Joe Glenton: ordinary soldiers should be heard
It took a bollocking administered in person by Billy Bragg to teach me the lesson, but these days I know better than to make the automatic assumption that anyone serving in the armed forces is necessarily a braindead reactionary.
At a small business meeting in London attended by some prominent lefties about a decade or so ago, I did make a contribution to that general effect. The man who famously bought himself out of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars and went on to become a fully fledged rock star angrily turned on me and rightly put me in my sorry little ultraleftist place.
Attitudes such as those I expressed then are deeply rooted on the far left. In my case, they go back to my teenage years as a member of Youth CND in the late seventies. Some of the lads I was at school with signed up to the services, and in the small town in which I lived, I used to bump into them in the pubs when they were back home on leave.
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Spectator tries to airbrush out AIDS denialism screening
Yesterday I revealed that Spectator magazine had hastily cancelled its screening of the film House of Numbers.
In the spirit of openness and transparency that they constantly demand of others, the Spectator abruptly deleted the event page off their website (see the Google cache) and remained very quiet about it on their blog.
No mention of the cancelled debate and no explanation. Complete silence. Although you can still watch the video on the ‘AIDS debate’ on their website.
Last night I emailed its editor Fraser Nelson with the following questions:
Do you regret hosting the screening of the film?
Should the Spectator really be giving space to films that have been contradicted with so much evidence? Isn’t this reminiscent of the MMR stuff? I’m just curious as to what prompted you guys to screen the film.
No response at all.
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Spot the difference…
The Daily Mail’s support of the BNP policies is descending into parody. Sod subtle machinations, spotting their strategy is as easy as piss.
Step 1. Its top columnists write entire tirades about the immigrants swamping the country, “ZaNu Labour” inflicting social engineering upon Britain, the nasty Muslims, the welfare state and all the rest.
Step 2. As suspicions of inflammatory content begin to surface, any of the above mentioned opinionators writes a token word or two against “the racist BNP”- better if garnished with adjectives such as vile, ogre and odious. Because: how can you say that the Daily Mail is racist when they’ve just badmouthed the BNP?
Step 3. See Step 1, only more virulent, with three quarters of the paper’s content resembling Nick Griffin’s shopping list.
Look no further than today’s paper for evidence. While the entire country saluted the way Question Time exposed the fascists’ appalling ideas, Nick Griffin complained that:
- the BBC is “hard left“;
- Question Time was “a lynch mob“;
- The programme should have been filmed elsewhere as London is “not my country anymore” and [the audience was] “dominated by ethnic minorities“.
Using the Blair Babes as an excuse
I’ve already commented frequently about the fact of gender inequality in our society, but also of the fact most people just don’t see it.
But it’s always good to have up-to-date examples.
Take Amanda Platell, writing in the Daily Mail, for example:
“All the more so when Labour’s own experiment with female shortlists proved to be so disastrous. Has Cameron learned nothing from the catastrophe that was Blair’s Babes – the female intake of the 1997 election? Remember Ruth Kelly? Jacqui Smith? Caroline Flint? As with so many Labour ladies, they turned out to be stunningly incompetent or ill-suited for high office. It was a national embarrassment.”
As Sunder at Next Left points out (h/t owed for the above), neither Kelly, Smith nor Flint were actually selected via women-only shortlists. So Platell’s article commits a basic error of fact, if her argument is that all-women shortlists returned particular examples of bad MPs.
Imagine the logic, applied to men:
“All the more when the United Kingdom’s centuries-old practice of either only – or overwhelmingly (in recent years) – selecting men to be MPs has proved to be so disastrous. Has Cameron learned nothing from the catastrophe that was the last 400 years of Parliamentary supremacy? Remember Anthony Eden? Neil Hamilton? David Amess? As with so many Tory gentlemen, they turned out to be stunningly incompetent or ill-suited for high office. It was a national embarrassment.”
Did Griffin lie about his father’s ‘war’ record?
On last night’s Question Time, Nick Griffin twice made the claim that his father, former Conservative councillor Edgar Griffin, had served in the RAF during World War II.
Griffin’s exact comments were:
Finally my father was in the RAF during the second World War while Mr Straw’s father was in prison for refusing to fight Adolf Hitler.
“Mr Straw was attacking me and I’ve been relentlessly attacked over the last few days, my father was in the RAF during the second World War, I am not a Nazi. I never have been.”
However, yesterday’s Suffolk Evening Star carried an interview with Griffin’s father in which its stated that:
Mr Griffin, who moved to Suffolk shortly after Nick was born in Hertfordshire in 1959, joined the Conservative Party when he returned from two years national service with the RAF in India.
Although the reintroduction of conscription into the armed forces was reintroduced, in 1939, by the National Service (Armed Forces) Act service during World War II, and in any armed conflict, is always referred to as either ‘War Service’ or ‘Military Service’.
The term ‘National Service’ did not come into use until 1948, three years after the end of World War II and ceased to be used, at all, with the end of conscription in 1960.
If, as the Evening Star’s article suggests, Griffin’s father undertook National Service, rather than War Service or Military Service, then he cannot have served in the RAF in World War II.
UPDATE – THE PLOT THICKENS
First things first – we can rule out the suggestion that Griffin’s father served in the RAF in India under, specifically, National Service (i.e. later than 1947)
The one concrete fact that I have been able to establish is Edgar Griffin was in the UK on 13 May 1947, the date on which he was invested a Freemason in Barnet.
Given that RAF AHQ India was disbanded on 15 August 1947, this would preclude Edgar Griffin serving in India during the period of National Service, which would indicate that he was in India at some point during the period from 1945-47.
As far as wartime RAF activity in India, by the beginning of 1945 the majority of RAF India squadrons were operating from forward bases in Burma, but for two squadrons based on Cox’s Bazaar and one base at Kumira, near Chittagong in what is, today Bangladesh.
What we also have, via Cath in comments, is a 2001 article from the Independent which gives this description of Edgar Griffin’s time in the RAF.
Edgar Griffin served in the dying days of the British Raj in India, in charge of 20 local aircraft mechanics. “I got on very well with them,” he says. “The Indian ladies also used to invite us to tea and were most kind to us.” How, he asks, could he possibly be racist with such a splendid record of racial integration?
On the basis of that description, if Griffin was in India with the RAF before the end of WWII (August 1945) then its highly unlikely that he was stationed with any of the RAF squadrons that played an active part in the final stages of the Burma Campaign.
The brief picture that the Indy paints is, however, consistent with the ‘Indianisation’ of those elements of RAF AHQ India that were due to be transferred to the Royal Indian Air Force on India becoming an independent state in August 1947., during which British personnel trained their Indian counterparts to take over control of the airforce.
Now it gets very interesting because this helps us to date Griffin’s service in the RAF in India specifically to 1946 – before that things remain uncertain – which could place Griffin’s father into some very interesting historical events.
Churchill, as is well known, was implacably opposed to Indian independence and even after the 1945 General Election, the new Attlee government resisted moves towards independence.
This stance began to change in January 1946, when RAF servicemen stationed in India mutinied – they actually went on strike – in protest at the slow pace of demobilisation and the use of British shipping facilities for transporting American G.I.s, although papers released later, under the 30 year rule indicate that the government were deliberately keeping troops in India to control civil unrest should this break out in connection with the independence movement.
This mutiny/strike helped to precipitate the Bombay Mutiny of February 1946 which, in turn, led to the British Cabinet Mission 0f 1946 and to an agreement that India would become an independent state in 1947.
The Indianisation of the facilities and aircraft of RAF AHQ India could therefore not have started until May 1946.
That leaves a couple of sizeable but as yet unanswered questions.
Edgar Griffin was born in 1922, and would have been 17 years old at the start of WWII and ordinarily would have been eligible for conscription at the age of 18 unless he declared himself a conscientious objector, as Jack Straw’s father did, entered a reserved occupation – and many conscientious objectors took that route out of military service to avoid the stigma of being openly labelled a ‘conshie’ – became a clergyman, or was deemed medically or mentally unfit for service.
By 1942, when he would have been 21, he would have been eligible not only for conscription but for a posting overseas.
Yet, it would appear that Edgar Griffin may no have entered military service until 1945 – so what exactly was he doing during the other five years of the war when he could easily have been called up?
Then there’s business of his actual service history, where Griffin claims to have served for two years but was also definitely back in England by May 1947 and could, therefore, have left India no later than April 1947 in order to make the four week journey, by sea, via the Suez canal.
If we take this two years as accurate, then Edgar Griffin must have been in India by April 1945 at the latest (which means that he did manage to serve in the RAF for all of four months of WWII) but also that he must have been stationed in India in January 1946, during the time of the RAF mutiny, which began at an base near Karachi but, according to a Channel 4 Secret History documentary broadcast in 1996, spread to 60 bases, including bases in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma and Singapore – the Air Ministry, however, only ever admitted to 22 bases having gone on strike.
So was Edgar Griffin, perhaps, one of the RAF mutineers?
Right now, we can’t be sure because we lack access to the kind of military records that would enable us to fill in the blanks although what we can say is that Griffin’s my dad was in the RAF jibe at Jack Straw looks likely to be considerably less impressive, once the facts are known, than Nick Griffin would like us to believe.
Edgar Griffin was certainly not a pilot, does not appear to have seen service anywhere near the front-line, even if he was stationed in India while the Burma campaign was still under way and may even have taken part in the second largest mutiny in the history of the British Armed Forces, one topped only by the Indian rebellion of 1857.
NATIONAL SERVICE
To reiterate the point about the date on which National Service began the British Armed Force and National Service website notes that:
The requirement for a peacetime force larger than that made possible by purely voluntary recruitment led the post-war Labour Government to move towards establishing a national service system in 1946. The National Service Act was passed in July 1947 after considerable opposition from some Labour and Liberal politicians. The Act was to come into force at the beginning of 1949. The Act initially required a period of one year to be served in the Armed Forces followed by a liability for a possible five years in the Reserve. Financial crises, the advent of the Cold War and the Malaya emergency led to the National Service Amendment Act in December 1948, increasing the period of service to 18 months. This enabled National Servicemen to be used more efficiently and effectively, particularly overseas.
The demands of the Korean War (1950-1953) led to the length of service being extended to two years, surpassing even the Service Chiefs’ original wishes. Liability to further service in the Reserve was reduced with each of these extensions. The period of service remained at two years until the end of National Service.
So the earliest date at which Griffin’s father could have joined the RAF under National Service, and served two years, was around 1950.
HIV – AIDS denialism at the Spectator
The new editor of Spectator magazine, Fraser Nelson has a blog-post on the magazine’s website titled ‘Questioning the Aids consensus‘.
Like a true right-wing maverick who questions the consensus and asks why people are so “vociferous” in the discussion:
Is it legitimate to discuss the strength of the link between HIV and Aids? It’s one of these hugely emotive subjects, with a fairly strong and vociferous lobby saying that any open discussion is deplorable and tantamount to Aids denialism. Whenever any debate hits this level, I get deeply suspicious.
Which is why the below clip – from a documentary which The Spectator Events division is screening next week, called House of Numbers – aroused my interest. The film picked up awards at various American film festivals, but has since been denounced as backing Aids denialism. Yet the footage shows Luc Montagnier – who won a Nobel prize last year for his work on Aids – saying that many HIV infections can be shrugged off by a healthy immune system.
He finishes with: “let’s have your thoughts”, and promptly gets eviscerated in the comments.
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How much will the BNP vote drop by?
For many years, people have argued that if only the BNP were taken on and debated against in public, they would be exposed and their support would collapse. We can now start to do a bit of an evaluation of how this approach is working.
In 2007, a team of debating champions, by their own fantastically modest account, defeated Nick Griffin in debate in the Oxford Union by forcing him to speak “the angry, racist language of demogoguery”. And last night, 8 million people watched him debate on Question Time, in a performance which every single newspaper reported on their front page today was a complete disaster for him.
According to the theory, this should lead to a fall in support for the BNP. Admittedly, there is weak evidence so far for this, in that the BNP got nearly 1 million votes a year and a bit after their arguments were “demolished” in the Oxford Union. But that only reached a tiny audience, and presumably the effect of Question Time will be much greater.
So would anyone like to venture a prediction about how we could measure the damage that this has done to the BNP?
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SuperFreakonomics – How to lose friends and irritate people
If there really is no such thing as bad publicity then Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner will surely be laughing all the way to the bank as sales of their new book ‘SuperFreakonomics’, the follow-up to their 2005 bestseller ‘Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything‘, head through the ceiling.
In a little under a fortnight since the book’s release, Levitt and Dubner have already walked straight into one major shitstorm by, seemingly tweaking the noses of a prominent environmental blogger and a well-known environmental advocacy group with their chapter on climate change.
And if Anna North’s article at Jezebel.com is anything to go by, their chapter on the economics of prostitution looks set to have a few feminists chewing the furniture as well, in very short order.
Controversy sells, even if its misplaced, which seems to at least partially the case here as neither chapter looks to be anything like as contentious as some of the book’s more vocal critics are trying to make out.
So what exactly, have Levitt and Dubner done to piss these people off.
Climate Change
Taking the climate change chapter first [pdf no longer available], and with the caveat that I’ve not yet had time to exhaustively examine all the claimed examples of misrepresentation and/or technical errors cited by its critics, what Levitt and Dubner have done is poke a stick at what is by far the largest and most intractable problem facing climate scientists working on global warming; their inability to make anything that remotely approaches a reliable prediction of its likely impact on the global climate. continue reading… »
Live chat – #BBCQT tonight
BBC Question Time starts at 10:30pm but it’s already being trailed on BBC News 24…
Update: Some reviews from across the web following QT
Our Kingdom: BBC/BNP after the programme
Shiraz Socialist: A Bonnie lass routs Griffin
Hagley Road to Ladywood: The BNP has the tabloids to thank
Bad Conscience: Not the apocalypse, but…
Paperhouse: Nick Griffin’s day out
Left Outside: Give ‘em enough rope
Sim-O: “I’m scum and I’m a racist”
How can the left deal with the BNP?
The BNP’s appearance on Question Time has prompted a wave of revisionism on the political right – with some going as far as saying that the right is better at dealing with the BNP and apparently the left is to blame for the rise of the BNP. And then there are some who say we should not heap abuse on Nick Griffin and instead need to deal with the concerns of BNP sympathisers. Let’s address this head on.
It’s farcical to watch right-wingers now adopt anti-racist credentials and pretend they don’t have a deeply racist past. This isn’t the party of anti-racism, this is the party with a history of opposing Nelson Mandela and supporting apartheid, the party of ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’, and the party of Enoch Powell (who is still widely revered).
There is a key difference between the left and right on anti-racism: the right actually believe and perpetuate many of the lies that have fulled the BNP’s rise. They may not be racist, or see themselves as racist, but they implicitly agree with the BNP’s concern that immigrants are “swamping” Britain, that they are getting preferential treatment, that most Muslims are dangerous etc.
The right is not only unwilling to take on the right-wing media which has created the conditions for the BNP to thrive, by pushing lies on immigration especially, but they support it. For example you won’t see them challenge the Daily Mail on the view that immigrants get special treatment.
In that sense the BNP has become a trojan horse for the right: they keep condemning the party while claiming hysterically that the concerns of those voters must be addressed. Funny, they never say that in relation to Muslim extremists, only white extremists.
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Revealed: Home Office communication on G20 Protests
contribution by Kevin Blowe
A week ago, I said on my blog that Home Office had received a Freedom of Information request asking for documents it held or produced between 1st and 8th April of this year that were either “briefings, notes, minutes, emails or letters prepared for ministers and senior officials concerning the 1 April 2009 G20 ‘financial fools day’ demonstration” or “memos, papers, emails, minutes or documents relating to either the 1st April 2009 demonstration at the Bank of England or Ian Tomlinson’s death”.
The Home Office website indicated that these were available “in hard copy only” so I requested them last Monday and, with surprising speed, they turned up in the post this week.
There are some 80-odd pages and they have been zealously redacted – in fact in one instance, a civil servant has decided to block out the name and contact details of Charlotte Philips, Head of News at the Independent Police Complaints Commission, even though this information is publicly available on the IPCC website.
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20 questions we should ask the BNP
The Guardian is reporting that the BNP is going to face more problems tomorrow when a website publishes its membership list again. Of course, I can only observe internal in-fighting and trouble at the BNP with glee.
I disagree with Peter Hain’s objection to the BNP appearing on Question Time tomorrow Thursday because it’s too late and just looks like an attempt at censorship. The BBC has been toying with giving the BNP primetime slots for quite a while and keep making excuses for their journalists’ sloppy questioning: so in one sense this is no worse than what has already happened.
Tomorrow night I’ll be running a live debate here and posting on Twitter during QT. I feel Nick Griffin will do well. But to help the others, and as a reference point for journalists in the future, I’ve prepared a list of 20 questions aimed at the BNP.
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Civil partnerships are the new Black friends
If we’ve learned anything over the last few days its surely that there are certain circles in which claiming to have been in favour of the introduction of civil partnerships is very much like having Black friends.
That, broadly speaking, seems to be the impression created by Jan Moir’s weaselling non-apology for Friday’s reprehensible commentary on the untimely death of Stephen Gately.
Its certainly the impression I took from from her closing remarks:
In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.
In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.
We’ve seen, already, that Moir’s on the record ’support’ for civil partnerships is, at best, desperately shallow and voyeuristic and it takes very little effort at all to discover that she’s plenty of previous form to be taken into account; from railing against the BBC for making Saturday night altogether too gay for her tastes, to suggesting that Elton John’s personal success, much of came while he was still heavily closeted, negates his criticism of religious homophobia, all the way this particularly spiteful commentary on the private lives of a number of Liberal Democrat MPs, past and present, which includes a particular fine example of the homophobic non-sequitur.
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Why is Camera-off backing off from TV debates?
After the initial hype around TV debates, it looks like David Camer-on is getting cold feet, even though he was earlier doing his best to goad Gordon Brown into a TV debate. On Saturday the Telegraph’s Melissa Kite reported that the Tory leader was morphing into Camera-off and had rejected the idea of TV debates:
Mr Cameron has proposed the most slimline option, involving one debate with all three leaders. But Mr Brown has told broadcasters he wants at least six. He and Mr Cameron would go head to head in one, Mr Brown would face Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, in another while Mr Cameron would face Mr Clegg in a third. Then there would be three more debates between Mr Brown and Mr Cameron focused on a different issue each time, such as the economy.
Presumably Mr Cameron only wanted one debate so he could illustrate his soundbite skills and escape without elaborating on silly things such as policy. Unsurprisingly the Tory blogs have been very silent on the issue.
The article added:
Mr Cameron believes that the Labour strategy is to have so many debates that the Tories will eventually unravel under the sheer volume of questions. Mr Brown is said to be particularly keen to put Mr Osborne under the spotlight because he is seen by Labour as the Tories’ “weakest link”.
For “sheer volume of questions”, read: ‘forcing them into concrete policy proposals’.
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Conservative affirmative action
This is a lovely example of conservative principles, taken from a conversation with leading American conservative thinker Irving Kristol:
“The talk turned to Irving’s son, William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.”
“With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action.
‘I oppose it,’ Irving replied. ‘It subverts meritocracy.’ “
Iain Dale’s selective denunciation of homophobia
Yesterday, via Twitter, Iain Dale joined the rest of the known universe in condemning Jan Moir – for instance, by RT-ing a post by Total Politics editor Shane Greer, calling the Mail writer a ‘bigot of the worst kind.’ This follows a recent episode in which Dale was also a victim of homophobia from the Mail.
Dale rightly complained to the PCC on that occasion, and I later followed his appeal for others to add their voices, by complaining to Paul Dacre and the writer of the offending column, Peter McKay (it hardly needs saying that, to date, I have had no reply).
But whilst Dale is happy to condemn a newspaper that has a history of targeting him personally, he singularly refuses to criticise anti-gay prejudice closer to home. Indeed, he has not merely failed to speak up against homophobia among Conservatives and their allies.
To take one example: as regular readers will know, recently I uncovered how Valdemar Tomasevski, a Lithuanian MEP who is part of the Tories’ coalition in the European Parliament, personally voted for a severely repressive and homophobic law that has been condemned by human rights watchdogs, including Amnesty.
Thanks to the considerable help of Sunny, that news spread fairly widely around the leftie blogosphere, was picked up by The Observer, and commented on by Lib Dem Shadow Foreign Secretary Ed Davey.
Yet Dale refused to be drawn on the subject, even when, on a visit to my blog, he was directly challenged to explain his inconsistent stance on homophobia by another commenter. Instead, he gave a brief, obscuscating answer, and disappeared.
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Jan Moir’s record speaks for itself
You all know that I’m the kind of blogger who checks things out, so when Jan Moir claimed to be ‘on the record’ as supporting civil partnerships, I just had to go find out exactly where…
Gay weddings are fine, but a gay divorce…
Since new legislation was introduced in this country nine months ago, more than 15,500 gay couples have done the decent thing and got married. The rise and rise of civil partnerships have pushed up sales of porcelain tea sets, Ralph Lauren cashmere blankets and quality Champagnes — none of your muck here, darling – and most people seem to be in agreement that the new laws were long overdue and a jolly good thing.It is interesting, however, that the vast majority – more than 14,000 – of the ceremonies took place in England. And while the popularity of gay weddings has surprised everyone, is it too soon to point out that I can’t wait for the first of the high-profile gay divorces to start happening? Surely some of them will turn out to be the kind of fabulous ding-dongs that make a wet Monday morning, a hot cup of tea and a trashy tabloid worth living for.
Even the most well meaning and kindly Daily Telegraph readers know that, somewhere out there, among the nascent gay divorces hovering over Never-Never Land, there will be a few that will promise to make the McCartney/Mills ructions look like a teatime tiff at the Ritz.
Roll on round one.
With ‘friends’ like Jan Moir, does the gay community actually need enemies?
The right’s silly obsession with marriage
The right’s prejudice in favour of marriage can sometimes lead it to some very sloppy thinking. Two recent pieces suggest this. First, the Spectator’s leader cites ONS research showing that married men are more likely to find work that single ones, and infers that “perhaps it’s time to chivvy the unemployed to church.”
This inference suffers from two problems. One is: why does marriage enhance employability? It could be because marriage causes men to want to work more, perhaps to escape the wife’s nagging. Or it could be that marriage is merely correlated with factors that make men attractive to employers: good social skills, reliability, a conventional mindset etc.
There’s lots of research (pdf) on this question – none of which the Spectator cites – which is gloriously ambiguous.
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Homophobia, misogyny and hypocrisy
The death of gay popstar Stephen Gately from pulmonary oedema this week was “unnatural”, not by virtue of foul play but because of his sexuality, according to frothing baghack Jan Moir of the Daily Mail .
More unnatural than the death of 38-year old Siobhan Kearney, whose former husband this week lost his appeal to be acquitted of her murder.
The judge confirmed that in 2006, Brian Kearney strangled Siobhan in her room then used a Dyson Vacuum cleaner flex as a ligature before trying to hoist her over the en-suite door in her bedroom in an attempt to make it look like a suicide. He then left the house, leaving their three-year-old son alone downstairs whilst his mother’s body slowly cooled.
More unnatural than the death of Kate Ellerbeck, who rowed with her mutually unfaithful husband and asked for a divorce, attacking him in a rage when he refused.
HSBC investment banker Neil Ellerbeck, who was this week convicted of manslaughter, told police that restrained his wife “forcefully”, pinning her to the ground with his entire 15stone bulk until she stopped “wriggling and kicking”, and left her corpse in the hallway. He then texted his lover, bought a lottery ticket, and went to pick up the couple’s ten-year-old daughter from school, telling her “Mummy’s not here because she’s gone shopping”.
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Jan Moir in the Daily Mail: sickening homophobia
Since Stephen Gately’s death last week, the Daily Mail has been desperately trying to dig up some dirt.
In spite of official confirmations that the Boyzone star died of natural causes, the Mail has decided that the unfortunate death of an innocent 33-year-old man is fair game (see, for instance, Paul Scott’s unashamed hatchet job the day after Gately’s death).
The lowest point was hit today by Jan Moir with her article “Why there was nothing natural about Stephen Gately’s death “, where this overpaid food obsessive uses a personal tragedy to lash out at civil partnerships and sexual minorities.
continue reading… »
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» 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 civil 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
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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