Category Archives: Apology

BBC apologises for misleading on pro-Palestine demonstrations

Misleading report: these people were not voicing their support for Hamas, BBC.

I was going to do a piece about this but the BBC has – for once – got its correction out first!

In a report on October 16, a BBC newsreader read out the following words:

I would have pointed out that the demonstrations were not about backing Hamas in any way; thousands upon thousands of people across the UK had taken to the streets to show support for the two million innocent Palestinian people whose lives are threatened by Israeli war crimes – collective punishment (cutting off their food, water and power, and bombing innocent civilians in retribution for the attack by Hamas), and forcible transfer (ordering a million of them to move from northern Gaza to the south of the region).

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But I didn’t get the chance before the BBC broadcast a correction:

Methinks Auntie must have received quite a lot of complaints about that one!

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Gavin Williamson wanted to clear his name of bullying accusation. He failed

Williamson apologises: he has failed to clear himself of bullying Wendy Morton and was ordered to make reparation to her.

Serial Tory failure Gavin Williamson has failed again – to clear his name of bullying fellow Tory Wendy Morton.

He quit as Minister Without Portfolio last year after sending expletive-laden texts to former Tory chief whip Wendy Morton, accusing her of excluding some MPs from the late Queen’s funeral last September.

Ms Morton lodged a complaint with Parliament in November and Williamson quit his government position in order to clear his name – but the inquiry found against him and he was ordered to deliver his apology in a speech in the House of Commons on Monday (September 4).

He said he accepted he had used “intemperate and inappropriate language,” and he accepted “the decision that my conduct constituted a breach” of the policy.

“I will do my utmost to ensure this does not happen again,” he added.

Opposition parties have questioned why Mr Sunak appointed Sir Gavin as a minister in October last year, after being told about Ms Morton’s complaint – and it is a good question, especially as Williamson’s apology comes at the same time as Chris Pincher’s suspension.

Pincher had to resign as a Tory whip after he admitted groping two men. It subsequently transpired that then-prime minister Boris Johnson had promoted him to the Whips’ office, despite having been informed of previous transgressions by the same MP.

Bullying is not the same as sexual offences – but the fault of the Tory leader in both cases is the same; giving a job to an MP whose integrity was, at the very least, questionable (and proved to be nonexistant).

Williamson sent the abusive texts to Ms Morton on September 13, 2022, complaining that he and other colleagues had been excluded from the Queen’s funeral for political reasons. Here are the most offending messages:

Ms Morton complained to the Conservative Party about his conduct on October 24. He refused to apologise.

Ex-Conservative Party Chair Jake Berry said he told Rishi Sunak of the complaint on the day it was made. Sunak subsequently made Williamson a Cabinet minister.

Morton handed Williamson’s messages to the Conservative Party on October 26, two days after she made her complaint – but Sunak insisted that he did not see them until they were published in The Sunday Times on November 6.

Do you believe that?

An official investigation into Williamson’s words to Ms Morton was launched on November 8 – but, by then, other allegations had been made against him.

According to the BBC,

Sir Gavin told a senior civil servant to “slit your throat” and “jump out of the window” when he was defence secretary.

An unnamed official told the Guardian Sir Gavin, who is now a Cabinet Office minister in Rishi Sunak’s government, “deliberately demeaned and intimidated” them.

The official said they raised concerns to the Ministry of Defence’s human resources department but made no formal complaint.

Williamson did not deny using the language mentioned in the accusation.

But he issued a statement: “I strongly reject this allegation and have enjoyed good working relationships with the many brilliant officials I have worked with across government.

“No specific allegations have ever been brought to my attention.”

Williamson resigned in order to fight Ms Morton’s claims against him on November 8. He also said he did not want to become a distraction from the work of Sunak’s government.

It was the third time the serial quitter had resigned a government role.

Williamson’s previous Cabinet role ended when he was sacked as Education Secretary in September 2021.

At the time, I wrote the following:

England’s education system is (momentarily) stronger with the announcement that Gavin Williamson has been sacked from his post as the minister in charge, as part of a Cabinet reshuffle by Boris Johnson.

His two-year tenure stands as testament to the fact that having no Education Secretary is better than having him in the role.

Incompetent Williamson’s failures are fast becoming the stuff of legend, with the headline disasters well-known to all of us:

In 2020, when A-level students could not take their exams because of Covid-19, he used a algorithm to allocate marks – that was rigged to make it seem that privately-educated pupils were more intelligent than the riff-raff from the state system that he ran.

He later tried to force disadvantaged, black and minority ethnic children in England to take exams when other kids didn’t have to, claiming that they respond better to examination conditions. It seemed clear racism – an attempt to put these children down with duff results.

He made it clear that the government expected all schools to open as normal in January this year – then closed them after just one day because prime minister Boris Johnson ordered a new lockdown and he was unaware of it.

He decided to foist Latin as a subject onto state school pupils, rather than anything useful. At the time I wrote: “Having killed the economy with Brexit and enormous numbers of the population with Covid-19, the Tories now want us all to learn a dead language.”

He scrapped dozens of legal rights for children.

He also wanted a clampdown on indiscipline in schools after the return from Covid-19 lockdown – but provided no evidence whatsoever to support his wild claim that our children had gone feral.

Before Boris Johnson gave him the bullet, it was suggested that Williamson would blame school pupils and parents if Covid-19 infections spike after the start of the school term.

Prior to that, he was Defence Secretary under Theresa May – but was sacked from that job too.

In May 2019, I wrote:

Theresa May has sacked Gavin Williamson as Defence Secretary, saying she has “lost confidence in his ability to serve in the role of defence secretary and as a member of her cabinet”.

It appears he is to take responsibility for an embarrassing leak from the National Security Council, stating that Huawei is to take a contract to help provide the UK’s 5G network, despite concerns over spyware funnelling information to the Chinese government.

But was he really to blame?

Mr Williamson himself is on the record as swearing on his children’s life that he had nothing to do with the leak.

But it seems an inquiry run by Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill has found that he was responsible for the leak, which has angered the United States government, which has banned Huawei from government networks and pressurised the UK to do the same.

Alternatively, some have suggested that the US is simply protecting its interests, saying Huawei provides better service than American firms.

According to The Independent, Mr Williamson is said to believe his firing was “politically motivated”.

It has also been alleged that Williamson was knighted on the wishes of Boris Johnson because he knew of connections between Johnson and Russia that the former prime minister wanted to keep quiet.

So there are certainly a lot of claims about Williamson. Did he ever clear up those previous allegations? Not as far as This Writer is aware.

Has he cleared up the other allegations of bullying? Not as far as This Writer is aware.

It is possible that some – especially among the Conservative Party – will want to close the book on Gavin Williamson’s alleged wrongdoing now.

I would suggest that it would be premature to do so. Let’s have all the answers first.

Right-wing news channel falsely accuses Jewish cartoonist of making anti-Semitic cartoon

Michael Rosen: He’s Jewish but has previously been accused of anti-Semitism over his support for Jeremy Corbyn. Now he has been accused of anti-Semitism on an entirely false premise.

We seem to be living in an age of accusing Jewish people of being anti-Semitic.

It’s utter insanity – this time perpetrated by right-wing current affairs channel GB News against Jewish poet and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen.

It seems GB News presenter Katherine Forster accidentally attributed a cartoon in The Guardian to Mr Rosen, when it was actually by Martin Rowson.

Unfortunately for all concerned, this particular cartoon featured a depiction of recently-resigned BBC Chairman Richard Sharp – who is Jewish – with a box marked Goldman Sachs, where he used to work, that contained what appeared to be a puppet of the current prime minister Rishi Sunak, an animal that looks like a squid and a CV – while Boris Johnson, on a high pile of an unidentifiable substance (the Independent seems to have reckoned money) calls out encouragingly to him.

The cartoon has been described as having “antisemitic imagery” such as “outsized, grotesque features” alongside “money and power”.

Mr Rowson has apologised profusely for the image, as reported in The Independent:

“Satirists, even though largely licenced to speak the unspeakable in liberal democracies, are no more immune to f****** things up than anyone else, which is what I did here.

“I know Richard Sharp is Jewish; actually, while we’re collecting networks of cronyism, I was at school with him, though I doubt he remembers me.

“His Jewishness never crossed my mind as I drew him as it’s wholly irrelevant to the story or his actions, and it played no conscious role in how I twisted his features according to the standard cartooning playbook.”

The Guardian has also published an apology on Twitter:

And the cartoon has indeed been removed.

GB News seems to have been more reticent about apologising for its own transgression.

Mr Rosen contacted the channel – via Twitter – at 4pm on Saturday, and requested a response detailing what it proposed to do about the error:

He repeated his request almost a quarter of an hour later:

From the tweet that follows, it seems GB News deleted its tweeted clip showing discussion of the cartoon, but not before it had been viewed 79,000 times.

At around 5pm, Ms Forster tweeted an apology to Mr Rosen and said the tweet had been removed. He responded with gratitude for her words, and with a statement crystallising his own view – that GB News should broadcast a correction along with its own apology:

He had already requested a correction by the time he had responded to Ms Forster:

By now, his supporters were making suggestions of their own. Mr Rosen, in the spirit of fairness, said he was waiting for GB News to respond:

Then he even put up a suggested wording:

That was at 5.36pm, Saturday, April 29. I’ve seen no apology/correction from GB News – although it has published a story about The Guardian‘s apology for the cartoon.

That piece does not mention or apologise for the broadcast comments about Martin Rowson.

This Site has contacted GB News to find out what the channel intends to do – if anything.

If no apology is forthcoming, it will be up to Mr Rosen to decide whether to take the matter further.

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