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More resignations from Politics Home

Liberal Conspiracy can reveal that John McFall MP, Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, and Richard Reeves, Director of Demos are among the latest high-profile opinion formers to resign from the PoliticsHome insider panel.

This following concerns expressed about its impartiality and editorial integrity in the wake of the takeover by Conservative deputy chairman Michaal Ashcroft.

On Saturday LibDem leader Nick Clegg and deputy Vince Cable said they were also leaving the panel.

Several independent media voices have also ended their participation in the panel.

Jean Eaglesham of the Financial Times, Stryker McGuire of Newsweek and Andy McSmith of The Independent as among the journalists to depart from the panel. Others are known to be considering doing so.

Liberal Conspiracy last night spoke to Demos Director Richard Reeves in Brighton. Reeves said he had been considering the issue since hearing of the Ashcroft takeover, and had decided that he should leave the panel because of the lack of confidence expressed in its editorial integrity by senior journalists.

“Impartiality is an absolutely vital value for Demos”, he said.

Reeves’ resignation will come as a particular blow to PoliticsHome. He has made a point of working across the political spectrum – hosting David Cameron and housing the progressive Conservative project, alongside that of James Purnell and Open Left, and publishing Nick Clegg on liberalism.

There are likely to be more resignations from the panel – not least because many MPs are not yet aware of, or just catching up with as story which has broken during the party conference season.

Editor Freddie Sayers’ wrote on Friday that he remained proud of the panel, and that the resignations had not affected its ability to continue. However, his email was described by one media expert as offering ‘tacit acknowledgement that the panel is bust’, in his plan to undertake an overdue ‘refresh’.

As it happens, the Phi100 process has been due for a refesh for some time, and we will certainly be looking to make it more dynamic, interesting and transparent very soon.

Any “refresh” is unlikely to restore trust unless it is overseen by independent voices, such as was the case with the role played by senior journalists including Andrew Rawnsley, Nick Assinder and Martin Bright to create the panel in the first place.

The website publishes a “Reputation Index” tracking how leading brands are perceived by the Westminster elite. Yet very few reputations seem to have been as seriously damaged as that of PoliticsHome itself since the Ashcroft takeover.

Labour: writing off their generation

Listening to a group of young people shouting ‘Labour, Labour, Labour; out, out, out’ while marching past Brighton’s conference centre yesterday took me back to when I was the same sort of age. We had a similar chant, you see. But back in the 1980s, the slogan was aimed at Maggie.

Instantly recognisable was the intensity of the hate on display, which was clearly of the kind that will last a lifetime. My twentysomething animosity to the Conservatives has been enough to secure decades of commitment to the far left, and I don’t doubt that a whole layer of students, young workers and a million or so NEETs in 2009 are in pretty much the same frame of mind about the party of which I a member.

I’m assuming, if only from what I overhear apolitical workmates in a similar age bracket say, that this mood is generalised and not confined to the radicals that each successive decade inevitably throws up.
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Questioning the BNP

Well, it’s happened. The BBC has announced that British National Party leader Nick Griffin MEP will appear on political discussion show Question Time on 22 October. Facing him (among others) will be Justice Secretary Jack Straw, a man believed by frequenters of far-right web forums to be a key part of the International Jewish Conspiracy.

I mention this partly because it will be interesting to see if Nick Griffin manages not to mention it when he faces Straw. Griffin, of course, is the author of the 1995 pamphlet Who Are The Mindbenders, which catalogues in some detail how Jewish (and in many cases “Jew-ish”) people control the media.
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Stop war criminals getting away with murder – Amnesty says please act today?

Amnesty have a good action on Gaza which you can support byclicking on the following link

They are calling on as many people as possible to email David Miliband right now. It is a very short, simple action. An independent UN fact-finding mission into the Gaza conflict has just published its findings. This major report outlines powerful evidence of war crimes and other violations of international law on both sides, consistent with the results of Amnesty’s own investigations. And the UK Government is reviewing it right now.

The UN Human Rights Council will debate the report on Tuesday (29 September), when a vote will be taken on how its recommendations should be acted upon.

The UK Government (a member of the council) is not planning to support key recommendations, which Amnesty believe offer the best chance of ensuring justice and accountability, as a well as a deterrent to future conflicts. Instead, they appear to be taking a lead from the US Government in dismissing the findings.

War criminals are literally getting away with murder. Act now

There can be no long-term peace and security in the Middle East without an end to impunity – please email David Miliband today and urge him to support the Goldstone Report.

During the 22-day conflict from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, some 1,400 Palestinians and nine Israelis were killed. Most of the Palestinians killed by Israeli forces were unarmed civilians, including some 300 children. Indiscriminate Palestinian rocket attacks killed three Israeli civilians and six soldiers.

ConHome paranoia about ‘liberals’ at the BBC

Recently, Mike Smithson questioned the reliability of ConservativeHome’s polling of Tory grassroots members.  He suggested that the site ought to join the British Polling Council if it wants to be taken seriously as a pollster. “Otherwise”, Smithson wrote, “shouldn’t we be dismissing each new finding as just another voodoo survey?”

On Friday, ConservativeHome links from its front page to yesterday’s Guardian story about Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s outrageous political meddling in the BBC’s hiring practices. Hunt had argued that the corporation ought to be actively seeking more Tories to be part of its news team, in order to counteract supposed liberal bias.

Directly below its link to the story, ConservativeHome alerts readers to a shocking discovery about the BBC that it had made on a previous occasion:

ConservativeHome discovered two years ago that there were eleven times as many liberals at the BBC as conservatives.

Er, actually, what they found was that, among BBC employers who were members of Facebook, eleven times as many recorded themselves as having ‘liberal’ political views as self-identified as ‘conservative’.

And not only is the sampling technique they employed a joke: there’s no attempt to analyse what parts of the corporation these liberal covert operatives were working in, or how senior they were, or what was the likelihood that they could influence BBC output. Just another voodoo survey then…

BHA threaten job cuts over minimum wage requirement

In the hospitality industry regulation has been so relaxed that we, as customers, may have been completely overpaying for the food and drink we’re buying. Yes, that steak may appear to be only £10 on the menu; however, thanks to lack of enforcement in ensuring that the tips we give to waiting staff are actually reaching those workers, we are at risk of willingly and “voluntarily” giving restaurants more than they ask for on the price of our lunch. We have no guarantee that those tips go to those that we feel deserve it.

So it should be with much greater fanfare that from next month our politicians will have set down the law that makes everything much more fair. That is unless you are the British Hospitality Association (BHA). If you are one of their illustrious sort then the response should be simply childish, petulant and threatening rhetoric about cutting restaurant staff jobs.
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Watch: ‘Blackwashing’ Obama’s critics

From the Colbert Report:

The terrorism story that keeps getting bigger

Tim Ireland’s take-down of the Sun’s front-page story through lots of investigation and persistence, forcing it to retract and apologise twice was a shining example of how bloggers can also have a big impact. Forget McBride and Draper – this is the real meat. But the saga hasn’t ended yet.

The Guardian’s Hugh Muir wrote yesterday:

…Last week we raised the question of Patrick Mercer, who chairs the parliamentary counterterrorism subcommittee, and had endorsed Jenvey as a man “who needs to be listened to”. The MP strongly condemned Jenvey’s deception, which occurred in January. “My office certainly received information from him but never worked with him,” he said. And that’s fine with us. But not with Mr Ireland’s site, Bloggerheads, for now it publishes an email sent by a Mercer aide to the People newspaper. “I have been in touch with Mr Jenvey about a number of things, but most of all the following, which in my view would combine well to make a very good Sunday story,” it says.

All quite collegiate then, but it comes down to the definition of “working” together, say sources close to the MP. Mercer himself had no further dealings with Jenvey, though his officials occasionally received information from him. Sometimes it checked out. Sometimes not. Two months after doubts were raised about Jenvey’s dodgy activities, the link between the fabricator and Mercer’s aides had yet to be broken. A shadowy world, this counterterrorism.

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Krugman destroys myth regulation caused crash

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman was a guest on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC in America this week to discuss Sarah Palin’s speech to a global group of investors in Hong Kong.

Palin’s speech blamed too much regulation as one of the origins of the financial crisis — a theory that Krugman ably picked apart, noting the “absence of any facts” to back up Palin’s

How ConHome makes money

I wrote earlier that ConservativeHome actually has a revenue stream – it’s Conservative Intelligence section.

Writing on the Tribune magazine blog, David Hencke has more:

Conservative Intelligence – whose slogan is “Not Access. Not lobbying. Just Intelligence” – is also run by Mr Montgomerie at ConservativeHome. To get the weekly newsletter costs £1,200 a year, according to the website. Mr Montgmerie says this has now been reduced to £1,000.

To get on the priority list for events organised by Conservative Intelligence to meet Shadow Cabinet ministers such as George Osborne, Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt will cost another £2,500 a year.

In January, subscribers to the priority list will be offered the chance to see an “unofficial Conservative Party manifesto” and a “draft timetable for a Conservative’s government’s first year” – with plenty of time to try to influence any changes they may want to see.

Mmmm. Any suggestion that events organised to meet shadow cabinet members should be classed as “access” will not be kindly received by them obviously.

Tim Montgomerie tells him: “If you say we are offering general access for people who pay for the newsletter, then I plead guilty. But we are not offering facilities for lobbying. If, say, BAA wanted a meeting with our transport spokesman, we would refuse.”

But what if BAA had corporate people subscribed to the CI list, and they just happened to run into the transport spokesperson at the event?

Tim Montgomerie’s efforts to make money from his highly influential site are laudable – people have to make money somehow I guess.

But isn’t there a conflict of interest if the editor is also trying to introduce people to the very people he writes about? (if there is a strict wall between the two operations then this possibility would be lessened. I’m not aware if this is the case or not – just asking)

At Next Left Sunder Katwala has a suggestion so Montgomerie can show his editorial independence: An unlikely alliance to end big donor politics