we’ll be spared the usual whinging from Dale about BBC bias - Marr’s obvious ahistoricity on this occasion is not a function of bias, I should add, but a reflection of the perils of making ‘popular’ history programmes for television whic, sadly, necessitates a bit too much dumbing down of content and playing to the gallery for my tastes.

Via Bob Piper I find Fat Man in a Bathtub struggling to find a suitable candidate for a BBC Poll on the best British film of all time (Bob has some good suggestions, btw):

The BBC is conducting a poll on the best British film of all time, and  I am struggling to come up with one. There is Last Orders, which is gentle, tender and funny and would probably bear repeated viewings, there is Kes, there is Nil by Mouth, there is Distant Voices, Still Lives but I am really struggling to come up with anything that can compete with the best of the US or France or Italy, or Japan or just about any country you can think of; British films just seem terribly parochial, and, worst of all, of their time; few  seem to transcend the era they were made in and I can’t think of one that I would have as my “desert island” film. It’s quite shaming, really.

My Life as a Dog just popped into my head, a great film, better than any British film I can think of, but a film which would get nowhere near my top ten films.

Part of the problem here I suspect is the difficulty one often has is determine precisely what can and cannot properly be considered a British film.

In the case of Japanese, French and Italian cinema - and indeed films originating in any country in which English is not the primary language, then language itself typically creates a clear delineation between what should and should rightly be considered to the output of that country’s native film industry. The very fact that films are produced in a language other than English for a non English-speaking market naturally creates a film industry in these countries that is far more self-contained in almost every aspect of film production than is the case in Britain - the French film industry, to give but one example, makes films in the French language in French studios using French actors, writers, directors, technicians, etc, financed by French money for distribution by a French company in the French market.

By contrast, a ‘British’ film may quite easily - more often than not, in reality - have been financed with American money and be distributed by an American studio. It may have American actors in its cast, even in leading roles, an American producer and/or director, American scriptwriters, American technicians. It may even have been filmed in America, be set in America and be targeted primarily at capturing the American market.

To compound matters even further, the same may be true of the American film industry, which makes extensive use of British actors, technicians, directors, studios, scriptwriters, stories and settings and even that disregards the complications arising from careers that span and move between both industries - Hitchcock is, perhaps, the classic example, having directed films such as The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Lady Vanishes, that are rightly considered classics of the British film industry, and films such as Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, etc are accorded equal status in history of American film-making.

Perhaps the best one can genuinely say is British films are impossible to define fully, but you know what one is when you see it.

I disagree with FMIAB’s contention either that Britain has little to offer to match the output of America, France, Italy, etc or that British films are necessarily ‘parochial’.

It would certainly be true to say that Britain’s film industry excels in certain clearly defined genres that have a definite connection to British culture - no other country quite does period drama, especially around themes of social class, quite as well as we do, and in the work Ken Loach and Mike Leigh we can rightly say that we’re near the top of the pile when it comes to themes rooted in social realism. And, of course, Britain has traditionally had a very distinctive - and very British - approach to comedy, from the classic Ealing comedies to the Carry On films right through to Monty Python, which may well reinforce the impression that the one truly definable characteristic of British film-making is its parochialism.

That’s a view that, to my mind, sells British film-making at its best woefully short, especially by comparison to the output of other countries.

Is the epic sweep and cinematic beauty of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia not more than a match for Kurosawa’s Ran - which is, itself, merely Shakespeare’s King Lear transposed to feudal Japan.

What of the all-American action hero? Doesn’t it tell you something that even the best and most profitable US efforts in this genre - think of Die Hard, for example - are good for what? Three, perhaps four movies at best?

How many Bond films are up we up to now?

What about the ‘caper movie’ - which would you rather watch, Oceans’ 11 (12 and, soon, 13) or The Italian Job? (and not the god-awful American remake, either).

Exactly!

Think about it - is Life of Brian a less funny film than Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday or Blazing Saddles?

Of course not - not least because simply by naming a character ‘Biggus Dickus’, ‘Life of Brian’ executes the single greatest and most painfully funny sustained knob gag in comedic history, and all without recourse to an apple pie as a crude prop.

I’ve already listed a fair few films that I think easily rank alongside the best that any other country has to offer, even America, and I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of our own film industry’s output over the years.

If Lawrence of Arabia doesn’t grab you, then what about one of his other classic films -say Bridge on the River Kwai or his adaptation of Dicken’s Great Expectations?

If Life of Brian doesn’t tickle your funny bone; how about The Ladykillers, Kind Hearts and Coronets or The Lavender Hill Mob.

You want gangsters? Try Get Carter or The Long Good Friday.

You want a thiller? Try The Third Man or the Ipcress File.

Black humour? How about If… or maybe Withnail and I.

Science fiction? Just try finding a better piece of dystopian SF than Brazil…

You know, perhaps the hardest thing about coming up with the best British film of all time isn’t a lack of quality at all but rather that we’re really spoiled for choice

It seems that I’ve been ‘tagged’ by Tom to give the once over to a Fox News Lite video ‘report’ (posted on Conservative Home) about Robin Aitken’s claim that the BBC is guilty of an “unconscious, institutionalised Leftism”

Mmm… Do I want to spend 15 minutes or so of my life listening to the same old hackneyed Tory whinging about the Beeb? Not really. Not when I’ve already seen Aitken on the box shilling his book for all he’s worth and the best he could come up with was that he was ’shocked’ to hear a BBC journalist say something to the effect of ‘Its about time’ when Thatcher quit.

All that proves is that Aitken needed to get out more - there were millions of people who felt that way at the time and you only had to travel a hundred miles of so North of London to find them in their droves.

Helpfully, Fox News Lite have provided a neat little summary of what Aitken’s whining about, which contains all the old favourites…

Institutional Bias

He says that he is not questioning the good faith of his colleagues but like the institutional racism of the Police, the internal systems of the BBC are biased in favour of left wing views.

Well, yes he would say that, wouldn’t he.

Public spending

He argues that the BBC makes left wing assumptions about public spending. For example, they never ask why is the government spending so much on a particular project? Rather they ask if the money spent is too little.

For instance?

Look, the BBC’s function is to report on public policy and not make it, which means that its perfectly natural for the Beeb to ask questions about whether the government is spending enough on a particular project if the contention of the government of the day is that if they spend X on Y it will lead to Z and Z doesn’t materialise as expected.

It’s not the BBC’s job to propose alternatives to government policy, that’s the job of the opposition parties.

Take the London Olympics, for example. The projected costs are already increasing are serious question marks already about how much it will actually cost when all’s done and dusted, in which case its quite right that the Beeb should pose the question as to whether the government’s cost projection are sufficient to the deliver the project as specified.

Whether or not the project could be delivered more cheaply if an alternative approach was taken is not, however, a question that lies directly in the BBC’s brief as a public service broadcaster. If the Tories want such questions asked then they need to be the one’s posing the questions, not the Beeb - the Beeb can then report what the Tories are saying and both sides of the argument should get an airing.

If, say, David Cameron makes such a challenge and it doesn’t get reported, then you’d have cause for complaint, but not otherwise. The BBC is not the public’s financial watchdog, that’s the job of the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, so if you want criticisms of government spending to be aired then its there you should start, not with the Beeb.

BBC employees
The employees of the BBC are usually arts graduates with progressive agendas such as promoting anti-racism, internationalism, opposing moral conservatism and being in favour of multiculturalism.

Yeah, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the TV station that employs people with qualifications relevant to the nature of their core business, isn’t their?

D’oh!

The left sets its agenda

The BBC only feels comfortable challenging certain issues when politicians from the Left question those issues. For example, it was only after the CRE questioned multiculturalism that the BBC felt empowered to do so.

Judging by the amount of bandwagon jumping from the right when Jack Straw made his comments about the wearing of the niqab, its not just the Beeb who only feel comfortable in challenging certain issues when those issues are raised by the left.

Chutzpah, so the classic joke goes, is the quality of a man who murders both his parents and then asks for mercy on the grounds that he’s an orphan, and that rather nicely sums up the nature of the Tories complaint here.

It would be perfectly true to say that for quite some time certain issues have effectively been off-limits to right-wingers, especially around race and ethnicity, where any attempt to raise those issues would result in a reflexive charge of racism and ‘playing the race card’.

However, it would also be true to say that that situation is largely one of the right’s own making, dating right back to Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘River’s of Blood’ speech - in the past the Tories have conspicuously played the race card and earned themselves a poor reputation in terms of their handling of race relations issues - it’s the classic ‘boy who cried wolf’ scenario writ large on political culture.

Now that something that the Tories are consciously trying to change - and fair play to them for their efforts, although it’s apparent that some Tories haven’t quite figured it out yet:

A RACE row has broken out at South Cambridgeshire District Council (SCDC) just a week after members were branded discriminatory in a Government report.

Councillors attending an “improvement planning” workshop were shocked and appalled when Coun Ted Pateman, who represents Bourn, used an old-fashioned and offensive racial slur. Many councillors had been upset by the Audit Commission’s recent finding that “there is a clear perception amongst some stakeholders that some councillors’ attitudes and behaviours are racist and discriminatory”.

But just days later 79-year-old Conservative Coun Pateman said: “There are all different sorts of wogs here, I don’t differentiate between them but treat them all as though they were English”.

I’m sure that’s not quite what the Tories have in mind when it comes to being more inclusive of black communities and Pateman’s almost certainly marked himself as suitable candidate for retirement with that remark had he not already decided to stand down, but then I have to admit that, even as a ‘leftie’ I find it difficult to find too much in the way of moral opprobrium to direct at Councillor Pateman if only because his comment has such a gloriously absurd Alf Garnett quality to it.

Yes, what he’s said is wrong and he has apologised for his remarks but in this case the mental picture this story conjures is one of Pateman surrounded by a volcanic eruption of spluttered coffee from his colleagues, and I just can’t help but find that funny. Whatever else he may be, at 79 years of age Pateman is no more than a dopey old dinosaur and this all a bit of non-story, but it does illustrate an important point about perceptions. For a long time the Tory Party has been perceived to have ‘a problem’ with race and ethnicity and until it manages to shake off that perception it will be somewhat limited in the kind of approach it can legitimately take on such issues without falling foul of its own past history.

That’s not the Beeb’s fault, that’s all down to the Tories themselves and they just need to convince the public that attitudes in the party have genuinely changed and changed for the better, all of which takes time - at the very least, they’re going to have to get through a general election campaign without falling into the old trap of making immigration a central platform of their campaign and over-egging the rhetoric on Daily Mail/Express lines before anyone is likely to be fully convinced that the party has caught up with the modern world.

No Tories in the room

If the team responsible for programmes like Panorama were sat in a room there would rarely be any one in the team who expressed conservative views. The end result is that these programmes are slanted towards the left wing perspective.

Its difficult to comment on this without seeing a response from the team behind Panorama, but one point I would make is that programmes like Panorama are somewhat different to the BBC’s main news output - the very nature of the programme itself is one in which there is a little more scope to editorialise its output as opposed to the kind of straight factual news broadcasting in the Beeb’s main news bulletins.

I can’t say whether Aitken’s criticisms have merit, but what I can say is that ‘magazine’ type programmes like Panorama need to regarded a little differently from other news broadcasting.

Sinn Fein

The Unionists were portrayed as the people who blocked the peace process. This was despite the fact that anti-discrimination laws had been passed in Northern Ireland which met Sinn Fein’s demands. He also alleged that information that was critical of Sinn Fein was suppressed because they did not want to offend the Republicans.

Sorry, but there’s rather more to the peace process and the necessary quid pro quo that its entails than simply the matter of one concession on anti-discrimination laws that met Sinn Fein’s demands.

Look, the situation in Northern Ireland is unlike anything else that exists within the domestic political arena, in fact I would strongly argue that the guiding principles of the peace process have little or nothing to do with conventional domestic politics and belong more correctly to the arena and mores of foreign policy. In short, the ‘rules of the game’ are fundamentally different to anything that the majority of the domestic audience is, or will be, used to and that alone is cause of significant misunderstandings as to how the peace process works in practice.

Take the whole question of early prisoner releases - that is just something that one would undertaken in a purely domestic arena and yet, in dealing with a cessation of hostilities in terms of foreign policy, prisoner releases (or rather exchanges) are a standard feature of any peace negotiations.

It’s a complex situation all around, and one made more complex for the British media by the fact that its taking place right on our own doorstep and not several thousand miles away as is usually the case.

Has the BBC been biased in its reporting of the peace process? No, I don’t think it has - or rather I don’t think its quite that simple.

While its true that as the process has developed, more and more attention has fallen on the Democratic Unionists as the main ‘blockers’ of progress, the truth is that this has far more to do with astute handling of the peace process, and the media, by Sinn Fein than any real bias on the part of the BBC or any other UK media organisation.

What Sinn Fein have been doing, cleverly, is using the static position of its DUP opponents to play out a very effective game of ‘bait and switch’.

The game works like this.

1) In order to move the peace process forwards, a particular action is required of Sinn Fein - most recently this has been a commitment to work with the police - one that Sinn Fein know full well they’ll have to give ground on.
2) Sinn Fein deliberately bait the DUP by stalling on taking this action as long as possible but without ever ruling it out - usually some minor objections are thrown up or its stated that some sort of internal consultation has to take place. Whatever. The net effect is that Sinn Fein’s position is put over as one in which they’re not quite happy with the situation but they could give ground eventually as there’s room for negotiations and a few wrinkles still to be ironed out.

3) The DUP take the bait and start issuing ‘demands’ - whatever it is that at issue, Sinn Fein must do it and they must do it now or the whole deal’s off, blah, blah, blah…
The impression this creates in one in which the DUP is visibly seen to be inflexible and obstructive, while Sinn Fein are the one’s who being flexible, considering things carefully, etc.

4) At the last minute, Sinn Fein make the concession they knew they’d have to make all along, but usually not before there’s been a dire warning or two from the British government and, more often than not an emergency summit between the British and Irish governments. Whatever the exact details of the scenario are, generally the denouement comes after there’s been some form of representation to Sinn Fein from the Irish government which has been the ‘difference maker’ as far as the situation is sold to the public, almost as if to suggest that the concession, when it comes, has been granted as a favour to the Irish government because they desperately want to keep things on track.

What this achieves, in terms of public perception, is a situation in which Sinn Fein are perceived to be the one’s behaving reasonably and making concessions, which the DUP is isolated and intransigent in it demands, when, in reality, they’ve been suckered yet again by a very effective game of political ‘rope-a-dope’.

If the BBC does sometime soft-pedal material that upset Sinn Fein, the effect of that is marginal at best by comparison to the effectiveness of Sinn Fein’s own tactics and their ability to exploit the negative public image of the DUP and its leaders. Whatever else Ian Paisley may be, he’s not someone who engenders a great deal of public sympathy and readily comes over as aggressive and domineering, and its that that Sinn Fein exploit to great effect.

BBC closed to criticism

They refuse to believe that they can do wrong. Thus when someone writes in with a complaint, they regard the person as a ‘looney’.

To be fair there may well be some measure of truth in this, although in mitigation one should note both that this kind of thing is fairly commonplace in all bureaucratic institutions and that, by its very nature as a public broadcaster, the ’signal to noise’ ratio is complaints to the BBC is likely to be poor even by comparison to other public institutions, i.e. the Beeb, I would suggest, does get more than its fair share of ‘green ink’ missives from its viewers and, as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt.

They are not honest about Islamic fascism

The BBC decreed that violent Islamism should not be described as terrorism. They also believe that they have a public role to play in promoting harmony between Muslims and the rest of society. This has led them to suppress certain stories about Islam in order not to create friction in society. He argues that whilst these are well meaning gestures, they affect their duties to publish the truth.

Ah yes, this old chestnut again.

Yes, the Beeb did appear to get itself tied up in knots over the semantics of some its reporting of the July 7th bombing of London, a situation that Roger Mosey, the Beeb’s head of television news, addressed in an article published in the Guardian’s Media section on July 13, 2005:

Finally, we are never immune from accusations of bias. It goes without saying that there is nothing more sensitive than matters of life and death, and the BBC’s audience response has been massively supportive and understanding about the dilemmas we face in reporting terror. There have been two main exceptions. From a smattering of radical websites comes the argument that we are being hypocritical in mourning the dead of London when we allegedly gloried in civilian deaths in Iraq.

This utterly misrepresents the BBC’s reporting of Iraq, where we have always sought to portray the whole picture of events in that country. The second exception is principally Fox News in the United States. A contributor to Fox said after the London bombings that “the BBC almost operates as a foreign registered agent of Hezbollah and some of the other jihadist groups”. On the Fox website today there is an opinion piece, “How Jane Fonda and the BBC put you in danger”. I am writing this in a building which was bombed by Irish terrorists. My colleagues and I are living in a city recovering from the wounds inflicted last week. If I may leave our customary impartiality aside for a moment, the comments made on Fox News are beneath contempt.

Then there has been a controversy about our use of language - particularly the question of whether the BBC banned the word “terrorist”. There is no ban. It’s true the word is contentious in some contexts on our international services, hence the recommendation that it be employed with care. But we have used and will continue to use the words terror, terrorism and terrorist - as we did in all our flagship bulletins from Thursday.

As it was with Fox News, so it is with Fox News Lite.

Selective use of facts

He accuses the BBC of being selective with their reporting of facts. For example, when the BBC reports that the majority of stop and searches were performed on young black men it fails to inform us that the majority of crimes were committed by young black men.

This is sheer and utter nonsense.

The most recent Home Office statistics on crime and ethnicity (for 2005) are published here, and while they do make for fairly depressing reading, the picture they paint is rather different from the claim made here by Fox News Lite:

At a general level, all Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups have a higher representation as users of the Criminal Justice System (CJS) when compared to their representation as members of the population as a whole. This is especially true for Black and Asian suspects and offenders. Black and Asian people experience a greater likelihood of being stopped and searched. Moreover, Black defendants are more prominent in the Crown Court caseload, although this is partly due to a tendency to elect for jury trial more often than other ethnic groups, including White. Furthermore, Black people are also overrepresented in the prison population reflecting, at least in part, the longer average sentences imposed upon them.

Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System - 2005

Got that?

Black and Minority Ethnic groups are over-represented in the Criminal Justice System in proportion to the their UK population - that much is true - but that’s still a long, long way from being a situation in which the majority of crimes are committed by young black men.

Black communities - which I take to mean people of African and African-Caribbean descent - make up 2.8% of the UK population and, in 2005, accounted for 14.1% of all ’stop and searches’, 8.8% of all arrests, 6.4% of all cautions, 6% of youth offences, 13% of defendants in Crown Courts (as noted, Black defendants are more likely to take their chances with a jury that with a, usually white, magistrate), 13.5% of the prison population (getting longer sentences on average) and 10.5% of prison receptions.

Looking now at white communities, the parallel figures are 91.3% of the population, 74.7% of ’stop and searches’, 84.3% of arrests, 83,8% of cautions, 84.7% of youth offences, 75.7% of defendants in Crown Courts, 76.8% of the prison population and 80.8% of prison receptions.

So who, exactly, is committing the majority of crimes?

Okay, in the interests of accuracy, a concept entirely lost on Fox News Lite, the statistical table from which these figures are drawn does have a couple of relevant ‘qualifying’ notes appended to it, specifically:

(3) Information on ethnicity is missing in 22% of cases; therefore, percentages are based on known ethnicity.

(4) Proportions for Mixed not shown above. Equivalent percentages for Prison population 2.7%; Prison receptions 2.4%; Youth offences 2.3%

Obviously, of most interest/concern here is the relatively high proportion of cases (about a fifth) in which the ethnicity of the offender is not recorded, with the result that the ‘blanks’ have been filled in by extrapolation from the general proportions extant on the other 78% of cases. Quite how valid this may be is a little open to question as the report does not make it clear exactly how this extrapolation was undertaken (i.e. using the aggregated national statistics or on an area by area basis) and this may skew the results a little - but definitely not so much that young black men would come out as being responsible for the majority of crimes.

Also absent from the data are area-based population demographics and this, again, makes it rather tricky to assess this information accurately as one cannot accurately compare the data on arrests, etc. to the demographics of the local population, which is is important as the one thing that is clear is that the figures are heavily skewed by statistics from the main urban centres.

Only once do the figures show the black community as the majority source of a particular offence - 57.8% of those arrested for robbery in London are black, so the statement that the majority of street robberies in London are committed by young black men (and women) would be a reasonable one, but not the statement that the majority of crimes were committed by young black men.

The moral of this story is simple that if you’re going to criticise someone for making selective use of facts then you’d better get your own facts straight first.

A mad right-winger?

He says he is not a mad right winger but an insider who has seen things going wrong and wants to make changes.

Disgruntled ex-employee, then?

To hell with it, you make your own mind up.

This all follows on, naturally enough, from Paul Dacre’s recent green ink febrile rant Cudlipp Lecture in which he accused the BBC of having “become a closed-thought system operating a kind of Orwellian Newspeak” - yes, it’s ‘political correctness gone mad’ time again - ho hum.

What’s the real issue here? What have the right got in for the Beeb so badly?

I guess that the obvious thing to suggest is that there is a concerted effort under way to try and pressure the Beeb into a shift to the right. Possible, perhaps, but unlikely.

In reality I think there’s something more fundamental at work here, something that’s not actually about whether the Beeb exhibits any particular political bias but rather more about the role and function that the BBC, by its very nature, plays in British culture - and the key to understanding what the issue is lies to a considerable extent in these remarks for Dacre’s lecture:

How instructive to compare all this with what is happening in America. There, the liberal smugness of a terminally worthy, monopolistic press has, together with deregulation, triggered both the explosive growth of rightwing radio broadcasting that now dominates the airwaves and the extraordinary rise of Murdoch’s rightwing Fox TV News service. Democracy needs a healthy tension between left and right, and nature abhors a vacuum. If the BBC continues skewing the political debate, there will be a backlash and I predict that what has happened in America will eventually take place in Britain.

This is not about political bias within the BBC, but rather about the effect that the BBC’s very existence has a public service broadcaster has on the UK’s ‘news market’.

Within the UK, the BBC performs an important sociological function inasmuch as it serves to ‘anchor’ the whole of Britain’s news/factual media. This is not, primarily, because the BBC is politically neutral. True neutrality is a difficult trick to pull off at the best of, although a good test of whether the Beeb has got it right is often whether get attacked for being biased from both sides of the political divide at the same time. Rather, the BBC and its style of news reporting defines public perception of what is ‘reasonable’ in terms of news broadcasting. It marks out and anchors the ‘centre ground’, the median position on any given story and one in which any evident bias is relatively small and of marginal importance.

Dacre is fulsome in his praise of the US and its overtly right-wing media including Fox News, which is, of course, owned by Rupert Murdoch, just as Sky Television (and Sky News’ are also owned by Murdoch - and yet Sky News and Fox News could not be more different. For all that it is noticably more right wing than either the BBC or ITN, Sky News is nowhere near being right-wing to the extent that Fox News is, or would be if its editorial style and slant were imported to the UK.

Why is that?

Well, in part, this clearly has to do with how television news in regulated in the UK, by OFCOM, whose code of practice does apply stringent rules on due impartiality, accuracy and undue prominence of views and opinions. But is that all there is too it?
I don’t think it is. There is something more at work here than simply a set of regulations and a Quango to watch over them and that something has to do with the sociological role of the BBC as anchor for the news media as whole.

Even if OFCOM’s regulations were relaxed sufficiently to permit a Fox News-style broadcast operation that was overtly right-wing in its agenda, I really do not think it would catch-on in the UK, let alone thrive and flourish as similar operations have in the US. In part that’s a function of cultural differences between the two countries, but more importantly I think its also a function of the existence of the BBC.

The reason that the political right have such an issue with the BBC is not that the BBC is markedly biased against them so much as, in defining the middle ground in news journalism - not what is neutral but what is reasonable - it provides a clear benchmark against which the biases of other news outlets can be readily assessed and evaluated by the general public.

In short, it effectively prevents the rest of the news media - and not just TV and radio, but also newspapers and magazines - from toppling over in becoming nothing more that propaganda vehicles for the political views of their owners/proprietors, and it does so simply be making that propaganda obvious to anyone who cares to look for it. Even if broadcasting regulations were amended in such a way as to allow something akin to Fox News to broadcast in this country, it still wouldn’t work and would fail to draw a significant audience simply because it would seem rather bizarre and over the top to most people by comparison to the BBC and its broadcasting standards.
Okay. so the obvious comeback to that last statement, as I’ve included print media in the mix, is, ‘But what about the Daily Mail/Express/Sun - aren’t they openly right-wing?’Well yes… obviously… but within limits.

There is nothing in law to prevent a newspaper adopting and pushing the same kind of overt right-wing editorial stance as that in use by Fox News in the US - many would argue that newspapers like the Daily Mail and Express are already there anyway, but by providing a benchmark for what is ‘reasonable’ in terms of news coverage what the BBC does is make those biases obvious to the reader. Simply compare and contrast the BBC’s take on particular story with that which appears in the Daily Mail and it becomes perfectly apparent within seconds exactly where and how the Mail is editorialising the story and adding its own politically motivated spin to events.

But even the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Express can only go so far into the realms of blatant right-wing paranoia without exposing themselves to outright ridicule - who really takes the Diana-obsessed Daily Express seriously these days - and such constraints as do exist are derived in the main not from regulation, and especially not from desperately ineffectual Press Complaints Commission, but rather from the presence in the news market of a largely unbiased and eminently reasonable middle-ground purveyor of news - the BBC.

That’s why some on the political right have got it in for the BBC at present - and for public service broadcasting more generally. It’s not because the BBC is biased but because one of the ways in which it does serve the public is as a kind of large scale bullshit detector; one that places curbs and limitations on their ability to push their propaganda through Britain’s mainstream media.

Can someone please remind me which political party Frank Field MP is member of? (rhetorical)

Or perhaps remind Frank, as he seems to be more than a bit confused of late, is his latest missive on Comment is Free is anything to go by.

A successful terrorist attack on London could make part of the capital uninhabitable for decades and make Britain permanently poorer. Yet, while London awaits its fate, Scotland Yard is fiddling away on an enquiry into the alleged sale of honours. How can the Metropolitan commissioner defend this enquiry as the best use of scarce police resources?

And the right six numbers on the lottery draw on Saturday night could make me a millionaire, but I’m not holding my breath for that either.

Are you actually serious here? The Met should forget investigating a criminal complaintin which is senior political figure may (hypothetically) because there might a few (no less hypothetical) scary Muslims out there.

Is there anything else you’d like to suggest that the Police stop investigating while they sort out this terrorist business. Armed robbery, perhaps? Burglary? Mugging?

Perhaps we should cancel all further housing developments until Barratt’s have built a 15 foot ’security wall’ around the M25 as well? That would make about the same amount of sense.

In criticising the Metropolitan Police commissioner for a serious misuse of police time I have not assumed that there is no case to answer on the honours front. No 10 has at the very least been sailing close to the wind. The whole saga is tacky, to put it mildly.

Tacky? That’s a bit of an understatement, Frank. Try ‘unethical’ instead.

Leaving aside the specifics of the Met’s investigation - on which Michael White offers a nicely considered take - what we can be sure of is that the Labour party did exploit a loophole in the provisions of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 to obtain funding, by way of loans, without disclosing the identity of the loanees, as it would have had to do in the case of donations.

What we also know, is that the Tories did the very same thing as well.

In fact the main difference between the two parties in this respect is that when both were caught with their fingers in this particular cookie jar, the Labour Party ‘fessed up and published a full list of their loanees, while the Tories stalled, paid off a number of existing loans - thus ensuring that neither the loanee or the terms of the loan would be disclosed - and then replaced these loans with other loans of, shall we say, ‘unclear’ provenence.

Presumably, Yates of the Yard has taken a good close look at these transactions as well, but that’s somewhat immaterial as the democratic, rather than legal, point to be made here is that both parties were ‘working’ the system to their advantage, and, in fact, the Tories worked the system right to very last minute an managed to wring every last drop of advantage they could out of it.

The way that the police have conducted the enquiry suggests to the media that it is the PM who is in the frame. But where did those senior Labour party figures who run the party, particularly in the run-up and during the election, believe the £18 million spent on the election came from, if not from wealthy donors? When the small group of top Labour officials, including the prime minister and the chancellor, mapped out the campaign, did they all believe that the £18 million or so they were committing to election campaign grew on trees?

That’s a very good question - provided, of course, that your prime motivation for asking it rests in genuine concern about what looks to have been the diminution of internal party structures, check and balances and you’r not just looking to take a bit of heat off the PM by ’spreading the load’, so to speak.

What is the financial control structure in the Labour party that allows the treasurer to claim that he had no idea of the source of the £18 million? Does not the Labour party have an audit committee to ask such elementary questions before money is committed?

That’s another question, Frank… and so is ‘Why does it appear that Party’s financial controls (and structure) were largely disregarded by those most directly involved in procuring these loans and and on who’s instructions and at who’s insitigation were they bypassed?’

Both are equally valid questions and, as a Labour Party member, I really would like answers to both of them, but again, I’m a little unsure of your motives here, Frank.

Are you demanding that we clean out the Augean Stables or just spread the blame a little more widely?

These are some of the very important questions the Labour party leadership needs to answer. They are not questions which have so far been put in public debate.

Nor, necessarily, should they be put in public debate, Frank, as you should well know as a Labour MP. All the questions you pose relate to internal Labour Party structures and practices, matters of considerable concern to Party members but not necessarily one into which the public have a right to included.

That’s not to say that public transparency is not an issue here - it is. We have to both do the right thing and be seen to do the right thing, but the debate itself is one for our own membership and not Mrs Miggins the life-long Tory Voter from Middle-Slopping-by-the Canal.

But we shouldn’t have to turn to the police to gain answers to questions which tell us something pretty fundamental about how political parties are run in Britain today. That a full scale police enquiry was put in hand raises not for the first time the judgement of Ian Blair the commissioner.

Actually, on this occasion it doesn’t call his judgement into question at all.

You see, back in 1215, a guy called John signed this bit of parchment called ‘Magna Carta’ and in doing so codified (by default) a basic principle - one that actually dates to Anglo-Saxon law - one that is sometimes expressed poetically as ‘be you ever so proud or mighty, no man is above the law’. And that’s a principle that has served us pretty well ever since - it was good enough to execute a king in the mid 17th century and its plenty good enough to investigate a Prime Minister and his advisers in the 21st.

Like it or not, the Met received a criminal complaint in this matter and having received such a complaint it is their bounden duty to investigate that complaint to the fullest extent permissible in law - no ifs, no buts and absolutely no ’sorry, not in our best interests’.

The commissioner has found himself in choppy political water recently and it was obviously easier for him to allow the enquiry to advance than to defend that with all the issues facing the Yard, the honours for sale fiasco was no where near the top of his agenda. But the easy option is, in this case, a negation of leadership.

Look, Frank, much as I harbour no great regard for Sir Ian Blair, and on record as saying so on on this blog on several occasions, even I am not inclined to suggest that his unwillingness to interfere in or curtail this investigation is a simple matter of political expediency, let alone a negation of leadership. He, or rather his officers, are doing precisely what the law and custom of this land says they should be doing - investigating the complain they received in a thorough and exacting manner.

You seem not to quite understand that half an investigation here is of no value to anyone, least of all Tony Blair and his staff.

If Yates of the Yard leaves absolutely no stone unturned in his inquiries (not ‘ENquiry ‘, Frank - yours pedantically) and finds no evidence of wrong-doing, then Blair will be fully and completely exonerated of all allegations. If, however, the investigation is seen to be anything less that thorough and exacting and no prosecutions ensue due to ‘lack of evidence’ then while Blair and others maybe exonerated in the eyes of the law, public doubts will remains and, most likely, become stronger than ever, having been fueled by conspiracy theories that will inevitably spring up in the wake on such an incomplete resolution to this affair.

If Blair et al are ‘clean’ - in legal terms - then its in their best interests for this investigation to proceed and be completed in as full and thorough manner as possible - only if they’re not is Yates of the Yard’s dilligent perfomance of his duties going to be a problem, one that will not go away if its seen that the good Inspector has been in any way constrained in the performance of his duties by outside political influences.

During Ian Blair’s watch the nature of the terrorist threat to Britain has fundamentally changed. Irish terrorists were about destroying buildings, usually after giving a warning. The nature of the threat posed by Islamic extremists is carried out by suicide bombers. What none of us know is when the next outrage is going to occur.

Nor is the threat, awful as it is, confined to such horrors visited on innocent individuals. An explosion of a dirty bomb could make parts of London uninhabitable for decades or more. Such an explosion would bring down more than the surrounding buildings. Twenty per cent of Britain’s income comes from the financial services sector. A dirty bomb would see much of this industry leave our shores. At a stroke our national income would be reduced from being at the top of the league of advanced countries, to the bottom, with huge repercussions for income and employment levels.

Likewise, bombing the Thames barrier at a record high tide with strong incoming winds would not only flood Canary wharf. Such an attempt would result in a pack of financial lemmings scuttling from our shores with the same devastating effect on national prosperity as a chemical or dirty bomb attack.

No, stop, Frank. You’re scaring me…

Have you ever thought of applying for a job as a scriptwriter on ‘24′?

It is against the need to try and prevent a catastrophe on this scale for our country that I continue to question the use of police time over the alleged sale of honours. I know it’s much easier for the police to chase a somewhat old fashioned crime as the alleged sale of honours than to try and foil the next, and then the next, terrorist outrage.

Of all the many things that scaremongering about ‘terrorist threats’ has been used to try and justify, this is by a long distance, the most contemptible - so much so that words fail me.

Well, not quite, as there are many words I could use here but as I’m consciously exercising a little more self-restraint than usual in the knowledge that some Party colleagues find my occasional forays into streams of inventive invective a tad off-putting - and I want this recieve the widest audience possible - I am rather more (self) contrained that usual in my remarks.

The commissioner has put what we are told is his most gifted senior policeman onto this task but it is these very gifts that we need to employ trying to keep ahead of the new terrorists. Given the choice between ruffling some feathers of the smaller creatures at No 10 for perverting the course of justice or reinforcing the unglamorous daily grind of trying to protect the security of our country, Ian Blair’s judgement looks eccentric, to put it mildly.

No, Frank. It’s you efforts to justify the softpedalling of what is, for the time being, at least, still a criminal investigation by raising the false spector of explosive-laced Jihadis wandering unchecked around London that is, to put it mildly, eccentric.

Insane might be a better term, were it not that I think that you know precisely what you’re doing here, so terms like ‘disingenuous’, ‘intellectually dishonest’, ‘duplicitous’, deceitful’ and ’shifty’ would seem to me to be rather more apposite of your arguments.

Quite where you are coming from here, is, I must confess, something of a puzzle to me. As far as internal dissention goes, those perennial dissenters of the ‘traditional left’, like Jeremy Corbyn or Bob Marshall-Andrews, them, I get. I understand pretty well where they’re coming from, how they see things and the beliefs and values that motivate them to act as they do - and in some instances I’m happy to admit that I’m not at all unsympathetic to some of the opinions.

You, on the other hand, I find perplexing. I can well recall your early days in government, back when you were the political ’superman’ who would modernise the welfare system singlehanded, only then to become a busted flush within a year or so of becoming a junior minister.

Now, when you’re not sniping from the backbenches you’re hanging out with your new found friends at the Thinktank ‘Reform‘, which professes to to be an “independent, non-party think tank whose mission is to set out a better way to deliver public services and economic prosperity.” but looks altogether more like a typical free-market Tory glee club to me and others who still subscribe to the view that if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck…

My you do have some interesting friends there, Frank.

There’s Christopher Gent, the former Chairman of Vodaphone and current Chairman of GlaxoSmithKline, for starters.

And what about Sir Douglas Hague, Economics Advisor to the Prime Minister from 1979 to 1983?

Err, hang on there. 1979-83? Care to remind us just exactly who was the Prime Minister at the time, Frank?

I guess Ruth Lea, Director of the Center for Policy Studies (founders Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) will need little introduction - she’s on Question Time enough for starters. She’s also, in case you hadn’t noticed, sufficiently involved in the right-wing pressure group, the Taxpayer’s Alliance, to have been a signatory to letters from the ‘Alliance’ sent to the FT and Telegraph and didn’t she once head up the
Now there’s nothing wrong with that - Lea’s political leanings are hardly an unknown quantity - but it does seem that you’re keeping somewhat curious company of late, including Stephen Pollard, of whom little needs to be said other than that were Blogger4Labour to run a poll for the man most likely to ship off and join the Tories once Blair goes, then its fair bet that Pollard would come in clear winner - and I ahte to say it, but on recent performance, you might well come in a not too distant second.

I could go on and pull out the details of a few of the other ‘Reform’ notables, say…

Tim Congdon - Politeia (along with Letwin, Maude and ‘Two Brains’ Willetts ) and Taxpayer’s Alliance (again), or

Prof. Anthony O’Hear - another special advisor, on education, to the Thatcher government and a noted social conservative, or

Patrick Minford, who has a Tory ‘rap-sheet’ as long as your arm - former Vice President of the Monday Club, currently on the Council of Conservative Way Forward, whose members include Thatcher, Tebbit, Parkinson and IDS, amongst others, and fair bit else besides.

As I said, Frank. Curious company you’re keeping these days?

Look, I know it’s not ben easy for you.

At one time you could have been a contender but since you got thrown off the waterfront all you’ve been able to is drag your bedraggled political carcass over onto Sunset Boulevard to play the Norma Desmond of the backbenches, so I suppose I should have some sympathy for you.

But you see, there’s this nagging question at the back of my mind that’s bugging me, because I can’t quite put my finger on the answer…

Who’s side are you really on here, Frank?

UPDATE: Apologies to Manic for filching this out of his comments but…

He’s [that’s Frank, btw] just replied to me with this: “Tony Blair ruined my career. I owe him nothing. So don’t bother your silly little head in thinking I put any arguments forward to save Mr Blair.”

Posted by: Manic at January 23, 2007 12:20 PM

Okay, that clears that one up… I think?

With all the fuss about Holocaust denial, should we now start worrying about the possibility of English Civil War denial?

Despite being the world’s oldest democracy, the UK has never had a revolution - no great rising of the people demanding the overthrow of the established order. 

I suspect that what Helena means is that we’ve never had a proletarian revolution in the UK, and I suppose she is technically correct as we didn’t become the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ireland) until 1800 - the 1707 Act of Union only created the Kingdom of Great Britain, but I’m still inclined to think that the Civil War counts as a revolution, and a British one, despite the name, especially as the Scots helped to start it.

Far be it from me to put words into the mouth of Tim Ireland, but it has not gone unnoticed at ‘the Ministry’ that a couple of points that Tim’s raised in the course of his extended polemic on the subject of Guido Fawkes (the blogger, not the 17th century Roman Catholic revolutionary) have led to raised eyebrows and a modicum of confusion in some quarters of the blogosphere.

Taken on face value, some of Tim’s comments on the subject of anonymity and *gasp* a ‘voluntary code of conduct’ seem, well, rather heretical - after all when a Mr ‘Nice-But -Dim’ (can’t be arsed to look up his name), from the Press Complaints Commission, flaoted the ’same idea’ before Christmas he was roundly pilloried by many bloggers for daring to suggest that we even consider (self)censoring our opinions - why should we treat such a suggestion from another blogger, and one who can genuinely claim to be a pioneer of the British blogosphere, any differently.

Nosemonkey picks up on both points is his (typically) considered response to Tim’s polemic, and on the face of it, it’s very difficult to disagree with anything he has to say:

I also see no problem with blogging anonymity, nor with political blogging that aims more at frivolous gossip than detailed discussion. Guido’s pseudonym is no more of a barrier to understanding his motivation than was Addison and Steele’s “Spectator” persona, or than are the many in Private Eye. If you care about what the writer’s own motivations are behind the pseudonym, they are often fairly easy to find out - and the people who can’t be bothered to find out evidently don’t care anyway. Quality will out - and it matters not a jot whether I write as “Nosemonkey” or under my real name if my arguments and evidence are good enough. The same goes for Guido - although (based on what crops up in his comments) a good proportion of his readers aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the box, enough of them are bright enough to know not to take everything he writes at face value…

…To try to promote accountability and honesty within this Fifth Estate - at least, within the political part of it - is obviously laudable. But any attempt to set up a voluntary code of conduct - be it stemming from a well-known blogger of long standing like Manic or from an external body like the Press Complaints Commission - is doomed to failure.

And yet, disagree with him I do, but only in terms of the context of his remarks and his understanding of precisely what it is that Tim is suggesting.

What is apparent here, to me, is that there is, even within blogging (and the wider ‘internet generation’), a ‘generation gap’ between those like Tim (and myself, for that matter) and other bloggers, of which Nosemonkey appears to be an example.

That’s by no means intended as a criticism of NM, merely a reflection of a difference in understanding between us when it comes to how we interpret Tim’s comments; one that I consider to stem largely from our ‘belonging’ to different ‘internet generations’.

Both Tim and I come from what might be called the ‘Usenet Generation’; the early adopters, the people who were out here on the electronic frontier before the internet became the near ubiquitous mass-market ‘commodity’ it is today. We ‘grew up’ in the ‘online world’, if you like, in what amounts to its ‘original culture’ and our views on certain things are still heavily ’shaped’ by that culture, even though, as the popularity of the internet has grown and more and more people have ‘joined the party’, that culture that has become more diffuse, less influential and less well observed over time.

NM points out that he sees ‘no problem with blogging anonymity’, nor do I, or Tim for that matter, for all that it may seem that he’s saying the opposition. Where we differ slightly, and the distinction is important, is in our understanding of what anonimity is, what it means and how, in ethical terms, is should be exercised.

I blog ‘anonymously’ in the sense that I make use of a psedonym (’Unity’), which serves as my ‘public face’ in the online world - there are a few bloggers who know the ‘real name’ behind the pseudonym and a couple who occasionally will refer to me by my ‘real world’ first name - which I don’t mind at all, as that tell no one anything much about who I am in the real world and in no way compromises the ’shield of anonymity’ I deploy while blogging.

Anonymity, in that form, presents no great problems, per se, and may well be necessary in order to prevent the online world spilling over in to ‘real life’ in ways that have a negative impact on the real person who exists ‘behind the shield’ - you only have look at what happened to Petite Anglaise to see the negative consequences that can arise if, and when, that shield is compromised. Without the shield of anonymity and the use of pseudonyms, there are many bloggers who would simply find it impossible to blog, to speak openly and honestly about their experiences and their opinions. Take away the option of anonymity and there would be few, if any, ‘work bloggers’, especially from the public sector - no Dr Crippen, no PC Copperfield no Bystander - and everything they give us by way of insight into the reality of their professional lives would be lost and the blogosphere would be so much poorer for
the absence.

Anonymity has its place is blogging, a role and function that for some of us is absolutely central to our being able to blog in the first place, but anonymity can also be misused and abused by the unscrupulous and unethical - what matters most is not whether or not you choose to remain anonymous, but how you make use of your anonymity and whether you do so ‘responsibly’.

Its about ethics - Unity is the pseudonym I use here, and also the pseudonym I use when visting other blogs and posting comments. I consciously maintain a consistancy in the manner in which I ‘introduce’ myself to others I encounter in the online world, such that my actions are transparent to others, and I deviate from that self-imposed ‘rule’ only if given no choice in the matter - the only place I don’t post comments as ‘Unity’ is on Comment is Free, and then only because their user registration system does not allow ‘duplicate’ usernames, and the name ‘Unity’ had already been taken by the time I got around to registering at CiF (not that I’ve ever seen their ‘Unity’ post a comment on there, but than, admittedly I don’t read every article on the site, so it may well be that me and the other ‘Unity’ have markedly different interests’.

And because I voluntarily adopt that practice, although I am anonymous in the sense that, with a few exceptions, by online identity and my real world identity are kept entirely separate such that one does not easily lead to the other, I am far from being anonymous within the online world - the name Unity, and the fact that I always use the option to provide a link back to MoT when commenting, if provided, serves as ‘audit trail’ on my online activities that leads back to here, and to me, And because of that, ‘Unity’ my online ‘persona’ is known quantity - to discover ‘who’ I am and where I’m coming from, all one needs to do is read my blog.

My ‘name’ (Unity) is my reputation and my reputation is what I stand or fall on as a blogger - and that, in my view, is precisely how it should be.

To some considerable extent, what Tim is referring to when he raises questions and concerns about anonymity, is not really the generality of anonymity, but ‘authenticity’ and the difference between the honest and dishonest use of anonymity within that context. It is one thing to make use of pseudonym to draw a line between the online world and the real world for honest reasons; i.e. to protect one’s real world identity for fear that exposure might cost you your job. It’s quite another to use the anonymity that the online world affords for things like spamming, trolling or to create a fictitious persona in order to cause nuisance or to try to damage/destroy someone’s hard won reputation - just ask Luke Akehurst what he thinks of that last tactic, as he’s certainly been on the receiving end of it.

That’s the distinction that lies at the heart of what Tim’s talking about when he talks about anonymity, and also the justification on rare occasions for deliberately breaking someone’s shield of anonymity and exposing the real individual ‘behind the mask’.

My attitude to the use of anonymity stems from and is informed by that ‘rules of netiquette’, which is what Tim is referring to when he talks about bloggers having a ‘voluntary code of practice’ - except that the rules of netiquette aren’t really rules and they aren’t really a code of practice; they’re much more a culture and set of social mores than inform one’s online behaviour.

Netiquette amounts to no more than a consensus amongst people in the online world that certain common sense behaviours and practices benefit everyone - its about being honest, both with yourself and with others - playing ‘fair’ if you like.

The simplicity of the principles on which its based should not, however, be allowed to mask its importance. The internet, in general, and blogging and its precursors - forums, newsgroups and bulletin boards - in particular, has developed and grown as a self-organising, self-regulating system in no small part due to netiquette and its widespread acceptance by individuals and online communities. Netiquette is how we all manage to get along and interact without the online world descending into complete chaos and constantly spilling over into real life in ways that cause harm.

The ‘rules’, such as they are, are actually pretty simple, so simple, in fact, that the rarely need to be stated explicitly - people just pick them up as they go along by watching what others do and following their example. That’s why is rare to see anyone talking about netiquette except when the rules are broken and the need arises to ‘correct’ someone behaviour, the mechanism for which is nothing more than peer pressure and the sanction of a loss of reputation, if the breach is a serious one.

For example, one of the most important of these rules, in my view, is, ‘what starts online, stays online’ - if I get into a flame war with another blogger, then we settle things online and don’t allow it to spill out into the real world. You don’t go around to someone’s house and the beat the living shit of them because they called you a cunt on their blog, nor do you break their shield of anonymity by tracing their real world identity and then start firing off e-mails to their employer in an effort to try and cost them their job.

In fact, even if they don’t blog anonymously, you don’t pull stunts like that on anyone, no matter your disagreement with them, unless there something in their conduct that provides for an overriding justification for your actions - if, for example, I discovered a Tory MP or councillor (or any politician from a mainstream political party) making blatantly anti-semitic or racist remarks under a psedonym on a far-right forum, then, yes, I would consider that good reason to break their ’shield of anonymity’ in order to expose their conduct to proper scrutiny - not because I disagree with them or despise racism (which I do) because such behaviour is unacceptable for someone who holds public office.

However, before taking things that far, I would also have to be extremely confident, if not absolutely certain, that I’d made a correct identification, that I’d interpreted their comments accurately and that their actions were serious enough to warrant such a response - simply disagreeing with them or thinking them an arsehole is not cause enough to warrent such an intrusion - and if all those conditions were satisfied, my first recourse would be to the political party to which they belonged and not to the Daily Mail or The Sun. Only if it became clear that their party would do nothing to rectify matters would I consider myself justified in taking the matter fully into the public domain.

Tim’s point about netiquette, about voluntary adherence to its ‘rules of conduct’ comes in two parts; first that, increasingly, the ‘new’ generation of internet users, which has many bloggers amongst them, are either unaware of, unmindful of, or simply don;t give a shit about these rules - simple as they are.

That’s nothing particularly new or unusual, there’s always been some degree of trolling and sock puppetry to contend with, but what is changing is how that’s regarded - the new generation is rather more inclined to see such things as an ‘occupational hazard’ and let things ride or dismiss it as being something that ‘comes with the terrority’ - as in ‘Oh, well - that’s just Guido being Guido.’

Second, Tim harbours a concern that if things become too chaotic and too unrestrained out here, particularly when it comes to crossing the Rubicon into the real world, then at some point that will be used as justification by politicians to impose , or attempt to impose, some kind of external regulation on us - that instead of being able to live by our own rules, which exist and have developed to support and facilitate free expression, we get forced into a straitjacket of the government’s devising.

I don’t quite share Tim’s anxieties, at least not to the extent that he’s expressing them, but I can see where he’s coming from. The internet’s much vaunted and valued culture of free expression owes its existence, in no small measure, to that culture having developed in an environment at at a time in which the dominant ‘voice’ that animated the evolution of internet culture was that of America. For as much as we like to consider free expression to be a ‘British tradition’, its the US Constitution and the protections afforded by its First Amendment that have shaped and created the internet’s culture of free expression and its all too easy to forget that, here in Britain, the protections we are afforded are in no way as comprehensive or preotected from govenrmental interference as they are in the US.

This is the text of the US First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And this is the best that we have, at present, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as enacted in UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998.

1.Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

2.The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

The difference is plain to see - the US First Amendment lacks that second (and very important) chunk of ’small print’ that lists a whole host of situations in which Parliament can make laws that abridge freedom of expression and freedom of the press, and often in terms that are highly subjective and open to interpretation - ‘for the protection of health or morals‘, for example.

Nevertheless, the main reason I don’t quite share Tim’s concerns is not because I can’t see why he’s concerned or that he has any cause for concern - our difference of opinion on this is only a matter of degree and not of principle.

Remember, the rules of netiquette, or perhaps culture is a better word, developed at a time when when there was much less interaction between the online world and the ‘real world’ - those of us who were around at the time found this culture to be of value even though little or nothing of what was said, or done, out here ever caught the attention of the press or of the political classes, let alone spilled over to affect or impact on their interests. We still developed our own culture and our own standards, even with no one looking over our shoulders and no one to watch over us but us.

Things have change over time, as they inevitably do, and many of us who come from the ‘Usenet Generation’ are becoming increasingly watchful, if not concerned by the direction that the internet, and particularly the growing influence, impact and near ubiquity of blogging is taking - there’s a ‘double whammy’ brewing that could come back to bite us all on the arse. As more people join the ‘blogosphere’, overall awareness and understanding of the culture of netiquette, what it is, why it developed and why us ‘old hands’ found it so useful is becoming increasingly diffuse, just exactly at the time that various real world institutions; the press and political elite are becoming more and more aware of us, what we’re doing out here and the extent to which we’re starting to impact on influence what’s going on their world.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure that if each of these two trends (the weakening of the netiquette culture and increasing ‘real world’ interest in blogging) keep going in their present direction then somewhere along the line there’s going to be an almighty ‘crash’ as the two hit head-on and come into direct conflict - and in the absence of US-style protections for free expression, such a conflict can only have one winner - ‘they’ (i.e. the political elite) have the power to legislate, after all.

That’s the picture that Tim’s seeing, and it one that I see too, albeit that I still think we’ve some way go before such a ‘crash’ becomes inevitable.

Getting back to netiquette in general, I can well understand why Tim’s reference to it a ‘voluntary code’ caused some consternation, not least as it appears to follow on from the likes of the PCC and Alistair Campbell mouthing off about such things before Christmas - and if the idea of Campbell taking a direct interest in what we’re up to out here doesn’t give you pause for thought, then you’re really no paying attention at all.

But the reality is that the two are connected only superficially - the ‘voluntary code’ that Tim’s referring to is nothing like that which the PCC would push for, and even the precise interpretation of the ‘rules’ of netiquette and their application will vary, to some extent, from medium to medium - the social mores of communicating by e-mail differ slightly from those on Usenet, which in turn differ from those in use on forums.

And blogging has its own variations that are specific to the medium and to its own culture.

There is, believe it or not, a formal internet ’specification’ for netiquette, lodged with the Internet Engineering Task Force as a ‘request for comments’ (RFC) - its actually designated as RFC1855.

If that sound like gibberish then let me just explain that RFCs are many of the open standards and protocols that make the internet possible were developed - if you developed a new, more efficient, protocol for sending emails then you’d publish it as an RFC, get feedback from and debate your proposals with others in the ‘technical community’ and out of that debate, a commonly agreed standard would emerge that everyone could then use. Many RFCs are highly technical and define what goes on ‘under the hood’ of the internet, some are advisory or suggest guidelines, and some just classic examples of techie humour, such as:

RFC1438 - Internet Engineering Task Force Statements Of Boredom (SOBs)

RFC1882 - The 12-Days of Technology Before Christmas

RFC2324 - Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)

RFC2795 - The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)

Some of the ‘original’ netiquette guidelines in RFC1855 - and remember the document only expresses what were, at the time, the ‘unwritten’ rules of online conduct and we not an attempt to create a new set of ‘rules’ - remain applicable today, even though RFC1855 was written and published in 1995.

Take this one, which applied to email, for example:

Be careful when addressing mail. There are addresses which may go to a group but the address looks like it is just one person. Know to whom you are sending.

That’s still a pretty common error that people make and one that, for some, has proved to less of embarassment and more of career-killer. And then there’s…

Use mixed case. UPPER CASE LOOKS AS IF YOU’RE SHOUTING.

That’s another one that still very much applies today - what blogger doesn’t, on spotting a long comment posted all in capitals, think to themselves either ‘Oh good, we’ve got the green ink brigade in tonight’, or simply ‘Oh shit, I’ve got me a nutter.’

Other rules of the time are no long really applicable - it used to be consider bad form to ramble on unnecessarily in sending e-mails or postings on newsgroups, back in the days when online e-mail storage was limited and relatively expensive and ontime time was paid for by the minute. Time (and bandwidth) was money and a user (or spammer) who waffled on or sent you stuff you neither wanted or needed was taking up both.

That’s the kind of ‘voluntary code’ that Tim’s referring to, the vast bulk of which amounts to no more than honesty, common sense and bit of common courtesy, little things that keep the electronic frontier tacking over without turning in Dodge City every 15 minutes.

In terms of netiquette one of Tim’s biggest and most valid beefs with Guido relates to what Guido laughably refers to his ‘comments policy’, for which, in responding to Tim, he’s provided only the scabbiest possible ‘justification’. My blog, my rules - and as long as I post those rules where people can see them, then they’ve no recourse to complaint and only themselves to blame if things get deleted.
Well that fair enough, to an extent, but then one of the key ‘rules’ of netiquette is that if you open up you little piece of the online realm to others, whether by way of a comments facility on a blog, or by running a forum, then with decision that goes some measure of responsibility for dealing honesty and fairly with people who enter your online fiefdom, provided that they deal with you in broadly the same terms.

For example, its considered, under netiquette, ‘bad form’ to delete or edit comments (or forum posts) without giving some brief explanation for the deletion or indicating where and why an edit was made.

Why? Because although it’s your blog, what you’re altering is very often someone else’s comment and its in your interests, in terms of your reputation, to be seen to be dealing fairly and honestly with people.

Few would quibble with a blog owner deleting comments that are nothing more than out and out personal abuse, unless the owner’s style of blogging would make that look hypocritical. For example, DK (Devil’s Kitchen) is well known for his robust and often inventive use of invective and will surely, at some point, be successful in adding at least one new swearword, or a new variant on an existing swearword, to the English Language. So on the principle of ‘do unto others…’ the last thing you’d expect DK to do is delete a comment just because someone referred to him as a cunt - and if he did, and especially if he did without giving an explanation for his thinking on the deletion, many would consider him to be a hypocrite and his reputation would suffer accordingly.

That’s an example of the culture of netiquette as it would (hypothetically) work in practice, under which DK’s ‘offence’ would be the hypocrisy and dishonesty of his dealings with the commenter who called him a cunt - but that would only apply to DK because such a comment is not out of keeping with his own style blogging.

It’s a practical, commonsense ‘rule’ - swearbloggers cannot complain at getting sworn at, unless something egregiously bad is directed at them. ‘Cunt’ would be fine, ‘fucking paedophile’ would be a very different matter because the abuse lies in the word ‘paedophile’ and that’s a term that DK doesn’t (and wouldn’t) use as a term of abuse. If DK did called someone a paedophile, then he’s easily intelligent enough to use the word in its proper context, i.e. the person referred to is ‘paedophile’ and there’s evidence to back up the assertion.

On the other hand, deleting or editing comments simply because a comment points out an error of fact or catches your in a lie (which is even worse) or rips your arguments to pieces or make you look like a ‘know-nothing’ dickhead is considered a serious breach of netiquette, because in doing so you’re dealing dishonestly with both the individual who posted the comment and, with your readers in general. And this ‘rule’ of ethical conduct applies equally to stealth editing your own posts to cover up mistakes and errors and ‘time-shifting’ corrections, where an error is corrected and acknowledged, usually by adding a brief note to the post indicating that a edit has been made, but ‘time-stamped’ in such a way as too make it appear that you’d spotted the error before it was pointed out in comments, and not afterwards.

Guido is quite welcome to set whatever rules he thinks fit when it comes to comments posted on his blog - in fact, this is one example of where he’s stated plainly what his ‘rules’ are:

* If you want to libel someone - get your own blog.
* If you want to abuse Guido, get your own blog (unless you do it wittily).
* If you want to complain about jews, blacks, lizards, little green men in your head etc. Get your own blog.
* If you want to complain that it is biased, get your own unbiased blog.
* If you want lengthy discussion about policy, bore on your own blog.
* If you get offended easily, don’t complain, don’t come back.

But merely having ‘rules’ and stating them on you blog does not mean that your rules are necessarily honest one, or one’s that deal fairly with people who visit you blog, no are they any guarantee that you’ll abide by your own rules and apply them fairly and with an even hand.

Guido’s ‘defence’ - you can read my rules anytime you like - means absolutely jack-shit, both because some his ‘rules’ are so wide open to interpretation that they can be used to justify any editing or deleting just about anything posted on his blog and because those rules only mean anything if you stick to them yourself…

…and there’s ample evidence to show both that exploits the arbitrary nature of ‘his rules’ to the full.

In fact, its safe to say that the only rule that applies to comments over at Guido’s is that its his blog and he do what he fucking well likes and its also safe to say that he’s got to the point where, between his coterie of comment box anonymongreals and his relentless media-whoring, he believes himself to be pretty much untouchable to the point where his reputation amongst other bloggers is of no relevance at all.

Effectively he’s removed himself from the blogosphere to a position somewhere between us and the mainstream media, which he’s not quite managed to join fully as yet, and as such his only real interaction with the blogging mainstream is as something of a parasite who needs our attention only when he’s pimping for hits - its not gone unnoticed that there’s a distinct element of proportionality beween the size of his hit count and that of his ego, one that conventional wisdom and urban legend might suggest would also indicate an inverse relationship with *e-hem* ’something else’.

Tim’s ‘Usenet generation’ background is clearly reflected in the manner in which he’s ‘gone after’ Guido by hitting him in the reputation on the basis of actions undertaken by Guido that clearly are ‘beyond the pale’ to anyone ‘brought up’ in the culture of netiquette. Lay the charge, provide the evidence and make the the ‘call to action’. Ostracise and isolate. That’s how the ‘rules’ of netiquette have always been enforced, by means of ‘peer pressure’.

If you want to be in community then you play by the rules or you can fuck off somewhere else.

Its the oldest method of ‘law enforcement’ there is, in fact when the PCC thing was being discussed before Christmas I saw this very principle stated, most aptly, in the following way:

Now here is the law of the jungle.
As old and as true as the sky.
The blogger who keeps it may prosper.
And the blogger who breaks it must die…

Sadly, I can’t recall quite where I saw the comment and who made it - its was on a blog is as much as I can recall, otherwise the requisite link and credit would be afforded.

How effective Tim’s approach will prove to be is rather more open to question - the blogging ‘community’ is not so tightly knit as that you’d find in a Usenet newsgroup or in an online forum and the ultimate sanction - complete expulsion by means of an outright ban on access is not an option open to bloggers. You can kick Guido and coterie of sycophants out of your own comments boxes, if they start to become a pain in the arse, but a complete expulsion is a near impossibility - Guido would have to something egregiously stupid like getting nailed in a libel action or posting something so over the top that Google/Blogger stepped in to shut him down on terms of service violation to isolate him completely, and the latter would only be a temporary thing as he’d be back within days using another provider or hosting his own blog in his own webspace.

So as far as Tim’s actions are concerned, while I understand both his motives and his modus operandi - and their origins - I have to concede that, for the time being, any effect they might have will be marginal, at best, and easily blown off by Guido as having no effect whatsoever - probably the most ‘damaging’ thing Tim’s managed to do is create sufficient smoke to get the attention of Ros Taylor, over at CiF and the mere fact that her article has drawn a mere 20 comments, including one each from me, Tim and Guido, and that, of the rest, most are more concerned with bitching about the Graun’s comments policy than anything that’s happening in own goldfish bowl is probably a better reflection of Guido’s real status and profile than any of the self-generated hype we’ve seen around Guido over the last year, especially when you think that winding up Polly Pot enough to make her take a shot at bloggers is usually good for at least a couple of hundrend replies on CiF, if not considerably more if the wind-up’s a particularly good one.

There are definable limits to what Tim could reasonably hope to achieve by taking an open pot-shot at Guido, which I’m sure he’s perfectly well aware of, and, for now, the best that he could hope for is to open a few eyes, show Guido up for who and what he really is and, yes, take a fair bit of flak in the process from some of Guido’s camp-whores - the latter aspect of all this is unpleasant (especially if you’re on the recieving end of it) but none the less instructive, as it does serve to illustrate and validate much of what Tim has had to say about the manner in which Guido operates, and while some might consider that Guido has more or less ‘blown off’ Tim’s ‘attack’ with barely a hint of being ruffled, quite as few others will have been looking at his reaction and making a mental note or two for the future having been even less impressed with Guido’s arrogance - and his antics - than usual.

So, where next?

Well so far as Guido’s concerned, what you do and how you respond to any of this is up to you, but if, as a blogger, you’re at all concerned or simply pissed with media creating the impression that Guido is somehow the ‘alpha male’ of British blogging then take the time to say so. Don’t just write off his antics by sighing and offering up the observation that its just ‘Guido being Guido’ - and I know we’ve all probably done it at least, I’ve done it myself - if Guido pulls a complete boner or gets right up your nose then do what you’d do to anyone else and have a go at ripping him a new arsehole.

Whatever else Guido might be, he’s not really a blogger - not in the general sense that most of us are. He might have started out that way, but as his ego and his profile have grown he’s become something else, no longer a blogger but not quite a bona fide member of the MSM, and if somewhere at the back of your mind you’re holding back on your opinions just because you got it into your head that Guido’s a blogger and its just not the ‘done thing’ to rip into him they way you might with a full blown member of the professional commentariat - A ‘La Toynbee’ or a Mad Mel or may be a Richard ‘Littlecock’ (far more in keeping with Guido’s style) - then might I suggest that think again and re-evaluate how you see Guido in relation to everyone else out here.

And if you do feel the need to try and classify Guido, then let me suggest that ‘media whore‘ is a good a phrase as any to be using. Try it for size - media whore - sounds about right, don’t you think?

And don’t think, either, that because Guido routinely blows off any flak that comes flying in his direction by playing to the idiots gallery on his own blog, that your comments don’t hit the mark and aren’t having an effect. If Guido really didn’t give a toss what other bloggers think then he wouldn’t have been popping up here and there to try and defend himself (badly). Whatever else you do, don’t get to thinking that he genuinely gives a shit what any of us bloggers really think of him but then don’t be fooled by his ‘why should I care, you’re only sending more traffic my way’ stance either. What Guido will be well aware of is while his antics might have got him the attention of the MSM and his name in the ‘most influential’ lists, the manner in which he’s got there has been largely by rubbing the MSM’s rhubarb and jumping their territory, and it’ll take one slow news day and a few signs of a bloggers’ ‘backlash’ aginst Guido to give someone the idea that a ‘why do they all hate Guido?’ piece might make for a easy column filler in the media section - that’s the thing with being a media whore, you’re only good so long as your supply of willing ‘John’s’ hold out and when you start looking a bit tired and worn out, you’re easily traded in for a fresh new model.

Whatever else happens, one thing Guido’s forgotten is the old adage that you should be nice to people on the way up, as you may well meet them again when you’re on the way back down - if (when?) does eventually fuck up, I think its safe to predict both that sympathy for Guido will be in pretty short supply and any payback he gets, especially from the MSM, is likely to be a real bitch.

More generally, if anything I’ve had to say here about the culture of netiquette is new to you or strikes a chord, then thnk it through, take a mooch around the net and read up on it and find out a bit more about what it is, where it comes from and how and why it developed.

The general contention seems to be that a ‘voluntary code of practice’ for bloggers is something that can’t work and won’t work - and if you’re thinking in terms of the kind of code that might be drawn up by the Press Complaints Commission, Alistair Campbell or a committee of MPs then you’re absolutely right.

A code of practice drawn up in their terms wouldn’t work.

But if you’re thinking that the negative reaction that the suggestion of a code of practice got before Christmas was solely down to bloggers standing up for their unfettered ‘right’ to express themselves freely and operate without any rules of conduct or good behaviour then think again - for some of us, especially those of us who belong to the Usenet generation, the real reason why we don’t need such a code is that we’ve already got one; netiquette, and its one that was wholly ‘designed’, ‘devised’ and ‘developed’ by us, for us and to suit our needs and purposes, and enacted by the most democratic of all means - an unspoken concensus that the ‘rules’, cultural and social mores of netiquette are no more than basic honesty and commonsense.

Netiquette works, if you observe the ‘rules’ because it works and it make everyone’s online existence just that bit easier and more enjoyable. It ain’t bust so it don’t need fixing - it just needs a few more of the ‘new generation’* to realise that it exists and appreciate what it can do or them.

*Despite identifying Nosemonkey as possibly belonging to a later internet generation that Tim and myself, that’s not to suggest that he’s either unaware of netiquette or doesn’t apply it to his own blogging - he patently does and probably without thinking about it or even necessarily recognising that he does it, unless he’s specifically referring to it - and that’s the only reason why I think he didn’t make the connection between Tim’s reference to a ‘voluntary code’ and netiquette. For someone like Nosemonkey, and many other bloggers, netiquette isn’t so much a code of practice and a matter of second nature - all it requires that you have behave like a reasonable human being and you’ll rarely, if ever, make a wrong turn.

And that’s why it works…

It’s often said of politicians that you know when they’re is deep trouble because it then that they become the story and not the issues.

I wonder if the same can be said for a newspaper?

On Monday of this week, I posted an article on the closure of The Lagoon public house, in Tipton, a hostelry that was well known, locally, as the de facto headquarters of the local BNP, in which I noted with some curiosity that the only local newspaper to pick up on the story, the independently-owned, Wolverhampton-based, Express & Star (which has no connection whatsoever with Richard Desmond’s Express and Star group, which published the Daily Express, etc.) completely neglected to mention the pub’s BNP connection; an omission made all the more curious by the fact that its licencee, named as Jamie Lloyd in the report, is, in fact, Councillor James Lloyd, the leader of the BNP group on Sandwell Council.

Strange, thought I (and quite a few others who’ve contacted my since I ran the story).

Even without the BNP ‘angle’, the mere fact that a councillor is to appear before a licencing panel of his own Local Authority because the Police has requested the closure of a pub of which he is the licencee as a result of violent incidents involving a machete and a semi-automatic weapon is something most would consider a matter of legitimate public interest, especially as the pub, itself, in situated in the same ward that the councillor represents. And its not as if the reputation of the pub and its regular ‘clientele’ is not common knowledge locally, nor is difficult to make the connection between ‘Jamie Lloyd’ and ‘Councillor James Lloyd’ either by way of his political affiliations or by a simple search on 192.com, which shows him to be the only James Lloyd residing in Tipton.

And yet the Express and Star appear either to have been unaware of these facts at the time of publication, or simply decided they were of no relevance to local people.

A puzzle, I’m sure you’ll agree, and that became rather more puzzling on my being alerted to an interesting little exchange that’s been taking place of late on one of Stormfront’s forums…

Okay, a quick ‘who’s who’ is in order here.

‘Ontology’ is former BNP member (and briefly a Birmingham City Councillor), Sharon Ebanks, who was expelled from the BNP last year following her unsuccessful efforts to retain, in the courts, the seat she had been ‘awarded’ as a result of a miscount in last year’s council elections. As to why she was expelled from the BNP, there are conflicting accounts - Griffin alleges an assortment of ‘misconduct’, including anti-semitism; Ebanks claims that the BNP welched on a promise to cover her legal costs, despite advising her to defend the election case, and got shot of her when she complained about it and demands they cough-up.

Ebanks has since set up her own political party, which she has been actively promoting on Stormfront, much to the consternation of those forum users who are still members of the BNP - think ‘Life of Brian’ and ’splitters!’ and you’ll get the general picture.

‘White Resistance’ is one of the BNP members with whom Ebanks have been having a few ‘running battles’ of late, frictions which culminated in the posts shown in the screenshot, in which Ebanks ‘outs’ ‘White Resistance’, identifying him as the BNP’s local organiser, Steve Haddon (pictured below with Nick Griffin - Haddon is pasty-looking guy on the left) and also as being a journalist in the employ of the Express and Star newspaper - the same newspaper that some would consider to have soft-pedalled the story of the closure of The Lagoon by omitting all references to its BNP connections.

Mmm… Curioser and curiouser, as Alice might say.

As the Express and Star does not ‘byline’ its stories in either its online or print editions, there is no obvious way to confirm whether the information about Haddon’s employment given by Ebanks is correct - although ‘White Resistance’s’ response to Ebanks remarks do appear to confirm both that she has correctly identified his real world identity and that of his employer:

I keep my job because people can’t be sacked from their jobs for being a member of political parties. The E&S would be rather hypocritical if they did sack me considering its past views on this very subject. Again, nice try though.

What can one say?

Well, what one cannot say is that Haddon (if the information supplied by Ebanks is correct) has had any involvement or influence over the E&Ss coverage of the closure of The Lagoon - for all one can tell he might just as easily be assigned only to the coverage of local Sunday League football.

And, yes, he (as ‘White Resistance’) is quite correct in noting that he cannot (legally) be sacked because of his political affiliations or membership of a far right politica