Apparently a Jewish woman who helped drive many of her fellow Jews out of the Labour Party for anti-Israel sentiment hasn’t been to that country since 1994 and is shocked to discover the apartheid it operates against Palestinians.
Does that ring true to you?
Or is she just professing horror in order to validate her own behaviour over the last few years?
It’s a bit complicated but here’s the journalist Jonathan Cook to explain:
Here is Dame Hodge telling British Jews they can't 'stand by' as Israel sinks into the abyss. And yet she's been one of the main instigators of the purges in Labour that have seen those very same Jews expelled in disproportionately high numbers – for supposed anti-semitism
Hodge isn't concerned about improving life for Palestinians – that's exactly what Labour's anti-racist Jews were persecuted for trying to do. It's the Israel lobby's attempt to create distance from Netanyahu's fascist government as a way to maintain their own credibility
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Hanged in effigy: how many people wished the statue’s head would snap off after a rope was strung around its neck in order to allow a crane to place it on its plinth?
We now know that the man who threw eggs at Grantham’s new statue of Margaret Thatcher was an arts centre deputy director who lives on the street where she was born.
According to Metro, Jeremy Webster proclaimed that he was “the first egg thrower” on social media shortly after doing it.
But the paper’s claim that the 59-year-old made a “call to arms” may have been exaggerated. He had tweeted, “Grantham unveils Thatcher statue, so guess where we are going?” That could have referred simply to himself and his partner, who filmed the egging.
The Telegraph also claimed that he put up a now-deleted post on Instagram which said: “South Wales miners are heading up to Grantham to remove her head.”
It is certainly known that the statue is a target for vandals:
After a large-scale £100,000 unveiling ceremony was approved by South Kesteven District Council in 2020, a Facebook group proposed an ‘egg-throwing contest’ at the event.
More than 2,400 people confirmed they would take part in ‘egg throwing’ and ‘potentially graffiti art’.
As a result of the warning, the council installed a CCTV camera directly opposite the statue.
Call it a hunch, but This Writer doesn’t think CCTV is going to stop anybody from expressing themselves.
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Stretching her neck: some commenters have suggested the only appropriate element of the statue’s placement was the fact that a rope was fastened around its throat, making it appear that the controversial former prime minister was being hanged.
Council workers have placed a controversial statue of Margaret Thatcher on its specially-high plinth, behind a (temporary) wall, in an unannounced move – and still failed to prevent the public having its say.
The £300,000 statue was offered to South Kesteven District Council after plans to erect it in Parliament Square in London were rejected.
It has been placed on a 10ft (3m) high plinth under CCTV surveillance to minimise the risk of vandalism.
However, within two hours of it being put in place someone had thrown eggs at it.
That’s true:
Some might say it would be appropriate for bright businesspeople – in the spirit of enterprise that Thatcher supported – to launch guided tours of Thatcher’s history in Grantham, culminating in a visit to the statue… with eggs provided and included in the cost.
Council leader Kelham Cooke said that, as Grantham was Thatcher’s home town, it was appropriate that the debate on her legacy should take place there.
It seems clear her critics have passed the first comment.
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Accused and accuser: Prince Andrew (left) is said to have sexually abused the woman now known as Virginia Giuffre (right) while she was still a child – and is doing everything he can to avoid facing trial for it. This in itself casts suspicion on his claims of innocence. And it may be bringing the UK Monarchy into disrepute for protecting him.
Let’s start this article with the important question: is anybody tracking down the perverts who had sex with underage girls provided by Ghislaine Maxwell?
It’s all very well saying that the procurer has been convicted so the route via which these vile creatures gratify their disgusting desires has been cut off – but it only means they will find other ways.
Police – in America – are going through the now-infamous black book kept by Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, but they are treating the associates listed within merely as possible witnesses, rather than as possible suspects (until and unless evidence is found to justify criminal proceedings).
That may come as a relief to people like Keir Starmer’s recently-appointed henchman Peter Mandelson, who has 10 entries in the book (suggesting that he wanted the paedophile pair to be able to get hold of him wherever he may have been), and newly-to-be-knighted Tony Blair, who has an entry in the book himself.
It may not be so much of a comfort to Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, who appears in the book 16 times and is accused of child sex offences.
And the repercussions may undermine the foundations of the UK Monarchy – an institution that has survived for almost a thousand years. That’s plenty of time to fall into filth and corruption – and to hide it by abusing the privileges that come with the highest position in the land.
It’s being reported that Andrew has just begun to show concern that his alleged crimes may bring down the Monarchy. It seems he had not previously spared a thought for the fact that being involved with people in a paedophile ring (whether he was a part of it or not) might bring that ancient institution into disrepute.
In This Writer’s opinion, the acts that have really put the future of the Monarchy in question are his attempts at evasion – his refusal to travel to America to face charges is not the behaviour we would expect of an innocent man; I understand he has claimed that his accuser should not be permitted to continue with her case because she now lives in Australia, not the USA (but that should have nothing to do with it; this is an international sex crime case and it seems logical to base the prosecution in the country where the offence was allegedly committed); and it seems he has also put forward a claim to have been in a UK branch of Pizza Express with one of his daughters at the time of the alleged offence – although nobody has come forward to corroborate the claim (and members of the public would certainly remember, even from 21 years ago, if a Royal walked into their local fast food joint).
His continued attempts to avoid justice are hugely harmful to the UK Monarchy because it makes the Queen complicit in the alleged crimes; Andrew is seen as having committed them (whether he really did or not is immaterial to this part of it) and then gone running behind his mother’s skirt tails for protection from the consequences.
Bear in mind that both Epstein and Maxwell, along with another sex offender – the US film producer Harvey Weinstein, were photographed at the 18th birthday celebrations of Andrew’s daughter, Princess Beatrice. It seems that Royalty and sex crime are well-entwined.
In his evasion attempts, Andrew is hugely aided by the UK’s mass media organisations – particularly the BBC. Maxwell was the daughter of a newspaper magnate (who was himself disgraced after he fell off his yacht and died, when it was found that he had been stealing from the Mirror Group’s pension fund). This means she is well-known to many of the journalists who have been writing about her – and their work has reflected their own sympathy for this child abuser.
The hypocrisy enough to send you reeling: the same people who took glee in claiming that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn should take responsibility for his brother Piers advocating criminal damage of Covid-19 vaccine-supporting MPs’ offices have conspicuously failed to suggest that Boris Johnson should take similar responsibility for his sister Rachel’s article, It’s hard not to pity Ghislaine Maxwell.
This Writer has absolutely no pity for anybody who uses children to gratify their (or other people’s) perverse sexual desires.
The BBC’s editorial position has also been characterised as calling for us to bless this poor lost soul – with manipulative choices of verbiage. So when referring to the girls or children who were abused in Maxwell’s paedo ring, the BBC describes them as “underage women”.
That’s sickening.
And there is worse. Coverage refers to Maxwell by her first name, as though she’s our friend; her victims are described as “accusers”; after previous reports of similar crimes referred to “grooming gangs”, there is no such attempt to whip up outrage here (quite the opposite); and there are no calls to interrogate participants in the abuse (going back to the black book).
The BBC went too far when it booked people who are known to be sympathetic to Maxwell, to comment on the case in its news programmes.
The backlash, after Epstein’s former lawyer Alan Dershowitz – himself now accused of child sex crimes – appeared on BBC bulletins, giving a sympathetic view of Maxwell and insisting on both his own and Andrew’s innocence, was huge.
The corporation’s bosses had to issue a statement admitting that Dershowitz’s appearance had not met BBC editorial standards, and that the matter would be investigated to find out “how it happened”.
The statement led to what some have described as “the Twitter burn of the year” – from the Sunday Sport‘s Twitter feed: “That’s putting it mildly. It didn’t even meet OUR editorial standards.”
Of course we all know how it happened. Dershowitz was booked by a BBC booking agent who – knowing that he is himself a suspect – contacted him or his agent/manager and asked to interview him. They then falsely presented him as an independent legal expert. It was deliberate – and deliberately misleading.
And now the BBC has lost any right to claim that its news coverage is impartial in any way, as people across the UK are accurately accusing it of deliberately protecting the rich and privileged at the expense of the poor and vulnerable.
I say accurately because, having admitted its fault over Dershowitz, the BBC compounded the mistake by booking Maxwell’s brother Ian, who was interviewed about his sister the very next day.
Of course he made a big fuss about claiming she was innocent – on a news platform that is watched and believed by 70 per cent of the UK’s population. Think about that.
A former BBC political news editor, Rob Burley, has claimed that failures like the Dershowitz booking are results of budget cuts at the corporation – to which critics responded by pointing out that such errors exclusively benefit the UK’s rich and powerful elite. They quoted a current saying: “It’s not a bug; it’s a feature” of the BBC.
Even former BBC reporters like Adil Ray have railed against the corporation’s biased coverage. In a tweet, he stated: “When I filmed a doc on the sexual exploitation of young girls by some Pakistani men it would not have been acceptable to hear a defence from their brothers. Why is it ok now?”
The answer is obvious: families of abusers who travel on buses, instead of luxury cars or yachts, simply don’t get that platform. And the question isn’t why the former don’t – it’s why the latter do.
And let’s face it – the BBC doesn’t have a good record of identifying, accusing and denouncing child sex offenders. Look at the way Jimmy Savile was protected for decades. He was a close friend of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, of course.
Sadly, this deference to the rich and powerful isn’t limited to the BBC and Rachel Johnson – whose bias towards Maxwell is likely to be due to the fact that the child sex procurer was at Balliol College, Oxford, with her own brother: UK prime minister Boris Johnson.
See how the people in this group link up and protect each other?
Returning to Andrew, it’s one reason we should be grateful that proceedings against him are taking place in the United States; it is unlikely that the UK’s compromised legal system would ever have even accused him. It didn’t accuse Savile during his lifetime, after all.
And let’s remember that Metropolitan police commissioner Cressida Dick is another alumnus of Balliol College, Oxford, who may well have known Maxwell there at some point – either as a student or as a former student.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how accusations against this fellow Balliol alumnus may have been taken by a Dick police administration, because we have the evidence of the Christmas 2020 parties that allegedly involved fellow Balliol alumnus Boris Johnson to help us.
That’s right: if Ghislaine Maxwell had been accused in the UK, the police would probably have responded by saying they don’t investigate incidents from more than a year ago.
Below please find material from Twitter that may provide valuable further information:
Ghislaine Maxwell deserves to go to prison, but where the fuck are all the men who actually had sex with these girls???
Now that Ghislaine Maxwell has been found guilty of selling children for sexual abuse, don’t you think we should investigate whom she sold the children to?
I don’t want to hear another word about how tragic her life is, only want to hear about the devastation caused to victims
Julian Assange faces 175 years in a Supermax prison for exposing the crimes of the powerful, but Ghislaine Maxwell only faces "up to" 65 years in prison for running an international child-sex trafficking ring for the global elite?
Three sex offenders, including two paedophiles, attending the 18th birthday party of some Princess at Windsor Castle. We’ve really no idea how big this cess-pit is. https://t.co/oTI1HPNFy4
Interesting how people were screaming at Jeremy Corbyn for the actions of his brother Piers, are now silent on that fact that Boris Johnson’s sister literally wrote an article “It's Hard Not to Pity Ghislaine Maxwell"
For anyone in any doubt about whom the @BBC serve the #Maxwell case exposes its role in defending the establishment. It’s not independent it’s not neutral it’s a tool of the powerful to influence how we think.
The framing of this case & the language used @BBC is a reminder of how the narrative is being controlled. First names of the guilty; accusers not victims; no "grooming gang" outrage; no drive to interrogate those who participated; sympathetic spokespeople. https://t.co/vpc9vXsjde
If only the TV and radio stations showing compassion to convicted child trafficker #Maxwell would direct that care and understanding to the survivors we would live in a better world.
As well as being one of the accused, this is the guy @BBCNews went to for first reaction to Ghislane Maxwell’s guilty verdict. pic.twitter.com/trpa7RP4KJ
Not satisfied with giving Alan Derschowitz a platform to attack Desmond Tutu as an "anti-Semite" and a "bigot" the BBC two days later give him a platform to defend Ghislaine Maxwell… POST CONVICTION!!!! Horrendous from the beeb
Even longstanding critics of the BBC were shocked by its decision to interview Alan Dershowitz following the Ghislaine Maxwell verdict. What does this tell us about the state of the organisation? (Thread) pic.twitter.com/gvfBWikhsY
Ian Maxwell is on r4Today defending convicted sex trafficker #ghislanemaxwell just now. Can you imagine the #bbc giving the family of a convicted Pakistani grooming gang leader a similar platform to defend a relative?!
Why is @BBC giving airtime to the Maxwell family on their main news bulletin? Ghislaine was found guilty of sex trafficking. The Maxwell family cannot accept the verdict. Families of abusers who travel on buses, not luxury cars or yachts, do not get this platform.
Why is the BBC now running an interview with Ghislaine Maxwell’s brother, pleading her innocence, on its main bulletin on R4? Would they do that for any other child sex offender found guilty in a court of law?
So yesterday the BBC was forced to issue an apology for inviting Alan Dershowitz to “analyse” Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction as he clearly wasn’t an independent voice.
Yet today they’ve literally handed a primetime platform to *her own brother* to back her up!
BBC & others running interview by brother of convicted #ghislanemaxwell, claiming her innocence. In 2011, when I filmed a doc on the sexual exploitation of young girls by some Pakistani men it would not have been acceptable to hear a defence from their brothers. Why is it ok now?
Does anyone remember the relatives of the Rochdale child abusers being given prime BBC slots after a guilty verdict to protest their innocence and undermine the testimonies of the victims? https://t.co/WiRqDLxbJD
Confess I'm genuinely surprised by the ongoing tone of the BBC's coverage of Maxwell's conviction. Mostly because it's hard to see who benefits. My best reading, it's not conspiratorial, it's a reflection of the deeply embedded deference to power & wealth across the organisation.
Interesting how quiet royal correspondents are. Or could it be, they are waiting for instructions from their publication owners, who in turn are waiting for the Palace to instruct their next move?
Of course the BBC News framing of Ghislaine Maxwell is appalling, they've been doing it for decades to protect the establishment, they lied about Scottish Independence, they lied about Jeremy Corbyn, etc Analyse any BBC News story and it's twisted to protect the powers that be.
Memo to @BBCNews : You can be rich, expensively educated and a criminal. It seems that you find that hard to believe, but trust me, just open your eyes and you will find the evidence all around you. And some are even convicted, however unlikely you think that to be.
It is surely now time for all those politicians and other public figures that have visited one of Epstein’s or Maxwells homes to be investigated for possible involvement in child sexual abuse. Can we now start to put together a list of U.K. residents known to be associated.
I fear that were Maxwell truly looking for a deal by giving evidence against Epstein's rich and powerful friends, she would suddenly discover she too had committed suicide.https://t.co/7zqyMTm326
The conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell is welcomed. I will state I believe after 3 years work on this case, I believe she was the chief and the former taxi driver Epstein the functionary. I now call on the Met Police to reopen their 1994 investigation into her activities in London.
I don't say this lightly, but I have grave doubts about whether the UK law enforcement and justice systems would have brought down two powerful figures like Epstein and Maxwell.
— Dorset Eye (Independent Citizen Community Media) (@dorset_eye) December 31, 2021
It’s amazing and shocking to think that after the disastrous impact of the Jimmy Saville cover up on the BBC, they’re still going with the “let’s be soft on famous paedos” strategy. pic.twitter.com/VltDlePCMP
We need to know who is paying Prince Andrew’s legal fees
I suspect it is the British people
It is hard to think of a more despicable use of our money than to help a very rich man in his attempt to escape justice from credible allegations of child rape
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Great minds think alike: I was going to put together an image with the caption “Johnson is the pits” but someone got there before me – the Mirror, by the look of it.
The worst part of Boris Johnson’s comments on pit closures is not their crass insensitivity – it is the clearly-stated intention behind them.
Even the Tory-supporting BBC couldn’t hold back from commenting that “He is reported to have laughed and told reporters: ‘I thought that would get you going.'”
He had said:
“Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country, we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether.”
He wanted to cause offence with his claim that Margaret Thatcher helped the environment by closing coal mines in the mid-1980s.
He knows perfectly well that she was no environmentalist; she wanted the mines closed in order to break the power of the unions. It was part of her plan to put millions of people out of work, because this would give employers the whip hand in wage negotiations (they would tell any applicant who wanted more that there were plenty of other people seeking a job).
Predictably, the Tory-supporting BBC has supported Johnson’s claim with a sidebar by “environment analyst” Roger Harrabin (who?) claiming that Thatcher had a point because she told the UN that greenhouse gases were “changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways” – in 1989.
That was five years later – an eternity in which she and her advisers had enjoyed plenty of time to dream up an excuse for the pit closures that plunged so many lives into poverty, uncertainty and despair.
Harrabin’s comment, “Her pit closures were not part of a green policy, but they did fortuitously show the UK could prosper without coal,” was as insensitive as Johnson’s. Tell that to the families of the mine workers who lost their livelihoods, and who are still struggling, even today!
Who exactly does Harrabin mean by “the UK”? Bosses of our big-business energy firms? But, they’re all foreign executives, most of whom work for the governments of EU countries. Privatisation led to shares in the formerly-nationalised energy industry being bought by those EU-based concerns.
Johnson, of course, is still claiming that the UK has Brexited itself away from giving money to the EU but this is clearly untrue.
Remember his Brexit campaign, when he lied that the NHS would be given £350 million a week? That investment might have done us all some good, prior to the coronavirus crisis but it was never going to happen because the Tories have been running the NHS down to make it ripe for privatisation – which would have made the UK even less capable of handling Covid-19.
Remember when he tried to make a joke of the massive loss of lives in the Libyan city of Sirte during that nation’s civil war? Or when he had to be stopped from inappropriately quoting a colonial poem by Kipling in Myanmar?
Remember when Eddie Mair, on BBC Radio 4, read out a litany of Johnson’s racist behaviour, to the dismay of Amber Rudd?
When Johnson refused to condemn widespread police violence against civilians in Catalonia?
When he spoke nonsense about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Parliament, and the Iranian government used it to threaten her with an extra five years in prison, beyond the five she was already serving on a trumped-up charge?
When he was reprimanded by then-Commons Speaker John Bercow for referring to Emily Thornberry in “frankly sexist” terms?
When he praised Viktor Orban on his election win in Hungary after an anti-Semitic campaign?
Put all that together and you know Johnson won’t apologise for this latest outrage?
Why would he? He’s a serial offender.
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The disgrace – no, the word ‘disgrace’ isn’t strong enough: this is the Sun story that mentally scarred survivors of the Hillsborough disaster and the families of those who died. It wasn’t ‘The Truth’ at all; it was a pack of lies.
More than five years after a jury ruled that 96 people were killed unlawfully in the Hillsborough disaster – and that their behaviour did not contribute to the situation – police forces have agreed to pay compensation to more than 600 people for mental distress caused by the attempted cover-up.
I have two questions.
Firstly: why did it take so long for South Yorkshire and West Midlands police to agree to pay up?
Secondly: Why aren’t the Conservative Party and Rupert Murdoch’s News International paying compensation, too?
Let’s go into the circumstances:
We all know that the Hillsborough Disaster was a fatal human crush at an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, hosted at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough Stadium on April 15, 1989.
It happened due to gross negligence by match commander David Duckenfield of South Yorkshire Police.
The police service then attempted to hide the fact that its failures caused 96 deaths and 766 injuries – the worst disaster in UK sporting history – by trying to blame it on the fans who were injured and died, saying those people caused the tragedy by being drunk and misbehaving.
West Midlands was the force appointed to investigate the disaster, but has since been accused of malpractices and failures that have been subject to a long-running investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).
Not only that, though: the prime minister of the day, the Conservative Margaret Thatcher, refused to release information that made the police look bad.
And The Sun, a newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, published a story headlined The Truth that was nothing but a pack of lies, supporting the fantasy created by the police.
This Writer believes a strong argument could be made that the newspaper story – which led to The Sun being boycotted in Liverpool ever since – caused more distress, more anguish, to survivors, and to relatives and friends of the deceased, than the police cover-up on which it was based (although I know it could not have been written if the police and the Tory prime minister had not lied in the first place).
Civil claims for compensation due to malfeasance in public office by the two police forces were submitted in 2015, during inquests into the reasons the 96 died.
The claimants said the lies had caused them to suffer trauma and psychiatric damage, and the compensation is to cover not only those injuries but also the cost of treatment and counselling.
Those claims were made nearly six years ago and the payments haven’t been made yet (at the time of writing). So I repeat: why not?
And how much are these people getting, to make one of the claimants describe the payout as “insulting” in The Guardian‘s news article about it?
The behaviour of the police was shocking, and undermines public faith in the reliability of our law enforcement officers across the UK – not just in the forces concerned.
But – as mentioned above – they weren’t the only organisations caught lying; they weren’t the only people who deliberately caused further distress over Hillsborough.
Margaret Thatcher withheld information – which was as bad as lying because it presented a false impression that the police were blameless.
She was able to do so because she was prime minister at the time – and she was prime minister because she was leader of the Conservative Party that had formed the then-current government.
She died in 2013 but it seems perfectly reasonable to hold the Tories responsible for putting her in a position where she could distort the facts. Why has the Conservative Party avoided compensating these people?
And that Sun headline has gone down in the history of journalistic infamy. The disgust of the city of Liverpool – in perpetuity – is not enough. Why has News International not offered compensation as well?
All three of these organisations should have offered payouts voluntarily, considering the enormity of the harm they have done, but they didn’t.
The police are only paying up because they were forced to.
Perhaps that aspect of this tragedy is the most damning of all.
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The shenanigans after yesterday’s (March 11) meeting of Labour’s National Executive Committee make This Writer glad not to be a member of that party any more.
The fact that Margaret Beckett is being allowed to continue as chair of the NEC after calling fellow committee member Laura Pidcock a “silly cow” on a Zoom meeting is unacceptable.
Pidcock had made a perfectly reasonable point after a motion to recall Labour’s party conference had been rejected with no vote taken, in a snub to party democracy.
The motion sought to recall the full party conference, possibly to coincide with Labour’s women’s conference in June, for reasons This Writer set out in a previous article:
The motion… reads: “Discussion in local Labour Party meetings has been suppressed; motions banned; scores of activists suspended; and anger and disillusionment is exploding across our lay membership across the party.
“Members are leaving in droves and many more are expressing frustration and dissatisfaction at the attack on democracy and free speech. Many members are saying it doesn’t feel like the Labour Party anymore.”
These are serious, party-splitting concerns, and it is unacceptable that Laura Pidcock, asking how members could have this out-of-hand rejection of those concerns explained to them, was dismissed as a “silly cow”.
The reaction on the social media was unequivocal:
I remember sitting in on an NEC meeting where expelling Simon Danczuk was discussed after he’d sent explicit messages to a minor. Margaret Beckett argued against it on the basis we “need a by-election like a hole in the head”. Can see from this she’s still stinking the place out https://t.co/lcZP6epU54
This is NOT how ANYONE should speak to a colleague, let alone the chair of Labour's sovereign body! 'Dame' Margaret Beckett should step down with immediate effect, such bullying, disgusting behaviour will never be tolerated. https://t.co/qI5HHrrBwP
— Damo #JoinAUnion #20More4All (@Cornish_Damo) March 11, 2021
Margaret Beckett should be removed before she has the opportunity to resign.
International Women's Week and @LauraPidcock, has just left a zoom of @UKLabour NEC meeting having being called a, "Silly Cow" in the open, by the NEC chair Margaret Beckett.
If this abuse had happened in my union they would be off @Keir_Starmer.
The last commenter is right: this is indeed Keir Starmer’s Labour.
And he has made it a cess pit.
I am delighted that I am not a member of an organisation that puts Starmer and Beckett in positions of seniority that they clearly do not merit. I have a feeling that many other Labour members will also abandon the party in the face of this ill-treatment.
And I expect the general public will do the same at the May elections.
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It’s the first time This Writer has agreed with Margaret Hodge in years.
She has said the government must ban online anonymity or make social media directors personally liable for defamatory posts, revealing that she receives tens of thousands of abusive tweets a month:
Hodge accused the government of deliberately delaying the online harms bill in order to avoid difficult conversations with powerful social media companies, and said she was prepared to take up a campaign to make sure the law was tough enough.
The Online Harms Bill arises from a White Paper produced last year – and This Site commented on it at the time.
The White Paper – and now the Bill (I expect; I haven’t actually seen any information on it since April last year) proposed a statutory duty of care, to be conferred on media companies including platforms such as Facebook and Google, online messaging services like WhatsApp and file hosting sites.
They would be required to comply with a code of practice, setting out the steps they must take to meet the duty of care. This may include designing products and platforms to make them safer, directing users who have suffered harm towards support, combating disinformation (for example by using fact-checking services), and improving the transparency of political advertising.
They would be expected to co-operate with police and other enforcement agencies on illegalities including incitement of violence and selling illegal weapons.
And they would have to compile annual “transparency reports” detailing the amount of harmful content found on their platforms and what they are doing to combat it.
The government would have powers to direct the regulator – initially Ofcom, with a dedicated regulator to follow in the future – on specific issues such as terrorist activity or child sexual exploitation.
I pointed out last year that the White Paper did not include any measures to stop people creating anonymous accounts.
If Ms Hodge wants to see that happen now, then I am all for it.
It will stop me receiving much (but not all) of the abuse I get from people wrongly accusing me of anti-Semitism after the Labour Party expelled me under false pretences (as shown in court).
But that’s not what was on offer in April last year. As I made perfectly clear, “regulating online media platforms will not stop people posting “harmful” content to them, if there is nothing to stop them from doing so. It is farcically easy to create anonymous accounts, from which to post objectionable and/or abusive content.
“Shut one down? That’s fine – the individual responsible can have another up and running in a matter of minutes, if they don’t have multiple aliases working already.”
And I made that point that “it has been argued that people must have a right to be able to post anonymously, because of personal circumstances that make it important – possibly for their personal safety.”
My response: “Fine. A system can be devised in which people apply for anonymity and the number of people or organisations able to ascertain their real identity is strictly limited. That would allow these individuals to continue functioning in the online world. And it would prevent others from abusing social media platforms. Any posts from an unrecognised anonymous account would be easy to flag up and isolate.”
If Ms Hodge is proposing such a system then I am behind her every step of the way, and never mind all the other differences we have.
Although – as a staunch witch-hunter herself – I wonder whether she would approve of that outcome.
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.Margaret Hodge: she once praised Jeremy Corbyn glowingly but is singing a different tune now. Why the change of heart? Political expediency?
For a leader who said he wanted to bring unity to the Labour Party, Keir Starmer has certainly caused a lot of division.
This Writer thinks the best conclusion to be drawn by those of us who are watching is that he lied; Starmer’s plan was always to cause the maximum amount of upset possible and ensure that Labour is incapable of opposing the Conservatives at a time when the Tory government is itself weak.
That is the only explanation that makes any sense at all.
So today the antagonism has intensified – as witnessed in the articles of that exhaustive follower of Labour’s woes, Skwawkbox.
I’ll level with you: this story is likely to develop so quickly and in so many different directions that it will be hard to keep up. But I’ll try to keep tabs on developments and point you to those that are of interest.
Skwawkbox tells us first that the unions have condemned Starmer’s continuing persecution of Jeremy Corbyn:
Unite’s Len McCluskey condemned Starmer’s ‘vindictive and vengeful decision which despoils Party democracy and due process‘ – and for acting in ‘bad faith’ in his ‘continued persecution’ of Corbyn – and accused him of destroying ‘party unity and integrity’ while undermining the EHRC report he has pledged to implement in full.
Fair comment, I think…
CWU general secretary Dave Ward went even further, describing Starmer’s action as ‘shocking’ – because it gives Boris Johnson a free ride over the serious issues of the day. Millions face redundancy, hundreds are dying every day and the government gets away with it. But Starmer wants a civil war.
Meanwhile a well-respected former Labour MP has quit the party in disgust at Starmer’s behaviour.
Former Colne Valley MP – and PPS to John McDonnell, meaning she worked as part of his shadow Treasury team – Thelma Walker has resigned her membership of the Labour Party, while expressing solidarity with former party leader Jermey Corbyn.
She made her feelings clear in a tweeted response to another former Labour MP:
“Labour MPs used [the PLP] as a vehicle for self-aggrandisement and personal attacks on those they didn’t agree with.”
“[I] witnessed the toxic atmosphere [in the Parliamentary Labour Party] every Monday evening. My stomach used to turn over before I went in the room. The same people would leave the meeting and report to journalists.”
That’s not the kind of Labour Party This Writer wants to have and I don’t think you want it either. But thanks to Starmer and his cronies, that’s the party we have.
On the subject of Starmer’s cronies, one of the reasons he kept Corbyn from rejoining the PLP seems to have been a threat by Margaret Hodge that she would quit the party if it happened.
Hodge has been a vociferous opponent of Corbyn, having spent several years denouncing him as an anti-Semite. It seems she is also a hypocrite, as a comment uncovered today shows:
“I was fighting fascism and that would be completely up his street. He takes stands on things and he fights his corner. I like that about him.”
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StarmerLabour mouth Lisa Nandy was doing the media rounds this morning, telling us that her party’s leadership wants Joe Biden to be the new US president.
There’s nothing wrong with that if she had stopped there but she didn’t.
She went on to say that this was because Biden had supported former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands war.
That is not a good position for Labour to take and I’ll explain the reason,
Once the Falklands had been invaded by General Galtieri’s Argentinian forces (he wanted control of huge oil reserves beneath the South Atlantic), the UK had to go out and liberate the people who lived there and identify as UK citizens – there’s no doubt about that.
But it is widely argued that the reason they needed rescuing in the first place is that Thatcher withdrew naval support from the area, deliberately making the Falklands an attractive target for the Argentinian dictator.
The intention was tacitly to invite him into starting a war that Thatcher could win, in order to create a surge of public support for herself and the Conservative Party here in the UK that would carry them to a stronger victory at the next general election. And it succeeded.
That’s the belief. In the light of it, Nandy’s comment is tone deaf:
Biden has a long history of standing with the British people because 'he stood with the Thatcher government over the Falklands'.
This is Labour now is it Lisa Nandy!?! Pro the spurious war Thatcher started to win an election.pic.twitter.com/PYskSDmEF6
It shows that StarmerLabour rejects its own party as it was in the early 1980s, preferring to trumpet its support for the Tory leader who championed the neoliberal ideology that brought disaster down on working-class families across the UK.
It should come as no surprise that Nandy said this was a good thing. Her talent for media stupidity is fast becoming legendary. Here…
Lisa Nandy went on Radio 4 to announce that antisemitism is a form of racism that “punches up.” Bafflingly antisemitic behaviour here. Genuinely galling. pic.twitter.com/ClkCv1RGwB
… is a clip of her from the BBC’s PM on October 29, presenting the anti-Semitic view that all Jews are rich and that hatred of them is “punching up”. She gets away with making racist comments – and inciting racism with them – because she is on Starmer’s side and for no other reason.
Sadly, she would probably have got away with such a comment, even under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, either because complaints would have been dismissed by right-wingers in the Governance and Legal Unit who would want her to continue as an embarrassment to Corbyn, or because Corbyn, assailed by false accusations, did not want to rock the boat. That was his weakness and ultimately the reason he lost two elections and his Labour Party membership has now been suspended.
Fortunately the tweeting public has no such restraint:
I remember when the @LeFTCampaign organised an excellent post-election meeting in Wigan in January this year, and some asked why we hadn’t invited the sitting MP, Lisa Nandy, to which we simply replied “because it’s a meeting for socialists”
Is Lisa Nandy quite well? Does she actually know what the Falklands was about? She's so embarrassingly useless. Nothing she says is based on any firm knowledge or expertise. Why are people like her so vaunted in Labour? https://t.co/B9iVjz4nFt
— PeakIpsedixitism #IStandWithKeiraBell🕸️🗣🟥🇪🇺 (@Jessica12uk) November 4, 2020
It's telling that the most positive thing Lisa Nandy could say about Joe Biden is that he's pro-war. Says it all. https://t.co/VKRR7vQ1bi
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) November 4, 2020
Lisa Nandy says "this is a very dangerous moment for democracy"…
Ironic since she sits in a shadow cabinet who threw their own election twice because they prefererred a far-right populist regime to a caring democratic socialist Government#PoliticsLive
— Politically Homeless #ShockDoctrine #NHSPay15 (@respeak_uk) November 4, 2020
Other comments by the daft Nandy have also attracted justified criticism:
No, the problem is that Labour MPs like Lisa Nandy would rather lose to the Tories than allow Jeremy Corbyn to become PM. They would rather smear their own party as institutionally antisemitic than oppose Tory bills that legalise state murder. https://t.co/6wIWI4Eq7n
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) November 4, 2020
Finally, this comment stands as a harsh reminder to us all of the backstabbing ways adopted by Nandy and her kind of Labour MP:
No Lisa Nandy.
That was in the UK in June 2017 & December 2019 but you still managed to screw us over… https://t.co/0sNDoz62Do
If they get into power, they would backstab all of the voters who put them there.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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