“The Evening Standard has become a joke and negative thanks to people like Gilligan and Nick Cohen…. who aren’t interested in reporting what’s happening in London but angling for jobs at City Hall.”

I’m no Fan of Cohen, but you can’t seriously mean that. Can you?

I don’t really know what Cohen’s motivations are – but I’d like to know why he was cursing Anthony Browne so hard – and then hailing him as a shining example once he joined Boris at City Hall.

I didn’t believe it until I saw it – they indeed have ‘sorry’ ads on those computerised displays on the Tube. What are they up to? They can’t make up for electing Boris and bringing down Ken with their endless smear-billboards.

I think the five year gap between the two articles tells you all you need to know.

That was a reply to Sunny, obviously.

Sy – what has changed over those years? Has Anthony Browne suddenly become all nice and fluffy? when Jeanette Arnold AM asked Browne why he had said those things – the best he could come up with is that he wanted to be ‘provocative’.

“what has changed over those years? ”

Nick Cohen has.

In 2003 he was still recognisably of the left, albeit someone a bit too fond of taking what he thought were unpopular stances.

Christ knows how you’d define him now, but barring economic issues, there’s virtually nothing (cough) left.

Funnily enough I saw one of these billboards today (as I was walking to St Mary’s to see my brand new baby daughter!) and since all there was by identification was the Standard’s rather anonymous little logo in the corner I couldn’t work out who the hell it was for.

Beau Bo D’or has found one of the posters.

Oh, and congratulations, Tim!

“Beau Bo D’or has found one of the posters.”

Oh, what a shame that’s too good to be true.

Congrats Tim F

Just seen a load of these on the electronic boards coming up the escalators. They’re a bit rubbish – the Standard logo is too subtle, so it looks as though the changing Sorries are leading into what comes next, so it goes:

‘Sorry – for taking you for granted’
‘Sorry – for being negative’
X MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE!’

TimF:

Congratulations!

5cc: *giggle*

It intrigues me that all of the competitors in the London evening paper market seem to be right-wing apologists. I’m fairly sure that London as a whole is still not Tory, despite Boris; I just suspect that more Tories vote, which is a problem for everyone else.

What are the congratulations to Tim F about? Have I missed something?

They mean Tim J, who commented at #8 that he has a new baby daughter, and who I also congratulate!

(Definitely not me though, I’d be gobsmacked if I suddenly found out I had a baby daughter!)

No it’s much deeper than that. It’s time that we all apologised for doing things and saying things that we shouldn’t have. Why not? It’s a new start.. go for it.

Oops; my mistake!

5cc – thought the same thing when I saw it today – the person who thought they shouldn’t have the Evening Standard name there, and just the logo, should be fired. It’s a whole bunch of money spent on a campaign that you can’t attribute to anyone. What a waste of money.

You certainly have a thing about The Standard, Gilligan and Cohen. As I have said elsewhere you constantly run the Holcaust Deniel Defence. For those of you who don’t know what this is it is used by people like Irving and Rassinier who will take the slightest discrepancy between the accounts of a couple of survivors, for instance, to then say that the whole thing didn’t occur.

Cohen’s “What’s Left” is what libertarian lefties like me have been saying for years about the mainstream, largely Trotskyist, left. They have been completely unable to adapt to a changing world and trot out the same old mantras that haven’t worked in the past and certainly won’t in the furure.

Of course the Standard campaign about Lee Jasper was politically motivated but it wasn’t a smear campaign. Jasper handed them his scalp on a plate and brought down Livingston. It is no good saying that because no one has yet been charged that Jasper has been exonerated because he hasn’t. Whatever you think of Gilligan every single fact that he wrote about the whole affair was true and twist and turn as you may you will not alter that.

Interesting article by Gilligan today on Baroness Pola Uddin taking up from the Sunday Telegraph expose. This is just the tip of the iceberg in East London there is more to come. Picked up fifty thousand eight page tabloid newspapers this morning which are the core of the Hackney TUC anti BNP campaign. Big meeting tonight to start distributing them to groups all over the borough. This is the Hackney end of the biggest anti fascist campaign ever mounted in this country. If anyone in Hackney wants to get involved contact and the national campaign is on http://www.hopenothate.org.uk

Cohen’s “What’s Left” is what libertarian lefties like me have been saying for years about the mainstream, largely Trotsk
Most of his hate in the book is aimed at the soft left, aka his drunken attack on the fabians, liberal conspiracy and the BBC.
Hari , a true liberal left libertarian pointed that out.
Also Cohen is an economic thatcherite , as his recent article praising the government of 1979 shows those tendencies.
Billy boy
Give one diffence between Cohen and the Thatcherite Gove or Charles Moore on any issue.
Do you read his articles ?

‘Sorry – for taking you for granted’
‘Sorry – for being negative’
X MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE!’

LOL – the makers of that film have almost as much to apologise for as the Standard’s editors! Is this campaign a cheap attempt to stall criticism from those writers on the actual left who have been critical of the Standard in the past, and so would be familiar with the font of its masthead and the little naked angel thing? Because most Londoners won’t be familiar with those things, and won’t know what the ballyhoo it’s all about.

Heed the chorus of this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REsezs6cQRc “It’s too late to apologise”

“Whatever you think of Gilligan every single fact that he wrote about the whole affair was true and twist and turn as you may you will not alter that.”

billaricaydickey – why are you so keen to defend fucking Gilligan? Mate of yours? Sure you’re not him? We have to ask these things, unfortunately, owing to past events. Here’s an example of why your trust is misplaced. Gilligan argued in his column a few months back that operating bendy buses cost more than non-bendy equivalents, which is wholly untrue (the replacements cost substantially more to run, as the public tender announcements revealed – Gilligan conveniently forgot to allow for increased capacity) and based on wilful misreading of publicly available facts. It wasn’t even a particularly clever untruth, so he did it because he knew no one powerful enough to stop him would bother checking. Result: the public get an entirely inaccurate view of the world based on Gilligan’s absurd prejudices and due to the Standard’s shockingly bad journalistic standards. They eventually published the correct details some months later, but I think we can guess whether or not Gilligan’s card was marked for making incomplete and misleading statements.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23578147-details/Ignore+the+bleatings+of+the+bendy+bus+brigade/article.do

Therefore we *know* he’s a bad journalist, we’ve known it for years (being right about WMDs but not being able to back it up should give you a clue here, as well as being given a job by Boris Johnson, that notably bad judge of character). That he has reputationally self-destructed spectacularly over the last year purely as a result of a couple of horrible little bloggers working out what he was up to rather confirms this, don’t you think? A man with actual integrity rather than a carefully constructed image of integrity (see his Wikipedia entry history for attempts to maintain this) would have laughed us off, surely, rather than smear us repeatedly in his column and then comment on CiF in such an unpleasant way that a lot of people with no particular interest in London politics decided there and then that he was a first-order tit.

All of which doesn’t exonerate Lee Jasper*, but at least puts huge question marks over the validity of Gilligan’s campaign. We know how he works now, and it’s likely that’s how he’s worked for years, since the Standard’s management had no interest in accuracy. Seriously, mate, give up supporting the bastard. It’s making you look like a fool.

* Boris’s borough bovver boys not being able to lay a finger on him legally would appear to do this, however. Democratic political activity of which one doesn’t personally approve is not the crime of the century, it’s what happens when the other lot are in power. See No2ID for an example of the correct way to fight it.