Nick Cohen: Writing from London

In its Christmas quiz, Private Eye reminds readers that in 2009 the pornographer and newspaper owner Richard Desmond sued the business journalist Tom Bower for saying in passing that he told his editors what they must in their papers. Desmond insisted that the very idea that he might use his tame journalists to reward his friends and punish his enemies was a libellous slur.

“Which of the following evidence,” asks the Eye, “did Mr Justice Eady rule was relevant to the case and could go before the jury?

a) The full text of a memo from a former editor complaining that he was forced to run ‘unjustified stories to settle scores’.

b) A tape of Desmond telling a businessman ‘I’m the worst fucking enemy you’ll ever have’ three days before a negative story was printed about him.

c) The fact that Desmond once punched a night editor for not running a story he wanted in the paper.”

As anyone who watches restriction on freedom of expression will have guessed, Eady ruled all of the above inadmissible. He refused to allow evidence of proprietorial interference to be heard in a case about proprietorial interference. Read the whole thing

The alleged child abuse in Gerry Adams’s family is close to being a perfect metaphor for Ireland’s failure to confront the disaster of violent republicanism. With sexual violence as with political violence, with the personal as well as the political, Irish nationalism cannot break from the dire illusions of the past.

As of Christmas, we had learnt that in 1987, 14-year-old Aine Adams claimed to her Uncle Gerry that her father – his brother, Liam – had been abusing her since she was four years old. He believed her. “She was always a very good wee girl; I just couldn’t imagine a child like her making up such a serious allegation,” he told Ulster TV, before going on to reveal that his father, whom he had buried with full republican honours, had also been a paedophile. Inadvertently or not, the unexpected baring of a soul few suspected he possessed diverted attention and it took a few days for the press to move from praising Adams’s “bravery” in emoting about his father to the practical question of what he had done for his niece and for other potential victims.

As far as I can see, for 22 years, he did next to nothing until Aine forced the issue by going on camera. She told Adams she had proved that there was a prima facie case to answer by agreeing to a police medical examination. Instead of being supported, Aine was persuaded to stop co-operating with the forces of British imperialism. In 1995, Adams went further and insisted that all abused Catholic boys and girls should refuse to talk to the RUC because the authorities used “these issues for their own militaristic ends”.

Read the whole thing

A reader’s guide to Thatcherism from Standpoint

MODERN LAMENTS about the decline of deference notwithstanding, the English have always regarded their leaders as idiots or crooks, and nowhere more so than in their literature. Today’s politicians do not feel the need to pretend that they read books. But in the 20th century, they had to put on a show of sophistication. When interviewers asked them to name their favourite novelist, they invariably picked Trollope — the only great writer to respect their trade. Despite the long tradition of insubordination, however, this scene from Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! could only have been written at a particular time about a group of politicians the literary intelligentsia hated more than any other before or since. Thomas Winshaw, a creepy banker whose aim in life is to keep wealth and power in the hands of men like himself, is wondering how his equally repellent brother, Henry, a venal, backstabbing political fixer, got away with cutting the health-care budget.

“Well it’s quite simple, really.” Henry leaned forward and threw another log on the fire. It was a cold, dark afternoon, and they were enjoying tea and muffins in one of the Heartland Club’s private rooms. “The trick is to keep doing outrageous things. There’s no point in passing some scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have to get right in there and top it with something even worse, before the public has had the chance to work out what’s hit them. The thing about the British conscience, you see, is that it really has no more capacity than…a primitive home computer, if you like. It can only hold two or three things in its memory at the same time.”

Thomas nodded and bit eagerly into his muffin.

“Unemployment, for instance,” Henry continued. “When was the last time you saw a newspaper headline about unemployment? Nobody gives a hoot anymore.”

No one of my age and political leanings needs to be told that we are in the Eighties. Like the first bars of a Clash song on the radio, a stroke of Coe’s pen takes you back to the grim, furious and still misunderstood left-wing reaction to Margaret Thatcher.

Read the whole thing

This has been a bad week for freedom of expression in Britain but a useful one as well because it’s two most serious enemies – money power and religious terror – have been in plain view.

First, the money. The BBC folded in the face of libel threats from Trafigura, the charming multi-national which dumped waste off the Ivory Coast and whose lawyers – Carter Ruck, inevitably – not only tried to silence the entire national press but Parliament as well. The corporation’s refusal to challenge it and by extension the libel law, which so favours the wealthy, has infuriated every journalist and editor I have spoken to. Newspaper finances are collapsing, yet good editors still take cases to court. The BBC’s management might have joined them. Unlike their competitors, they enjoy a guaranteed income – the tidy sum of £3 billion a year. They could have afforded the £3 million cost of a libel case, and ought to have looked at Simon Singh, Peter Wilmshurst and others who are running the risk of personal bankruptcy in order to fight for reform. I think they and their supporters will win. As Jack of Kent points out, politicians are moving and there are signs that the senior judiciary are starting to worry about the growing national and international contempt for the law they preside over.

If we do get reform, BBC managers will benefit from fights won by better and braver men and women, whom they were not prepared to stand by when it might of made a difference. I am afraid the Trafigura climbdown reveals the BBC to be a parasitical organisation, which profits from the sacrifices of others.

Carry on reading

A young woman walks into a bar, drinks too much and carelessly shows the man next to her that she is carrying a wad of notes in her handbag. He mugs her on her way home and the police arrest him. The jurors mutter that she has no one to blame but herself, but they don’t mean it. However much of an idiot they think she has been, they still know that a mugging is the responsibility of a mugger and the guilty man must pay.

A young woman walks into a bar, drinks too much and carelessly flirts with the man next to her. He follows her and rapes her. The jurors mutter that she has no one to blame but herself, but this time they mean it. She is more than just an idiot.

The supposed provocation she offered absolves the alleged rapist of responsibility. It’s her fault now.

Take the case of a young and previously confident woman I know who walked into a bar.

Read the whole thing

Discussion in Standpoint of how spy thrillers in the Noughties dealt with every enemy spies might have been fighting except the enemy they actually were fighting.

“For connoisseurs of the issue-avoiding thriller, however, nothing beats Spooks. The real MI5 deals with radical Islam almost to the exclusion of all other threats. The BBC’s fictional MI5 deals with every threat except radical Islam. I appreciate there are better ways to spend my time, but every week I am transfixed by the effort the corporation puts into steering clear of al-Qaeda.”

Read the whole thing

From the Observer
Once a suicide bomber has killed himself and everyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, ideologues rush to claim him like rival firms of undertakers fighting over a corpse. If he has posted a video raging about the Iraq war then Bush, Blair and the neo-cons are the “root cause” of the mass murder. If his university teachers had stood back while Islamists radicalised the campus, then liberals who cannot tell their friends from their enemies are to blame.

Not until I read the New York Times last week, however, did I learn that jihadism could be explained away as a jolly jape. Pakistani police, who must cope with the equivalent of a 7/7 massacre virtually every week, had arrested five American citizens, who came from Washington DC and its Virginia suburbs. The Pakistanis claimed that they had exchanged emails written in code for months with a recruiter for the Pakistani Taliban, and were heading for an al-Qaida stronghold. The suspects left behind a video, which Washington police said had jihadist overtones and which a local Muslim leader described as a “disturbing farewell statement”.

Surveying the evidence, the New York Times wondered, “whether the men acted on a lark or were recruited as part of a larger militant outfit”. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, of course, but “a lark”? Maybe Billy Bunter has taken over the newspaper’s foreign desk. More probably…
Read the whole thing

From the Observer.
Anyone who knows the history of backlash populism, from Nixon and Agnew onwards, will find the new fury at the environmental taxes comfortingly familiar. From the Palin rallies in the American Midwest via the baking suburbs of Brisbane to the screaming blogs of the English Tory party, the chants about climate change are the same. The liberal elite, the so-called experts, the unelected, unaccountable grandees, who poison our children’s minds through their control of the schools, foist their values on us through their courtier newspapers and television stations, take our taxes and use them to fund their weird minority causes, are at it again. Preying on hard-working families, and forcing their fads on the common people.

The feeling of suppressed class war is back. Globally, environmentalism is a middle-class cause, and in Britain, disastrously for its supporters, the children of the aristocracy and super-rich dominate the green movement. As before, many onlookers fear that they will pay the price for the soothing of the consciences of the wealthy. The conspiracy theories and the wails from the under-educated at the pretensions of the intellectuals have a tired ring, too. We appear to be on an old battlefield.

But do not make the mistake of dismissing the anti-green upsurge as another outbreak of crankiness.

Read on…

In Standpoint

The struggle for liberty in Britain has all but vanished from the national consciousness. Most people know that John Hampden refused to pay ship money but I doubt if more than a handful know anything else about him. John Wilkes is forgotten, and only the older generation of left-wingers remember John Lilburne. Americans have it much easier. Home Box Office could make an intelligent and popular biopic of the life of John Adams because he seconded the Declaration of Independence, argued about basic principles as he helped draw up the constitution and then found how those principles conflicted with the pressures of power when he became president. Defining arguments about political ideas ensured the immortality of America’s founders.

British history is less dramatic because there was no defining moment when liberty was won. If the British think about how they got to where they are, they assume in a Whiggish way that our freedoms evolved by a gentle process of moral improvement. We forget that gains were won by bloody-minded people who took a stand against the establishment as much for the hell of it as any other reason. As the historian Ben Wilson says in his excellent What Price Liberty (Faber and Faber, 2009), the British way was dependent on people scrapping against authority in an undignified manner and defending their gains in the same way. It is a history without many national heroes but with many lesser heroes.

One such was William Garrow, the dominant barrister at the Old Bailey in the 1780s. He invented the rigorous cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, and his tactics pushed the law into accepting the presumption of innocence, rules of evidence and rights to representation, which we now take for granted. Before the legal revolution Garrow began, a defendant relied more on luck than on law to save him from the gallows.

Read on…

The Observer, Sunday 29 November 2009

Political corruption greased the wheels of many of the great disasters of capitalist history. In 1721, after the collapse of the South Sea Company had ruined Georgian Britain, the Commons established the useful precedent of sending the chancellor of the exchequer to the Tower for taking bribes from the promoters of the company’s shares. The rampers of the maniacal Japanese stock and real estate bubbles of the late 1980s also took care to pay off the politicians who might have saved their country by regulating the market.

However harsh commentators have been on the performance of our politicians before the 2008 crash, they accept that the British state was not for sale this time around. When Gordon Brown told his audience of bankers at his Mansion House speech of 2007 that “the City of London has risen by your efforts, ingenuity and creativity to become a new world leader”, the executives of HBOS and RBS had not stuffed his pockets with gold. When he went on to congratulate himself on “resisting pressure” to regulate them, the poor fool did so without the prompt of illicit inducements. The City had no need to corrupt him when the giddy ideology of the free market had already turned his mind, along with the minds of the Conservative opposition, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority. Humbert Wolfe’s ditty – “You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to” – applied as well to Britain’s leaders as its financial hacks.

I suppose it is better to be governed by idiots than criminals, but wonder if we will continue to enjoy this small mercy.

Carry on reading