Potter on Murdoch: “I’d shoot the bugger”
The dying playwrite Dennis Potter tells Melvyn Bragg (in 1994) what he’d like to do to Rupert Murdoch. What has finally happened is almost as satisfying. Sadly, Potter is not with us to gloat.
H/t: “Mr Jelly not Jolly” (whoever he may be).
NUJ condemns Murdoch’s closure of The News of the World
In a shock announcement … [07.07.11] James Murdoch has informed staff at the News of the World that the newspaper is being wound up with its last edition printed on Sunday.
General Secretary said: “This shows the depths to which Rupert Murdoch
and his lieutenants at News International are prepared to stoop. The
announcement James Murdoch should be making today is the dismissal of Rebekah
Brookes as chief executive of News International. The shocking revelations this
week show beyond doubt the systemic abuse and corruption at the top of the
operation ran by both Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. Yet News International
has persistently lied about the extent of this scandal and tried to pass it off
as a problem created by a couple of rogue reporters.
200 staff in the UK and Ireland, and putting scores more freelances and casuals
out of a job, is an act of utter cynical opportunism. Murdoch is clearly
banking on this drawing a line under the scandal, removing an obstacle to the
BskyB deal, and letting his senior executives off the hook. That simply won’t
wash. It is not ordinary working journalists who have destroyed this paper’s
credibility – it is the actions of Murdoch’s most senior people.
when he said in his statement today that ‘Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom
bad.’ Yet those wrongdoers are still there today, at the top of the News
International empire and ordinary staff at the paper are paying with their
livelihoods.
– a newspaper that has been in print now for 168 years – is a calculated
sacrifice by Rupert Murdoch to salvage his reputation and that of News
International, in the hope that readers will switch allegiance to a new
seven-day operation at The Sun, the government will wave through the BskyB deal
and he will widen his grip on the UK’s media landscape.
Wapping dispute it is the behaviour of Rupert Murdoch and his management that
has caused the closure of the newspaper. The NUJ will offer all support to its
members at the News of the World facing compulsory redundancies and will be
organising an emergency meeting of all journalists at the title to offer advice
and support.”
From the archive: Daniel Morgan, Jonathan Rees and the anatomy of a murder
Now seems like a good moment to remind readers of this piece from ‘Shiraz’ on 14 March this year:
On 10 March 1987 the body of a young private investigator called Daniel Morgan was found in the car park of a south London pub. An axe was embedded in his face.
Last week, a former business partner of Morgan’s, Jonathan Rees, together with two brothers, Glenn and Garry Vian, were aquitted at the Old Bailey after the case against the three was dropped by the CPS because the amount of paperwork involved meant that it could not be guaranteed that the defence had been able to see all the evidence before the trial started. A fourth man, Jimmy Cook, had been cleared at an earlier hearing and Sid Fillery, a former police detective from Catford, had been cleared of attempting to pervert the course of justice. Rees and the Vians have previous convictions for serious offences. Rees served seven years from December 2000 for planting drugs on an innocent woman he was trying to frame. On his release, he was immediately re-engaged by his previous client, the News Of The World.
An employee of Morgan’s and Rees’s firm, Southern Investigations, said in evidence 23 years ago that a business contact had talked of wanting Morgan dead and that his police contacts at Catford would help bring this about.
We shall never know who murdered Daniel Morgan, in the same way that we’ll never know who killed Stephen Lawrence. But note the names above, just for the record.
As with the Lawrence case, there are questions about the role of the police. Rees had been paying a network of corrupt cops who sold him information. There have been five police investigations into the Morgan murder, the first of which is now admitted by the cops themselves to have been obstructed by police corruption. The collapse of the case last week seems to have been due to a genuine cock-up by the new team who investigated the case and by the CPS, rather than corruption. But after the series police of cover-ups that have dogged this case, one has to be a bit cynical about that.
After the collapse of the case an honest cop, Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell, expressed his personal feelings to the Morgan family, describing the outcome as “wholly regrettable.” He went on: “This current investigation has identified, ever more clearly, how the initial inquiry failed the family and the wider public. It was quite apparent that police corruption was a debilitating factor in that investigation…Significant changes have occurred since that time; nevertheless, there are important issues which we need to examine in order to understand what led to today’s decision.”
The only newspaper to have given this case extensive coverage has been the Guardian (from which most of the information in this piece has been obtained). The Murdoch press has largely ignored it, which is, perhaps not surprising: the main customer of the information that Rees obtained by bribing cops and hacking into phones was the News Of The World (though the Mirror also paid him for information).
Acting Deputy Commissioner John Yates has some explaining to do: he assured Parliament that the phone-hacking scandal was limited to Clive Goodman (former NOTW royal correspondent) and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, both of whom were jailed in 2007. He also stated that hacking phone messages was only illegal if the recipient had not yet listened to them (!). Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda, has accused Yates of misleading two parliamentary select committees on the phone-hacking issue. Now, the director of public prosecutions has written to the Guardian, accusing Yates of misrepresenting him in attempting to justify the evidence he gave the select committees.
But if Yates has some explaining to do, David Cameron and Nick Clegg have even more: this time-line shows that Andy Coulson (until recently, Cameron’s communications director) must have known about Rees’s activities when he was Deputy Editor and then Editor of the NOTW – and that Cameron must have known this when he gave Coulson his job with the Tories and the coaltion government. Clegg must have known about the prosecution of Rees and its implications when he signed up to Cameron’s coalition.
The whole business stinks of Murdoch criminality, police corruption and Tory/Lib-Dem complicity. There will be more revelations tonight at 8.30 on BBC 1’s Panorama.
Meanwhile the killers of Daniel Morgan and their police friends have gone free, while his family are left to grieve. Morgan’s brother Alistair told the Guardian: “It was obvious my brother was going to blow the lid off the links between the police and criminals.”
James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks “should face the full force of the law”
Tom Watson MP makes excellent use of parliamentary privilege:
Brooksgate, hackgate or however they’ll gate it
Alex Massie is usually a genial chap, but he got his razor out today:-
An exclusive look at a strategy memo prepared for Rebekah Brooks this afternoon:
…..
You were only doing your job and your job was giving the punters what they wanted. (Yeah, we’re going to have to drop the it’s “inconceivable” that you knew stuff; everyone can conceive that you did. Tough break but there you have it.)
No, if you sinned it was because you loved the readers – the Great sodding British public – not wisely but too well. They’re a prurient, censorious, malignant bunch of bastards and we gave ’em a paper to match. If they’ve got a problem with that they should look to their own consciences first. Never mind the motes, look at the beams matey.
Defend Dale Farm families!
Eviction notices have been served to 51 traveller families on the Dale Farm
site in Essex, sparking a call for activists to help defend their homes.
Basildon Council has served the notices which give them until the end
of August to leave Dale Farm, which was first occupied in 2001.
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Travellers at the site, thought to be the largest “illegal” encampment in Europe and home to
around 400 people, have offered to leave peacefully if alternative plots are
provided for them.
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The cost of enforcing the eviction has been put at more
than £10 million, with finance coming from the Home Office, Essex Police,
Basildon Council and the Department for Communities and Local Government and
others.
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Instead of persecuting a minority community, they could spend the
money protecting jobs and services, and help integrate the travelling community
into society instead of demonising them as scroungers and criminals.
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Activists are being urged to join a resistance activity weekend on
Saturday July 9, which will include sessions on legal observer training,
discussions with residents and other resistance activity workshops.
A call-out has also been made for supporters to join Camp Constant on Friday July 29
To find out more about Dale Farm and how you can help visit http://dalefarm.wordpress.com or search on Facebook for Dale
Farm Solidarity.
H/t: William Lodge
30th June: an “unqualified success”
An NUT comrade writes:
I understand why things might seem so mixed from a UCU perspective. June 30th
was a far from ideal date for them and it came as part of a campaign that seems
to lack direction or focus. There may also be some of this feeling in PCS where
the strategy of periodic one-day actions remains untied to any longer term
strategy.
the campaign building up to it has been a more or less unqualified success. That
is not at all to say that the problem of overall strategy has been resolved or
that we won’t experience the same ennui that exists in PCS and UCU if that isn’t
sorted out. The significant features of the action however were as
follows:
- the NUT set about winning the other teacher unions to a
strategy of balloting for co-ordinated discontinuous strike action against these
proposals as far back as December. The most important other union, NASUWT, just
would not be budged for various universally awful reasons. To our, and even more
their, surprise the ATL moved our way. - The NASUWT refused to believe that the ATL would carry
this through (and not without good reason, we were all surprised). First they
told themselves they won’t come to our side. Then that their Exec wouldn’t
agree. Then that there was no way their conference would approve a ballot. And
finally that their members wouldn’t deliver a yes vote. They were wrong on every
count. They were invited to reconsider at every point but refused. Instead they
tried to use their contacts in the TUC to bully ATL to break from us. - The 83% ATL yes vote and the unprecedented 92% NUT yes
vote comprehensively blew the ‘stay with the TUC’ approach out of the water.
This matters a lot. - The turnout, composition and public reaction to the day
itself reinforces all this and vindicates the strategy. In Leeds, for example,
the NASUWT is the biggest teaching union. And yet 82% of secondaries and 70% of
primaries were closed or partially closed. - One key purpose of the action, especially at this initial
stage, is to get the debate about public sector pensions out into the open and
see if we can win it. Perhaps the decisive outcome of this week has been that
the govt has completely lost the argument on key aspects of their proposals. The
affordability argument in particular is so discredited that they have
effectively abandoned it (shifting to the much vaguer word ‘untenable’). - There are all sorts of examples out on cyberspace now of
the govt losing the debate (Maude and Justine Green on Today on consecutive
mornings). But I think the weathervane stuff can be found in the comments from
readers after vitriolic articles in the Mail and Sun attacking the idea that
teachers should ever strike (Melanie Phillips in the Mail here),
and witchhunting two prominent NUT women as “Scargirls” (Sun here).
The majority of comments on these articles strongly disagree and ask where the
attacks on the bankers are.
bloody mountain to climb in those who have stayed out of the fight. But June
30th was a potential game-changer and we should recognise that if we
want to build the kind of co-ordinated action campaign that can with this.
Game-changer because:
- the Prentis/Barber/Keates strategy has been decisively
undermined - Ed Miliband’s response to the strikes been a sharp jolt
of reality to all those who thought they had a leader moving even marginally
back to Labour as a party articulating workers concerns - the striking unions for the most part, and very
definitely the NUT, will feel vindicated and emboldened by their success. The
question of what next is a an immediate question - In Autumn students will be back fully as will the Y11 and
Y13 school students who took the main lead in school walkouts. None of these
were around on June 30th. The prospects of doubling the size of Thursday’s
events just with that alone is not fantasy. - Should Unison, Unite, NASUWT and the primary heads union
join in with all of the above we are looking at something on an dramatically
bigger scale. - If that scenario develops it creates major problems for
govt and Labour. Both have relied massively on the non-striking ‘sensible’
unions this week and on the claim that there are negotiations which haven’t
broken down. If they have broken down and the ‘patient’ unions have been forced
to join the momentum will appear to be entirely with us. To Miliband we will say
‘still the wrong time, Ed? Choose your side’.
ahead of us. Two key things for me locally are to
activists who did the best work building up to June 30th to get them organising
the schools that didn’t come out as strongly, visiting local workplaces
etc
go and actively lobby every MP on the issue with a view to harassing the Tory
and Lb Dem and getting the Labour MPs to back us in public and put pressure on
Miliband.
That Miliband ‘hostage video’ in full…
Painful, even without the superfluous graphics added by the YouTube poster:
From Ian Bone:
ED MILIBAND INTERVIEW ‘LIKE HOSTAGE VIDEO’ or ‘TALKING CELERY STICK’
This BBC interview with Ed Miliband yesterday on the strikes marks a new nadir even for him. He gives the same wooden and stiff answer to four questions, talks like a computer and looks weirder than ever. Look at the eyes – I reckon he’s an alien or a talking celery stick with bulgy eyes. He is seen by most punters as just weird, a geek, hopeless and hapless. take a look: interview with the BBC
….someone said it “looks like a hostage video!”
Ottilie Patterson RIP
I’ve just heard that Ottilie Patterson, singer with the Chris Barber Band in the 1950s and ’60s, died on 20 June aged 79. She had been living in obscurity in Ayre, South West Scotland for many years. In my humble opinion, she was the finest and most sincere blues singer that Britain ever produced (she was born in Comber, County Down, N Ireland).
The writer and trombonist Mike Pointon interviewed her at length in 2008 for Just Jazz magazine; this fascinating document deserves to be republished somewhere. Here’s a couple of extracts.
On first experiencing jazz and blues:
“Well, this guy lent me those records with Bessie [Smith], St. Louis Blues and Reckless Blues, and I came home from college with these, and my mother is making the dinner and I was up in the living room, and the only gramophone record player I had was the one that my brother John had got in the Air Force. He had swapped something for this player, a real old clapped out thing, but he got it for two shillings and something else, and if he ever had a 12 inch platter on, you had to rewind it before it got to the end. That was the only thing in the way of a music player we had, and it was just a little portable-type thing. We had a small wooden stool that my father or grandfather or somebody had made, like a little country stool, and we used to set it on that.
“So I came in from college, wound up the thing and put Bessie on, singing St. Louis, and I thought, gosh, that’s amazing. It’s kind of funny, when she sings, she sort of flattens all the notes out, so you didn’t get so much of a tune, you got a kind of wail, and then I turned it over and put on Reckless, and from that day to this I wouldn’t hardly play that record because it’s too precious, ’cause you’ll never capture that feeling you got when you first heard the thing, and I never wanted to tarnish it. And even once I started to sing it, I thought, I’m not going to sing this too much, it’ll spoil it, it was ethereal, and that record hit me hard and I was hooked forever. Then I remember my mother saying, ‘Hurry up, your dinner’s ready.’ I was in another world – then add Mezz Mezzrow [‘s book Really The Blues] to that. Oh boy!”
On touring with Big Bill Broonzy:
“It was such a short space of time, you wonder how you got so close to somebody, but then you’re travelling in the car together all day. Bill asked me out for a Chinese meal at The Great Wall, and I was so pleased. We were walking along Oxford Street and he could have broken my heart. He had a sort of flat-footed gait, and he said, ‘You’re not ashamed to be seen with me?’ I said, ‘I’m proud,’ and my heart nearly broke. We went to the Chinese restaurant and Bill was talking about the Blues, and he said, ‘The Blues isn’t just anything,’ and he took up his beer glass, which was empty by this time. Then he said, ‘Depends on how you look at life. I could take this glass and save a man’s life, bring him water and save his life. Or I could take this glass and fill it with strong liquor and he could be very drunk. Or I could take this glass and break it, and I could kill him.’ That was part of his little sermon about what the Blues are like, and he told me never to give up. That said more than white critics did.”
The record that changed Ottilie’s life: Reckless Blues by Bessie Smith.
Hari on down
It’s impossible not to write about Johann Hari’s shenanigans. I held down my fingers but they compulsively crawled to the keyboard. You hear that an award winning writer has smartened up his interviews by replacing what the interviewee said with something he wrote once, or said in a more articulate and aphoristic fashion to another interviewer. You call this producing “an intellectual portrait“. As thousands of Twitterers have shown, it is obscenely easy to spoof and piss-take.
In the Reading Room of the British Museum Karl Marx shifts uneasily in his chair. “Carbuncles,” he explains to my inquiring and sympathetic gaze. “What are my views on religion?” He draws on his cigar, a spark falls in his beard which starts burning and I pour water from a carafe over him. He wipes his face and gazes on the heap of Blue Books that litter his desk. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
I imagine Johann Hari on the train from Hull looking glumly at his notes. The great poet had been polite but not forthcoming. What had he said about his childhood? “I didn’t enjoy it much.” This intellectual portrait was a mere paint by numbers sketch and he would have to fill in the rest. So:-
Larkin gazed out the window, and a faintly wounded expression came across his face:- “They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they do not mean to but they do.”
If Hari had fudged statistics – well, which of us can do the maths. If he didn’t pore over background material as thoroughly as he should have – that’s forgivable for a 1000 word piece. Hari however did something which anyone can see is dishonest. Supporters find excuses for him. It seems he didn’t get the regular journalist training and so missed the Ethics and Good Practice module. But what he did falls within primary school play ground morality. You don’t say you heard someone say something to you when they didn’t, even if it’s the sort of thing they would say.
As a columnist Hari is used to scolding wrong-doers for their lapses of judgement and morals and now the scolded are avenged. Those who have called him a light-weight in the past are full of I-told-you-so. The right are drinking the best vintage Schadenfreude. He’s given everyone the chance to suggest that the Zeitgeist told him to blur the difference between “narrative” and “truth”, and to deplore the tons of opinion to ounces of reportage that fill the newspapers these days. In blog comments anonymous media navvies complain that Mr Glamour Boy gets the good gigs without the graft, and the big neon name is sent off to cover foreign affairs, transport and the environment, whether he knows anything about them or not.
I would never have broken my neck to read a Hari piece though when I have come across them recently I’ve thought he has got better and was not as callow and shallow as in his earlier writing years. I was cheering him when on a discussion programme he gave the Roman Catholic church a smacking for their paedophilia cover up, pointing out that no other big organisation would have been allowed to get away with it. He’s liberal-left so no doubt I’m on his side most of the time.
But now he’s shown he can’t be trusted. He’ll never be quoted in this town again.
Shiraz Socialist 