FROM THE NOTTING HILL BUNKER: BULLET POINTS TWO

In November 2006, just a year after the London bombings, another terrorist attack took place on the streets of London, this time involving the use of radioactive material. This attack resulted in the death of a British citizen. All the evidence points to a foreign power being implicated in the attack; given all of this, and the Governments declared aim of fiercely fighting terrorism wherever it is found you might think the government would want to do whatever it takes to root out and bring to justice those responsible. You would be wrong.

For the government in which all the evidence points is Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the victim an asylum seeker from Putin’s thuggish state, Alexander Litvinenko. Putin has been throwing his weight around respecting the investigation of this attack that has the murky fingerprints of the Russian security service, FSB,[1] all over it.

Theresa May: Making your world secure, unless that is, it
upsets Vladimir Putin. 

The coroner looking into Mr Litvinenko’s death has been preventing from accessing any material that might link the death to the Russian state, a whole swath of relevant documents being given Public Interest Immunity PPI, i.e. kept secret. Our current Home Secretary, Theresa May, has blocked a full public inquiry into Litvinenko’s death, called for by the coroner and in which secret material could have be seen in-camera. She cited amongst other things ‘international relations’ and possibly to curry favour in the current climate of austerity, the cost.

Marina Litvinenko

Yesterday saw Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, being blocked in the courts after she was refused protection against incurring £40,000 costs should her attempts to challenge this decision fail. So there you have it, British values are one thing but relations with Russia and saving money more important.[2]

I am getting pretty sick of people waving a flag in my face and spouting  windy rhetoric about British values, yet when push comes to shove, when the moment comes to stand up for those values against thuggish bullies like Putin they are the first to scuttle for the mouse hole.

 Notoriously in a recent summit a Russian spokesman wrote of the UK as a small island of which nobody any longer takes notice. Theresa May and her colleagues seem intent on proving the point.

Appeasing bullies never worked, the Tories tried it before, between 1936 and 1939, it didn’t work then and it will not work now.  

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Mehdi Hasan

Mehdi Hasan is currently being lauded on the left for the pretty effective kicking he gave to the Daily Mail on the BBC Question Time programme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ZCrDtAC7A

There is a side to Mr Hasan that many of those cheering in their front rooms may have been  unaware. As the Mail, all too gleefully,[3] reports in today’s edition, 05/10/13, Mr Hasan has previously sought employment by the mail. In July 2010 Mr Hasan wrote ‘…I have always admired the papers passion, rigour, boldness and of course news values. I believe the mail has a vitally important role to play in the national debate, and I admire your relentless focus on the need for integrity and morality in public life and your outspoken defence from militant atheists and secularists…I am also attracted by the Mail’s social conservatism on issues like marriage , the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies.’

Mr Hasan is no friend of the secular left and has attacked people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins for drawing attention tothe damaging role religion plays in society. Mr Hasan is a literalist Muslim who holds, very small c, conservative views. Nothing wrong in all of that and I would defend his right to propagate these views, though insist on my right to attack these same views without being smeared as an ‘Islamaphobe’ [whatever that means], for doing so.

Mr Hasan is very good at playing to the gallery and can dish it out. You can be pretty sure though he did not wish his little missive to the Mail to be made public. There is a word for those who say one thing in public and another in private.  

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I Watched Glenn Greenwald being interviewed by Kirsty Wark on Newsnight, the interview was a train wreck from the start. Wark appeared completely out of her depth, her questions sloppily composed and poorly put; she was shredded just about as effectively as any document marked ‘top secret.’ Newsnight’s decline is one small example of the BBC’s deterioration as a news gathering organisation.

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"I haven't seen it."
Should have gone to Specsavers*

The whole affair of The Mail’s hatchet job smearing Ed Milibands father, which Quinton Letts on the same BBC’s Question Time, ludicrously kept describing as ‘an essay,’ was interesting at a range of levels. I have already written about this; see below, so I am not going to back over the affair in detail.

David Cameron seems to have been given far more credit than he deserves for simply saying that he understood why Ed Miliband would wish to defend his father. He never condemned the Mail, in fact instead did a ‘Wenger;’ Arsene Wenger a football manager who after one of his players viciously scythes down an opponent always says that he cannot comment as he “didn’t see it.” Cameron says this of an article that featured as the lead item on the TV news and was the major talking point across the internet. His response was both cowardly and disingenuous, he is afraid of the Mail, and the truth is that, respecting the ‘feral press,’ he lacks Miliband’s balls.

What was noticeable was that others who had previously experienced the Daily Mail’s highly sensitive and nuanced treatment suddenly found the courage to come out into the open and fight back.

For decades the Mail has been used to drowning out the people it despises, it is not used to taking on its opponents on a more level playing field. In the post Leveson climate, using social media, people are fighting back and the Mail is struggling to cope with concerted social pressure. Quinton Letts gave away far more than he realised when he characterised the Mail as a beleaguered ‘village.’ This was, one suspects, not always the case, however the cultural climate of Britain has shifted, leaving the Daily Mail behind. Now the bloated old bully, used to intimidating threatening and ultimately silencing anyone who gets in the way, is getting some of its own medicine and it doesn’t much care for it.

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[1] Fully grown child of the KGB

[3] It seems that the Mail well have breached it’s own confidentiality policy by leaking this correspondence.

*Apologies to Private Eye

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