The reports were true, but I was wrong. There has been no degeneration. Ferguson has always been this crass and crassly inaccurate.

Donald Markwell, Warden of Rhodes House until last year, pointed me to his John Maynard Keynes and International Relations for the gruesome details. Markwell had to devote time and space to the ugly task of dissecting an attack on Keynes by Ferguson in a 1995 edition of the Spectator. He damned Keynes for saying in his Economic Consequences of the Peace that the Carthaginian terms imposed by the allies on Germany at Versailles would wreck the economy and could push Germans over the edge again. (‘Who can say how much is endurable, or in what direction men will seek at last to escape from their misfortunes?’)

That Keynes was right and reparations led to Germany’s great post-war inflation was not a point Ferguson could concede. Do not forget that for the Thatcherites of the 1970s’ generation, Keynes was a hate figure. Keynes thought that he had devised ways to save capitalism from communism (and from itself). But no good deed goes unpunished, and the Right of Ferguson’s day loathed him for his dislike of mass unemployment and support for deficit financing. No ground should be given to him or courtesy shown him, and Ferguson offered neither. He wrote of Keynes at Versailles.

‘There is, however, no question that a series of meetings with Carl Melchior, one of the German representatives at the armistice and peace negotiations, added a vital emotional dimension. Melchior was a partner in the Hamburg bank MM Warburg – ‘a very small man,’ as Keynes described him, ‘exquisitely clean, very well and neatly dressed with a high stiff collar…The line where his hair ended bound his face and forehead in a very sharply defined and rather noble curve. His eyes gleam..with extraordinary sorrow.’

‘It is not too much to infer from these emotive phrases some kind of sexual attraction…Those familiar with Bloomsbury will appreciate why Keynes fell so hard for the representative of an enemy power.’

So not just a puff but a treacherous puff too. Keynes argued against being beastly to the Germans because he wanted to get beastly with Carl Melchior.

Even at the time Ferguson could not carry off the ‘queers can’t be trusted’ line successfully. The casual reader of the Spectator in 1995 may have thought that it was ‘too much to infer from these emotive phrases’ that Keynes advocated a generous policy towards a defeated Germany because he was enchanted by a German diplomat. Ferguson had to admit that ‘before he arrived as a Treasury representative at Versailles, Keynes believed that any reparations imposed on Germany should be on the low side’. After discussing Keynes’s sexual encounters with men, he has to add ‘granted there is no evidence that his love [for Melchior] was in any physical sense consummated.’ Although he informs us that, ominously, Melchior was ‘unmarried’.

Then there is the question of whether Keynes was right to wonder whether Germany could cope. Ferguson brushes over the awkward facts that in 1919 Germany was close to starvation, communist revolutionaries were trying to seize power, and right-wing militias (the ancestors of the Nazis) were trying to put them down. As Markwell says, Keynes thought that ‘if starvation were to be staved off, Germany’s need for food supplies was urgent,’ and France’s revanchist willingness to let the country suffer had to be fought. (Markwell adds but Ferguson forgets to mention that many in the British and American delegations agreed with Keynes, and admired Melchior as well. Perhaps they were gay too) Then there is the question of Keynes’s patriotism. You can say that the Economic Consequences of the Peace helped prepare the ground for appeasement if you want to stretch a point.
Unlike Virginia Woolf and many others in Bloomsbury, however, Keynes was not a pacifist. He saw through Hitler the moment he came to power, and found ways to finance World War II.

I may be being a hopeless optimist but the argument about Ferguson may illustrate wider shifts in opinion. Hearteningly, the homophobia of Ferguson’s (and my) youth is over. Once a bullish and butch right-wing intellectual could raise a dirty laugh by sneering at the queers. No longer – as Ferguson has found to his cost.

I also hope that the taste for intellectuals who will say and do anything to get attention is declining. The claim that you are being po-faced and PC if you insist on upholding basic standards in debate no longer works the way it once did. After the initial fuss, Tom Chivers of the Telegraph, a distant relative of Keynes, wrote that everything about Ferguson’s attack on his great-great uncle was wrong.
Of course Keynes cared about about future generations. His remark ‘in the long run we are all dead’

was not a sweeping dismissal of the far future, but a very specific rebuke to economists who thought that, because “in the long run” the price of goods varied with the amount of money in the economy, they didn’t have to worry about price fluctuations now. In fact, Keynes said, there could be large price variations caused by how quickly people spent their money, and that could lead to the devastating problems of inflation and deflation that he spent his life battling: “Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”
But whatever he wrote, the idea that because he had no children of his own he didn’t worry about what happened to other people’s is ridiculous – not only because he did marry, to the surprise of his friends; his wife, the ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova, miscarried their child.

What are readers meant to say when presented with an intellectual who shouts ill-educated abuse to make himself heard? ‘It’s all a game, it’s a bit of a laugh, Ferguson’s a card, don’t take him too seriously?’ Many have had their fill of all of that and are shrugging their shoulders and walking away.

If I were a conservative, I would worry. We’ve had rampant Niallism these past few years. Britain and the Eurozone’s austerity policies sound good in a pub argument, but have not worked so well – or indeed at all – in the world beyond the saloon bar. In America, the Republicans went off with the Fergusonesque Tea Party and lost. Now British Conservatives are appeasing Ukip.

They should be careful. Many people who might have given them a hearing will walk away if they carry on like this. They will say of them, as Keynes said of the Conservatives of his day, ‘They offer me neither food nor drink — intellectual nor spiritual consolation… [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already attained.’

The post More Niallism: Keynes opposed Versailles because he was a screaming queen appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

Britain was not a country where the natives could debate their grievances and foreigners could come to talk of oppression in their own lands. Our politicians and judges welcomed actions from corporations at home that were clearly designed to use the crushing power of money to intimidate critics into silence, and from Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, Hollywood paedophiles, Islamist fanatics and Saudi petro-billionaires. A Russian newspaper contesting Putin’s mafia state or a Scandinavian newspaper investigating the Icelandic bankers’ Ponzi scheme, would be hit with a biased law and huge costs by the London courts. Even after the death of Robert Maxwell in the early 1990s revealed that the old fraud had used the libel law to suppress criticism of his criminal business enterprises, the establishment did nothing.

Conservatives condemn “liberal judges”. But with the odd exception – the current Lord Chief Justice being the most glorious – there is nothing liberal about their attitudes to free debate. Although Article 10 of the Human Rights Act protects freedom of speech, every competent lawyer will tell you that the judges have not used it to extend rights, or indeed to protect rights we once had and are now losing.

I am afraid the judges reflect wider society. The national reflex is to demand bans whenever uncomfortable, unpleasant or unfamiliar speech is heard. Add to that depressing mix, the Leveson inquiry into the peeping Toms of the tabloids, and the chances that libel reform would pass seemed slim.

But last night, despite all of the above, Parliament reformed the law. Many people can claim credit for forcing change through. Lord Lester, who more than anyone else wrote the legislation, and Index on Censorship, English Pen and Sense About Science, who ran a model campaign. But Simon Singh deserves the most praise. His determination to fight an unjust law made reform possible.

He will hate me praising him, let alone calling him a hero. He is a diffident man, whose tone is ironic, except when he is talking about science. He wasn’t a celebrity or politician, but a successful author whose books on code breaking and the cracking of Fermat’s last theorem were joys to read. After writing them, he collaborated with Professor Edzard Ernst to produce Trick or Treatment, an investigation into whether “alternative” therapies work. (None does, except as placebos, with the partial exception of St John’s Wort.)

Chiropractic therapy – the pummelling of backs by mystic masseurs – was particularly pernicious. All alternative treatments are potentially dangerous. Credulous patients, who believe their quacks, may avoid seeking trustworthy advice from a qualified doctor, and suffer the consequences. But chiropractic falls into that small class of alternative therapies that are not only useless but dangerous. In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experienced temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. Patients put themselves in jeopardy when they allowed therapists to execute high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust on their necks – one of the most vulnerable parts of the body, as hangmen know.

Singh and Ernst went on to document cases of chiropractors killing patients, and published in 2008. Here is an account of what happened next from my You Can’t Read This Book.]

A few months later, the British Chiropractic Association held National Chiropractic Awareness Week. Singh noted that it offered its members’ services to the anxious parents of sick children, and wrote an article for the Guardian, ‘Beware the Spinal Trap’. He began by saying that readers would be surprised to learn that the therapy was the creation of a deranged man who thought that displaced vertebrae caused virtually all diseases. The British Chiropractic Association followed suit by claiming that its members could treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying.

There was ‘not a jot of evidence’ that these treatments worked, said Singh. ‘This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.’ He went on to explain that he could label the treatment as ‘bogus’ because Ernst had examined seventy trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back, and found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat them.

By the standards of polemic, it was an even-tempered piece; far angrier articles have been written with less cause. Singh was warning that parents would be wasting their money if they took children to chiropractors, and could risk harming them too. He backed up his comments with reliable evidence, and concluded that ‘If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.’ This unexceptionable thought was no more than a statement of the obvious.

The chiropractors did not sue the Guardian, but went for Singh personally, hoping that the threat of financial ruin would force him to grovel. The Guardian withdrew his article from their website, thus lessening any ‘offence’ caused, and offered the chiropractors the right of reply, so they could tell their side of the story and convince readers by argument rather than by threats that Singh was in the wrong.

The chiropractors carried on suing Singh, and demanded that he pay them damages and apologise. Singh did not see why he should, considering he was reporting reputable evidence that chiropractic therapy was the invention of a faith healer, whose claims that his mystical method could cure sicknesses that had nothing to do with backache were nonsense. At a preliminary hearing to determine the ‘meaning’ of Singh’s article, the judiciary soon showed why English law was feared and despised across the free world. Determined to draw him into the law’s clutches, the judge [Mr Justice Eady] put the worst possible construction on Singh’s words.

He ruled that because Singh had said ‘there is not a jot of evidence’ that chiropractic therapists could cure colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, the courts would at enormous expense see if they could find one piece of evidence, however small, to support the chiropractors. Maybe if a child stood up in court and breathlessly announced that a chiropractor had cured her, that would be a jot. Maybe if the judge could find a smidgeon of doubt in one of the studies, Singh would have to pay for a phrase that may have been ever so slightly inaccurate.

If Singh could prove that no such doubt existed, he would still not be free of the law. The judge ruled that when Singh said of the British Chiropractic Association, ‘This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments,’ he was accusing it of dishonesty. It seemed clear to those of us who did not have the benefit of a legal training that he was doing no such thing. In his article, Singh said that chiropractic therapists had ‘wacky ideas’, and accused the hard-line among them of being ‘fundamentalists’. In normal English usage, to describe someone as a fundamentalist who holds wacky ideas is to accuse him of folly, not of mendacity.

Not according to the judge. He ruled that when Singh wrote ‘happily promotes’, he did not mean that chiropractors ‘carelessly’ promoted bogus therapies without a thought for the available evidence, or ‘stupidly’ promoted them because they did not understand the findings of clinical trials. No. Singh was accusing therapists of deliberately and fraudulently promoting quack remedies they knew to be worthless. ‘That is in my judgement the plainest allegation of dishonesty and indeed it accuses them of thoroughly disreputable conduct,’ the judge told Singh.

Proving whether a believer in magical medicine, the ‘faked’ moon landings, the ‘truth’ about Obama’s birth certificate or any other mystical or paranoid theory is a fool or a liar is a next to impossible task. The most disturbing thing about fantasists is that they are often sincere. Yet on the ruling of the English courts, a writer who described a neo-Nazi or an Islamist as ‘happily promoting bogus conspiracy theories’ about the global reach of the Elders of Zion, for which there is ‘not a jot of evidence’, could be sued for libel in London. And unless the writer could prove that the object of the critique was a liar instead of a fool, the writer would lose.

After hearing the judge’s ruling, Singh’s friends, his lawyers and everyone else who had his best interests at heart advised him to get out of the madhouse of the law while he still could. He had already risked £100,000 of his own money. If he fought the case, it would obsess his every waking moment for a year, possibly longer, and he could lose ten times that amount if the verdict went against him. Even if he won, he would still lose, because another peculiarity of the English law is that the victor cannot recoup his full costs. It was as if the judiciary had put Singh in a devil’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Singh’s wife, the BBC journalist Anita Anand, understood the principle at stake, and backed her husband. Whatever happened, she said, the case would not divide them. But the question remained for Singh, how far could he go before deciding that the risk to his family’s finances was too great? To cap it all, the judge had come up with a reading of Singh’s words that made a defence impossible.

No one would have blamed him for backing down. There would have been no dishonour in withdrawing from the fray. Thousands of publishers and writers in England and beyond have looked at the cost and biases of the English law and thought surrender the only option. Singh said that if he were a twenty-five-year-old with no money he would have apologised. But his bestselling books had given him financial independence. He resolved to refuse to put his name to a lie by authorising an apology. He knew what his enemies would do with it. Ernst and Singh had spent years investigating alternative medicine. No potential patient would spend more than a few days doing the same. If he apologised, chiropractic therapists would wave his retraction at potential patients, and say that Singh had admitted that their philosophy was not gibberish, and their claims to treat children were not bogus. As shamefully, an apology would also make Singh complicit in silencing other journalists, scientists and editors, who would think hard before challenging alternative therapists after seeing how the law had forced him to retract.

From Stalin in his show trials to oligarchs suing investigative journalists, censors want recantations as well as exemplary punishments. I have seen billionaires, including convicted criminals, extract admissions of guilt from British newspapers too poor or too frightened to fight, and use them to convince journalists and politicians around the world that legitimate criticisms of their actions were groundless. Singh did not wish to join such sorry company.

So he fought. The diffident man turned out to be a superb public speaker: funny; precise; and even-tempered. His lawyers overturned Eady’s judgement on appeal, and Singh gave up his life, and the chance of earning a large amount of money, for the campaign. He attended every meeting, however small. His example swayed doubters, and convinced politicians from all parties to tackle an abuse they had allowed to fester for decades. For how could you argue that it was right for the law to threaten writers discussing urgent issues of public health, even if they were in the wrong – which Singh was not.

Few did in the end, and the legal establishment had to retreat. The Singh case illustrates an important point about liberty. People imagine that freedom comes in revolutions and bills of rights. But sometimes revolutions turn authoritarian and bills of rights turn out not to be worth the paper they are written on – as article 10 of the Human Rights Act shows. More often, change comes when bloody-minded individuals refuse to accept the commonsense advice to “move on and let it be,” square their shoulders and fight back.

If you meet Simon Singh, tell him what a great guy he is. His embarrassment will be wonderful to behold.

The post Simon Singh: Let us now praise a bloody-minded hero appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

The partially successful attempt to stop the BBC playing a clip from a 1939 children’s film is one of the most surreal cases of censorship I have seen. Right wingers were not demanding that the BBC blacklist the song because it was pornographic or libellous. The lyrics the merry Munchkins chirruped were irrelevant to them. They were censoring because they disapproved of the motives of the people who had bought the song, not because of the content of the song itself. That the BBC went along for the most part with them showed how quickly its new director-general would fold under political pressure. That the Mail was prepared to demand a ban, showed that the right could be as politically correct as the left. I assumed that the Mail would never again be able to ask for freedom of speech on its own behalf, but I underestimated the thickness of its brass neck, and within days it was calling for the liberty to speak and write without a shadow of a blush on its face.

I duly filed a piece for the Observer saying that I and many other who opposed Mrs Thatcher felt uneasy about celebrating her death. Her supporters had a good case when they said that the protests were simultaneously childish and grotesque. But as soon as they censored, they lost the argument.

On cue, an email arrived from Russia Today, Putin’s English language propaganda station. Everyone who goes along with the denial of human rights in the West, the Leveson inquiry in Britain or any double-standard in a democracy should think hard about its implications.

I am a producer on Russia Today TV network, a 24 hour news channel broadcasting in most parts of the world. We are talking today about BBC radio not playing the witch song (actually then it was changed to 5 seconds of it only) and are looking for guests with opinions and i came across your story and i thought it was wonderful and quite opinionated. So, i was wondering if there is a chance we could ask you to talk to us about your views LIVE today, in the evening. We are talking about freedom of speech, and i think this is what your article is about.

I told her I didn’t work for Putin and neither should she. The naïve may wonder about her motives. Why would the debased journalists of a mafia state want to highlight the absurd and ham-fisted attempts of the British Right to determine what songs the BBC could play? In 2010 Reporters Without Borders ranked Russia 140th out of 178 countries in its Press Freedom Index. Opposition politicians cannot gain access to the mainstream media. The Net is censored. Journalists are imprisoned and murdered on occasion. Surely, Russia has no interest in upholding freedom of speech?

Nor does it. Russia, like every other dictatorship, wants to show that freedom is a sham. The so-called “free world” is not free at all, it tells its subjugated peoples. Its politicians are no different from your politicians. They ban and control as do we, and then hypocritically criticise us. At least we are honest.

Attacks on freedom of speech in Britain are therefore doubly damned: they deny our right to argue and investigate; and they are used by dictatorial regimes to deny those same rights to their citizens.

Apparently William Hague told the Cabinet that repressive leaders the world over would throw Leveson in our diplomats’ faces whenever Britain tried to protest against abuses of human rights. (And he spoke before Parliament sought to extend press regulation to cover bloggers on the Web – just like Putin.) And, of course, they will.

As the British fight their nasty little culture wars, and indulge their pathetic desire to determine what can and cannot be said, they should remember that somewhere over the rainbow, someone is watching.

The post Vladimir Putin meets the Munchkins appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

How can this be? All these polls were taken during the raging welfare debate. Commentator after commentator wrote articles assuring us that Labour was on the wrong side of public opinion, and the Tories had at last found an issue that would move the voters their way. Unanimity gripped the punditocracy. Attitudes to welfare had hardened, they said; and, indeed, they were right about that. Cameron and Osborne had Labour where they wanted it, they continued; and the panicked reaction of the Labour leadership suggested they had a point there too. As Belloc might have said, when it came to welfare cuts

The stocks were sold; the Press was squared:
The Middle Class was quite prepared.

But, however good they were as essayists, the pundits made pretty poor reporters. The evidence does not show any surge in Tory support, quite the contrary in fact. If readers or conservatively-inclined journalists want to look for comfort they can say that at some point in the future the Tories will profit from the welfare debate – although I suspect that as cases of decent working people losing money and homes multiply the government’s position will weaken. Perhaps they can look at the large share of the vote UKIP is collecting in the polling figures, and speculate that it will go to the Tories at a general election. Maybe they can criticise the polling companies, and say they’ve overstated Labour support in the past, although they did not get it so wrong in 2010.

But all these arguments are predictions, often wishful predictions. I have always said that it’s difficult enough for a journalist to find out what is happening and impossible for him or her to know what will happen. We are reporters not clairvoyants. The evidence shows that while a large section of the public want to cut welfare payments to the undeserving, it does not like it at all when Conservatives propose doing just that. (Or if that is too strong, does not like it enough to tell opinion pollsters that they will vote Conservative as a result.)

The old line about the voters liking Tory policies until they find out that they are the policies of the Tory party still holds. To use language that would give the editor every right to take me outside and shoot me, the Conservatives still have not “decontaminated their brand”. If I were a Tory I would be worried. They have had what was meant to be one of their best weeks in months, and there is no evidence that it has done them any good whatsoever.

The post Evidence-based politics: the case of the incredible shrinking Tory Party appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

‘Unsurprisingly, as a prominent Muslim figure, I frequently receive abuse and threats – mainly from racist extremists of the EDL-ilk. That and the sheer violence of Marchant’s language in discussing me (‘I will load the revolver and we can all take turns … [makes mental note to keep revolver well cleaned and oiled]’) should explain why I acted when the tweets were drawn to my attention.’

There was no remote hint of any racism in Marchant’s tweets or any other comments he made about him. But then this is a tactic many of us are becoming familiar with. Rahman and his kind are desperate to stop the notion gaining currency that you should oppose the Islamist religious right and the white far-right with equal force and for the same reasons. Criticise reactionary ideas on liberal and left wing grounds and their supporters immediately claim that you back the EDL and BNP. I have noticed that members of the white far-right are trying the same trick: oppose them, and you become a supporter of radical Islam. Truly what unites extremists is more important than what divides them.

Notice, too, in that passage that Rahman does not say that Marchant and his friends were joking on Twitter about killing themselves if Labour readmitted the renegade mayor to the party. Everyone else accepts that the tweets were just the banter of friends chatting among themselves, including the police, whose time the Mayor has wasted. Nor did Marchant say he ‘regretted’ the joke, as the Mayor claims. He said he regretted any genuine discomfort caused due to misunderstanding of the joke. I find it hard to believe that there has been any genuine discomfort whatsoever in this case, but there you are.

On to Rahman’s own record. No-one ever accused him of being a member of Islamic Forum Europe. The fact that he works with groups of other faiths is entirely irrelevant (so what?). That does not mean he cannot be a front man for Islamic Forum Europe

If he is not, why according to the Telegraph did, ‘six of the people who signed his nomination papers have the same names as senior office-holders and trustees of the IFE.’? 

If Rahman is a ‘moderate social democrat’, as he claims, why did the Press Complaints Commission rule that he can be described as ‘extremist-backed’, if he is not backed by extremists?

If Rahman is not intent on harassing people who disagree with him, why has he just wasted £100,000 of the public funds of a desperately poor borough harassing a whistleblower (a case which he lost)?

And why, while I am at it, did Rahman put in place as assistant chief exec to the council someone with close links to the IFE, even though recruiters could barely find any evidence that he was remotely qualified for the role?

If the IFE is not an ‘extremist network’, as he claims, does he deny its links to the murderous Jamaat-i-Islami, whose leaders in Bangladesh are currently on trial for vile war crimes? Does he suggest it has never had connections to hate preachers? The idea that it is not extremist is risible. That ‘every previous council leader’ has worked with Islamic Forum Europe, by the way, is hardly a recommendation, merely an indication of the dire state of the local Labour party. 

Doubtless the ‘moderate social democrat’ will be supply answers to these pressing questions to Tower Hamlets’ luckless citizens soon.

The post Lutfur Rahman: Not a ‘bully’, just ‘sly’ and ‘unappetising’ appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

Labour had expelled Rahman, a frontman for Islamic Forum Europe, after he ran against the official Labour candidate to become mayor. Unlike many of the conformists and appeasers on the London left, Marchant and his friends believed that it is the job of leftists to oppose the religious right. Not everyone agrees with that admirable sentiment. The supporters of Ken Livingstone are constantly agitating for Labour to readmit Rahman: in part because they like anyone, even religious reactionaries, who are against “the West”; in part because they have the Tammany Hall politician’s respect for the ethnic bloc vote Islamic Foreign Europe can mobilise.

Musing on this theme, Marchant joked to his friends that if Labour were to readmit Rahman they would just have to kill themselves. ‘I will load the revolver and we can all take turns,’ were his precise words.

You can probably guess what happened next. Hugh Muir the Guardian’s diarist, called Marchant. Rahman’s people were accusing him of threatening to kill him, and the Met were investigating the ‘death threat’. At least Muir had the decency to mention that Marchant was joking about suicide rather than assassination. No such delicacy restrained the London Evening Standard and the Left Futures blog, both of which left their readers with the distinct impression that Labour members were threatening to gun down Rahman.

An understandably dazed Marchant wrote

Let’s follow the logic here. Were I a would-be assassin, it seems firstly particularly odd in that I would choose to make such a threat in a publicly accessible way as Twitter. Secondly, the fact that it was only addressed to my own Twitter followers, meant that anyone wanting to make something of this would have had to actively seek out this tweet. In order to be an even vaguely credible threat, it would, surely, need to have been addressed to Rahman himself. It was not.

It looks like the fuss has blown over, and that London’s ever watchful police service has found more pressing matters to investigate.

The wider point remains that the Web in general and Twitter in particular provides indelible evidence that the malicious, the prissy and the vengeful can use against you, on a scale we have not seen before.

Older people lament the decline of reticence. They condemn the young for making public exhibitions of themselves on the Web, and add the popularity of reality TV and confessional memoirs to their lamentations on the decline of modern manners.

But it is too simplistic to think new technologies get their users into trouble by making the private public. Rather, they make what was public but virtually unknowable available to everyone willing to search for incriminating evidence. Say 20 years ago, you had got blind drunk. Your friends take pictures of you in a deplorable state. The police arrest and prosecute you. The magistrate fines you for being drunk and disorderly, and a reporter records the verdict with a paragraph or two in the local paper. Society would have punished you in a public hearing. In theory, you have a stain that might stay with you for the rest of your life. In practice, strangers need never know. The friends’ pictures would go in an attic rather than on the Web; the newspaper cutting and police record would be buried in filing cabinets.

Before the Net, the courts convicted a friend of mine for possessing marijuana. Because he was the child of famous parents, the story made the national press. He grew up to become a jobbing news reporter moving from office to office. In every one, he sneaked into the library and ripped up the reports of his conviction. By the time he had finished, it might as well never have happened. The public event was effectively private.

A few years later, a friend on the Independent was also convicted of possessing drugs. The most malicious man on the paper was, as so often, the religious affairs editor. (Holiness corrupts, in my experience, and absolute holiness corrupts absolutely.) He wrote a column in the Church Times berating the sinfulness of Independent journalists – we drank too much, slept with people we should not have done and so on – and put it online. He did not name anyone apart from the woman with the drugs’ conviction, whom he seemed to hate with a passion. She has an unusual name. And for the next 15 years, every time she applied for a job, prospective employers have googled it and found out about her record. She’s lost several promotions as a result.

What was once an obscure misdemeanor her enemies could never find was traceable via a search engine in seconds. Twitter is particularly dangerous because of the power of the written word. Newspaper and book publishers have always known that they are more likely to be sued for libel than broadcasters because print is a permanent record. It feels more solid and damning than broadcasts which disappear into the ether. The trouble is that people write on Twitter and Facebook as if they are talking to friends. They behave as if they do not have to mind their manners and bite their tongues. I like that. I don’t want the freedom to communicate to be curtailed. But there is no doubt that the illusion that no one can listen in, leaves incautious users wide open to attack.

The Marchant case makes my point. If he and his friends had had a jokey conversation in the pub about Rahman, Britain would need to have been a Stasi state with informers everywhere for the police to learn of it. Because they joked on Twitter all Rahman needed to do was search for mentions of his name and flam up a case.

The Director of Public Prosecutions has offered some sensible guidelines on Twitter prosecutions. If the Web is not to remain such a boon for narks and sneak, we need a wider cultural change, however. We could do with understanding that we have moved from a world where it was difficult to find discreditable information about someone. Once, if you learned that the police had investigated a man who was applying for a job, the nugget of information assumed a vast significance. Because information was so hard to find, you could assume that the one discreditable fact you had in your possession was the tip of an iceberg, to use the cliché. Now so much information is recorded, we ought to be surprised if we can’t find something discreditable on the Web, or information that can be twisted to make someone look discreditable.

When we realise how far technology has changed we will understand that we ought to be as worried about the Lutfur Rahmans and all the other bullies and grasses who manipulate gullible journalists and police officers as the supposed villains they “unmask”.

The post Twitter: A playground for hysterics, prudes, fools and spies appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

If David Cameron had any sense, he would stand up in the Commons and say

“I am withdrawing the Royal Charter. The law officers have assured me that Lord Justice Leveson, though a fine judge in many respects, did not understand the Human Rights Act. He failed to see that the courts would almost certainly find that his plans to force newspapers and websites to join his regulator by hitting them with punitive fines were unlawful in practice. My problem is that too many in Parliament cannot see it either.

“There is a madness here in Westminster; a fanaticism which I, as a traditional Tory, find distasteful. I do not like officials in the Department of Culture Media and Sport drawing up lists of who must submit to censorship – the Angling Times, no, Hello! Magazine, yes, student newspapers, no, local newspapers, yes, “small-scale blogs,” no, medium-or-above-scale blogs,” yes. It’s not just that these pronouncements may have no legal force, it will be up to the courts to decide how interpret the legislation, I am worried that British civil servants are sounding like officials in a banana republic producing a list of targets that the regime must monitor and those it can safely ignore..

“I don’t regret seeking all-party agreement. There’s nothing wrong with looking for consensus. But politicians have been caught up in a giddy rush to escape from the reality that legislating on free speech is hard and dangerous, the work of years. I once said that “the next big scandal waiting to happen” is lobbying. Well we’re having that now. Hacked Off, will not name its backers. It will not say whether they include British or foreign oligarchs who want to shut down investigative journalism. Yet it sat in the Leader of the Opposition’s offices, munching pizza and drawing up legislation in the middle of the night. I accept I should have supported the leader of opposition when he denounced the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone. But since then, I have lost respect for him. He’s shown himself to be a weak leader, the plaything of special interests.

“I am struck how the Guardian, Spectator, Private Eye, New Statesman, Economist and Financial Times, have all expressed alarm. None of these papers was criticised by the Leveson inquiry. The Guardian indeed provided the stories which led to the Leveson inquiry.

“I am more struck by the fear that is spreading through websites, blogs, local newspapers and small magazines, which once again have broken no laws. I don’t like people being frightened about what they write. Writers should not be frightened about what they write in a free country as long they write within the law.

“So I’m withdrawing the Royal Charter, and going away to think of a better idea. Labour and the Liberal Democrats can keep behaving like the Tea Party in Washington by hijacking bills and trying to force Leveson through. Who knows, they may succeed. But I can see an assault on fundamental liberties coming and an administrative disaster too, and I want nothing to do with it.”

Cameron, of course, will say nothing of the sort. He is as weak in his own way as Miliband. But all of the above remains true, particularly the point about fear spreading through what is meant to be a free country. It is outrageous that Brian Leveson and Parliament are telling magazines, local newspapers, websites and national newspapers, who have behaved honourably, that they must pay to join a regulator, which can punish them for writing within the law, or face punitive damages in the courts if they refuse.

Punitive or exemplary damages are essentially criminal penalties in civil cases. A judge can punish a publisher even if he wins a case, by ordering him to pay costs. If he loses then the sky’s the limit. Judges do not like them for obvious reasons, and the Court of Appeal has severely restricted their use. In the days when Labour was in government and stuck by sensible principles, the Department for Constitutional Affairs consultation paper, The Law on Damages (CP 9/07) refused to extend their use in civil cases.

The Government … considers that there should be no further lessening through statute of the restrictions on the availability of exemplary damages. The purpose of the civil law on damages is to provide compensation for loss, and not to punish. The function of exemplary damages is more appropriate to the criminal law, and their availability in civil proceedings blurs the distinctions between the civil and criminal law.

If you are a writer or publisher – who has never hacked a phone or monstered an innocent person – and are frightened by the attempt by Leveson and the current parliament to extend exemplary damages, take some heart from this briefing from Gill Phillips, the chief legal officer at the Guardian and Observer.

It is worth noting that Lord Justice Leveson neither invited nor received submissions on exemplary damages during his Inquiry and the recommendations in the Report on exemplary damages are based on an out of date Law Commission report which was prepared before the Human Rights Act 1998 was passed.

In other words, he didn’t know what he was talking about and did not take steps to remedy his ignorance. Phillips continues

What is regarded as particular objectionable is the fact that these single out for punishment a particular category of defendant, rather than a particular kind of conduct, all the more so where the category of defendant singled out includes the press. The advice here is particularly strong, namely: to punish the press for what others may do without punishment is inconsistent with the special importance that both domestic and Strasbourg jurisprudence attaches to freedom of the press under Art 10 of the ECHR.

Leaving aside the very serious concerns in principle about introducing exemplary damages, anyone reading what is proposed in the latest draft clauses and comparing them with what the Leveson Report recommended can’t but say that these current clauses are a million miles away from what the Report recommended.

In other words, the courts will strike this down. This is why no big publisher apart from the editor of the Independent is signing up to the new regulator. They know that Hugh Grant, Miliband and Clegg have got greedy and stupid. They had the old Fleet Street on its knees. It was willing to offer concessions, many of which I would have welcomed because I believe that the old Fleet Street needs a tough independent regulator as long as there is no hint of political control.. But like many another greedy and stupid man before them, they have overreached, and may end up with nothing. The first publisher to be hit with exemplary damages will be able to take a human rights case to Strasbourg if necessary. I know from private conversations that lawyers are queuing up to fight what would be one of the great free speech cases in British legal history, and that they are confident that they can win

I implore writers and small publishers to follow suit and not to be frightened by the clowns in Westminster either. You should carry on investigating and arguing and debating. As they used to say in Eastern Europe, you should behave as if you are living in a free country even when you are not. True censors in Britain’s past and in today’s dictatorships are frightening. Their modern British equivalents, Hacked Off, most of the Tories and all of Labour and the Lib Dems – the celebs and the pols – are many things. They are contemptuous of human rights and the procedures of parliament. They are as willing to threaten serious journalism as malicious journalism. They are ignorant of this country’s liberal traditions, and they are caught up in a cultish frenzy. But they are not truly frightening, just brutish and unthinking. They can be beaten.

The post Leveson: Don’t be frightened by the state appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

Their libertarian dreams, as we can see tonight, were an illusion. Those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’ are tougher than they look. They are more than capable of using the new technologies to their own advantage, while censoring what their citizens write online. In the past, I would have directed you to China, Iran or Belarus to see web censorship. But now we can get all that at home.

Politicians and broadcasters are talking tonight as if those hundreds of millions of words had never been written, and we are still living in the pre-Berners-Lee age. They keep saying that the party leaders proposed “press regulation” today, when that was barely the start of it. The establishment – and when all three parties and the extra-parliamentary great and good come together, I think I can describe them as such – has emotional reasons for misleading themselves and the public. They see the excesses and alleged crimes of the tabloids and want to say that the legislation before Parliament will stop them. But there is also a strong element of propaganda. By focusing on the brutishness of the tabloids, they make the public forget about attacks on fundamental principles and perhaps allow themselves to forget as well. For when people behave dreadfully they normally have to delude themselves before they can delude others.

I can see the propaganda’s appeal. Although I believe in freedom of the press in theory, I find the sanctimony, pornography and bullying of much of the press revolting. I don’t think the state has the right to control them, but if the tabloids closed tomorrow I wouldn’t shed a tear.

“Press regulation” as the BBC News was saying at Six and Channel 4 News is saying as I type, does not sound so bad, not even to me, if all it means is stopping the tabloids. The briefest study of the Royal Charter and the Crime and Courts Bill which carried Leveson proposals, however, shows that the first attempt at press licensing since 1695 does not confine itself to the press. In public, the establishment talks about “press regulation”, in the small print, its demands are much broader and very modern: it wants Web regulation.

The regulator will cover ‘relevant publishers’. If they do not pay for its services and submit to its fines and rulings, or set up their own regulatory body, they could face exemplary damages in the courts. It is not just the old (and dying) newspapers, which the state defines as ‘relevant publishers’ but ‘websites containing news-related material’.

As Index on Censorship says, ‘Bloggers could find themselves subject to exemplary damages in court, due to the fact that they were not part of a regulator that was not intended for them in the first place. This mess of legislation has been thrown together with alarming haste: there’s little doubt we’ll repent for a while to come.’

What ‘news-related’ material can get you into trouble? It turns out to be the essential debates of a free society. Dangerous topics to write about include ‘news or information about current affairs’ and ‘opinion about matters relating to the news or current affairs’. Any free country should would want the widest possible discussion of news and allow the largest possible range of opinions about current affairs. As of tonight, Britain does not.

Oh and how could I have forgotten, in homage to the toned and gilded originators of the new authoritarianism, the three main parties are also warning us to be careful about ‘gossip about celebrities, other public figures or other persons in the news’.

Is there an upper limit on readership? Is a website that has a few dozen hits a day exempt? Or do the state’s plans mean that every website that comments on news and current affairs or gossips about Hugh and Jemima must pay to join the quango, accept its punishments, or face exemplary damages in the courts? The government does not know. Alternatively do John and Joan Smith, blogging from their living room about the plight of the poor or foreign affairs, have to set up their own regulatory body. If so, how the hell are they meant to do that? Again, the government does not know. Do not be surprised by their ignorance. When Nick Clegg, Charlie Falconer, Oliver Letwin and Hacked Off, cook up a plan to change fundamental liberties at 3am in Ed Miliband’s office, confusion must follow.

What about Twitter feeds? My editor at the Observer, John Mulholland pulled me up short last year when he pointed out that an approving review Richard Dawkins had written on his website on my last book –on censorship, aptly – had been tweeted hundreds of times after Dawkins put a link on Twitter. ‘That’s done you more good and been read by more people than any review in the mainstream press,’ he said. He was right. Dawkins has 645,000 followers. That’s more followers than the Independent has readers. Should his Twitter feed be regulated? Should he face exemplary damages if he tells the state to piss off, as I hope he would? Or should there be some kind of Twitter limit? If you tweet about the news and celebrities and only have 100 followers will you be free to speak your mind within the laws of the land? But if you get 500, 1,000, 10,000 followers should the new rules apply?

Paul Waugh of Politics Home asked Downing Street whether the new quango would cover Twitter. It didn’t know. The Crime and Courts Bill says that people who publish about their hobby, trade, business or industry and the authors of online academic journals will be exempt. The government is, of course, exempting itself and all other ‘public bodies’ as well, for it would never do for the state to abide by the rules its citizen must follow. Everyone else must submit, as far as we can tell.

The anarchist in me is looking forward to sheer bloody mess this half-baked, illiberal, ill-conceived censorship will bring. It will be a perverse delight to see the regulator overwhelmed and the politicians, who applauded themselves so loudly today, mocked tomorrow. But this isn’t funny because basic human rights are at stake. I am already getting bloggers contacting me, and asking if they need to tone down what they write or sign up to the quango. If politicians from all parties – and let us not forget that just as in Murder in the Orient Express they are all guilty – do not instead tone down this sweeping legislation a great chill will descend on the free republic of online writing, which until now has been a liberating and democratic force in modern British life.

The chilling effect is the most sinister and pervasive form of censorship, and something no robust, plain-speaking democracy should tolerate.
As I say in You Can’t Read This Book , which Dawkins was so kind about.

‘You can be a famous poisoner or a successful poisoner,’ runs
the old joke, ‘but you can’t be both.’ The same applies to censors.
Ninety-nine per cent of successful censorship is hidden from
view. Even when brave men and women speak out, the chilling
effect of the punishments their opponents inflict on them
silences others. Those who might have added weight to their
arguments and built a campaign for change look at the political
or religious violence, or at the threat of dismissal from work, or
at the penalties overbearing judges impose, and walk away.

Update 10.20 pm Downing Street has now told the Guardian that “personal blogs” like the Guido Fawkes political website would not be covered, but news-related websites like Huffington Post UK would.” Still no word on Twitter, I see, but personal political blogs like Guido Fawkes and many another right wing and left wing blog, are hard hitting. They are news blogs, and in the case of Guido Fawkes and some of his left-wing competitors they are large-scale news providers. The distinction makes no sense. More to the point, where is it written into legislation? It’s not in the amended Crime and Courts Bill, while the Charter just says the Leveson “Inquiry recommended that for an effective system of self regulation to be established, all those parts of the press which are significant news publishers should become members of an independent regulatory body”. It does not say what the government defines as a significant news publisher.

This is all going to end up in the courts. The judges will have to clean up Parliament’s mess. I should warn liberal readers that the English judiciary’s record on freedom of speech is dire.

Update 8.30am Tuesday 19 March As you were. Downing Street has dropped last night’s line about exemptions for “personal blogs” – whatever they may be – and has returned to the old line that it doesn’t have a clue what is going on. Be kind, it’s only the government, why should it?

The post It’s not a press regulator, it’s a web regulator. appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

The reader has to stare hard at her words to realise that Pryce was Oakeshott’s source, and that Oakeshott and her editor John Witherow had handed her over to the police. The eight-month prison sentence Mr Justice Sweeney gave Pryce today followed. Of course it did. Journalists once knew that if you betrayed a source they could end up on the dole, or in prison or, in the most severe circumstances, dead.

Writing in the Spectator last month, I explained:

‘The requirement to protect your sources was the one moral principle journalists had. Self-interest played its part — confidential sources will not speak to reporters if they suspect they will reveal their identities to the police or their employers. But a reporter’s honour mattered as much. You had made a deal with a source. You had given your promise and shaken hands. Your source could lose his or her job or liberty if you broke your word. You had to keep it.’

That was then. To read Oakeshott’s bluster today you would think that Pryce had stabbed her in the back rather than the other way round. Oakeshott describes how Pryce had had the impertinence to talk to the Mail on Sunday as well as the Sunday Times. ‘She had double-crossed me,’ wails the poor victimised thing. ‘While I was busy protecting her identity, she had been busy revealing all to a rival newspaper…This was an extraordinary betrayal and deeply underhand after everything we had been through together. Our relationship had been based on trust. I had kept my side of the bargain; she had broken hers.’

Oakeshott does not understand that the moral obligations between a journalist and his or her sources flow in one direction only. They are putting their life and liberty in your hands not vice versa. They are free to deny the truth of the stories you print, if that what it takes to keep them in a job or out of prison. They can speak to other journalists; they can do whatever they want. You are in their debt. They are not in yours.

In an couple of paragraphs, which are if anything even more embarrassing, Oakeshott moves on to deal with the tricky question of why the Sunday Times delivered Pryce to the cops. We put up ‘a vigorous fight’ she assures her readers. ‘But eventually we were forced by a judge to give up the correspondence, along with copies of our written agreement with Vicky.’

This is not how the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, described it. In a statement issued on October 3 last year, he said that the CPS had advised the police that they needed the confidential information from Pryce in Oakeshott’s possession if they were to send Pryce and Chris Huhne to the dock. In October 2011, the authorities secured a court order for the ‘newspaper to produce material to the police’. The Sunday Times appealed, as it should have done. But, Starmer continued, Witherow and Oakeshott’s resolution soon faded. They did not fight to protect their source ‘but subsequently consented to producing the material in question just before the appeal was due to be heard, on 20 January this year’.

The emails they handed over were crucial, Starmer implied. They ensured there was ‘sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against Mr Huhne and Ms Pryce for perverting the course of justice’.

Journalists once went to prison rather than reveal a source. Now they can’t even go to an appeal court. Instead, Oakeshott’s source is in jail. I asked friends of Pryce to ask her on my behalf if the Sunday Times had sought her permission before it gave detectives what they needed to turn her into ‘a broken woman’.

‘No, it did not,’ came the reply.

My Guardian colleague Marina Hyde said that the lesson of the Sunday Times’ treatment of Pryce was that no one should talk to journalists. Perhaps that is going too far; at least I hope it is. It is not going too far, however, to say that no one in their right mind should talk to Isabel Oakeshott on grounds of taste as much as anything else.

The post The Sunday Times jails its source appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

Instead of involving detectives and judges, the party’s disciplinary committee set itself up as a kangaroo court, and “tried” the man it would identify only as “Comrade Delta”. The minutes show the paranoia with great clarity. One of the seven “judges” said that the SWP had ‘no faith in the bourgeois court system to deliver justice’.

But then nor could its “proletarian” disciplinary committee. The “judges” had no independent evidence – how could they when they were a bunch of Trots rather than a competent court? They were not impartial. They knew the “accused”. They valued the “leading role” he had played in the party. And they acquitted him.

I wrote in the Observer

That’s the way it is on the far left. The hierarchical party always has the potential to become a rapist’s playground. Consider the predator’s opportunities. The rank and file has to obey the party line without question. The leaders of political cults, like their religious counterparts, increase their power by fostering paranoia. Members can trust no one outside the party, especially the police and judiciary. The SWP says that Comrade Delta’s alleged victim was free to go to the police and chose not to, but party dogma insists that justice is impossible in bourgeois courts. Only when it is too late do women learn that the alternative disciplinary system of Marxist-Leninists exists to control them and let the leaders do as they please. The parallels with the Catholic church are too obvious for me to labour.

My colleagues are working on more stories of rape on the far left. One as yet unreported case comes from a woman who wrote to me after my Observer piece {details redacted}

I wanted to tell you that I was in the SWP a few years ago, and was physically and sexually abused. Following the rape, I left the party, but was encouraged to take the complaint to the disputes committee to make sure he didn’t do it to other women in the party. The disputes committee meeting lasted 5 hours. I was asked if I had been drinking. They said that if {the alleged assailant} and I had recently broken up my case would be invalid. They constantly asked me if I was still attracted to him, and referred to instances of him hitting me as ‘shaking’. They also constantly asked if I was sure I had not consented to sex.

The disputes committee also told me that if I talked to the media or anyone else that I was in trouble. {The man} was allowed to bring two character witnesses who claimed I was a convincing slut, and he had my statement for a month before the meeting, but I had no idea what he would say in his
statement.”

Notice the tenor of the questioning. Are you a vengeful ex-girlfriend? Are you a drunk? Are you still besotted with him? Are you sure what he did to you was really so bad? You wanted it really didn’t you? Naturally, after this performance, the SWP let its comrade off with a few years suspension from the party, and hushed up the scandal.

The fault with the far left’s rape tribunals is not just that they run show trials – they are Marxist Leninists, after all, and show trials are what they do – but that they allow politicians to usurp the role of the police and courts.

The same criticisms apply to the Liberal Democrats. Lord Rennard maintains his innocence. Fair enough. But if the Liberal Democrats have evidence that a crime has been committed, they must take it to the police. Internal party committees are not a substitute for competent detectives and competent courts. The shameless behaviour of Lib Dem spin-doctors is already suggesting that the supposedly “independent” investigators face a potential conflict of interest.

For you do not only find paranoia on the far left. Even though Channel 4 News, which houses the most left wing broadcasters in TV journalism, broke the scandal, the party line as delivered to both the BBC and the Guardian is that the “Tory press” is using the allegations to get Clegg or to undermine the Leveson report or to further some other plot or smear.

In other words, “we are the real victims here” – the cry of all the over-privileged, self-pitying baby-men of our time. You can already see the argument building that, if the Liberal Democrat investigators uphold the women’s claims, they will be doing the Daily Mail‘s bidding, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the faithful.

In these paranoid circumstances, you can no more guarantee that the Liberal Democrats will put the interests of justice before the interests of the party than you can expect the Socialist Workers Party to provide an alternative to a court of law. Conspiracy theory, manifesting itself as a paranoid fear of a “bourgeois state” or “Tory press”, prevents an honest evaluation of the facts.

I have one further point, which I accept it is difficult for a man to make. If women in either the Liberal Democrats or the Socialist Workers Party feel that the hierarchy is brushing their grievances aside for the sake of political convenience they should not just go to the police. They should also think of going to a TV studio and making a fuss. I know, I know, easy to say and hard to do. But there is nothing the Comrade Deltas and Comrade Cleggs fear more than a woman speaking to camera, live and on air.

The post Sexual abuse: Don’t toe the party line appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

The Putin regime – that mixture of autocracy and gangsterism – is desperate to discredit the late Mr Magnitsky and his employer, Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital. If you don’t know the story, I’ll explain why.

Browder exposed corruption in Russian companies. The Russian authorities did not approve. Interior Ministry police raided Hermitage’s offices after Browder and most of his employees had fled the country.

Magnitsky stayed and claimed that the Interior Ministry police had stolen the seals to its Russian subsidiaries and passed them to a crime gang. The gang re-registered the companies and claimed to be Hermitage’s rightful owners. They told the Russian authorities they owed Hermitage a tax rebate. Within a day, corrupt officials handed over £143m of public money.

Magnitsky complained to the Russian equivalent of the FBI. Russia being the way it is, the Interior Ministry arrested him for speaking out. The state held him for a year in wretched prisons. In June 2009, Magnitsky developed pancreatitis and cholecystitis. The prison authorities denied him treatment. They probably tortured him, too. When civilian doctors finally came to see him on the day of his death, the guards would not let them into his cell for an hour. The doctors found his body lying in a pool of urine. He died rather than retract his testimony.

Needless to add his murder does not concern the Russian authorities. Rather Bill Browder’s campaign for justice for his dead friend has enraged and frightened them. Browder has convinced the US and EU countries to pass “Magnitsky laws” that freeze the foreign assets of those involved in Russia’s biggest tax fraud.
Browder is hitting the Russian elite where it hurts. He is depriving bureaucrats, criminals and politicians (the boundaries are porous) of the ability to enjoy their loot in the boutiques and spa resorts of the West.

Russia is desperate to discredit the campaign, so the state has put Browder on trial in absentia and placed the ghost of Magnitsky beside him in the dock. It charges them with committing the very fraud they exposed.

Magnitsky will not be able to understand the proceedings or speak in his defence, for reasons which should be obvious. As a spokesman for Hermitage said, the trial is a desecration. ‘The only place where a notice to Sergei Magnitsky can be delivered is to his grave at the Preobrazhenskoye cemetery, and any written confirmation would need to be obtained from his corpse. There is a special place in hell for the people organizing this.’ Magnitsky’s mother’s has begged Russian lawyers not to appear, but the court has found lawyers willing to participate in a show trial of a murdered member of their own profession in return for money and a step up the career ladder.

I would reach for the obvious comparison with Stalin and Vyshinsky. But to be fair to the men who presided over some of the greatest crimes in human history, they never prosecuted cadavers.

Russian lawyers and judges seem uniquely disgraceful but let us not rush to judgement just yet.

Part 2 “English justice”

Magnitsky’s ghost will also be on trial at the High Court in London. In his testimony, he claimed that Major Pavel Karpov of the Russian Interior Ministry (pictured) was one of the officers involved in the con.

Karpov has now issued a writ for libel against Browder and Hermitage for repeating the allegation. He has chosen his destination well. London, is the ‘town called sue’, the world’s favourite stopover for libel tourists with a still unreformed libel law that places heavy burdens on the defence. If an English libel judge finds in his favour, Russia could use the ruling alongside the trial of the corpse to discredit the global campaign against its kleptocrats.

For a retired policeman, who earned £300 a month when he was working as a cop, Karpov can afford lavish legal representation. He has hired Olswang, a corporate law firm, and Andrew Caldecott a pricey QC. For a while, he also paid for the services of PHA, Phil Hall’s PR company. (Hall has since dropped Karpov, but won’t say why.)

I should declare an interest and say that his solicitor is Geraldine Proudler, who is on the board of the Scott Trust, which is meant to protect my liberal journalistic values and the liberal values of all my colleagues at the Guardian and Observer. (Values that the Russian oligarchy uses every means to destroy, up to and including the murder of journalists.)

How can Karpov afford these expensive “professionals” if he is the honest and unfairly maligned police officer he claims to be?

According to the defence Bill Browdler filed at the High Court, the services of London’s well-groomed lawyers are not all Mr Karpov can afford.

“Until recently the Claimant [Karpov] was registered as living at Balaklavsky Prospect with his grandmother and his mother in a modest apartment of 54
square metres
“In spite of the relatively modest level of salary paid to the Claimant at all material times under the terms of his employment by the Ministry of the Interior, he has acquired very substantial assets and enjoyed an upmarket lifestyle which it would be impossible for him to have earned
legitimately through his official position.
“Moreover, the Claimant’s mother had.. [a] pension [of] less than $3,200 per annum. Notwithstanding this, she also acquired very substantial assets in her name which it is to be inferred were the product of the Claimant’s 
illicit activities”

The defence list the land Karpov and his mother have bought, the “new build luxury apartment in the prestigious Shuvalovsky development,” the Mercedes Benz (cost $72,601), the 9 other vehicles, the 47 trips to 17 different countries he has enjoyed, and his visits to ‘Moscow’s finest restaurants and nightclubs’.

Despite all of his conspicuous consumption, the defence continues, Karpov still has the money left over to finance these ‘libel proceedings, and has
 provided security for costs in the sum at this stage of £100,000.’

Proudler assured me that Karpov was a victim of smears. Although she would not reveal the source of his wealth, she said it was not from corruption.

She had better be right. Because if she is not it will mean that England’s legal profession will have sunk lower than even I imagined possible.

The post Arraigning a corpse appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

The first piece of evidence was Johann Hari – whose exposure caused the greatest scandal my small world of “broadsheet” journalism had seen in years. Hari did not confine himself to making up quotes and facts to enhance his career. Night after night, he went on Wikipedia and defamed his many enemies under a variety of pseudonyms – I should declare an interest and state that I am proud to say that I was one of them. It wasn’t enough for Hari to con his way up the greasy pole. He had to drag down real and imagined rivals as well.

My case was supported by the brazen boasting of Stephen Leather at last year’s Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. Leather told the audience

As soon as my book is out I’m on Facebook and Twitter several times a day talking about it. I’ll go on to several forums, the well-known forums, and post there under my name and under various other names and various other characters. You build up this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself”

I am the last person who could damn writers for trying to plug their work. After a close examination of my own attempts to get you to buy You Can’t Read This Book, I admitted that there were working girls at King’s Cross with more dignity than an author with a book to sell. But using fake identities is a premeditated attempt to deceive readers. Leather was posing as an impartial observer or impressed customer to dupe the reading public.

‘Leather was not ashamed,’ I noted. ‘He crowed like a prize cock and expected his fellow crime writers to applaud his cunning.’

So far, Leather looked like an ordinary huckster in the style of Jayson Blair, the plagiarist and fantasist, who conned the New York Times. He was trying to make a quick buck, and he was not too choosy about how he did it. His unselfconscious bragging aside, the most bizarre aspect of the affair appeared to be that Leather was not a desperate unknown struggling to attract attention. He was the second bestselling British author on Kindle worldwide in 2011 and had no need to play low tricks.

But, as so often with British frauds, the story did not end there. I talked to the remarkable Jeremy Duns, a British thriller writer who acts as a literary detective in his spare time. No one is better at scouring the Web to find evidence of plagiarism. Duns told me that he had discovered that in true Hari style, Leather blackened the names of those who crossed him. After checking his evidence and contacting everyone concerned for a comment, I wrote up Duns’ findings

When he wanted to fake an identity, Leather picked on Steve Roach, a minor writer who had made disobliging remarks about one of his books. Leather created Twitter “sockpuppet” accounts in the names of @Writerroach and @TheSteveRoach. Roach described on an Amazon forum how one account had “16,000 followers all reading ‘my’ tweets about how much ‘I’ loved SL’s books”. He was nervous. He told Duns in a taped conversation that Leather was “very powerful” and not a man to be crossed. Roach emailed Leather and begged to be left alone. Pleased that his cyber bullying campaign had worked, Leather graciously gave Roach control of the @Writerroach account he had created, to Roach’s “great relief”.

After the Observer published, Leather went to the Press Complaints Commission to say that I had no right to call him a conman. He could hardly maintain that he had not set up “sock puppet” accounts to plug his books – such is his cynicism and the cynicism of the publishing culture he moves in, he had admitted as much in Harrogate. So he went for the accusations about Steve Roach. He attached a letter from Roach denying that Leather had cyber-bullied him, and the long, long process of adjudicating a contested article began.

Jeremy Duns and I were able to show from taped interviews, screen grabs and caches how Leather operated. You can read the full details here, but in short Roach was an unknown writer and Leather was doing everything he could to keep him that way. He wrote damning reviews of Roach’s books online. Meanwhile, “Roach’s” supposed Twitter accounts were promoting Leather’s work.

At one point Roach wrote a book about Leather. When someone reviewed it on Amazon saying it was a stupid book that gave a one-sided view of a pathetic argument, Roach replied, on January 12, 2012.

‘It is indeed a stupid book, but a necessary one. This ‘pathetic’ argument is actually an attempt by one of the UK’s top authors to wreck my own writing career.’ Roach went on to say that he wrote the book as a ‘last ditch attempt to get SL off my back’, and that if Leather agreed to leave him alone he would remove the book from Amazon.

As his faintly pathetic outburst suggested, the worn down Roach was ready to beg for Leather’s forgiveness. He told him that he had ‘outsmarted him at every level.’ Leather accepted his apology, and Roach was relieved and grateful, as I had said he was in the original piece. The generous Mr Leather then handed Roach control of the Twitter account he had established in Roach’s name. What a gentleman he is to be sure.

Roach was hardly alone. Steve Mosby, a far superior writer, and one we all should read if this review is a reliable guide, upset Leather after the Harrogate book fair. Needless to add attacks on real and fake Twitter accounts Jeremy Duns could show Leather controlled started.

It wasn’t too long before it became more personal. Comments about my book sales, about me being ugly, and so on. I don’t really mind the personal stuff. I view all of it as a bit pathetic. But I suppose the worst of it right now is the comments about my wife. Every few days, Leather uses one of his accounts to tweet “Tick tock” over and over, which is a reference to an earlier message he sent me about whether my wife was “improving with age”. Again, it’s pathetic. But it’s also misogynistic, and more than a little creepy.

Most of the time, it was obvious Leather was behind them, especially after he owned up to the fake Twitter accounts. For the most part, I found it laughable. I understand that, and have some sympathy with Roach, but I really don’t feel bullied. I think he wants people to feel bullied, but, for the most part, I feel like a little kid is ringing my doorbell and running away. It’s irritating, but little more than that.

So there you have it, one of Britain’s leading thriller authors behaving like the type of nasty boy who pulls the wings off flies.

As I said at the start, I experienced Hari personally and saw how the Independent covered up for him. When I phoned Leather’s publishers last year, they would not answer questions. Instead, they set up another of their authors to be their spokeswoman. The poor woman knew nothing of the facts of the case. She would have been severely embarrassed if I had quoted her, and then presented evidence that showed her to be naïve at best and a corporate stooge at worst. As I admired her writing, I left her out of it. So yes, I believe there is something particularly rotten and cynical in British culture, and I stand by that view.

In fairness, I should add, however, that Steve Mosby has a less complicated explanation.

‘I think it’s fairly simple: Leather’s a bully. We’ve all met them; that’s all he is. He wants to behave how he likes, and he doesn’t enjoy it when people tell him that he shouldn’t. When people do, he gets affronted and attempts to shut them up – and then, when he can’t, he engages in childishly insulting behaviour to maintain some inner sense of superiority. It’s a male ego thing – he just doesn’t like to be challenged.’

PS For the record here is the Press Complaints Commission adjudication, which I was given last week. It ruled that

The complainant said the article inaccurately alleged that he had engaged in a “cyber bullying campaign” against Mr Steve Roach, which caused Mr Roach to be “nervous”. The complainant provided a copy of a letter he had received from Mr Roach in which he said that his “spat” with the complainant was “no big deal”; that “at no point did Leather use the Amazon review system to blast my books”; that the columnist was “wrong to say that he [the complainant] attacked me under the cloak of anonymity”; and that he did not consider the complainant a “cyber-bully”. The newspaper in correspondence provided evidence from an Amazon thread which suggested that Mr Roach felt the complainant was bullying him at the time. Mr Roach said, “Actually, Mr Leather, … you changed your review from 1 star. You also deleted reviews of books that you figured out were unavailable, but left 1 star ratings of books that you yourself have said you would never read and I don’t believe you have read. You also called me a cockroach on your blog. You also ignored numerous attempts to end the blog”. The newspaper said Mr Roach even wrote a book about the complainant’s attempts to “wreck” his writing career, describing the book as a “last ditch attempt to get SL [the complainant] off my back”. With this in mind, the Commission did not consider that readers would have been significantly misled by the columnist’s assertion that the complainant had engaged in a “cyber bullying campaign”, or that he had caused Mr Roach to be “nervous”. It could not establish a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) in relation to this point.

With respect to the allegation that the complainant attacked “rivals” from “behind a cloak of anonymity”, the Commission noted that the complainant did not appear to dispute the quotation attributed to him in the article in which he said that he posted on forums “under my name and under various other names and various other characters”. The newspaper had provided screengrabs of Twitter accounts which the complainant subsequently revealed to belong to him in which he described the writers Steve Mosby and Luca Veste as being “two sad men with too much time on their hands”. In view of this evidence, the Commission considered that the columnist was entitled to report that he had made comments from behind a “cloak of anonymity”. There was no breach of Clause 1.

The complainant did not consider that anything in the newspaper’s email substantiated the claims made by the columnist that he was a “conman” and a “hustler”. The Commission noted that the complainant did not appear to dispute that he had gone on to “several forums… and post[ed] there under [his] name and various other characters”. In view of this, the Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware of the context in which the words were used, and would also recognise that these terms represented the columnist’s own views of the complainant’s conduct. It could not establish a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code.

As far as I understand it the PPC adjudication means that, even in Britain, even after the all the work of Lord Justice Leveson and Hacked Off, I can still call a conman and a huckster a conman and huckster.

Much obliged I’m sure.

The post The Leather Case appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

British Asian feminists and their supporters had gathered to launch the Centre for Secular Space an organisation whose work I would say is close to essential. It is not fashionable, however, because its focus is the collusion between the Anglo-American left and the Islamist right, which has betrayed so many Muslims and ex-Muslims, most notably Muslim and ex-Muslim women. Gita Sahgal, Nehru’s great niece, became the movement’s figurehead and eloquent spokeswoman when the once respectable and now contemptible Amnesty International fired her for protesting about its promotion of supporters of the Taliban. She and her allies are now trying to stir Britain’s sleeping conscience.

The failure of Britain’s liberal establishment and white left to combat reactionary religion, or even call it by its real name, stuns them. I can say from experience that if I talk about the ‘American Christian right’ or the ‘Israeli right’ no one will blink. Nor should they, I am using specific terms whose meanings are clear. When I use equally precise language talk about the ‘Muslim right’, one of the great forces of reaction in the world today, my comrades either go blank, because I am using language they cannot understand, or accuse me of ‘racism’, lack of ‘empathy’, inappropriate ‘language’ or some other gross offence against modern etiquette.

Meredith Tax, a battle hardened campaigner, has had the same experience

‘Nobody on the left ever objected when I criticized Christian or Jewish fundamentalism. But when I did defence work for censored Muslim feminists, people would look at me sideways, as if to say, who are you to talk about this? This tendency has become much more marked since 9/11 and the “war on terror.” Today on the left and in some academic circles, people responding to attacks on Muslim feminists in other countries are likely to be accused of reinforcing the “victim-savage-saviour” framework or preparing for the next US invasion. This puts anyone working with actual women’s human rights defenders in places like North Africa or Pakistan in an impossible situation.’

Other speakers were from Southall Black Sisters, Bengali secular campaigns against Tower Hamlets’ Islamist establishment and Iranian resistance groups – classic left wing figures, in other words. Yet they are ignored or in the case of Sahgal fired for speaking out.

All emphasized how many in the British state and British left were racists hiding behind liberal masks. On the left, the racism came in the constant postponement of campaigns to improve women’s lives whether they are immigrants or in the poor world. Their suffering must always be subordinated to the struggle against ‘American imperialism’. This would be bad enough if we did not see from the far Left way into the liberal mainstream supposed progressives allying with clerical reactionaries and clerical fascists. They ignore the victims of theocracy and accept their oppression.

You might think that Sahgal and her comrades would be inundated with offers of support. At one level they are. Politicians, journalists and honourable people from all backgrounds want to hear the arguments they are making. But they are desperately short of funds. The institutions of liberalism, which ought to be their friends and donors, have been taken over by anti-liberal men and women. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch look with horror on those who speak out about murder, mutilation and oppression if the murderers, mutilators and oppressors do not fit into their script. The Guardian, New Statesman and BBC turn away with embarrassed coughs. The police want to keep the natives of the East End quiet by cooperating with Islamic Forum Europe. Although Labour ministers, particularly Labour women ministers, tried to speak out against the double standards during the last government, the policy of the Labour establishment has been to do nothing to upset the ethnic block vote. The Liberal Democrats meanwhile are as reliably anti-liberal on this issue as on so many others. It tells you all you need to know about the debased state of liberal-left politics that Sahgal and Tax are more likely to get a fair hearing from Cameron than Miliband or Clegg.

To give you an example of how deep the rot has penetrated, take the behaviour of Human Rights Watch. Its executive director Kenneth Roth urged Western governments to support the Muslim Brotherhood governments in the Middle East. (Roth cannot, you see, confine himself to reporting abuses of human rights without fear or favour. He is too grand for that now, and issues orotund statements on foreign policy as if he were Henry Kissinger, a cynical old brute he is starting to resemble.)

Sahgal replied:

You fail to call for the most basic guarantee of rights—the separation of religion from the state. Salafi mobs have caned women in Tunisian cafes and Egyptian shops; attacked churches in Egypt; taken over whole villages in Tunisia and shut down Manouba University for two months in an effort to exert social pressure on veiling. And while “moderate Islamist” leaders say they will protect the rights of women (if not gays), they have done very little to bring these mobs under control. You, however, are so unconcerned with the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities that you mention them only once, as follows: “Many Islamic parties have indeed embraced disturbing positions that would subjugate the rights of women and restrict religious, personal, and political freedoms. But so have many of the autocratic regimes that the West props up.” Are we really going to set the bar that low? This is the voice of an apologist, not a senior human rights advocate.’

I hope you could hear a lot more in that vein. The trouble is that because the Centre for Secular Space argues against our shifty consensus it has no money. They need everything from computers to wages for secretaries. If you can help at all, even by giving them an old laptop, please contact them via the link here

The post Lone voices against Terror appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

“Fine. If you don’t like paying the taxes the rest of us have to pay, there’s a big road heading out of London called the M4. Take it, and hang a right at the sign marked Heathrow.”

He understands that the notion of the state granting tax exemptions to fortunate classes ought to have died when the French revolutionaries abolished the privileges of the noble and clerical estates in 1789. So does Jesse Norman, whose conservative assault on crony capitalism you can read here, and the other intelligent Conservative I write about in my Observer column this week. So, apparently, does David Cameron.

Yet I remain astonished by the number of conservatives who defend the right of the plutocracy to escape the taxes the little people must pay. Go to this list of press releases from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and you will notice a startling omission. The most hypocritical campaign group in Britain has issued barely a word of protest about corporate and plutocratic avoidance. It complains about government waste, but keeps silent about the burdens the super-rich place on the people it so presumptuously claims to represent.

In the past, right-wingers argued for lower taxes and a smaller state and left-wingers argued for higher taxes and a bigger state. Both agreed, however, that you had to pay what taxes the state set. If you did not like them, you could campaign for a change in government policy or a change of government.

Now libetarianism, once an interesting anti-authoritarian philosophy, has degenerated into servile money worship, and taken large numbers of right-wing thinkers down with it. Conservative writers cannot see anything wrong with plutocrats gaining an unfair advantage, and do not think about how powerful interests that can demand state bailouts distort markets.

Norman does, and has little time for the conventional right-wing argument that if tax avoidance is legal then no one should complain. We are not talking about a couple moving assets to keep their tax bill down, but vast corporate structures hiding money in piratical tax havens. When the representative of Google spoke to the Commons Public Accounts Committee last year, he explained that his firm paid next to no tax in Britain because its brand was invented in America and its engineers were based in California. He sounded reasonableness personified until MPs pointed out that Google ran its profits through Bermuda, which is neither the birthplace of its brand nor a home to its engineers.

A good rule of thumb in all circumstances is to ask whether you can defend your actions in public. No person or organisation lives apart from society, and if you cannot explain yourself to your neighbours or fellow countrymen and women you are finished. The tabloids are damned because they could not point to one of the stories they obtained by hacking and say, ‘we may have been in technical breach of the law, but because we broke it to find evidence of corruption and the misuse of power, you should thank us.’ The corporations are damned because, even though they were within the law, they avoided taxes with such effort and on such a scale they hurt the society that houses and protects them.

As my City friend would have predicted, now that even David Cameron is condemning tax avoidance, corporations are threatening to leave in a huff. The Telegraph reports that Kris Engskov, Starbuck’s UK managing director, has demanded talks after the Prime Minister said tax-avoiding companies had to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’.

Sources close to the business said that plans announced last year to invest £100 million in new UK branches could be put on hold, meaning fewer jobs will be created.

Mr Engskov has not asked himself why the British should care if Starbucks cuts back on investment or leaves altogether. It has paid £8.5 million in corporation tax, despite total sales of £3 billion. The Public Accounts Committee said Starbucks UK had achieved this remarkable feat by shuffling profits around the world. It is now offering to donate £20 million as a sort of goodwill gesture. (Can we all do that, incidentally? Not pay tax for years then make a charitable donation.) Even if it does, the tax will represent a tiny portion of turnover. From the point of view of the Exchequer, it is a matter of supreme indifference whether Starbucks stays or goes.

You may worry about the jobs of Starbucks low-paid workers. I did until I looked at Marketing Week’s survey of the coffee market, which pointed out that there are many other chains and thousands of independent coffee shops. If Starbucks were to go, they would move into the gaps in the market, and may pay tax too.

There is no reason why Mr Cameron should not listen politely to what Mr Engskov has to say, then point him westwards, and tell him to keep going until he reaches Heathrow.

The post Last call for Starbucks. Your flight is about to depart appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

The tailor isn’t impressed. He cannot marry off his middle daughter until he has married off her older sister, he says. He does not want his beloved girl to move far from him, and everyone knows the Rothschilds live in Paris and London. In any case, he is not sure about this Rothschild fellow: he has heard he is irreligious and a drunk.

The matchmaker answers all the objections with great patience until, eventually, the tailor relents.

‘Excellent,’ says the matchmaker, ‘now all I have to do is talk to the Rothschilds.’*

David Cameron came to power determined to keep quiet about the European Union. William Hague warned him that it was a bomb that could explode in his face and destroy his government. But the Conservative Party would not listen. It told Cameron he had the power to tear up treaties and renegotiate Britain’s obligations. It answered every objection the prime minister could think of until – at last – Cameron relented and agreed to a policy he once thought impossible.

‘Excellent,’ said the Tories, ‘now all you have to do is talk to the EU.’

*As told in Masha’s Gessen’s chilling portrait of Putin The Man Without a Face.

The post David Cameron marries a Rothschild appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

The Conservatives are nowhere now. As late as 1992, Hornsey and Wood Green was a Tory seat. This year they closed their local office and gave up, as they have given up in so many British cities. I don’t want to go on about Conservative failings in the Spectator of all places, but if you people got out more you would realise that few care about EU, gay marriage and those other bugbears, which make you seem as strange as Scientologists or 9/11 truthers. If you mentioned the extortionate cost of finding a home, or jobs, or pensions, you might begin to seem like creatures from the same species as the rest of us.

Which is not to say that Labour have it easy. Barbara Roche took Hornsey and Wood Green in 1992. Just before the Second Iraq War of 2003, her Constituency Labour Party ordered her to vote to against sending British troops to overthrow Saddam. In good Burkean fashion, Roche insisted that she was a representative, not a delegate, and voted for war. It was a magnificent declaration of independence. Unfortunately for her, local Labour members declared their independence too, and resigned en masse. She had no one to campaign for her, and her defeat was inevitable.

The Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone took the seat in 2005 on an anti-war ticket, and won again in 2010 with a majority of 6875.

I cannot tell you how much I dislike this stupid, two-faced and dangerous politician. People say there are no good causes left worth fighting for. Not true in my humble opinion. Removing Lynne Featherstone from office is as noble a cause as you could hope to find.

I must declare an interest. Featherstone intervened during the recent hullabaloo about the “transphobic” polemic by Julie Burchill my newspaper the Observer ran a few weeks ago. Featherstone demanded that we should fire Burchill and fire the editor as well. I have worked through the worst days of Bernard Ingham and Alastair Campbell’s manipulation of the media, but I have never before heard a minister in a democracy call for writers and editors to be fired for publishing an opinion, however offensive and controversial it may be. That the minister in question calls herself a “liberal” means that Featherstone is not just a menace but a hypocrite too.

And a fool. Featherstone will have lodged herself in the minds of many readers with her statement when she was equalities minister in 2010 that Christina Hendricks was ‘a fabulous role model’ for young women – an announcement which produced the unimprovable headline in the Daily Mash, ‘Women Should Be Hot, Slutty Secretaries With Massive Boobs, Says Equalities Minister’. Beyond her wittering, lies the grim condition of women living under the coalition she serves, which stands as a rebuke to all her pretensions.

Labour should retake the seat in 2015. Indeed, Labour has to retake the seat if it is to have any hope of forming a government. Pundits who talk about Miliband presiding over a ‘united left’ overestimate Labour’s strength. In most Liberal Democrat seats in the shires, if left wingers vote Labour because they can no longer support the party of Clegg to keep the Tory out, the Conservatives will come through the middle and win. If you look at Labour’s list of battleground seats, Hornsey and Wood Green is one of the few Lib Dem seats the party hopes to capture.

Yet when I went to the pub with the Labour activists, they were in despair. They did not have a candidate in place, and probably would not get one until the summer. They had no one to introduce to the voters: no one even to call the local papers and argue the Labour case.

‘What?’ I said ‘Why ever not?’

My hosts explained that bureaucratic manoeuvrings and political correctness at Labour’s regional office had paralysed the local party. It was telling them to have an all-woman shortlist, which was taking forever to arrange. I suggested they called Tom Watson or another national organiser. My companions shrugged. No one cared about them, they implied.

Parties that are steaming to power do not behave like this. They cover every angle, think of every eventuality, and deal with every objection a nervous voter may raise. In short, they have a restlessness and an urgency about them that Labour at the moment lacks, and not only in North London’s leafy suburbs.

The post Can’t we even throw out Lynne Featherstone? appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

As I acknowledge right away, hard evidence is hard to find. Football’s rules change: what was a manly tackle in the 1960s is a foul today. Yesterday’s ‘Spanish practice’ in the workplace becomes today’s criminal offence. The danger of false nostalgia is great. But you should not let the difficulties of comparing the present with the past unnerve you, and I hope I provide evidence that backs up our gut belief that standards have fallen.

If anyone doubts my conclusion, listen to yesterday’s 606 from BBC Radio 5 Live. It wasn’t available when my piece went to press, but how I wish it had been.

Fans phone 606 to give their views on the games they have seen that day. Robbie Savage, a retired footballer, remembered mainly for his foul play, and Mark ‘Chappers’ Chapman, one of those cheery, chirpy 5 Live presenters who could turn a pacifist to mass murder, butt in.

‘Guy from Lingfield’ called (21 minutes in) to protest about Savage. A Nottingham Forest player had made a mistake, and allowed a Derby County striker through to create a goal. Savage had said earlier that the Forest player should have brought the County forward down to stop the goal and ‘make up for his mistake’.

Guy, who is clearly some kind of living fossil, said the Forest player should have tried to win back the ball back by fair means or trusted his teammates to defend the goal. Professional fouls weren’t acceptable.

The ridicule poured on this naïve fool is a wonder to listen to.

Savage explained how a professional sportsman thinks. He would know that he was not going to get a red card because he wouldn’t be fouling the last man. So he should, ‘bring the guy down, commit a professional foul, take a yellow card for the team. If he does that, Derby don’t score and Nottingham Forest win the game. Simple as that.’

Guy from Lingfield made an even bigger fool of himself by refusing to agree with the professional. ‘No, no, I don’t think that’s a good attitude…’

‘I do,’ said Savage.

‘…in general for schoolchildren or other footballers, really, or for your own teammates.’

With a voice full of sneering incredulity, Savage said that his teammates would have applauded the foul (as I am sure they would). ‘It’s not cheating,’ he insisted.

‘Well it is cheating,’ said Guy.

‘It’s a yellow card, he takes a yellow card for the team…If you don’t like it, tough.’

The most fascinating part of the exchange is the reaction of ‘Chappers’. I am not one of these people who say the BBC must always uphold moral standards, although many BBC journalists do. I accept that broadcasters need to interview moral and immoral people alike to allow their audience to understand the world as it is. Savage is a fair representative of the cynical hack footballer, with more belligerence than talent, and provides an insight into how mediocre players think. Broadcast him, by all means.

But as a journalist, Chapman has a duty to ask hard questions without fear or favour. In this instance, he couldn’t think of a single hard question for Savage, because he couldn’t see anything wrong with what Savage had said.

‘Isn’t it all part and parcel of the game?’ he asked at one point. After Guy had hung up, he went on to describe his defence of fair play as ‘weird’.

This exchange is evidence. Fifty, even twenty years ago, sports journalists, in particular BBC journalists, would have condemned professional fouls, and given a hard time to players who condoned them. Now they let the players off the hook and devote their energies to damning referees.

The post The BBC: ‘It’s professional to cheat’ appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

In a 2005, they broadcast an episode entitled Trapped in the Closet. The little boy Stan goes to one of the Scientologists’ personality testing centres. His “Thetan” levels are so high the Scientologists decide he must be the reincarnation of L Ron Hubbard, that herder of credulous souls who founded the sci-fi cult in the 1950s.

South Park’s writers have a lot of fun leaking the religion’s secrets. They explain that long, long ago, the evil alien emperor Xenu fills DC10s with people who were excess to his glactic empire’s requirements – quite how he got DC10s is not explained. He crashes them into the earth’s volcanoes. Once they were safely deposited in Vesuvius, Mount Etna and suchlike, Xenu nukes them. The souls of the unquiet dead now inhabit all of us. If you are fool enough to fall in with Scientologists, you will pay thousands of pounds to learn about the dastardly Xenu, then thousands more to “clear” the ill effects of being hit by an H-bomb.

Anyway, celebrity Scientologists John Travolta and Tom Cruise join the crowd on Stan’s lawn in South Park that has gathered to worship the messiah. When Stan tells Cruise he does not think he’s as good an actor as Leonardo DiCaprio or the guy who played Napoleon Dynamite but is “OK, I guess”, the despairing Cruise buries his face in his hands. “I’m nothing,” he says. “I’m a failure in the eyes of the Prophet!”

Cruise runs into Stan’s wardrobe and locks himself in, allowing assorted characters to shout “Tom Cruise come out of the closet!” for the rest of the show.

In the final scene, Stan refuses to become the Scientologists’ new guru because he wants no part of a “big fat global scam”. Outraged Scientologists bellow that they will sue him. Cruise comes out of the closet and ups the ante. In an in-joke I doubt not one American viewer in 10,000 got, Cruise cries.

So you’re NOT the prophet huh?! You made me look stupid! I’m gonna sue you too!”
Stan Well fine! Go ahead and sue me!
Crusie I will! I’ll sue you in England!

The joke, as many publishers have learned to their cost, was that anyone could be sued in England, even if they published or broadcast mainly in America. Once here they would find that the law was biased against the defendant, and the costs were fantastically high.

As it turned out, the joke was on us. When a British satellite television channel ran the series, it showed every episode of South Park apart from Trapped in the Closet in case Cruise did sue in England. (I suppose I must add, what with England being the way it is, that when I repeat the line “Tom Cruise come out of the closet” I do not intend to suggest that he is now or ever has been gay. I am just quoting a gag.)

Then again, the Scientologists could have sued. Like all fanatical religions, they want to stop criticism that might wake the faithful from their trances. The English law is happy to oblige them. Transworld was going to publish Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief by, Lawrence Wright, a serious and respected author, who is on the staff of the New Yorker, and has a cupboard full of awards. He has investigated Scientology for years. As you can see from this New Yorker essay on the disillusionment of the Hollywood screenwriter Paul Haggis felt at the end of his time with the cult, Wright conducts meticulous research and explains his findings clearly.

When timid liberals tell me we should treat religion with politeness and “respect,” I reply that, although there is much to be said for politeness and we all tell white lies, religion is too important to handle with kid gloves. Religious and political ideologies demand the widest powers over the citizen. They must expect robust criticism.

In other words, and to put it rather pompously, there was a public interest in publishing Going Clear; and good grounds for getting in out of the closet. The threat of a libel action was too much for the publishers to bear, however. No one can predict in advance how much a book will make. But I guess that Transworld would have been more than happy if they had collected £30,000 from a serious piece of contemporary non-fiction. A libel case at the High Court would risk £200,000, £300,000 maybe a £1,000,000. Like so many others, Transworld could not afford to defend the truth of what it wrote. The “lawfare” of the Scientologists had closed debate. You can find Trapped in the Closet on the Web. You will be able to order Going Clear via Amazon in America. But as I argue in You Can’t Read This Book, the fact that prohibited material is available somewhere is not really the point. The knowledge that a special interest can punish it in your country enhances its power and stops local campaigners in their tracks.

I do not wish to appear grudging. Politicians from all parties have agreed to reform the skewed libel law, and they deserve credit for that. But they have come up with a sorry measure. There is no proper public interest defence. Corporations can still sue, even though corporations are not people. Contrary to the best principles of the Common Law, the burden of proof will remain on the defendant. Worst of all, Parliament is not tackling the fantastic costs of libel, which make it a rich man’s law.

So here we are ladies and gentleman, at the start of the 21st century, in the middle of what optimists believe is an unprecedented age of freedom, and English publishers still cannot publish books publishers all over the world can sell, and cultists and plutorcrats can still use our courts to impose controls on the essential arguments of a free society.

The post Scientologists trap us in the closet appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

And in everyday dealings with others, I don’t feel as if I’m rich. I don’t have a car. My wife and I watch what we spend at the shops. I wish I could wine and dine every night, but, alas, I cannot.

So I go on thinking that I am an ordinary member of the British middle class, until I start talking to people who are 25 years younger than me. I have learned to be careful about what I say. A couple of times, I’ve been chatting to a friend who is settling down with a partner, and I’ve said without thinking that obviously they would be buying their first flat. They look at me much as an African peasant looks at a western tourist. I am a creature from another world. I am something they think they can never be: an owner occupier; a member of the rapidly diminishing – and rapidly aging – band of property owners, which no longer has to worry about where they will live. Whenever I have shot my mouth off, my speech has degenerated into embarrassed stuttering. I feel vulgar and cruel; as if I have been deliberately rubbing the noses of propertyless into the misfortune of being born at the wrong time.

Ross Clark has just published one of the best political pamphlets I have read recently – A Broom Cupboard of One’s Own (you can download it here for £2.37 ) He emphasises how unprecedented today’s market is by pointing to the supposedly depression-afflicted 1930s. For all the suffering, a lower-middle class couple who had eight shillings a week to spare could buy a home; perhaps one of the new semis in Heathway Park estate in Mitcham.

It’s the type of place the discerning still sniff at. But its typical 1930s’ houses were solidly built homes with three bedrooms, a garage more often than not, and a bit of lawn at the back. You could have a couple of kids, eat round a table, do some gardening, and have a nicer life than most people cooped up in our over-priced and under-spaced modern rabbit hutches enjoy. “Guaranteed modern houses, brick built throughout,” the sales pitch for Heathway Park went. Yours for prices ranging from £315 to £530.

That would be from £18,000 to £30,000 at today’s prices. Except that the young can’t buy at “today’s prices”. A typical 1930s’ semi in Mitcham now costs about £330,000.

As interesting as Clark’s argument that we have constructed an economy that guarantees high prices are his proposals to ensure that people, particularly the young, have somewhere decent and affordable to live. Clark is a small “c” conservative. (He may also be a large “C” Conservative for all I know.) He writes for the Tory press and the Spectator. He is hardly a red revolutionary, in other words. Yet try to imagine this coalition implementing any of his recommendations, and you will see the vertiginous gulf between the needs of the country and the complacency of our leaders.

Clark wants new housing development agencies to have the power to use compulsory purchase orders to buy land at current prices (rather than the vastly inflated price land with planning permission to build attracts). Nothing particularly radical about this idea. The developers of the 20th century new towns bought agricultural land at cost.

Restrictive covenants should guarantee that only owner-occupiers can live in the majority of new homes, he continues. Covenants would drive down prices by stopping the buy-to-let landlords, who have inflated the market, moving in. Again this is hardly a radical measure. Mansion blocks in London say you cannot rent out your property. Meanwhile in a final attempt to make housing affordable, Clark suggests stopping Whitehall piling ever more environmental requirements on new homes, which push up the price of what ought to be cheap property at the bottom end of the market.

Away from owner occupation, he wants tenants to have the option of staying in a rented property for three years to give them some security of tenure, and an end to the destructive policy of council house sales, which forces the taxpayer to pump housing benefit into the pockets of undeserving private landlords.

You may disagree with some of the above. But my point is you cannot imagine the coalition implementing any of the above. We are in a housing crisis that extends from the homeless on the street well into the middle class. We have couples deciding not to have children because they do not have the space to house them. We have people paying extortionate rents, and the lowest rate of new home construction in almost a century. Yet ministers just sit there like gouty old men in the 19th hole – belching out the odd protest about nimbyism, flogging off more council homes or proposing a ludicrous scheme to subsidise mortgages, which will only push up house prices further. One might have thought that Tories in particular would have wanted to get people into homes. The housing booms of the 1980s, 1950s and indeed the 1930s sustained them in power. I assume too that the grown up children of the poorer members of the cabinet must be telling their fathers what a racket housing has become. But perhaps they’re not, because nothing ever happens

After interviewing David Cameron, Matthew d’Ancona wrote on Sunday that the prime minister wanted a second term because he was a man of destiny

It is clear that the personal has become absolutely grafted on to the strategic. If Cameron has experienced an epiphany, it is that his mission is not simply to clear up Labour’s mess but to prepare Britain for what he calls “the global race” – and that this will take the country, and him, many years to accomplish. A pragmatist by temperament, he has succumbed to the radicalism required by the times.

This is simply not true. Housing is a great issue of our time, and it has produced no radicalism from Cameron. The longer his government goes on the more it looks like the second Wilson administration (or the second Baldwin administration, if you want to stay in the 1930s). A government that filled the papers with political news while it was in power, but which no one missed or even remembered when it was gone, because it failed to tackle the urgent problems of its age.

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In 1980, he heard an appeal by the Birmingham Six, the men falsely convicted for the IRA’s massacre of drinkers in two Birmingham pubs in November 1974. The six were suing the police for damages for the beatings they said they had received. Although it was not a full appeal, Denning understood the implications, and rejected the claim:

‘Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial … If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous. … That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, “It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.’

Denning was prepared to refuse to hear a case from men, who later turned out to be innocent, rather than entertain the possibility that the police may lie. (His words were all the more disgraceful, because Denning believed convicted murderers should a hang — a punishment from which, somewhat notoriously, the innocent dead have no appeal.)

It is easy to knock him, but how many of us still fall into Denning’s way of thinking? My initial, almost instinctive, reaction to the Mitchell affair was that we could trust the police to investigate the scandal. But why should we? The potential damage to the police of exposing the full story is enormous. We have prima facie evidence that someone — how to put this politely? — ‘exaggerated’ or ‘misremembered’ at least parts of the case against Mitchell. The Downing Street police log says there were eyewitnesses who might support officers’ claims that Mitchell called them ‘plebs’. These simple tourists were ‘visibly shocked’ by Mitchell’s outburst, apparently. The CCTV footage Michael Crick obtained shows just one man walking past the Downing Street gates at the time — and he doesn’t seem shocked or agitated in any way. Then there was the serving police officer, who claimed to be an eyewitness, but was in fact nothing of the sort. As Crick puts it:

‘With Mitchell’s resignation, the Police Federation was triumphant and the press were jubilant. But in fact the Tory chief whip had been brought down on the say-so of a police force who may have leaked their own log, and on evidence which was only corroborated by a rather strange email from a man who claimed to be an eye witness, who later told us he was not there.’

If half the suspicions that police officers, who hate the government’s cuts, destroyed a chief whip’s career without due cause are true, the vista is indeed ‘appalling’. The prospect it raises can fit into a sentence. If they can frame a chief whip, they can frame anyone. And even those who have clung on to Denning’s naïve faith, despite the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, De Menezes and Hillsborough, will have to rethink everything they thought they knew.

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