Kneel before Steve Bell

As usual, Bell captures the horror of the Tories' hypocrisy perfectly. He's one of the justifications for The Guardian's existence.

It's all doom and gloom down at t'Guardian

People are losing their jobs elsewhere, even in the heart of the chattering classes. Yes, my favourite newspaper is shedding people and sections. Hopefully they'll be treated well, though Fleet Street has a saying about liberal papers treating their staff worse than reactionary ones.

The Guardian has declines recently - the supplements, such as Environment, have been reduced to allow more journalists to spend time on important stories about Amy Winehouse, The Wire, celebrity sport columns and whatever Tanya Gold thinks we should know about her on any particular day. Now they're ceasing to publish the Technology supplement - an innovative and (you'd think) essential part of a forward-looking newspaper. I'd drop the TV listings personally and cut the 'essential clothes under £3000' dross.

Over at the Observer, the decent magazines are going: Sport Monthly, Woman and Music. All that will be left is the Department for Supporting Illegal Wars Based on Falsified Evidence and (hopefully), Rawnsley and Mitchell who, let's face it, needs the work. I certainly won't miss Escape (the travel section), lacking a cat in need of litter material.

Does it matter? Newspapers are migrating to the web - and losing millions of pounds in doing so. Murdoch plans to put his papers' sites behind a pay wall, while others, like the Guardian rely on advertising (which is why they're going bust). I love the accessibility of the web versions - but I also love the flow, convenience and portability of the newspaper, the ability to tear bits out, write on them, pass them over to your friends, fashion them into sunhats…

Witticisms aside though, it is a bit worrying - loads of US newspapers have closed, and UK ones are struggling, despite having a much better readership. We need spiky, independent journalism. Can't we ban the Daily Mail instead, and forcibly transfer their readers? It would be like being sent on an involuntary and unpleasant foreign exchange holiday. They don't like our clothes (sandals), our food (muesli), our relaxed attitudes to sex, drugs and politics… but they'd be transformed after a few months - into nice people.

Kafka: alive, well and living in London

Newspapers have had the right to print anything said in Parliament since 1688. MPs have used this to circumvent libel laws and identify bad guys by naming them in speeches/questions in Parliament, which the papers then print.

Until now. How's this for a blanket ban on free speech? Essentially, the Guardian can only report that something might be said. Nothing about the subject, the speaker, the time…

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

I'd love to know what the subject is.

The Daily Fail - again

The Daily Mail (remember, it supported Hitler, Mussolini and the British Union of Fascists) play another blinder: it found an NHS doctor who earned £380,000 in a year, and it's horrified.

One small problem. This doctor didn't earn that much at all. When the NHS was founded in 1948, the doctors hated it, and so deals were struck. Aneurin Bevan said he'd persuaded them to accept the NHS by 'stuffing their mouths with gold'. The General Practitioners, you may be surprised to learn, aren't salaried NHS staff. Instead, they own their businesses, which they don't mention very often.

So - this £380,000 per year doctor doesn't 'earn' it at all. He receives it, and uses some of it to pay secretaries, rent, nurses, bills, etc. etc. I'm sure he isn't living on beans, but equally, he isn't taking home the same as a lawyer, to draw an appropriate parallel.

Now, how much does the editor of the Daily Mail get for pouring out a daily spume of racism, hatred and inaccuracy? Well, last year it was £1.6m: rather more than four of this doctor's sum and twice the BBC Director-General's salary. It's also over ten times the Prime Minister's pay. Has Dacre saved many lives recently?

Meanwhile, speculation is rife that The Observer might be closed, as the Guardian Media Group is losing lots of money. The Guardian bought the Observer a few years ago, and it looked like a decent fit, as the Observer was a decent liberal paper which had been treated appallingly by some very shady owners. It hasn't worked: although it looks very good, the Observer was drifted further and further to the right, while also becoming quite boring, with some exceptions such as Andrew Rawnsley. I hoped it would become a Sunday version of the Guardian under a different name, but that hasn't happened.

Sunday newspapers are difficult, especially now that Saturday ones are so huge. They used to be run completely separately from the weekdays, and had nice long deadlines so that substantial journalism could be conducted (the model was the Sunday Times and its Insight team before Murdoch ruined it) - now they're acres of fashion and navel-gazing. I'll miss the Observer because it's the best of a bad bunch, but not as much as I might.

Where have all the nerds gone?

Turns out I'm late to the party. I've been blogging for about 9 months - just when everybody else is giving up, or at least very rarely posting, according to this Guardian article and the New York Times, which noted that only 7.5m of the 133m Technorati tracked were updated within 120 days. Apparently everybody's Tweeting or Facebooking.

Which is odd: both those outlets are more about social contact than content - I'd have thought there'd be room for both, unless Twitter/Facebook fans have nothing to say and the good grace not to say it at length on a blog. Don't worry though - I'm going nowhere. Either I drone on here or send my colleagues mad…

I'm off to Fleet Foxes tonight - will be intriguing to see what they're like live, as I think they're good but too tame on record.

Another colossal, brilliant, waste of time

Welcome to The 'Spill - the overflow from the Guardian's Readers Recommend. Obsessives live there. I'm coming home!

Education educashon educashun

Kate reminds me that there's now no government department with the word 'education' in its title. So much for 'education education education'. Instead, Mandelson's Business department is now responsible for research as The Guardian notes, so if you aren't designing weapons or commercial stuff, you may as well give up. How very Thatcherite.

Food processors are great!

I don't like advertising. Especially pro-pollution ads, so it annoys me when The Guardian, which cares about the environment, runs ads for airlines and SUVs etc - because they need the money. George Monbiot rants about it much better than I could (and without early Blur references in the title).

Community payback

Steve Bell really is the new Gillray or Cruikshank. Today he imagines our leaders treating themselves as they treat poor people who nick another £10 from the social security…

Seumas Milne nails these bastards completely.

I buried this suggestion in an earlier post. Here's the version I just sent as a letter to the Guardian:

I have a solution for housing MPs which will reduce the opportunity for sleaze and produce social benefits.

Each MP will be loaned a council flat in London as their second home, preferably in the worst-built, highest-crime, least-maintained estate available. They will be offered the same facility in their constituency, though if they already own a home there, moving will not be required. Once the flat is furnished (and maintained) at reasonable expense, no further money will be provided. Living amongst the poorest citizens will keep the MP honest, remind them of their vocation, dissuade them from acquiring expensive white goods, encourage them to consider the most pressing social issues, and will surely lead rapidly to pressure on local authorities and agencies to improve living conditions for the people we consign to such places.

Never trust a copper, never read The Sun

Do the police lie to us? Of course they do. But most of the time, they merely mislead, dissemble and distort. Why? Because every branch of public service has been encouraged to see itself as a 'player' in the information game. Each agency has an internal PR team - which isn't the same as a communications team - trained to play offence/defence spin rather than to provide accurate, cautious, checkable and honest information. The police have their friendly media contacts and they know which papers (I'm looking at you, The Sun - 'G20 anarchy' indeed, and you Daily Mail) will print whatever they say without bothering to check using boring old journalism - and in the case of Tomlinson, may have added further imaginary details simply to suit their pre-mixed 'story', as Nick Davies points out:

There were six days of substantially false coverage about a man who apparently died of a heart attack as he walked home while a screaming mob of anarchists hurled missiles at the police officers who tried to help him. Any inquiry into this media misinformation will want to find out whether that was simply the hyperbole of ignorant reporters or the product of bad practice at the Metropolitan police, the City of London police or the IPCC.

They got caught this time thanks to citizens ignoring threats to treat filming cops as 'aiding terrorism', but it must make you distrust pretty much every account of any major event prior to this. Nick Davies has a good piece in today's Media Guardian. How's this gem?

when an IPCC investigator came to the Guardian, with a City of London police exhibits officer, he asked for the video to be removed from the website on the grounds that it could prejudice the police inquiry and would upset the family. The deputy editor-in-chief who met him declined and pointed out that the Tomlinson family at that moment were in another part of the building, talking to Paul Lewis, the reporter who had driven the story, and publicly thanking the paper for its help.

But this isn't simply a problem for the rozzers. It's a fundamental journalistic failure brought about by financial concerns (investigative journalism is expensive: transcribing 'sources' and press releases can be done by the office monkey) and by the collapse of a public sphere independent of hegemonic forces: papers have grown dependent on 'authority' and close to power - they'll automatically cite established, discrete power blocs such as police forces and governments rather than test their claims (except for climate stories, in which case they'll print the ravings of any mad liar (Johnny Ball, Bellamy, Lawson, Monckton) rather than the 99% of actual climate scientists who know we're screwed).

We should do the world a favour

…by embracing our own extinction for the sake of the planet. Today's Guardian polls climate change scientists. 85% don't believe we can restrict global warming to 2 degrees - though only 39% believe it's scientifically impossible. It's governments, politics and economics which make it impossible. 2 degrees will make things difficult. The expected 4-5 degrees will cause mass extinctions, human misery, economic disasters and huge political instability. As usual, it's the poor, darker, innocent people who'll suffer first. Sadly for me, I probably won't be dead before it starts impacting on us.

Vaccines = good. Celebrities = gaping cultural void

Mindless celebs who think that being able to wave at photographers qualifies them as doctors, scientists and theologians actually kill people because morons (or ordinary people lost in the echo chamber of postmodern existence) listen to them. Marina Hyde, of whom I'm no fan, makes this point wittily in the Guardian.

Meanwhile, a somewhat angrier American has founded the Jenny McCarthy Bodycount, which logs the number of vaccine-preventable deaths for whom he blames this woman, who went from stripping for Playboy and dating film stars to 'writing' anti-vaccine books seemingly unhindered by shame, self-consciousness, scientific training or any of the other qualities we should admire in human beings.

Ian Tomlinson RIP

I said a few days ago that the G20 riots had descended into the traditional police riot, and the footage of Ian Tomlinson (a man trying to get home from work) being bludgeoned by the police despite the fact that he was walking away with his hands in his pockets vindicates this. Is he our Blair Peach?

There is a cultural problem with the police at the moment, one which reminds me of the 1980s. They're spending an awful lot of time quietly briefing politicians and newspapers that mass violence is coming, and that they'll be going in hard: the very antithesis of their legal duty to FACILITATE protest. The police in this country have always been a reactionary and politicised force - witness the industrial disputes and the weirdo religious pronouncements of the 1980s, and the backlash which greeted Ian Blair's attempts to humanise the Met.

After the facts, their PR people are concentrating on selling a rosy version of events, as though they're working for a washing-powder company rather than a service supposedly existing to serve the public. Public bodies must be held to account, but they also have a duty to take far more care. Police PR mustn't be a marketing exercise, or be seen as an offence-defence role. One appalling example was the police injury list from Kingsnorth's environmental protest. The cops told the media and politicians that 70 officers had been injured during the £5m+ operation. However, a Liberal Democrat Freedom of Information request revealed no injuries sustained by attacks or scuffles with protestors. The 'injuries' ranged from toothache to bee stings, taking in 'officer injured sitting in car'.

This isn't just funny: it's a serious attempt to deceive readers of already pro-police newspapers and legislators. There's a sustained attempt to consolidate the extra powers afforded to the police after September 11th and use them against all forms of protest, as Mark Thomas et al. have repeatedly demonstrated. The National Extremism Tactical Unit is undertaking surveillance of peaceful protestors and journalists as though they are terrorists, and other secretive units are prepared to treat us all as threats to state security, rather than as concerned citizens.

Nor should individual policemen be allowed to escape scrutiny by ordinary citizens or by the courts: the ban on filming cops is an attempt to hide misdeeds, and a recent police brutality court case saw officers refusing to give evidence.

We've all been conditioned to see the police as 'on our side', despite their track record: the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad (aptly named: they committed a lot of serious racist crime), the Miners' Strike, and on and on. I've challenged a police officer for completely over-reacting to some loud kids at Wolverhampton station - a minor but scary event - and I'd recommend you do the same. They work for us and need reminding of this sometimes,

I just need to get this off my chest

Barclays Bank, which is negotiating with the government for the taxpayer to insure their insanely risky investments, is a serial tax evader. Worse than that, it has an arm which specialises in shifting money around the world with the sole purpose of making money out of the taxpayer - about £1 billion pounds a year. The Guardian, despite having some dubious links to certain financial bodies, has been uncovering Barclays' web of deceitful trades, which the Inland Revenue haven't got the resources to follow.

This is what one financier said of Barclays' scheme, in the Financial Times:

I will say it was absolutely breathtaking, extraordinary. The depth of deceit, connivance and deliberate, artificial avoidance stunned me. The intricacy and artificiality of the scheme deeply was absolutely evident, as was the fact that the knew exactly what they were doing and why: to get money from one point in London to another without paying tax, via about 10 offshore companies. Simple, deliberate outcome, clearly stated, with the exact names of who was doing this, and no other purpose.

Until now I have been a supporter of the finance industry - I work with people there regularly and respect many of them, and greatly enjoy the Financial Times and other financial papers.

However this has shone a light on something for me, and made me certain that these people belong in jail, and companies like Barclays deserve to be bankrupt. They have robbed everyone of us,every single person who pays tax or who will ever pay tax in this country (and other countries!), through both the bailouts and schemes such as this.

Barclays' response is to ban publication of, and linking to, the leaked internal documents which revealed how they steal from us while begging for our help. So let's give a big hand to Wikileaks, which makes sure that leaked documents are never lost for good. You don't have to read them, just understand that this kind of activity is the Web's version of public service. The Guardian, like many companies which pay tax without trying to cheat, has a big office in London and responsibilities to employees and readers: it can't publish and be damned if the courts (yet again, acting solely for the powerful against the public interest) issue an injunction. Wikileaks, ironically, is like the dubious corporations who hide offshore (Walkers Crisps: a Swiss company now), and can post information out of reach of local courts.

These people are thieves. The Department of Work and Pensions is currently running an Orwellian campaign against benefit cheats who 'rob' the rest of us by falsely claiming the dole, or whatever. Fair enough - though living on £50 per week isn't exactly the same as having a Bond-villain style hideout. How about we conduct a similar campaign of persecution against these financiers? They steal far more than all the benefit cheats put together.

Some of their activities are illegal, and rely on the connivance of offshore states (Britain, ironically, encourages this behaviour onshore and offshore), and the poverty of the Inland Revenue - which sold its office to an offshore company which thus avoided tax. I can't express how angry this stuff makes me. I know all my friends think that I'm a boring old wanker for getting wound up by this, but it's important. These bankers and lawyers like their Chelsea mansions and airports and golf courses and private schools and all the other trimmings that makes life in Britain fantastic for the rich, but they're engaged in a concerted plot to make live worse for the rest of us: tax pays for roads and schools and infrastructure and child benefit and the NHS and pensions and clean air and universities and street lights and the police and the ambulance services and the firemen and the coastguard and so many things, so these bastards are stealing the high life and leaving us naive morons to pay for everything.

I have an enjoyable job and I'm paid fairly well (for now - half my contract expires in September), but I'll never be rich. There are, however, small ways in which I could get some tax back, quite legally. I don't do it. I believe that governments (even these gimps) are a good way to improve the lives of the citizens as a whole and it's our duty to contribute (which doesn't mean we shouldn't scream blue murder when it's wasted, as with Trident and ID cards). We have responsibilities to each other: my taxes pay for a binman's heart operation and his children's education and his taxes pay my salary. Everyone's a winner in the long term, which is why these tax-avoiding scum are thieving from us in exactly the same way as the benefit cheat: rich men have their bins emptied by the council the same as the rest of us. Their cleaners claim child benefit and their heart attack will be treated by an NHS nurse.

How's this for an idea? Ban non-domiciled or tax-avoiding executives from using public services. No bins emptied. Turned away from A+E. No road travel. No TV or radio. No calling the police, fire brigade or ambulance. No calling the council when the neighbours have a noisy party… we could wreck their lives until they're shamed into paying up.

Let's start with Lord Rothermere. He owns the Daily Mail, which hates governments but also hates foreigners and tax cheats. He lives in a massive, tasteless, reactionary, £50m mansion in Wiltshire which wasn't big enough so he's added another couple of wings to the building you see here.

Apparently, however, Donhead St. Andrew in Wiltshire is a foreign country. It must be because Private Eye (discussed here) has discovered that Rothermere is, for tax purposes, 'non-domiciled' and therefore doesn't pay UK tax on his £800m (inherited) fortune because his father lived in Paris. The Inland Revenue decided that this blatant theft wasn't worth investigating.

I must go for a little lie-down now.

Jack Straw: more evil than Hazel Blears?

I've thought recently that Charlie Brooker's column in the Guardian has become a little self-parodic in recent times.

I was wrong. This week's column is brilliant because he's angry with Jack Straw and nails that little turd for his contempt for democracy. Read it for yourself. However, the bit that makes me boil with anger is Straw's statement of his political beliefs:

"If people were angels there would be no need for government . . . But sadly people are not all angels."

Never mind that this is purest bollocks: people will still need disaster relief, and health care, and old age care, and environmental protection and everything else that isn't law'n'order.

Brooker points out that Straw therefore elevates politicians above the people, which is bad enough. What gets me though is that this is Straw coming out as a philosophical Tory. At the heart of the socialist (and liberal) project is a fundamental belief in the essential goodness of humanity. Toryism believes that people are inherently bad and need restraining. This is the fundamental philosophical divide - and Straw clearly believes that government exists for the purpose of repressing the atavistic qualities of the people. I think I prefer the American 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' to his profoundly depressing vision. No wonder the cover of my copy of The Demon Headmaster takes Straw as its inspiration. (I can't find a scan of it, but here's one that looks almost as chilling):

O Frabjous Day

My favourite scientist, Pharyngula, is joining my favourite newspaper for a monthly column. With Bad Science on board, it's swiftly becoming lefty-rationalist central!

Also, it has a sense of humour. Its nickname is The Grauniad because of its formerly awful proofing - look up grauniad.co.uk

Slow blogging

Jon Henley in today's Guardian covers the rise and (gentle) fall of slow blogging. It's a nice idea - post something infrequently and let people mull them over. Unfortunately, the originator of this idea, Todd Sieling, has ceased blogging due to lack of readers. It's little wonder Sieling likes the idea of plodding blogging: he's Canadian!

Seriously though, I like the idea of moving blogging from instant reaction to contemplative haiku - but it's not going to happen because you can't control how the reader uses or consumes your material. They won't read an entry in a slow blog, go away and think about it for a week, then return for the next entry. They'll consume the post, then fill the intervening time reading other material, then never go back to the slow blog because they're bored…