No, the TUC is not banning high heels
Nadine Dorries MP says on her blog:
Don’t ya just love the TUC? Apparently, at their forthcoming conference, they want to debate a proposal to ban the wearing of high heels in the office. Can you hear the collective sharp intake of breath and the no noo nooo from all of British office working womankind?
…
I’m 5ft 3 and need every inch of my Louboutin heels to look my male colleagues in the eye. If high heels were banned in Westminster, no one would be able to find me.
For those subjected to regular uninformed tirades by Dorries, who recently declared that Trident was not a weapon of mass destruction, this may not entirely be a bad thing.
The TUC is not looking to ban high heels in the office.
The news story originated with the Torygraph – which has long had a vendetta against trade unions.
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Unthinking criticism of South Yorkshire Police
Depending on your point of view, it’s either an innovative approach to building community relations or proof of the Islamisation of our police force. You might’ve heard about the revelation that two sergeants and a community support officer spent a day accompanying a group of Muslim women around Sheffield city centre. All the women, including the white police officers, were dressed in Islamic costumes, including the burkha, jilbab, hijab and niqab.
Naturally, a lot of folks have flapped their jowls in fury: the bile-soaked secularists who squat in blog comments sections; the various ‘jihad watch’ websores who warn of ‘dhimmisation’; and the more ‘wholesome’ Christian People’s Alliance, whose response makes you suspect they wouldn’t have had a problem if only they’d all dressed as 12th century monks .
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Save the Observer? Why exactly?
There’s a campaign to save the Observer newspaper after reports over the weekend that GMG might shut down the loss-making paper. Other than just sheer sentimentality what reason is there to support its existence?
The Observer isn’t a left-wing paper. It has a few somewhat vaguely left-liberal columnists. And then it has people like Andrew Anthony and Nick Cohen who spend half their time saying the left is in bed with Islamists. And don’t forget its shamelessly cheer-leading for the Iraq war. Any apologies forthcoming?
That doesn’t mean I want it to shut down. Sunder asks if I would be ok, “if sunday press were to shake out to Times, Mail, Telegraph and News of the World?” — not really, but then the Observer doesn’t really offer itself as a left-wing counterbalance. I don’t read any of these Sunday papers anyway – I stick with the American press and blogs.
The point is: if there was a choice between the Guardian and the Observer, and there seems to be, then I’ll take the Guardian any day. That is a paper I can be loyal too, especially with its stellar work recently on tax justice (Barclays), the G20 riots and fingering News International. Can anyone remember the Observer breaking something so big recently it dominated the news agenda for days? I can’t. Supporting the Observer for it’s own sake, while making life worse for the Guardian, doesn’t look like a sensible proposition to me.
More on other blogs
Paperhouse: Save the Observer, 2003 edition
The Third Estate: Save the Observer?
Blood and Treasure: unlamented death of a newspaper
Media Blog: Times readers choose Shadenfreude over reason as Observer wavers
Charlie Beckett: The Observer: why bin it?
Exploitation right under our noses
Last Thursday’s Newsnight was a stunning piece of investigative journalism. Hotelcare, one of the leading agencies for hotel cleaners in the country, was caught red-handed with serious exploitation of foreign workers at some of London’s top hotels.
To say that the revelations were a surprise would be on a par with feigning shock at the recent MPs’ expenses scandal. The rumours that some London hotels are paying less than the minium wage had been circulating for a while. Indeed, back in 2005 hospitality website Caterersearch was already pointing the finger at Hotelcare’s dubious employment practices but failed to cause the stir that it should have.
Taking advantage of the foreign workers’ poor grasp of English and the fact that they’re often unaware of their rights, those workers are led to believe that they would only earn the minimum wage (£5.73 an hour) if they clean two and a half rooms per hour.
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“Killed by a tawdry dream”
Amy Barnes, the young model recently murdered by her ex-boyfriend, was in fact “killed by a tawdry dream”. It’s the Daily Mail’s latest verdict, according to an article by Paul Bracchi.
“How the obsession to become a WAG“, the headline goes, “led this beautiful girl into the arms of a violent psychopath“, with the conclusion that “had she not been sucked into the tawdry world of nightclubs and footballers – she would probably have never met [her killer Ricardo Morrison]“.
Sure enough, according to our Mail churno, Amy Barnes’ Facebook memorial page is “the subplot to this tragedy”, as it contains a flurry of pictures of girls -including Amy- in revealing outfits, cleavages, panties and stilettos.
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The Sun: a hypocrisy machine
The Sun’s exclusive on Theresa Winters, the woman from Luton who has had all thirteen of her children taken into care and is now pregnant with her fourteenth, ticks all the paper’s buttons. Broken Britain, scrounging feckless layabouts and of course the bourgeois journalists working for a “working class” newspaper sneering at their own target market.
It doesn’t really make much difference that I can’t think of anything less feckless than being perpetually pregnant, and that yet again the paper is pushing for benefit reform by finding the most extreme case it can, regardless of how the kind of reform it demands would punish those who are deserving as well as those who “aren’t”.
Combine this with the casual dehumanisation which infects all such stories, with Winters described as the “Baby Machine”, leeches and slobs and you have a classic example of a newspaper providing its readers with a target they can hate without feeling bad about doing so.
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How to write a good political leaflet
David Semple and Cath Arakelian are both critical of the quality of Labour’s leaflets in the Norwich North by-election. There is a link to some of the leaflets here.
Writing good leaflets is actually quite difficult, and I have seen many horrendous ones produced by the central party and local activists alike. So to kick off a discussion, here are some thoughts about what makes for a good leaflet:
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An attempt to smear Mehdi Hasan from New Statesman
Mehdi Hasan is a recently appointed senior editor covering politics at the New Statesman magazine. I mentioned a week go on Pickled Politics that a minor kerfuffle blew up last week when an article he wrote about biased coverage of terrorists in the media was questioned by Harry’s Place blog.
He gave a stinging response. Obviously not happy with the way he had come back at them – it looks like now HP is running a smear campaign against him. Over the weekend they ran a post titled: ‘Mehdi Hasan Exposed. Part I – Atheists and disbelievers are “cattle” and “of no intelligence‘.
It’s worth pointing out that I don’t know Mehdi Hasan and apparently I met him years ago but don’t recall the incident. But it’s worth while deconstructing the post itself for the absurd question it raises.
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Greens: 21st century Stalinists?
Scratch Jean Lambert, get Lavrentiy Beria; Green politicians are totalitarians in the making, just itching to refound a carbon-neutral Gulag Archipelago.
This, anyway, is the position of Times hack Antonia Senior, who has obviously given the matter a great deal of thought. Her stark warning must be heeded at once by anyone naïve enough to cast the odd tactical vote for the Green Party, in the misguided belief that they are a harmless enough functional equivalent for the old-style moderate social democracy unavailable elsewhere on the ballot paper.
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Richard Desmond happy with High Court win
Richard Desmond, philanthropist, pornographer, adherent of Godwin’s Law, and Great Architect of The Daily Express was jubilant last night after spending a jolly few weeks socking it to silly biographers in the High Court.
Desmond, once described as ‘an appalling man’ by Britain’s most appalling man, told his own newspaper: “It was worth it to stand up in court and set the record straight”, apparently unaware that he’d actually lost the case.
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What the coverage on crime statistics doesn’t say
contribution by Gabe Trodd
I’d like to offer a different take on today’s crime statistics, which: have been boiled down and put on the front page of the Guardian and has been securing significant coverage on BBC News all days. They will inevitably be subject to the patronising and cynical ‘Broken Britain’ drones and hand-wringing of David Cameron, George Osbourn and Chris Grayling.
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The media execs who apparently knew nothing
After the statement from News International over a week ago, and last Sunday’s News of the World editorial, you might have expected that Tom Crone, Colin Myler, Stuart Kuttner and Andy Coulson might have came out defiant and dismissive to the Commons culture committee, especially after last week’s bravura performance from Nick Davies.
The News of the World stance appears to have now changed three times. First it was to deny nothing; then it was to deny everything; now it seems to be know nothing.
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Political tweets of the day
Catherine Mayer:
Useful insight of the day from Nadine Dorries: “We refer to MPs as MPs but we’re people.”
Tim Ireland / Bloggerheads:
NOTW/NewsInt complaining about repeated investigations like a drug mule bitching about cavity searches. Boo hoo.
Feel free to highlight your twitter accounts in the comments.
Coulson to face MPs as Tory support cracks
Former News of the World editor Andy Coulson will face the culture select committee at the House of Commons tomorrow.
Perhaps MPs could ask him whether he was completely unaware that NotW journalists other than Clive Goodman were involved in illegal phone blagging activity. They could also ask him if the NotW had ever paid private investigators to hack into people’s voicemails or to obtain information illegally. Perhaps MPs could also ask Rebekah Wade, who will also be giving evidence, why News International paid off people to keep silent, while telling the world that only the royals had their phones hacked, and that too only by Goodman.
On Friday former Sun editor Rebekah Wade confirmed the out-of-court settlement with Gordon Taylor. It was the first time News International has admitted those allegations. Yesterday the Independent on Sunday reported that shadow chancellor George Osborne refused to repeat Coulson’s denial he knew of the pay-offs.
How crap is our right-wing media?
This article in the Washington Independent focuses on the “birther movement”, obsessed by the view that Barack Obama was not born in the United States:
Ironically, the ‘birther’ movement began in response to Obama’s own efforts to debunk rumors. One year ago this week, the presidential campaign of then-Sen. Barack Obama launched FightTheSmears.com, a web site designed to push back against false rumors about the first African-American presidential nominee. To push back against rumors that he was not born in Hawaii, the campaign reproduced a Certificate of Live Birth from the state’s Health Department. Instead of terminating the conspiracy theories, that inspired new theories — that the certificate had been forged or that even if it hadn’t been forged it was the sort of certificate that could be given to someone born outside of the United States.
Guess who is part of their British contingent? It’s Melanie Phillips. What’s notable isn’t just that Phillips perpetuates these conspiracy theories – but that mainstream right-wing publications such as Spectator Magazine are happy to publish it. It wasn’t long ago that Phillips revealed Obama’s plan to turn the US into a Muslim country.
Mainstream lefty publications may be somewhat dull but at least they don’t publish front-page editorials that are pure unadulterated rubbish.
(h/t: @mjrobbins) Update: Now with video!
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Smearing opponents as anti-semitic
A favourite tactic of die-hard defenders of Israel is to smear critics of the country’s policies through guilt by association, lies, and decontextualised quotations.
I have come to know this latter strategy quite well. Based on short extracts, or even a single sentence, from two out of the 100 plus articles I’ve published, I have been accused of ‘understanding anti-semitism’ and ‘defending’ Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial.
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Political incorrectness gone mad
You may have heard it mentioned by conservatives that certain opinions are practically off-limits, and that lefties have been preventing people from arguing that, say, the traditional family is the best way of raising children or that immigration should be reduced.
For example, I have read or seen these opinions argued for, and claims made about how they have been suppressed, in the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Evening Standard, by religious leaders of all the major faiths, by the Conservative Party, the UK Independence Party, the British National Party, in bookshops, in reports produced by think tanks, on the telly, on the radio, and, of course, on the internet (this is not an exhaustive list).
I therefore conclude that us lefties are obviously doing a pretty hopeless job of using political correctness to stifle freedom of speech, and need to jolly well try a bit harder.
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How Tory bloggers spun Coulson
There has been an intriguing side-show to Coulsongate / NotW blagging story: the speed at which many Tory bloggers came out to distance themselves from Coulson, to Guido Fawkes who insisted that the Guardian were wasting their time with the whole issue. Yesterday showed that not to be the case at all.
And indeed the affair raises some very important questions about the context of bloggers versus lobby journalists.
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The News of the Screws is screwed
At the weekend the News of the World was unequivocal in stating the the phone hacking story was almost completely baseless. In an act of extreme chutzpah, it even called on the Guardian to practice what it preached when it said that “decent journalism had never been more necessary”.
All eyes were then on the Commons culture committee yesterday, where first Tim Toulmin of the Press Complaints Commission, then Nick Davies and Paul Johnson, Guardian News and Media’s deputy editor, were to give evidence. Toulmin hardly did the PCC any favours. It seems remarkably relaxed by the allegations made by the Graun, as it has been from the beginning.
Davies then did the equivalent of setting the session alight.
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The award for most absurd defence of Murdoch…
… goes to ConservativeHome editor Tim Montgomerie, who says:
I do not wish to defend every action of the News International empire, but Rupert Murdoch has been an overwhelming force for good in this country’s life and politics. Sky Sports has revolutionised English football.
…
Compared to the increasingly isolationist Daily Mail – which has consistently appeased foreign dictators since the 1930s – there is also something bracingly internationalist about News International.
That is so cringingly bad I think it deserves its own prize. If Rupert Murdoch does not give Montgomerie a job or at least invests in CH then I shall be sorely disappointed. It is funny though, that when Tories get caught in compromising positions then they scream revenge but when its the opposition doing it when they scream ‘whataboutery’. This takes arse-licking to a whole new level. Hey, who cares about your phone being “blagged”, look at least you get footy on Sky Sports!
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