Rogue Media

Oh dear. Despite all the madness of 'Hackgate' and the horrible weekly revelations before Lord Leveson's inquiry, it seems that old Tabloid tricks are alive and well, with 'Red Top' reporters skulking around ministers' gardens trying to set up a sting (see here).

Which is why I continuously call for proper press regulation, just like the broadcast media has, and hope that the Good Lord Leveson sees sense.

Don't You Just Love Trev?

Oh how we laughed. The Cragsbury family flailed around in hysterics. It was the best entertainment we’d had for some time. What, pray, where we laughing at?

That brilliant article written by Trevor Kavanagh from The Sun. Oh, the poor oppressed Sun journos. Feeling a little hard done by, are we? Excuse me while I cry into my beer. Now before I start my rant, let’s just remember that News International titles are but some of the papers that have been behaving illegally. They have all been at it and in this blog post, Guido has a handy graphic showing the results of the 2003 Information Commissioner’s research. So, News International titles were at it but others were at it more. Anyhoo, let’s get to the facts:

1. News International provided information to the police voluntarily - Interesting. This would indicate that they had spotted some ‘open and shut’ evidence of wrongdoing and knew they had to react ASAP.

2. ‘It’s an outrage. 10 officers were sent to arrest each journo. Why could they just not have been invited to a pre-arranged meeting at the police station, like the other pervious arrestees?’ - Er, no, you numpties. From past experience, after this cordial invite, the shredders would have been on turbo charge 24/7. And the 10 plods were there to search each journos premises, seize any evidence - IT, papers etc - bag it, tag it and remove it. Can’t do that with one plod now can you.

3. ‘There are 171 police officers, torn from other important investigations, more than worked on this investigation or that investigation, poring over this silly case’ - (Full outrage face), listen carefully you assholes. If you hadn't broken the fucking law you wouldn't be being investigated. And if you hadn’t broken the fucking law so often and over such a long period, the police wouldn’t need so many fucking plods.

4. ‘It’s a witch hunt’ - No, it is an attempt, very, very belatedly, to sort out the cesspit of our print media which has hitherto descended into the gutter, been flagrantly breaking the law and has not been held to account by the police until now.

It’s amusing to listen to the dead tree press and all their acolytes whinging and moaning and complaining. You would think that nothing had happened to warrant any censure. So arrogant, they still don’t get it. They just want to sweep it all under the carpet ASAP so they can get back on with trashing people’s lives.

And, oh the hypocrisy, complaining about police raids! It's hysterical. Really you couldn’t make this up. The Sun, which for years bribed policemen so they could be warned off when there was a police raid about to take place, so they could be there with their cameras and record it for their readers. Makes me cry with laughter.

If journos want to moan, the real crisis here is just how badly the Murdoch empire has handled this whole process.

1. For years, they had the ability to stop their journos from breaking the law. They failed.

2. They had a chance to investigate the issue properly in 2002 when the Steve Whittamore allegations became known. They failed.

3. They had a chance to sort it out in 2003 when Steve Whittamore was imprisoned. They failed.

4. They had another chance in 2006 to change things when the Information Commissioner published What Price Privacy. They failed.

5. They had yet another chance in 2007 when Glen Mulcaire and Clive Goodman were imprisoned. They failed again.

For years, their clearly adopted strategy was to sweep it all under the carpet and hope and pray that no one asked any awkward questions.

So, Trevor Kavanagh, your problems lie in a widespread journo culture of law-breaking and your management’s purposeful disinterest in sorting it out. And once the stench became too strong and they were forced to address it, they monumentally fucked up. They closed one of the largest circulation tabloids in the UK - The Screws,

(a) in the vain hope this would draw a line under the affair - how’s that plan working out for you, Rupert?

(b) on the ‘evidence’ pushed by one of their competitors - The Guardian - which has proved to be completely and utterly wrong.

Now that’s what I call a fuck up.

And here's the thing. How long can the board and investors in News Corp put up with the cesspit of their UK print media operation dragging them down? The FBI are now on their case in the USA. Much more of a problem. And if they pull the plug and walk/sell, which is attractive as the UK print media operation is so tiny in the big picture for News Corp, what then?

Well that’s a problem here in the UK because The Sun (profitable) pays for The Times and The Sunday Times (both unprofitable). Without these three titles, UK media land would be a much worse place. Unless of course you're a Lefty who would love these titles to disappear and enjoy a victory over the ‘evil Murdoch media empire’.

So all you non-Lefties out there, be careful what you wish for.

Will Leveson Work?

There is a lot wrong in print media land.

There are currently 5 police inquiries into the behaviour of the print media - Op Weeting for phone hacking, Op Elveden for police bribery, Op Tueleta for computer hacking, Op Kalmyk for accessing computers and Op Rubicon for accessing computers in Scotland.

The Culture Select Committee is also carrying out its own investigation - remember ‘foam pie-gate’.

And all this follows on from the 2003 Information Commissioner’s Office inquiry - Op Motorman - which looked at similar issues and produced a report called What Price Privacy? It pointed out that all the print media were at it and that News International was not the worst offender.

As each day of the Leveson Inquiry unfolds (and this humble blogger has been following it very closely) the facts are now clear:

1. The print media, and principally but not exclusively the tabloids, has hacked, blagged, bugged, burgled and thieved its way through our society for some years. The swaggering arrogance of the editors and journos appearing before it has been breath taking.
2. Amazingly, no editors or journos can remember anything - emails they may/may not have written or calls they may/may not have made - and specifically they didn't see any hacking ever. None. Not once. Nothing to see here. Move along please.
3. Self-regulation has manifestly failed. One tabloid newspaper group - The Express - can’t even be assed to submit itself to the PCC in any case.
4. As with any organisation threatened with statutory regulation, the print media are desperately throwing up every reason they can, especially the ‘freedom of the press’ card, to pretend that regulation would be the end of the world as we know it.

The coverage in the media has been painted as a ‘News International are evil’ story by…guess who…all those who hate the Murdoch media, led initially by The Guardian which as ever wrapped itself in a cloak of self-righteousness rather forgetting that (a) its initial claims that New International journos hacked Milly Dowler’s phone have now been shown to be complete bullshit and (b) that it was identified as one of the main offenders of phone hacking in the ICO’s What Price Privacy? report.

So what should be done?

We have the best broadcast media in the world. Really, we do. Travel abroad and watch/listen to foreign broadcast news and compare. Ours is without doubt the best in class. By a country mile. Authoritative, accurate, fair and professional.

And it’s fully regulated.

QED. End of argument.

I am anything but a big government guy. I am instinctively against regulation. But print journalism has inhabited a nether world, often in league with politicians too craven to hold them to account and whose backs they scratch, along with a police community who illegally trade information with them and have until now refused to impartially enforce the rule of law.

Time to clear out the stable. These total tossers, who have cheapened so much of our society, should be regulated and Leveson should recommend that clearly.

There is only an upside. All the scaremongering by the print media and its acolytes about any negative effects of regulation is just lobbying by interested parties. Is our fully regulated broadcast media toothless and weak?

Demonstrably not.

I remember in 1992 when David Mellor as Secretary of State for National Heritage told the press it was “drinking in the last chance saloon” when the PCC was established. Nothing has changed since then. In fact things have become worse with more and more stinking evidence piling up of the print media’s misdeeds.

But I fear that the cautious Lord Leveson and the craven political class will once again blink and not do what is right.

Belle de Blog

Two weeks ago, a blogger unmasked herself. A research scientist called Dr Brooke Magnanti fessed up to being Belle de Jour, the well known ex-hooker blogger. I say well known. It seems the blog was well known to everyone but me. But now I’ve caught up.

I have followed the story for the last two weeks and all its ups and downs as I had followed the NightJack story before and the Girl with a One-Track Mind unmasking before that.

My interest is because, like her, I blog under a pseudonym. Now, my reasons are different from the three much better bloggers previously mentioned. NightJack was a serving policeman blogging about the madness of everyday policing. Belle and The Girl were hiding the intimate secrets of their lives.

I blog anonymously because (a) I have a professional life and want to divorce my private musings from my work, my employer and my profession, and (b) it allows me to be so much more free with my thoughts and language.

Question: should bloggers be allowed to be anonymous?

Answer: does the right to free speech (accepting the reasonable constraint of libel) no longer exist? After this year's NighJack ruling, it seems not. Silly really, becasue I guess that large organisations can track down bloggers or close them down if they put their mind to it, so why does it matter? In reality, I think it doesn’t. Not at all in fact.

But the media hates blogger anonymity and various journos have tried to unmask some of us, viz the three previously mentioned bloggers and more. Why?

Two reasons methinks:

1.The print media (aka the dead tree press) are failing badly and are on a constant downhill trajectory. Trade and regional titles are closing left and right. Fleet Street margins are now almost non-existent. Why? Because you can now get so much content for free online. Wake up guys. Your business models are fucked. Thus, they love to attack their new growing competition as they fail.

2. Journos love exposing secrets. It’s what gets them notoriety and thus more money. It’s not for principle or any laudable reason, trust me. Just money.

But here’s the thing: exposing bloggers achieves nothing – apart from selling some more papers – and in fact makes society less rich, less interesting and less informed. We know less about the madness of policing now that NightJack is dead.

Blogs that expose how stupid society now is, make fascinating, insightful and riveting reading. I love Random Acts of Reality as it graphically reminds us how appalling our society now is and how the London Ambulance Service has to deal with us binge drinking morons. The Magistrate’s Blog shows us how ridiculous our court system has become. Inspector Gadget and The Policeman’s Blog tells us the reality of policing in 2009.

We need these guys and their insights.

But, I can see that the political class with their arrogant belief in regulating everything, aided and abetted by journos who like King Canute want to halt the rise of free internet content, will conspire sometime in the future to try and regulate the blogosphere. One moron has already suggested it.

The Beautiful Game?

I follow rugby much more than I follow football. In part, this is due to the fact that I have always been so bored by the disgusting behaviour of footballers and their managers. These over-rewarded thugs are poor role models in so many ways.

Dominic Lawson covered this so eloquently in this week's Sunday Times, I feel compelled to share it here.

What is Heroism?

So this weekend, much of the Cumbria flood news coverage focused on the sad death of PC Bill Barker. The media hailed him a hero. We all awoke on Saturday morning to breathless reporters telling us how he died, where his body had been recovered, that it was his birthday, how many children he left behind, reading the hastily prepared media release from his wife, his Chief Constable saying that he was a modern day hero etc.

Now I don't want in any way diminish the life of PC Barker. He was no doubt a popular policeman and a good man. What I want to criticise is the media coverage of these sorts of situations.

PC Barker was a policeman doing his job. He was directing traffic on a bridge in the early hours of the morning when the bridge he was standing on collapsed. A good public servant doing his duty when tragedy struck.

But not heroism.

Heroism is a young man who, realising his colleagues were taking heavy enemy fire, that there were already several casualties and more were likely to be killed, got up and rushed straight in the direction of the enemy, just 20 metres away, raking them with automatic fire, allowing the rest of his section to withdraw back to safety so the casualties could be treated. He was later found dead beside the enemy he had killed in his aggressive counter attack (Corporal Bryan Budd VC, 3 PARA).

Heroism is a young man who's vehicle mistakenly came under fire from a pair of American ground attack aircraft (great allies, huh?). Having escaped from the burning vehicle, he returned to it when he realised that his gunner was trapped in the turret and succeeded in rescuing him. Realising that his comrades were all injured, he returned to the vehicle a second time to inform his headquarters of the situation. He then proceeded to help the wounded gunner to safety even while the two aircraft carried out a second attack, hitting him in the lower back and legs. Finally, he returned to the scene of the attack a third time to attempt to rescue the injured driver of another burning vehicle (LCoH Christopher Finney GC, Blues and Royals).

Heroism is a young girl who jumped out of her armoured vehicle and climbed up the side of it to rescue the vehicle commander who had been shot in the mouth, all while being heavily fired upon by enemy snipers at night. One bullet hit her rucksack as she climbed the vehicle. She then helped drag the vehicle commander back into the safety of the vehicle while still being fired upon (LCpl Michelle Norris MC, RAMC).

Again, I am sure PC Barker was a great man who behaved with dignity and great public spirit last week, but we must not let media hyperbole cheapen what real heroism is. As the death toll in Afghanistan mounts and we all become numbed to the regular casualty roll, we would do well to see detailed coverage of how each of our dead gave their life.

Wednesday Games - Game 1

Who might gain from Gordy being ousted post the disastrous Euro/local election?

Option 1 - Any likely successor, who would take on the absolute fag end of this Parliament and then face certain death in a few months in a General Election

or

Option 2 - The media who would be guaranteed acres of coverage for months

Hmmm. I wonder who is stoking this story?

New Tory Media

So The Sun, has come out as supporting the Tories for Thursday's European and County elections. Mildly interesting.


Not that this isn't huge news but who else would The Sun support? The 'NuLab love in' has long since passed.

But factor in that this is a News International paper, where the proprietor (one Rupert Murdoch) has a history of being involved in that particular decision, and who is someone that all main parties try and court. Now that makes it much more interesting.

But here's an even more interesting question: what is the ongoing relationship going to be like between the next Tory Government and The Daily Telegraph? Now that really is interesting.

Suppression of Free Speech

Despite the fact that Poor Old Nadine Dorries still clearly doesn't get it (as posted here yesterday) and that she is a lightweight who said some loopy things on her blog, it is outrageous that the Barclay Brothers have managed to get her blog taken down.

I thought we lived in a free and fair democracy?

I thought we had a right to free speech?

I thought you could say or write anything about anybody, accepting that they may sue you for libel or slander?

WTF is going on? How an earth can a newspaper and/or its owners (get the irony) stop free speech? Someone please explain this to me.

Impressionable Elites

(Not going to talk about MPs, expenses, the Speaker or any of that shit for a while...hopefully).

A good book I read recently, given to me by a colleague, is called Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Today's Big Changes by Mark Penn. Penn is a Lefty political strategist who has worked for both Bill and Hilary Clinton. Don't let that put you off. It's an interesting book.

Penn highlights a number of small, often low key, trends that have emerged over recent years which give us a clue about where society is now and where it's headed. My particular favourite is what he calls 'impressionable elites'. Let me explain.

All his polling in recent years has demonstrated an intriguing and paradoxical trend. The higher a person is up the educational scale, the more lightweight their political views and interests. The lower down the educational scale people are, the more inquiring and focused their political views and interests are.

There is logic here. The 'haves' are not struggling for survival. They are comfortable. Food is on the table aplenty, even if in current economic times it is from Tesco not Waitrose. But the 'have nots' are locked in a perpetual struggle for survival, desperately trying to make ends meet.
What this leads to is higher educated people not worrying so much about the detail of political issues, policies, agendas whereas those lower down the education food chain are absolutely concerned about what their politicians stand for because they are hoping that they will help them get a leg up.

This in turn leads the better educated able to gossip about what their politicians are like, rather than what they stand for. They are more worried about how they dress than what they believe in. Meanwhile, the lower educated segment are absolutely glued to what their politicians say and could not give a toss about the lightweight stuff.

Think this through. Read the dead tree press. It's mostly about style rather than substance. They are more worried about what Michelle Obama is wearing rather than what her husband and Gordy are actually agreeing to in their meeting. Think how dumbed down our media have become in the last 10 years. Think about the decline of the BBC news, or Panorama, or why we now have some irrelevant celeb on BBC Question Time. All this is part of that trend.

Words of the Day

"Now, you may say that politics has ever been a mucky business, with journalists willingly allowing themselves to be used in the pursuit of the political vendettas of Westminster; but what is striking about the methods used by Brown's courtiers is that they never, ever, employ arguments of substance, still less principle, in their attacks against those who are deemed to have taken an incorrect position. They only go for the man, never the ball."

Dominic Lawson, The Independent

Drapergate 2 or McBridegate 1?

So the delicious story of No 10's dirty tricks department is building to its crescendo. Guido has two tasters here and here, as well as being on Sky today (so much better than the debacle on The Daily Politics, Guido, good work). The Great Iain Dale, also on Sky and BBC today, has opined as well. Dizzy has uncovered the embryonic Red Flag site and Tory Bear has made us all laugh.

Like all of us I am sure, I am salivating at the wonderful Sunday reading awaiting me. The story will unfold for the next 24 hrs in all its glory. I guess McBride will be sacked. Draper already looks as if he has been edged out. Many bloggers will chitter chatter over the next few days, but what are the lessons learnt, particularly for Dave and his incoming tribe?

1. Political parties and their politicians, like all leaders, need to have integrity. And integrity is important. You cannot command respect without it. And like virginity, once lost it can never regained.

2. As a leader, claiming you did not know what your close advisers were doing or that whilst unethical 'it's OK because it's within the rules' just won't wash with the floating vote. The tribal vote will always overlook problems, but they don't win elections.

3. If a staff member has shown a complete lack of integrity, you sack them and - here's the lesson for NuLab - never employ them again as leopards tend not to change their spots. Draper is a proven lying shit and always will be. I am sure Lord Manbypanby will blow up in their faces at some stage too. (Dave - think Jeffrey Archer, think Jonathan Aitken, think David Mellor. Don't ever go there.)

4. The politicisation of the civil service needs to be reversed. Civil servants should be neutral. Political advisers are party animals. They need to be kept entirely separate.

5. The dead tree press will forever more follow the blogosphere. It's been easy for Dave in opposition. It will be harder in Government, and he needs to think now how to keep ahead of that change.

The Latest Lib Dem Bandwagon

So the moronic Loony Dems are jumping on the bandwagon of the death of a newspaper seller on the sidelines of the G20 violence, calling for a criminal inquiry. Of course our illustrious media are fanning the flames: questions must be asked, is this the face of unacceptable policing, cop violence etc...

Time for some facts:

Fact 1 - The guy in question was in the way of the police clearing a street during a day of mass rioting. They pushed him. He fell. He later had a heart attack. Unfortunate. Were the police responsible for his heart attack? No.

Fact 2 - Should the police have pushed him? Yes. That's what riot police do. They push people out of the way to clear streets.

Fact 3 - WTF was he doing there anyway? I closed our London office for the day and made staff work from home so that they could not get caught up in any problems. Anyone who was stupid enough to be wandering around the City of London during a riot was playing with fire. Idiot.

Fact 4 - At moments of mass public disorder, society asks individual civil servants - be they policemen or soldiers - to make split second decisions whilst in the middle of total madness, always with only scraps of information available at that immediate moment - aka the 'fog of war'. Sometimes these decisions, made in a fraction of a second, can mean life or death.

Fact 5 - These split second decisions are then poured over for days, weeks, months and years by those who want to make political capital out of the incident, their lawyers and of course the asswipes of the media who just want a 'Shock! Horror!' story.

Fact 6 - As a society, we ask these civil servants to behave in a legal, level headed way in totally out of control circumstances. They will inevitably make mistakes. And as a society, we owe these civil servants our absolute support, even when they make mistakes resulting in loss of life.

Society has imprisoned soldiers who in a split second made a wrong decision whilst fighting for their lives in Northern Ireland. Society has bleated on and on about collateral damage or friendly fire in Iraq and Afghanistan. Society has wanked on about the Brazilian electrician slotted by mistake the day after 7/7.

We are asking ordinary people to do absolutely extraordinary things in totally mad, highly stressful and very frightening circumstances. We should always support them.

Anyone who wants to cast the first stone - yes, you David Howarth, you Lib Dem wank pot, prostituting yourself for a few votes - should spend half a day on the front line wearing a flat cap and a DayGlo vest being bottled in central London by a mob of half drunk, half drugged up anarchists.

Update: OMG, it gets worse. The BBC are leading their bulletins with this story. The Today programme on R4 just had David Howarth on. His smug, sanctimoniousness was bowl evacuating in its stupidity. He claimed the police 'shoved' the newspaper seller. Not just 'shoved', an evil crime in itself, but he then added that they 'shoved him hard'.

What.

The.

Fuck.

They were riot police. Policing a riot. Clearing a street. What do you think they were going to do? Write him a love letter?

What David Howarth did not mention:

1. WTF the newspaper seller was doing in the City in the middle of a riot in the first place?
2. WTF the anarchists were doing there at all?
3. The incredible restraint the police showed all day long.

This is politicking at its worst.

This man, who apparently aspires to be a Government Home Office minister, is not fit to lick the sweaty ass of any policeman in this country.

The Variable Value of Life

2001 - The events of 9/11 (a moment in history which even has its own name) killed just under 3000 Americans. The world stopped. Wars were waged. The aftermath will impact on global geopolitics for generations.

2009 - The Italian earthquake killed around 180 Italians. The BBC flew news teams to the earthquake site for News at 10 that night. Wall to wall media coverage will go on for some days.

2003 - An earthquake hit Bam, a city in Iran. Over 26,000 Iranians died with more than 30,000 injured. I'll say that again: over 26,000 people died with 30,000 injured. Minor mention on the news for a couple of days. The world didn't stop. No wall to wall media coverage.

It would appear society, governments and the media ascribe a higher value and newsworthiness to the lives of different nationalities.

YouCare.com

Interesting campaign a friend alerted me to: YouCare.com. The campaign's 'statement of intent' is as follows:

"YOUCARE.com is a new campaigning website that has been created in an attempt to highlight and improve declining standards of newspaper journalism in the UK.

"We believe that the implementation of a few simple law changes will ensure greater press responsibility and accountability, therefore integrity.

"We believe in freedom of the press but have grave reservations concerning corporate media concentration and the lack of varied dissenting voices holding power accountable.

"We believe we are witnessing clear agenda driven journalism in the UK, clearly sensationalist, unbalanced, unfair and often malicious.

"We believe independent regulation is now a must, not self-regulation or governmental control.

"We believe in an automatic right of reply for all citizens misrepresented by the press in the UK, as libel proceedings should not only be a preserve of those who can afford it.

"We believe the size of any apology or correction should be of the same size and same prominence as the lie.

"We believe there is a crisis of trust in the print media in the UK. This must be addressed now as our human rights and our democracy is suffering as a consequence.

"We intend on getting the British Public interested and involved in debating, current media issues.

"We believe that by raising awareness of newspaper’s ethical responsibilities and promoting a two-way interactive system whereby the general public are able to police declining standards of print journalism themselves we will be able to remind corporate media organisations of their civic responsibilities and begin to improve standards."

Don't know who's behind it but I can't disagree with much of that.

Our Balanced Media

Sunday Times - MPs claim stamp duty on expenses

Mail on Sunday - We buy Jacqui Smith a new BBQ and MPs' New Zealand junket

News of the World - Peter Robinson sucks the taxpayer dry

Sunday Express - Hoon on the fiddle

Observer - Nothing

Sunday Mirror- Nothing

Even the Independent covers the Hoon story

A balanced media. The bulwark of democracy.

Jade Reality Check

I wrote this about the death of David Cameron's son. It just as well applies to Jade Goody.

Today will be nauseating. First, the people who made Goody - the tabloid, red top media and the lower end of the TV spectrum - will gush with faux tears about her demise. We will breathlessly follow the funeral all day. Again, the media making money out of an unwitting fool.

Second, celebs and politicos will all queue up to wax lyrical about "how special she was", "how wonderful she was", "what a brilliant ambassador she was" etc. Nauseating.

Third, the media will cry pity tears for Jack Tweedy, "how brave he's been", "how he was her rock", "how much he loved her" etc. Puke.

Perspective: as sad as any death is, particularly a young person's, this happens every day in every town all over the country. All over the world. No one cries for them.

Goody was in fact famous for being just incredibly stupid and for milking her 15 minutes of fame by doing anything, however debasing - including while blind drunk pushing a wine bottle up herself on live TV. Tweedy is a convicted felon, currently tagged, who is shortly to go to court on another charge.

These are not role models. They do not deserve adulation.

Update: Apparently it was not Goody who performed the wine bottle routine. It was another Z list called 'Kinga', whoever she was.

Celebrity Madness

The just ridiculous media wankathon that is the coverage of St Obama is not unlike the complete madness that descended on them at the time of Princess Diana’s death and subsequent funeral. He is not God, guys. He is the President currently in charge of a fucked economy.

Likewise, the appointment of Alan Shearer as manager of Newcastle today. And for that matter, Martin Johnson as England rugby manager. Neither have ever managed anything but have celeb player status.

To illustrate how totally stupid this is, imagine taking Robert Peston and appointing him as BBC director general, or Mathew Parris and appointing him as CEO of News International. It’s amazing how the cult or religion of celebrity is now invading every part of national life.

Everything you need to know about the state of how celeb crazed our society now is, can be summarised by this: the first photos of Wayne and Coleen Rooney’s first child, due in the autumn, are apparently worth £1 million according to London Life last night.

Pathetic and unbelievable.

Fred

Am I the only one who can see sense? Is the media totally bloody blind to what is going on here? Are the dead tree press so craven that they just suck up the latest piece of Government spin without question.

Put aside for a moment the following:

• your natural British prejuidce of those that are successful
• your natural British prejudice of the rich
• your natural British prejudice of top businessmen being paid lots of dosh
• the ins and outs of 'who knew what and when' about Fred's payoff

Now - clear headed I hope - read this:

The Government is managing to carry off the greatest blame shift in bleeding history and all the media can waffle on about is one bloke and his rather exorbitant pension arrangements.

This is the most incredible piece of spin we have ever witnessed. The balls of it are just breathtaking. The spin men of Whitehall are totally locking us all onto a complete and utter distraction so that Gordy can get away with daylight fucking robbery of us the taxpayer. I've lost count of how much the Government have spent now. I used to think a million quid was a large sum. Now tens of billions seem minor stuff.

Captain Bloody Prudence and his one eye is doing what all Labour PMs have always done. Hurling taxpayers' money around like confetti, trying to spend his way out of any tight spot. Our children are going to be paying for this for years and years. Decades. Old Fred will be dead and forgotten, his pension long since drawn, whilst future chancellors are still trying to fathom how we can pay off the incredible debt created 20 years ago or more by a long discredited ex PM and his one eye.

And what are the media all focused on: Fred and his pension. Please, please, please someone write about what's really going on. Forget bloody Fred.

But if you really need a villain, add up the huge salaries, exorbitant expenses and outrageous final salary pension arrangements of Gordy, the eyebrow man and all the other assholes at the Bank of England and the FSA that actually got us into this hole. Trust me, it will make Fred look like a lightweight.

A Perfect Storm

The Government’s fiddling of the official stats on knife crime has made me think about how campaigners misuse data for their own benefit. The rise of the ‘single issue fanatic’ (often called a SIF in the trade) has been astounding in the last 20 years (tobacco, phone masts, MMR, 4x4s, dangerous dogs, handguns etc). Why? I think a number of factors have been instrumental:

a. Weak politicians who are desperate to appear relevant
b. The 24/7 news agenda that simply must be filled
c. The all dominating dogma of the ‘human interest’ angle on every topic
d. The quite astonishing human appetite for conspiracy theories

(These last two are the lifeblood of the soft left ‘media luvvie’ intelligentsia who dominate control of the media).

Thus, you can get anything banned if you know how. Below, the 10 steps to the perfect storm.

I am an SIF and want to get Government to crack down on…whatever it is I am against…let’s say, Bic biros for sake of argument.

Campaign Plan

1. Procure research showing a theoretical health concern

Anything will do really. Just a rogue bloke whose first name is ‘Professor’ or ‘Doctor’ will suffice. Actually a woman is better, especially if she is vaguely attractive. The fact that the risk is in the 0.000 range simply doesn’t matter.

2. Calculate a ‘theoretical body count’

Remember to turn “one in 1,000,000 children could be at risk” into “millions of children could be at risk”. (In reality, 60 children in the UK could be at risk, probably about as many that could be at risk of being struck by lightning or being in a car accident with a member of the Royal family in fact).

3. Ramp up the ‘theoretical body count’

Go global baby: “100s of millions of children could be at risk worldwide”. Now we’re cooking.

4. Find a couple of case studies

Get said academic to trawl A&E records to find the three children who died from swallowing a Bic biro top in the last five years. Sign the parents up. Film interviews with them – cue shots of parents looking at pictures of their dead children on the mantelpiece, sitting on the sofa leafing through the family photo album, must make them cry though, that sort of thing.

5. Establish a website with some factsheets

‘Facts that Bic don’t want you to know’. Easy. Done in a day.

7. Scare a trio of backbench MPs (one from each main party)

Ideally these should be constituency MPs of signed up parents. Film ‘rent-a-quote’ MPs outside Parliament: “One death is one death too many”. Prepare Early Day Motion, demand for meetings with ministers (“Legislation required at the very least”). MPs must call for Government action. You know the score.

8. Day before launch

Call up Bic at one minute to five o’clock in the afternoon and demand to know what they are doing. Must ask on tape: “How many children has your product killed in the last year alone?” Record the inevitable “No Comment”, probably from the receptionist or night security guard.

9. Launch campaign

Run a big media story in the Saturday Daily Mail. “We asked Bic to speak to us but they were unavailable for comment”. Sit back and wait for the telephone to ring off the hook.

10. Feed story to all media outlets for Sunday

Best targets: Sunday Mirror, News of the World, Observer, BBC TV news. Ensure academic, crying parents and tame MPs available for all Sunday TV bulletins and political chat shows.

Result: for sure on Monday a Government minister will cry crocodile tears on every channel and explain the outline legislation that the Government “has been working on for months”.

Job done.