Stephen Pollard/Spectator: yes, it is libellous to brand Muslims fascists
Posted on Thursday 2 September, 2010
Filed Under International, Politics |
6 Comments
WHAT if a future British National Party leader sued a publication that described his organisation as fascist, and won the action? Don’t laugh. After all, we live in a country where even the most oddball of plaintiffs can issue particulars of claim that lead to years of litigation, even where the case is plainly an abuse of process.
Remember, too, that the BNP routinely insists that suggestions that it nurses affinity to fascism – perish the thought! – are ‘utter nonsense’ and designed to gag freedom of speech. Nick Griffin himself maintains: ‘I am not a fascist – that is a smear that comes from the far left.’ Why, he even avers that he ‘detests’ fascism. So that’s alright, then.
I suspect that his personal track record on this score is sufficiently, ahem, compromised to mean that he would have little chance of success. But say he is succeeded by a squeaky clean member of the BNP’s so-called civic nationalist wing, with no personal history of hanging out with boot boy bands and holocaust denial.
Say the new guy was savvy enough to recruit a few token blacks and Asians, in line with Equality and Human Rights Commission requirements, and to insert a clause in the BNP constitution explicitly disavowing fascist aspirations.
Blair memoirs: I may even read them
Posted on Wednesday 1 September, 2010
Filed Under New Labour |
21 Comments
I WAS once involved in loose discussions about ghost-writing the autobiography of a 1970s rock star. Although nothing ever came of the project, I was present at a meeting with a literary agent, at which the inevitable topic of money came up.
Everything depended on how many beans the subject, who was a huge name back in the day, was willing to spill. On the agent’s reckoning, a certain level of sales to those who were teenagers at the time seemed all but guaranteed, so even the blandest of memoirs would probably fetch an advance of £30,000.
But had the guy in question had been will been willing to reveal all – the underage groupies, the drugs, the fights on the tour bus – the bidding would have opened at around £100k and might even have gone far higher, with me on for a tasty percentage. Sadly, he opted for discretion, and that in the end was that.
By contrast, Tony Blair – if the wall-to-wall coverage accorded to publication of ‘A Journey’ today is anything to go by – appears to have opted for a fair degree of frankness in his memoirs. But are Random House getting the £4.5m-worth of frankness they are paying for?
Zimbabwe: why Blair changed his mind on Mugabe
Posted on Tuesday 31 August, 2010
Filed Under International, New Labour |
9 Comments
NAOMI Campbell’s account of how she was gifted dirty pebbles after flirting with Liberian dictator Charles Taylor was perhaps the biggest story of the 2010 silly season, dominating many media outlets for days on end in early August.
Most of the coverage was down to the involvement of a supermodel. Routine tales of African strongmen pocketing the cash from the sale of precious stones obtained by brutal means are not deemed worthy of reporting.
So little attention was paid to the news that even as the kerfuffle in The Hague was still ongoing, Zimbabwe raised around $72m from the auction of diamonds from the Marange fields.
Buyers from the United States, Israel, Russia, Lebanon and India all attended the sale at Harare airport, some of them keeping private jets on stand-by in order to get the hell out as soon as possible, we are told.
Malcolm X and Michael Gove: separated at birth
Posted on Friday 27 August, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party |
20 Comments
I SAW the Spike Lee biopic when it came out, of course. But other than that, I have to admit to not knowing a lot about revolutionary icon Malcolm X.
That’s pretty remiss for a leftie, so to put matters right, I am reading ‘By any means necessary’, a compilation of the 1960s black nationalist leader’s speeches in the last year of his life, following his break from Nation of Islam.
The book was published by the US Socialist Workers’ Party, at that time a Trotskyist grouping, and is designed to show that Malcolm X’s thinking was evolving in the direction of Marxist socialism. That doesn’t come across as very likely.
No class-based analysis whatsoever is in evidence. Indeed, the focus is on community self-organisation, and it does strike me that some of the ideas expressed would not sound out of place in a flagship speech from a Big Society Cameron Conservative.
Welcome back to Britain, Mr Nadir
Posted on Thursday 26 August, 2010
Filed Under Business, Conservative Party |
5 Comments
HERE we are, more than three months into a Tory-led government, and there has yet to be a single sleaze scandal of any genuine seriousness. So bang on cue, one comes along and resurrects itself from the past.
Asil Nadir, the bloke what done a runner to Cyprus back in 1993 rather than face the rap for 66 theft charges totalling £34m, is back in Blighty and has got a hot date with the judge at the Bailey. I naturally make no presumption as to his guilt or innocence.
The bail-jumping East End sweatshop boss was a major donor to the Conservative Party at that time, as indeed were big league smack dealers from Hong Kong and Greek shipowners who had been rather too chummy with that country’s military junta for the taste of many democrats.
As a journalist who remembers having a field day writing about the dodgier aspects of the Thatcher and Major years, I must profess to deep disappointment at Cameron’s success in keeping a clean nose so far.
Fr Chesney and the Claudy bombing: answers, please
Posted on Wednesday 25 August, 2010
Filed Under Ireland |
30 Comments
UNLIKE the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, at least the police ombudsman’s report into the Claudy bombing did not cost anything like £195m. And it only took it eight years rather than 12 to establish for the record what everybody knew already anyway, which is positively speedy by comparison.
Briefly put, Al Hutchinson found that parish priest James Chesney was an Irish Republican Army quartermaster and in that capacity directly involved in the 1972 terrorist atrocity that claimed nine lives and injured dozens of others.
Tory home secretary Willie Whitelaw discussed the issue with Cardinal Conway, head of the Catholic church in Ireland. The Cardinal conceded that Chesney was ‘a very bad man’, and decided that he should be punished by being transferred to a parish the other side of the border, where he served until his death in 1980. There. That showed him.
To this day, sections of the Irish Catholic hierarchy readily come to their guy’s defence. The former Bishop of Derry is insistent that Chesney could not have been involved with the IRA, because he vehemently denied the accusation twice.
Ed Miliband: damn right he’s not a Bennite
Posted on Tuesday 24 August, 2010
Filed Under New Labour |
24 Comments
HILARY Benn famously fought the Leeds Central by-election campaign that gave him a seat in parliament on the slogan ‘a Benn but not a Bennite’.
Given that even Tony Benn’s offspring feels the need to emphasise repudiation of his old man’s politics, it’s safe to pronounce that particular 30 year old brand of leftism completely dead, with the stake driven through its heart and the reburial ceremony at the crossroads duly completed.
But in a fit of maliciously motivated playground name calling, there are some who seem determined to stick the label Labour leadership contender Ed Miliband, who is like his brother David the son of the prominent Marxist academic Ralph Miliband.
Indeed, if their late dad’s recondite brand of non-Stalinist left eurocommunism had ever achieved more than the limited currency it did, they would both be styling themselves Milibands but not Milibandites.
David Kelly: when states do [and do not] kill
Posted on Monday 23 August, 2010
Filed Under Iraq, New Labour |
11 Comments
WHEN a man leaves his home carrying a boxful of powerful painkillers, a bottle of water and a pruning knife, the assumption has to be that he harbours an obvious intention to kill himself.
When he is known to be in a depressed frame of mind and when there is a history of suicide in the family, then there is a presupposition that he is capable of doing just that.
So the onus is on anyone who argues that the death of David Kelly stems from anything other than the obviously tragic spectacle of a broken and shabbily-treated man taking his own life to provide some rational grounds for this counterintuitive contention. The conspiracy theorists’ case strikes me as somewhat insubstantial.
What effectively is being suggested here is that Dr Kelly was somehow ‘taken out’ – I think that’s the spy thriller jargon – by forces associated in some way with the British state. The inevitable subtext is that the case represents just one more drop of blood on the blood-soaked hands of that well-known war criminal Tony Bliar.
Sir Philip Green: tax avoider gets job on the side
Posted on Friday 20 August, 2010
Filed Under Business, Conservative Party |
27 Comments
PUT the firm in the name of the missus, set the old girl up with a nice little gaff down in Monaco, and then pay her a dividend of well over a billion quid. Tell the taxman to go swivel.
That’s essentially what Sir Philip Green did in 2005, so ensuring that not a single one of those 1,200,000,000 spons got unnecessarily spent on schools and hospitals and that sort of stuff. All 100% legit, natch.
The thing is, the Topshop boss has got an expensive lifestyle to maintain. Not only does he have to find the upkeep of the standard super-rich trimmings, like a £20m superyacht and a £27m private jet, but he has actually got a solid gold monopoly set. Pure class, that geezer.
And say what you like about Phil, he does know how to throw a good bash. We are talking about a bloke who spent £5m celebrating his 50th birthday with a three-day Roman toga party, with guests including Michael Winner, Jeremy Beadle and Stirling Moss. Both Tom Jones and Demis Roussos were hired to put on a turn.
Town Hall skiving: worse than the private sector?
Posted on Thursday 19 August, 2010
Filed Under Society |
23 Comments
COUNCIL staff twiddle their thumbs for two-thirds of their working day, according to a survey by some firm of management consultants I have never heard of, which has predictably been bigged up by the Daily Telegraph.
I did google to try to find the original report, so that I could at least run my eye over the definitions and the methodology, but have not been able to find the document. Even so, the claim – coming at the time that it does – strikes me as potentially ideologically motivated.
The chief contention is that council staff are only productive 32% of the time, while the comparison figure for private firms is 44%. That means that hundreds of thousands of pen-pushing town hall idlers could easily be given the boot, and nobody would even notice so long as the rest of ‘em got their rear in gear.
Oddly enough, none of the media coverage I have been able to find answers the first question I would pose about this research, which is ‘who paid for it?’
