It Was The Sun Wot Manufactured It
The Sun crows over the Shannon Matthews case:
The prosecutor said cops recovered at [Michael] Donovan’s flat a copy of The Sun from March 11, with the headline: “£50,000 for Shannon. Sun ups reward to find lost girl.”
Police also discovered a copy of the Daily Mirror which had been ripped up and dumped in a bin.
Its bizarre that The Sun should choose to delight in this little factoid, because it draws attention to a few rather negative interpretations:
- “The Sun is paper of choice for evil scheming child abductors”
- “The Sun falls for trap set by evil scheming child abductors”
or worse
- “The Sun’s dubious track record inspires evil scheming child abductors”
Wrong outrage, wrong target
There’s been an enormous tabloid fuss about Recorder Shaun Smith’s comments on namby-pamby sentencing guidelines, which he says prevented him from sending a burglar to jail.
[Dominic] Wong had admitted battering his way into [seven months pregnant] Safa Moustafa’s home and stealing cash while she cowered upstairs with her two-year-old daughter… [She said] ‘I’m now very nervous and anxious in my own home. I’m forever checking doors and windows and keep looking outside to see who’s around. I can’t even go into the garden unless my husband is here. I can’t be alone in the house and have friends to sleep over.’
Said Judge Smith:
This is sentencing by numbers. I want to send you to prison.The public want to see you go to prison. But I can’t send you to prison because of the guidelines I have been given.’
Indeed, this is an outrage. But the outrage is that the judge doesn’t appear to know the guidelines that he’s working from.
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A séance with Richard Nixon
Nixon might be dead, but politics is a magnet for people who possess the same corruptible mindset. In a ruling that will surprise nobody, a committee of 4 Democrats and 8 Republicans found Sarah Palin guilty of abusing her position as Governor of Alaska in a bid to get her brother-in-law sacked.
The phrase ‘a heartbeat away’ has become so over-used that it now sounds like a shrill chiché, but in this case it’s useful to remember when considering the enormity of this ruling. What these events tell us is that John McCain believes Sarah Palin, who, like Nixon, has used the power of her office to persue petty personal grievances, possesses the competence and character to assume the Presidency. If I was an American, I’d be deeply insulted.
This report from Noam Schreiber is full of unsettling similarities between Palin and the author of Watergate: the inferiority complex, the class resentment, the deceit, treachery and vindictiveness. I don’t really agree with all the hyperventillating about this being the ‘most important election ever’, but I do know that the times are far too serious for a pernicious, superficial little hack who mutters malaprops and mangled talking points and can’t even manage the bare minimum commitment to ethics & integrity. America deserves better.
Sir Ian Blair sacking: since when did Paul Dacre decide senior police appointments?
You wouldn’t expect a leftie to mount an out-and-out defence of the track record of Britain’s top copper, and I’m certainly not going to do that.
The de Menezes killing happened on Sir Ian Blair’s watch, yet the worst consequence for the Metropolitan Police was a conviction for breach of health and safety regulations, as if the offence was of no more import than leaving packing cases blocking a fire escape. continue reading… »
She didn’t deserve children
I’ve had Cerebral Palsy since birth. Luckily, I’m mildly affected by this physical disability. I often thank God that I have amazing parents, who very rarely complain, or let anyone see that they are struggling with the difficulties of having a child with a disability.
When I first read about Joanne Hill, I was shocked. Hill, 32, from Wales, drowned her four-year-old daughter, Naomi, in a bathtub because she couldn’t cope with Naomi’s mild Cerebral Palsy. She came up with the plan to kill Naomi after Naomi’s father, who cared for her deeply, refused to put her up for adoption.
Hill was ‘embarrassed’ by Naomi’s leg splints and hearing difficulties, and irritated by some of the side effects of her medication.
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David Cameron: you broke it, you own it
David Cameron will – according to extracts from a biography published today and carried in just about every newspaper – be “as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer.”
He tells author Dylan Jones: “[J]ust as Margaret Thatcher mended the broken economy in the 1980s, so we want to mend Britain’s broken society.”
You have to laugh, don’t you?
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Insane? But it’s what these Tories are about
David Cameron yesterday called the latest report from Policy Exchange ‘insane’. As well he might. But for the modern Conservative Party, the only thing insane, was to say this stuff out loud.
Because for the think tank, the ranks of which make up a large chunk of the new Tory establishment, these views are nothing out of the ordinary.
Can Cameron’s big ‘nudge’ idea work?
The Spiritual Civilisation Construction Commission has the job of curbing anti-social behaviour in Beijing whilst cultivating courtesy and civility instead. It has issued booklets and launched campaigns to minimise littering and China’s problem with public spitting, it has issued edicts on sartorial and social matters from handshaking to the length of one’s skirt. It has also been accompanied by a zero tolerance, broken windows approach to minor infractions such as spitting.
This is interesting for one major reason: it sounds very much like an extreme version of policies suggested by David Cameron, a whole suite of policies that might be labelled “soft paternalism”.
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A smackdown for feminism in courts
Nice one, Mrs Harman. With her Equalities Officer hat on, the Leader of the House has championed one of the most innovative changes to UK murder law in the past century: it is now slightly less legal for men to kill their partners in anger.
More specifically, a new proposal from Minijust the Ministry of Justice is calling for an end to the hopelessly misogynist provocation defence. This is a defence dating back to the 17th century that can reduce a murder charge to manslaughter if a defendant can claim that he or, in rare cases, she, ’saw red’ or was cajoled or insulted into lashing out at zir partner. It’s used in cases of infidelity where a partner might be induced to murder an adulterous spouse in a fit of jealousy. It’s used by husbands who claim to have been nagged to (someone else’s) death, to have been asked to take the bins out one too many times until they somehow found their fingers around their partners’ throats.
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How tabloid journalism works (pt 934)
It’s the silly season, it’s a Sunday, and you haven’t got anything approaching a front page story. Do you: (a) put in the effort and attempt to find a new angle to the problems facing Gordon Brown? (b) continue to go on alarmingly about the moral decline in society because a rich man who enjoys being spanked has won a court case or (c) turn the most innocuous addition to a social-networking site which just happens to be a rival to the one owned by your own proprietor into a super splash?
There’s just no contest if you’re a Sun “journalist”, is there? I’m not on Facebook as I don’t have any friends, but even I know there’s a whole plethora of “poke” applications, such as giving one of your friends a virtual sexually transmitted disease, as well as literally dozens of similarly hilarious things. There isn’t however at the moment a moral panic about STDs, but there certainly is about knives.
Why is New Labour stigmatising poor people?
James Purnell says the long-term unemployed “will be required to work full-time or undertake full-time work-related activity in return for their benefits.” (par 2.18 here).
This raises several questions. Isn’t this an abuse of language? I had thought that if you work, the money you get in return is wages.
And if you have to work 40 hours a week to get Job Seekers Allowance of £60.50, you’re paid £1.50 an hour. How is this consistent with the principle of a minimum wage?
But there’s a deeper question. Purnell could have sold a similar policy differently. He could have spoken thus:
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Tory bloggers should have more confidence
For those of us who lean centre-right the most dispiriting thing about the row over the crime statistics is the paucity of confidence it demonstrates in some Tory supporters, particularly among bloggers.
We’ve established a near-constant 20pt poll lead, notched up significant electoral victories in London & Crewe, garnered the sort of positive press coverage they’ve only dreamt about for c.15 years and seen even Labour’s most loyal and optimistic supporters in the press now talk about the ‘scale of’ rather than ‘likelihood’ of defeat.
That’s the sort of context most oppositions would shed a limb for.
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Let’s have a party for Thatcher
So, a state funeral for Maggie? Why the hell not. Let’s do it.
And whilst we’re at it, let’s have a frantic choir of badly-dressed midgets singing the ding-dong song. Hell, I’m only 5ft tall myself, I’ll lead the chorus. Let’s have a party. Let’s have a gigantic piss-up to see the old girl off, and with her what remained of industrial Britain: its hatred.
Because once the witch is dead, maybe the progressive left can finally move on.
We lost, back in the mid-80s. Well, in fact, I was watching The Poddington Peas and eating a rusk on a sofa in Islington at the time, officer – but, vicariously, I lost too. We all lost. We need to face that, forgive ourselves and move on.
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What does Cameron’s “broken society” say about us?
Reading the Grauniad’s interview with David Cameron and the accompanying article, it’s very difficult not to become depressed that after 10 years of Blair, within a couple of years we’re going to be under the thumb of his very real heir, and with not just the Labour party but the entirety of the left raising barely a whimper of defiance.
Cameron’s broken society gambit is almost certainly the one detail that makes me despair the most. He knows it’s not true, we know it isn’t true, the government knows it isn’t true, even the Times, whose sister paper has done the most to perpetuate the notion knows it isn’t true, and yet I don’t think I can recall a single politician, whether they be Labour or Liberal Democrat who has directly challenged Cameron to provide some real evidence that British society is any sense broken.
Here’s Cameron’s incredibly weak case for it:
He denies he is giving a false picture of Britain by talking of a broken society, saying: “There is a general incivility that people have to put up with, people shouting at you on the bus or abusing you on the street, or road rage. There is a lot of casual violence; and I think it is important to draw attention to it.”
A Bit Eclectic Today…
SnapsThoughts has a photo essay on the fraughtness of union links with Labour. Each image is accompanied by some thought-provoking words. Highly recommended.
Douglas has news of a sexist Tory. In other news, bears are Catholic and the pope poos in the woods.
Spirit of 1976 discovers his inner Clarkson and feels DIRTY.
Sexual Intelligence Blog reports on John McCain’s reluctance to discuss sexual matters. Not in front of the children, dear.
Jonathan Calder is rather cross about curfews, and people who hail them as a success before they even start.
Lee Griffin has some praise for the home secretary’s plans on knife crime.
Feminist SF covers the finale of the most recent series of Doctor Who.
That’s all folks. Tips to the usual address, and I’ll see you Sunday.
I don’t need a lecture from David Cameron
I need David Cameron lecturing me on moral responsibility in much the same way as I need a layer of icing applied to my lasagne.
Cameron had the gall to give this speech on the eve of the Glasgow East by-election campaign, in a deprived city licked to a splinter by the economic policies pursued by his party in the 1980s.
He said:
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Both 50 Cent and Paul Dacre corrupt the youth
Other than being the Big Swinging Dicks in their very different respective ‘hoods, there might at first sight appear to be little in common between a rap superstar and the editor of the Daily Mail.
But following on from a comment in a Shakilus Townsend post I wrote on my blog, I am rather taken with a possible parallel between 50 Cent (pictured) and Paul Dacre, namely the role they wittingly or otherwise play in popularising ‘knife culture’.
Fiddy, of course, routinely glorifies violence for commercial reasons, because that’s what sells records. For his part, Dacre regularly ramps up the reportage of the latest moral panic, becauses that’s what sells newspapers.
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Outflanking David Davis…to the right
The BNP have a lot to answer for in regard to pulling down the gene ral tenor of virtually any electoral debate, but it is not to them that I refer herein.
No, it is to ‘independent candidate’ Jill Saward who is running against David Davis in Haltemprice and Howden on the basis that all our society seems to be interested in are the rights of the accused, not the rights of the victims.
This one could give the hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade a run for their money when she declares that…
Straw publishes anonymity bill
The government has now published the text of its emergency Criminal Evidence (Anonymity Bill) in response to a recent ruling by the Law Lords that the use of anonymous witnesses under existing common law provisions is prejudicial and breaches the defendent’s right to a fair trial. continue reading… »
From Total Politics to Total Burnout
Is there a blog we should be reading, or a post that you think we should link to? Email us your tips to tips@liberalconspiracy.org
Iain Dale’s Total Politics site has launched, and revealed its editorial team. It’s actually quite interesting, and appears to be very well funded too… Why no, these grapes are sweet and tasty, why’d you ask? (Hat tip, Mark Pack at LDV). Oddly they don’t appear to have linked to us from their political blogs directory, but then, as a top ten political blog we’re hard to miss, and the blog directory is so badly-constructed, it’s possible they have linked to us and I just haven’t found the link
Andrew Rilstone writes about how a writer’s writings are distinct from and yet linked to the writer as a person and that person’s political views. Brilliant post (and not just because he says The Shadow Over Innsmouth is better than The Call of Cthulhu), but does contain rude words: proceed with caution.
PC Bloggs turns her ever-acerbic eye onto government in the latest of her occasional series on 21st Century Policing. If I could make PC Bloggs a Home Office advisor…
Political Betting are wondering if the Labour Party will lose their deposit in Henley.
Lynne Featherstone is a big blubbing girly – and this entry is so lovely it turned me into one too. Get your tissues out, and I won’t tell anyone that you needed them.
BluJay posts in the cheerfully-named So Very Doomed group blog about the difficulties that we in the developed world will have obtaining food if things don’t change drastically and soon.
Slightly Warped posts pictures of a fire in a cave in Uzbekistan that’s been burning for 5 years (so far) and is known as the Door to Hell. (Hat tip: Neil Gaiman)
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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