IF YOU are in the business of finding out and publishing things that somebody in a position of influence wants kept quiet – and that’s a business all good journalists should try to be in – then these are heady times. Secrecy, official and otherwise, is being undermined as never before.
It actually used to be hard work prying information out of people. Back in the 1980s when I started out as a hack, the best tactics included the careful cultivation of union activists and middle management awkward squad types with grudges against their bosses. Frequently this ‘contact building’, as we used to call it, entailed having to buy people beers.
Otherwise, it was largely a question of diligently rooting through council agendas and court records, although on a few memorable occasions each year, a plain brown envelope with incriminating material used to land on your desk. And boy, weren’t you pleased when that happened.
The advent of the fax made things a damn sight easier. Your friends no longer had to photocopy documents, smuggle them out of work and then send them to you by post. Instead, they could just whack them onto a fax machine and magically they would reappear in your office.
With modern information and communications technology, leaking has never been easier. What’s more, organisations that were formerly super-secretive have become slightly less so; I can now ring up NATO and get a quote from a spokesperson if I need one.
New Labour has even brought in Freedom of Information legislation, although its practical impact has been pretty limited from the muckraking point of view.
In general, the overall trend has made my life easier, and moreover has to be a good thing for the public’s right to know. Let it rock, say I. But I should add a few qualifications here.
Take, for instance, a text message identifying those responsible for the death of Baby P, which even as I write is circulating the mobile phones of Britain. The originator urges people to pass it on to ‘name and shame’ the couple, branding them ‘cruel vile killers’.
That is just what they are, of course. But reporting restrictions in court cases are usually imposed for good reasons, including the need to ensure that the judicial process is fair, and to avoid a hysterical lynch mob atmosphere that could see innocent relatives or even people with similar surnames beaten up or worse.
Earlier this week, the entire membership list of the British National Party went on line. It soon disappeared from the original website on which it was posted, but has now been widely disseminated, and can readily be googled up in minutes.
I’ve got no brief for the fash, of course, and far right outfits such as Redwatch have long been in the habit of posting the names and home addresses of trade unionists and socialists on their websites. I am one of the ‘reds’ that stands thus exposed.
But the BNP is a legal political party and its members should have the same rights to data protection as members of all other legal political parties.
What we really need is more revelations about the things that really matter. If you do get made redundant in the next few months, don’t forget to copy your boss’s hard drive and pass it on to your friendly local hard news merchant. Not only does the bastard deserve it, but you’ll have a friend for life.
Posted at 14:34, 20 November 2008
Comments (14)
And I'm sure they'd be just as respectful of your right to data protection (not to mention the right not to have the shit kicked out of you by a gang of boneheads) if you pissed them off and they got hold of your phone number... jeez Dave wassamatter with ya?
Dave - stop being so defensive - this leak is a chance for the left to expose and hammer these hypocritical fascists - whose leading members boast of working with Redwatch - the BNP are already in disarray over it and could impode over the leak - lets make sure they do:
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=16501
By 'hammer' I mean 'politically hammer' in a mass collective fashion- I am against individual acts of terror against fascists - and by 'impode' I mean 'implode'...
Whats scary, and got a bit lost in the glee about the list being made public and debates about how to use it, is the fact that the BNP has over 10,000 members.
Looking through the list its quite a geographical spread and just from looking at the addresses where I live seems to be a mix of classes and professions.
"a mix of classes and professions"
Hopefully that will help explode the myth that working class people are more likely to be racist than middle-class people.
Like some of the comments above, I think BNP members are undeserving of the same rights members of other political parties get.
I think there are a few vicars on the list.
Hi tim f, I don't know if it does explode that myth but if you look at the varying ways the data has been laid out on the Googlemaps mashup and heat map, it is clear that the BNP have built the basis of a mass party of fascism in certain parts of the UK.
Looking through the list there's a solid core of working class elements aligned with a very British array of ex service personel, academics, small and larger business men.
It really does bring to mind the class composition of classic 1930's facism.
As stroppybird pointed out, the shear size of it is what we should be alarmed at.
And to counter it the left has what ?
That's the scariest question of all.
I thought snowball's site had the best take on this issue with the quotes from Jeremy Dear and Keith Norman, spot on.
Eddie, the BNP are going nowhere, have gone nowhere and will never go anywhere.
Like the Islamic fascists they represent the ultimate fringe of nothing.
Pray tell me what their programme is?
Get rid of Jonny foreigner.
Do you honestly think the working class, the middle class and the upper class are so stupid they will ever get that lot into power?
Btw: like the photos on your site. Absolute beautt. You made me right bleeding jealous.
I am glad there is so much unity here on this matter, I heartily second comrade Snowball and comrade Truman's points.
The legal niceties will count for NOTHING should the BNP achieve any degree of power (and the fact they got so many Councilors and Barnbrook elected, should be a wake up call to us all), history shows that the danger and rise of fascist parties has been consistently underestimated and with the benefit of hindsight we shouldn't make that same mistake.
I am very happy the BNP membership list was released, as it might give anti-fascism in Britain the boost that it sorely needs, highlight the extent of BNP membership across the country (and even abroad) and put these fascists under greater scrutiny.
This is a significant blow to the BNP, so all anti-fascists should welcome it, and please, please let's have less liberal hand-wringing :)
The Googlemap/mashup has gone, and when you compare it to the similar map produced by the Guardian, I would suggest that perhaps the Googlemap wasn't particularly accurate and was over-egging the BNP's relative strength considerably.
Strop says Whats scary, and got a bit lost in the glee about the list being made public and debates about how to use it, is the fact that the BNP has over 10,000 members.
I think that more scary is the very small number of actual card-carrying members (presumably a high proportion of which are activists, at least at election times) in the BNP's electorial strongholds (e.g. Barking and Dagenham). It seems that a large majority of their members there hold public office. Indeed, at the last London council elections, they would have probably swept the board, had they stood enough candidates. But they couldn't, as they admitted, as they didn't have enough members. I won't even mention the "quality" of their councillors.
What would their level of electoral support be if they weren't little more than a phantom organisation on a ballot paper? What if they had a genuine presence in the community? And what would the streets be like? That is, surely, the worrying thing. The other question is: could an active, present, political left (i.e. not flown in from outside the area, not just telling people to "stop the Naziees" and waving some lollypops), do anything against this? To be honest, I'm not sure.
Blimey, Hazel Blears (a woman who scares me a bit having heard her on Newsnight the other evening telling us that "Strictly Come Dancing" proves that the public aren't cynical and disinterested about politics or democracy) writes some common sense stuff in the Guardian on the BNP, the likes of which got me immediately labelled a "Trot" (and it wasn't meant nicely) in my local CLP a decade or so ago. Will her CLP members now get strange phonecalls from student activists at New Labour HQ telling them to select somebody else?
"In a strongly worded piece, Blears argues that demonstrating against the BNP is not enough, however. "Shouting 'Nazi' is not the answer," she writes....Blears writes: "We must recognise that where the BNP wins votes, it is often a result of local political failure." She adds: "Estates that have been ignored for decades; voters taken for granted; local services that have failed; white working-class voters who feel politicians live on a different planet. In such a political vacuum, the BNP steps in with offers of grass-cutting, a listening ear and easy answers to complex problems.""
"Local political failure"? Labour political failure.
"Easy answers", eh. Unlike the "no bloody answers" of her lot.
Quite right DZ - all of this would be fine if Blears and her fellow idiots had not been in power for the past 11 years, and therefore in a position to do something about the disenfranchisement of white working-class voters if they so chose...
Andrew Coates seems to overstate the sense of the working class, middle class and upper class. A lot of people thought the Germans too civilised to be swept along by the people with the swastika totem.
The fact is that, on the cusp of severe economic crisis, the BNP outnumbers the "Marxist" left in Britain by about three to one.