Hugo Chavez - the final word

I notice that on the day of Hugo Chavez's state funeral, Anglo-American journalists are still being highly disrespectful, with snarky comments about who attended the service, with smug references to their human rights and foreign policy records.

As with many democrats, I am not comfortable with the concept of charismatic personality cults either, such as the one Chavez built, even though, ironically, we do it with our own (highly cherished) royal family. The right-wingers, who often befriend authoritarian regimes sympathetic to their goals, had a tendency to knock the Chavez government in Venezuela though. Why was this?

The reason is that right-wing politics, which has sadly become as much populist discourse in the UK as it has been in the USA for decades, is against the redistributive policies that were championed by Chavez.

This is sad for one significant reason. After the Second World War, the British public actually voted for democratic socialist politics. Labour was elected, and the NHS, an education system, the welfare state and social housing were built, albeit under the much quieter and thoughtful leadership of Clement Attlee. I am convinced that nowadays, such policies, along with a major nationalisation programme, would lead to spiteful vilification in the press along the lines of that subjected to Chavez.

Hugo Chavez may have few friends in the neo-liberal West, but he has now passed away. He deserves a little more than the same obituary that was given to Kim Jong-il, Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, with only the names and a few local details altered.

His status was sufficient enough for our own Conservative Foreign Secretary, William Hague, who is by no means a socialist revolutionary, to pay his respects to Chavez and his family. It was also remarkable that despite the constant criticisms in the UK media, the British public nonetheless still had enough independence of thought to ensure that "RIP Hugo Chavez" was a statement popular enough to briefly trend on the Twitter website.

RIP Hugo Chavez indeed.

Every day is a bad news day under this government

Living in Britain at the moment is a tougher experience than we have been used to. While we continue to struggle to make ends meet, every day it seems as though there is another piece of news that is a slap in the face to us all. Each helping of gloom is supported by a source, which cumulatively are broad and inclusive.

Wednesday 27th February

Centrica, the private company that owns British Gas posts a tasty £606m residential profit in 2012 - up 11 percent on the previous year. In November 2012, the company put up gas bills by 6 percent.
Source: Which (consumer group)

Thursday 28th February

The bank that needed to be bailed out by the government, the Royal Bank of Scotland, made a pre-tax loss of £5.17bn. Many of the losses were due to PPI claims and fines. Bonuses remain set aside for staff. Astonishingly, the hapless organisation has been praised by the government.

Source: BBC

Friday 1st March

The pound plunges to a two-and-a-half year low against the dollar following a "shock" fall in manufacturing output. I place the word "shock" in quotations on purpose, for many of us would hardly be shocked by a fall in manufacturing under a Conservative-led government.
Source: Sky

Saturday 2nd March

From the file marked 'how to win friends and influence people', Philip Hammond, the Secretary of State for Defence decided to suggest that spending cuts should be made to welfare rather than his war chest. Great. We can all starve, but at least our military will be kept strong. Nothing like North Korea at all, of course.
Source: Independent

Sunday 3rd March

The Conservatives are now making noises about withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights after the next election, in what is seen as a populist move as a knee-jerk response to some high-profile defeats for the government regarding the deportation of terror suspects. A move would put Britain in a minority of two, alongside Belarus – at present Europe’s only remaining dictatorship.
Source: Independent

Monday 4th March

Government policy to encourage banks to lend in order to breathe life into the economy is a catastrophic failure after banks and building societies slashed lending by £2.4 BILLION in the three months to December. The government’s “Funding for Lending” scheme was meant to encourage the banks to lend.
Source: Evening Standard 

Tuesday 5th March

In a slap in the face to all those struggling to make ends meet, George Osborne went to the European Union finance ministers’ meeting to fight the corner of the bankers by voting against a cap on bankers’ bonuses. He lost 26-1.
Source: Telegraph

 

And you wonder why Labour are 13 points ahead in the polls.

As horsemeat scandal escalates, could excrement be next?

The equine jokes are knackered out. As many could have predicted, and some of us already had, the horsemeat controversy is fast escalating towards an infamous scandal, with the police now involved. As the seriousness of non-standard ingredients in everyday food products sinks in, it has emerged that some processed food products contain up to 100% horsemeat and possible veterinary drugs deemed unfit for human consumption (video link - Daily Telegraph). It is therefore evident we have no idea what is added to bulk out these frozen processed food products. Research suggests that in our love of burgers and pies, we could be consuming anything - including excrement. You read that correctly: it is entirely possible we are eating animal 'waste products'.

Any unforeseen and unstated artifact found in a foodstuff is by definition contamination. We have been relatively good-humoured, and typically British, about the shocking news that popular food products used to feed our families are contaminated with horsemeat. The online community have been happily trading jokes in some form of virtual horse play, an indicator of the generally light-hearted response.

Meanwhile, media outlets, including the BBC, have been full of vox-pops from hardy shoppers mostly arguing those who buy cheap food should be neither surprised, nor dare to complain, that they have been sold contaminated food. I avoid the cheapest products myself and have never been allured by sausages and burgers bulked up with rough matter, but even I accept that those who buy the cheapest goods (particularly given these hard economic times) at the very least are entitled to know the ingredients.

The problem is we do not know what is in our food, and the nature of our diet means we lack the sensual capability to detect what is in our food. What other possible explanation could there be for our apparent willingness to scoff a Findus beef lasagne and not even consider that it may have 100% horsemeat content?

For too long many of us have existed in our shallow Anglo-American dietary paradigm, where the textures of our most popular food are beaten down to a flavourless pulp, blended with filler and supplemented with seasonings and sugar to make them desirable. This is how we consume our sausages - bulked out with rusk, herbs and sugar. We consume our burgers in a similar way. We smother them with ketchup, brown sauce or stuff them in a roll full of condiments, ensuring we can barely taste or feel the texture of the meat potentially poisoning us. This is serious, given that we are potentially eating poo, to put it politely.

An escalation of the horsemeat scandal (Source: Wikipedia)

In his investigation of meat packing factories, Eric Schlosser revealed in his excellent book Fast Food Nation that in order to keep meat-processing costs low, production lines were run at the highest possible speed the workforce could cope with. This led to errors, including the frequent incorrect removals of cow stomachs, resulting in excrement spillages contaminating those retail beef products (2002, p.197; p.203). If you think that sort of thing could not happen here, then consider what your reaction would have been to the possibility of horsemeat contaminated burgers just a couple of months ago.

Schlosser argues that higher standards of meat are demanded by the EU, but this offers little in the form of reassurance. I am fully expecting excrement to be a future development of this current food contamination scandal, reducing the horsemeat issue to a level of comparative triviality. With the news that drug-contaminated horsemeat could have been entering our food chain for at least a year before it was discovered, there is some inevitability that other nasties will also have found their way in undetected.

I have some sympathy for the traders, from the smallest grocers to the largest supermarkets. I am a long-term critic of the largest corporations, but other than around-the-clock monitoring of their supply chain and frequent laboratory testing of their own products, it is difficult to know how they could have prevented this fiasco. They are not entirely blameless though, for their desire to provide us with cheap food leads them to use suppliers prepared to supply goods at a dangerously low demand price.

With some hope, the current food scandal will mark the demise of the race to the bottom in our consumer culture. In the meantime, I suspect there will be more unsavoury food discoveries, inevitable government inquiries and eventually legal actions. Regardless of the level of food poverty in Britain, all consumers have a basic right to know what is in their shopping basket.

Normalising the predators - a response to Jon Henley's article on paedophilia

Today, I read an article so ill-conceived, I can hardly believe The Guardian published it.

Jon Henley, in this analysis of evidence on paedophilic desires, has written something widely criticised as heavily apologetic of paedophiles an their behaviours.

Critics include Labour MP, Tom Watson, and Mark Williams-Thomas - the researcher whose investigation revealed the truth about Jimmy Savile's private lifestyle.

Henley's article claimed to be a review of the conflicting evidence about what causes paedophila, and the harm it causes. Closer inspection of the piece illuminates some worrying claims from dubious sources.

The tone of the piece is set from the offset, attributing a quote to the pressure group now known as Liberty, which apparently normalises paedophilia. Henley goes on to say that in light of the Savile backlash, it would be unlikely for any organisation to make such a claim.

The most worrying aspect of the article was the use of Tom O'Carroll as a source, described by Henley as "a former chairman of PIE and tireless paedophilia advocate."

O'Carroll was cited as saying "[i]f there's no bullying, no coercion, no abuse of power, if the child enters into the relationship voluntarily … the evidence shows there need be no harm." The comments are given an air of legitimacy with Henley's commentary that "[s]ome academics do not dispute the view of Tom O'Carroll."

Leading the criticism of Henley's controversial report is Mark Williams-Thomas, who described his main concern with the article as "giving a voice to a convicted child sex offender who wants [to] say adult sexual contact with a child is not abuse."

The respected Labour MP, Tom Watson, added that the article was "[a] jumbled list of arguments for a more sympathetic approach to paedophilia."

Most worrying to my eyes is the normalisation tone of the piece. That is not to say that exceptions do not happen. Relationships between very young people and adults do happen, and some even survive as the younger party moves into full-adulthood.

However, such relationships are not conventional, nor should they ever be considered as such. Fresh in the memory was the relationship between a runaway schoolgirl and teacher that worried and alarmed the entire nation.

The reaction from the public was remarkably mixed, with some even sympathetic to the pair. Fewer would have argued the relationship as justifiable though.

Any attempt to rationalise the behaviour of the predatory minority must be resisted, which is why Henley's article has been widely condemned by observers of all political shades.

Time for everyone to calm down over McAlpinegate

I am sleeping fairly well at night right now. I have never written a tweet implying Lord McAlpine was a paedophile. (Note: tweet is a common definition of a micro-blog post. Additional note: Paedophile is a term describing those attracted to children typically below the age of 13, though in Britain the word is used a little more liberally to refer to anyone who legally is not expected to pay an adult fare on public transport.)

In fact, I have never written a tweet bearing McAlpine's name, prior to his unveiling as the poor bloke BBC Newsnight meant when implying some shadowy relic of the Conservative Party was abusing children.

And despite witnessing many tweets directly claiming he was a paedophile (along with four or five regularly alleged others), I believed it was unethical to "retweet" any of them. (Note for those not familiar with micro-blogging websites: Retweet is the Twitter term for copying someone else's tweet into your own Twitter page for other Twitter members to view.)

There was one notable tweet bearing his name that I may well have retweeted, but it no longer exists, for the author (a highly respected Guardian columnist) has apologised and presumably removed it. For that reason, it is no surprise that I do not even remember if I retweeted it! However, I best apologise just in case.

The tweet in question did little more than question some of the dubious things written about McAlpine on the Internet, but I suspect in the current climate the author will be in trouble over that.

That author apologised in the form of a tweet and linked it towards a more detailed apology. I decided to retweet his apology to my followers - you know, just in case. I hope Lord McAlpine accepts it and that is the end of the matter.

Now that is clear, I add a caveat or two to the above summary of McAlpine vs Twitter. Firstly, I fear that having won the goodwill of the public in light of some rather diabolical allegations, McAlpine (and more significantly those representing his interests post-McAlpinegate) risk overplaying his hand. Secondly, even if McAlpine's response is legally tenable, it is very much in the context of laws that have not caught up with the demands of print and broadcast media, let alone the online variety. First, I shall deal with the former point.

I personally think McAlpine's response is understandable. If I had been subject to the allegations he has faced, I would be on television too, auditioning my croakiest voice and reminding the audience how devastated I am by the allegations. I would have been demanding the BBC justified its research. No question - I would have sought some compensation from the broadcaster.

Having said that, I also think McAlpine has already done very well. His settlement with the BBC must surely be some sort of precedent for dealing with libel through innuendo and cryptic messaging.

I dare say if the BBC was not so on its knees in the fallout of this and the Savile fiasco, they may have had more of a stomach for a fight. They wanted the episode over as quickly as possible and who can blame them?

So you would think that Lord McAlpine would be happy with the settlement for a mischievous report that caused a lot of harmful gossip, and a clear message sent to the world that he is not a paedophile.

No sooner had the BBC surrendered, his legal team outlined their plans to pursue up to 10,000 Twitter users over the publishing of defamatory tweets in what is described as potentially a libel action with the largest number of defendants ever. The response is hardly a surprise when the first defendant (the BBC) settled out of court despite not actually mentioning him by name, instead allowing public gossip settle that matter. I too would be trawling the cyber and the tangible trying to find my next catch.

His next catch seems to be ITV, who broadcast the segment where Phillip Schofield handed a list of paedophilic names to David Cameron. He (McAlpine, that is!) was believed to be on that list and it is rumoured a camera picked it up. (Note the deliberate use of 'believed to be' and 'rumoured' in that sentence.)

I would be absolutely fuming if I was on Schofield's camera-shot list, and understandably McAlpine must be fuming about it. However, has anyone actually seen names on the list? It may have been caught by a camera, but was that particular camera part of the broadcast feed at the time?

These are crucial questions, because as things stand, despite an apology aired on This Morning, nobody seems to have produced the offending screen caption. I would have thought with the millions of feral Twitter users, ready to shine a light on predatory paedophiles at any moment, the offending screencap would have been doing the rounds within minutes of the broadcast ending. I have not seen any image, and I practically live on Twitter at times!

We were told viewers might have seen the list. It seems nobody has seen it. Someone should tell Lord McAlpine. This time, he is in the clear!

Except nobody will, as his legal team looks towards holding anyone and everyone to account. It is an approach that risks McAlpine losing the goodwill he has earned in the aftermath. I do not have the biggest Twitter feed in the world, so it is not a representative tapestry of views, however I have noticed a change of mood among those I follow.

When BBC Newsnight originally apologised, there was a mixture of sympathy for McAlpine and irritation that a story about child abuse had been superseded by poor journalism. The sympathy towards McAlpine has fallen away on my Twitter feed, and I wonder if he should retreat from further action while he is ahead.

His reputation has ironically been enhanced, as a weak and feckless media (in part brutalised by arcahic libel laws) made huge steps to apologise to him and stress that he is not a paedophile. Many people were quick to sympathise with him.

My second point regarding the post-Newsnight fallout is that I feel that libel laws in the UK need to catch up with the reality of the Internet, or it is going to destroy what is good about websites like Twitter.

Twitter enables lay members of the population to debate, discuss, talk, have a laugh, sometimes troll, sometimes troll aggressively and sometimes troll unlawfully. It is a big room where everyone can shout at anyone, with the rather obvious drawback that whatever is shouted is rendered into cyber-memory. Those words are there forever.

I am no legal expert, but my understanding is that British law is often cast through precedent. There will be many precedents needed in light of McAlpinegate if we are to prevent an online crisis of communication.

First of all, there will need to be an acceptance that although journalists and writers publish on Twitter and other sites, so do people who are not used to their copy being checked by lawyers before they hit the send button. (Note: Journalists have their work checked, and yet they have been known to wrongly accuse – the Chris Jefferies case springs to mind.)

Any developments of law that see thousands of people with a few dozen Twitter followers going to court will be to the detriment of ordinary people, many of whom who already have enough to worry about in day-to-day life. Lord McAlpine certainly would not have the same anxieties and worries that they face.

There is going to need to be a clear post-multimedia agreement governing Internet use which does not penalise ordinary people. I cannot offer much help to those who are directly tweeting allegations about people. As I already said, I am not a legal expert, but I am now old enough to know by now that to call someone a paedophile requires a stack of irrefutable evidence.

I can offer suggestions for those who have retweeted, or wrote implied comments. By letter of the law, it would seem that those who retweet gain responsibility for taking that tweet to their followers, but how many people know this? Any retweet is clearly marked with the original author's name. Ignorance being no defence is a harsh principle to reply here. This is not as black and white as knowing that violence or sexual abuse is legally wrong.

This is important, because there may be no end to this. Courts could find themselves being a revolving door for trivial Twitter actions, with judges having to rule on who retweeted someone else's innuendo. The fact of the matter is that people could potentially be sued for retweeting a comment by a respected Guardian journalist originating from a rather dubious news report by the respected (but heaven knows why!) BBC.

That is the reality, and it seems wrong because it is wrong.

I would suggest that judges become familiar with the Twitter architecture. It is clear how the site works. If someone tweets something potentially libellous with 100,000 followers in tow, then it is obvious that it is going to be spread much wider. This puts the onus on the original author to get it right. Retweeters do so with the original source of their tweet clearly marked, and those retweeters who are clearly not media-savvy should not be punished for not knowing the rules of engagement. If some of those who are media-aware (and legally-aware) cannot get their Twitter activity right, what chance the rest of us?

One logical conclusion is that people will not just be sued for tweets and retweets, but they will also be sued for mentioning the names of high-profile people who are tweeting potentially libellous material elsewhere on the website. For example, Sally Bercow has come in for a lot of unfair criticism for also being little more than careless about who she saw "trending" on the website (McAlpine, since you ask). Assuming her tweets are deemed unlawful, what fate could befall anyone who simply tweeted the text “I wonder what Sally Bercow is up to today?"

Most of the "chattering classes" know who Sally Bercow is.

To find out what Sally Bercow has been writing, she is well-known enough to be the first twitter result if anyone enters "Sally Bercow" into the search box.

If I wrote a tweet "I wonder what Sally Bercow is up to today," there is the argument that I am effectively signposting people to her page containing lots of questionable tweets.

This could happen to a lot of other people too. This is why the law as it stands cannot work.

I also fear what the consequences of these issues could be for opinion. A lot is written about high-profile Members of Parliament, for example, Nadine Dorries, who has recently been a resident of a jungle somewhere on the other side of the world. Dorries has always attracted a lot of criticism from those on both the left and the right because of her unconventional approach to public office.

Nobody can expect to be sued for describing her as a ghastly, awful woman, as it is an opinion that is not necessarily damaging. However, some may feel that Dorries has gone on a TV show to boost her own profile. They may argue that she is deserting her constituents while doing that. They may believe she is not fit to be an MP on that basis.

My fear is that Dorries may consider those viewpoints to be damaging and contest them on that basis. If a portal is opened to sue people for expressing such sentiments on Twitter, then the whole principle of debate is at risk.

Admittedly, criticising someone's fitness for office is not comparable to calling someone a paedophile, but the recipient could still fight the Twitter membership on the basis they feel it is damaging to their future employment opportunities and reputation. There are stakes here that are much bigger than context of one accusatory episode where this is located. The law must reflect that.

For now, I believe everyone has to calm down a little. We must cool down with the feral accusations. I can understand why feelings are running high though. I used to think, and still do to some extent, that Brits are extremely paranoid and irrational when it comes to the issue of paedophilia.

The Sun mixes up coverage of right-wing politics, international affairs and celebrity gossip with regular titillation stories from the courts about paedophile activity. If the stories look peculiarly out of place outside of the context of a local newspaper, it is because they are. In some ways, the newspaper's obsession with the issue is borderline creepy.

It has been known for innocent people to be attacked in the street because they happen to resemble a paedophile mugshot published in the tabloid press. This is not on.

I do believe though that Britain has a bigger paedophile problem than I originally thought. In some ways, the Internet has flushed them to the surface in much the same way as rain brings out slugs. Without being rumbled by an eagle-eyed computer repair engineer, Gary Glitter would still be enjoying regular paedophile holidays to the Far East, unchecked.

Shouting out the names of presumed paedophiles on Twitter is not the answer. We need to apply pressure to get these high-profile child abuse cases re-opened and re-examined, so the offenders can be brought to justice.

It is not just ordinary citizens, many of whom are worried parents and people with good hearts, who need to cool down though. A little understanding needs to be shown by those who are trying to control what is published on the Internet.

Let us not forget the public was wound up by this story by the very classes now trying to stamp down on Twitter activity – those in the media. The wind-up process started earlier in the day of the Newsnight report into the child abuse scandal, when someone connected to the report tweeted to tell people it was likely to be screened and involved an old Tory.

The idea may not have been to cause feverish speculation, but it had that effect.

When the news report went out and (quelle surprise) nobody was named, that raised anger levels further. Bearing in mind Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards paedophila, this outcome should not have surprised anyone, apart from maybe the most moronic of TV executives.

So whereas the Twitter community needs to calm down a little now, so must also those who are the most condemning of us.