UKIP – Bigotry The Mail Missed

“UKIP's vile Mandela 'slave' rant exposed: Disgusting remarks made about South African president and murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence 'reveal true face of party'” thundered the Mail On Sunday yesterday, as Glen Owen dished the dirt on the party’s internal online forum. But it was the kind of thing that didn’t get into his article that tells you rather more about this body.

Not least is the omission of their own revelation that Victoria Ayling, close ally of Nigel “Thirsty” Farage, and who said of immigrants that “I just want to send the lot back”, had been a member of the racist National Front (NF) some years ago. This is important, as UKIP bans former BNP members from joining its ranks – and the BNP was born out of a split within the NF.

John Tyndall, who founded the NF, left after the 1979 General Election, with Private Eye magazine alleging there had been a falling out between him and Martin Webster, who was gay. Tyndall, who led the BNP from 1982 to 1999, was a notorious homophobe. And to be an NF member in the late 70s, with Tyndall’s 1962 conviction for paramilitary organising in recent memory, is seriously bad.

It gets worse: last Friday, UKIP Euro-election candidate Gawain Towler looked at the “Scruton Manifesto” and concluded that UKIP already embraced its principles. Roger Scruton founded the Salisbury Review, which for some years embraced the concept of repatriation for immigrants. Its contributors, as I noted recently, are still prone to using unfortunate language when talking about ethnic minorities.

So now we have two reasons not to touch the Farage fringe with the longest of bargepoles. And, as the man said, there’s more: on the same UKIP Daily site that Towler used to show his support for Scruton, Nigel Jones, another MEP hopeful, gives the impression of rank paranoia as he froths at “Europhiles” in what is called “LibLabCon”. Perhaps “EUSSR” will be along shortly to keep it company.

And another item missing from the MoS charge sheet is the behaviour of another of the UKIP faithful it mentions, Martin “Marty” Caine from the pleasant seaside town of Poole. In a Twitter exchange with Phil Dore, he referred to the family of murdered soldier Lee Rigby as “idiots” (as well as, separately, mounting a defence of the EDL). UKIP deny they are in any way allied to the EDL.

Caine then threatened to sue Tom Pride, who called supposedly libertarian UKIP “about as libertarian as I’m a catwalk model”, for pointing out that he had, er, called Lee Rigby’s family “idiots”. Which he had demonstrably done. As Littlejohn might have said, you couldn’t make it up. And that concludes today’s Kipper kippering of the party’s racist and bully-boy underbelly.

Nobody with brain engaged should even consider voting for this shower.

So Farewell Then Ariel Sharon

Today, former Israeli Prime Minister – and military commander – Ariel Sharon takes his last journey, to his family’s ranch in the Negev. Sharon, who died on Friday after spending eight years in a coma following a massive stroke, has been given full state honours, as befits a former PM and survivor of the 1948 generation, one who fought in the Israeli war of independence.

Yet Ariel Sharon remains a controversial figure: this is acknowledged even by the most conservative of media outlets. One cannot understand the man, his country, and the times they lived through without understanding this. And it is the craven inability to see Sharon’s downsides that marks out The Commentator, and its almost adulatory obituary, standing all alone.

It is not for Robin Shepherd and his dwindling band of firmly right-wing contributors to tell readers that Sharon behaved insubordinately and recklessly during the 1956 Suez campaign in an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge Egyptian forces from the Mitla Pass. Nor is the indiscriminate killing of dozens of Palestinian civilians in a reprisal raid in 1953 even mentioned.

Sharon continued to have difficulty doing what his superiors told him to do even when he returned to the IDF on the occasion of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Fortunately his side won. But the greatest stain on his reputation came when, as Defence Minister in the early 80s, he oversaw the invasion of Lebanon and soon ratcheted it up into a full-scale war.

What he promised would be over in 24 to 48 hours had already lasted three months when Christian Phalange militiamen entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut and massacred hundreds – perhaps thousands – of Palestinian refugees. The suspicion that Sharon had caused the IDF to look the other way was inescapable. The subsequent Kahan report confirmed the suspicion.

Yes, an Israeli commission of inquiry found Ariel Sharon culpably negligent over the killings. This is excused by The Commentator, and Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, which triggered the second Palestinian intifada and set off the wave of suicide bombings and reprisals is not mentioned. Sharon then portrayed the building of the security barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories as inevitable.

Yes, Ariel Sharon fought courageously for his country. No-one questions this, or detracts from his patriotism. But he, like so many conviction politicians, will be remembered rather differently, depending on which side of the Israeli – Palestinian divide you are on, or even, within Israel, your view of recent history. The Commentator does his memory no favours by declining to give the full picture.

It’s a perversely blinkered view of the world that Robin Shepherd inhabits.

Delingpole Scrapes The Abuse Barrel

Out there on the right, one pundit is celebrating an anniversary. Yes, it was about this time last year that James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole decided it would be A Very Good Thing to attack the disabled, and in particular those who identified themselves with the Spartacus Report. This was followed by an episode of misogyny so blatant he had to apologise for it.

Not even a teensy bit fair and balanced

Del Boy ranted “Is it just me – or do the most warped, bitter people on Twitter all have ‘Spartacus’ embroidered across their picture”. On being reminded that Spartacus led a slave revolt, he sneered “Ah. That’ll be it. They’re angry about being enslaved by the injustice of free taxpayers’ money”. But when the really nasty insults came, they were kept separate from his attack on the disabled.

That nasty episode was when Del leapt to the defence of his pal, the loathsome Toby Young, and made a comment about Suzanne Moore that Maily Telegraph editor Tony Gallagher forced him to remove, and for which he had to apologise. But clearly, the passage of time has caused the episode, and its lessons, to fall from close memory, as today he has once again crossed the abuse line.

Delingpole had been coming off second best in a Twitter exchange with former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) member Danny Blanchflower, who joshed him about his lack of economics knowledge: “@jamesdelingpole and his O-Level in woodwork”. Del Boy wasn’t going to stand for that kind of impertinent language, and certainly not from a rotten lefty.

So in he went with both feet, Auto-Sneer set to stun: “You don’t seem to understand, Blanchflower. You are a total spazz, everyone hates you and you smell. Seriously”. Delingpole clearly thinks he can channel Rick from The Young Ones, except that the 1980s sitcom was funny, and Del Boy isn’t. This latter fact was brought home to him by two dissenting commenters.

Sharon Avraham put him straight: “He’s not funny. The word ‘spazz’ is highly offensive and unacceptable”. Alan Old concurred: “You may think it’s acceptable to use public schoolboy insults such as spazz, but it’s not”. It was not for nothing that the organisation founded as the Spastics Society was renamed Scope in the 1980s – that was partly to do with use of the former term as abuse.

So what will Delingpole do this time? Will he say sorry and withdraw, or will Tony Gallagher have to cause him to do so? And how long before he indulges in another exhibition of similarly bad behaviour? Strange that it’s the supposedly libertarian right that complains it is being bullied and insulted, and not engaged on its ideas, while at least one of its number is doing exactly that to others.

Say sorry Del, and then ask nicely if you can rejoin the grownups.

Gove Academy Woes Continue

Problems with all those Very Wonderful academies encouraged by Education Secretary Michael “Oiky” Gove and his cheerleaders continue, and this weekend it became clear that those catering to primary age children are not immune to the problem of head teachers departing, or otherwise going missing, as not one, but two of them made the news for all the wrong reasons.

Yes, you, and it's still our money

First came the news from the Surrey commuter belt town of Guildford that the head of Weyfield Primary Academy had suddenly departed his post, despite a glowing Ofsted report and the support of enthusiastic parents. “Simon Wood joined the school in 2012 when it was struggling with one of the worst reputations in the borough and was regarded as 'inadequate' by inspectors” it was reported..

But this soon changed: “Within a year its ranking had risen to 'good' and inspectors were praising the ‘magical’ atmosphere of learning”. One parent told that “This is a tragedy for the school. Mr Wood used to greet every child by name at the gate. He was special. It just doesn’t make sense for him to leave like that”. And note that this is yet another instance of a departure part-way through the school year.

Why would The Kemnal Academies Trust (TKAT) take such a step? Ah well. Although the school had improved sufficiently to get a “good” rating from Ofsted, recent Key Stage 2 test results had been poor. Although Wood said these “were to be expected and that ‘it was always going to take two years to redress the balance’”, it looks like another premature sacking rooted in lack of realism.

And, it seems, Weyfield Primary Academy and TKAT is not an isolated example, as parents in Worcester have now discovered: the town’s Perry Wood Primary school, run by Griffin Schools Trust, is now without its head teacher, although it would appear that Ange Beddow has not left. She just hasn’t been there since the beginning of December, and nobody can tell when she will return.

Amusingly, Worcester News cornered “Oiky” in the mistaken belief that it would make a difference: “The minister admitted his shock over the situation – which has seen popular head Mrs Beddow be away from the school since early December – and vowed he would try to sort out the stand-off and get answers for parents”. Gove was “going to get answers”. Like heck he was.

Griffin Schools Trust “has not commented on the situation, saying only that Mrs Beddow remains in her role”. But parents have been told nothing, and the local authority is powerless: “because it is an academy the school runs its own affairs, and both the school and the trust have rejected pleas for answers”. Welcome to the new and totally un-accountable world of Gove’s academies.

“Oiky’s” cheerleaders are once again silent today. No surprise there, then.

Douglas Murray – You’re A Bigot

If a supposedly mainstream pundit said “conditions for Jews in Europe must be made harder across the board”, the reaction would probably be a combination of disbelief, condemnation, and a thought that someone was just re-reading something from the 1930s. But that statement – with “Jews” replaced by “Muslims” was indeed made recently by a mainstream pundit. And he got away with it.

Behold the new face of intolerance

That pundit is one Douglas Murray, who has now been given a platform by Spectator editor Fraser Nelson. “There are certain things in Britain about which it is impossible to speak frankly. The birth rate of the Jewish population is a prime subject”. Sitting up straight, are we? Good. Then that instance of “Jewish” can be corrected to “Muslim”, which is what Murray actually said.

Had anyone really used the word “Jewish” in that statement about the birth rate, they would have been instantly condemned. Yet when Murray uses “Muslim” instead, he is merely “reporting ... a fact which most of our media refuse to touch”. Yes, Doug is just saying what ordinary people are thinking.

This “nicely demonstrates part of the pickle this country is in. Even the papers that will report on one of the biggest underlying stories of our time, and one which demonstrates an unprecedented change in the make-up of our country, must on all accounts be turned into a good news story. And since expressing any worries about the fact is undoubtedly terribly bigoted and nasty, we’ll all just have to nod our heads, keep our fingers crossed [and] mouth the same platitudes” he concludes.

Murray’s subtext – that Muslims are coming to get us by out-breeding the natives – is OK when it is the followers of The Prophet who are the target. So it should surprise no-one to see the more thoughtful of their number have put everyone straight on where he is coming from. Mehdi Hasan has noted that Murray encouraged the EDL, and that he referred to Islam in Europe as an “opportunist infection”.

This last led to the Tory front bench cutting its ties with Murray, and Paul Goodman taking on the pundit’s bigotry, drawing this response from Cristina Odone at the Telegraph: “The beauty of Britain lies in its tolerance towards all, Muslims and Murrays. But when the latter tries to eject the former, someone has to step in. Thank you, Paul Goodman, for doing so”. This, too, is significant.

That is because Ms Odone is a Roman Catholic: it is not so long ago that such an affiliation made its practitioners second class citizens in the UK. She therefore knows all about prejudice towards religious minorities. And that is what Douglas Murray is peddling, under the smokescreen of playing devil’s advocate and supposedly saying what all those ordinary people really think.

This is poisonous, rabble-rousing bigotry, and nothing else. That’s not good enough.

Top Six – January 12

So what’s hot, and what’s not, in the past week’s blogging? Here are the six most popular posts on Zelo Street for the past seven days, counting down in reverse order, because, well, I have to go out later. So there.

6 Dorries Question Time Foot In Mouth Mid Bedfordshire Tory MP (yes, it’s her again) Nadine Dorries got no sympathy at all when she talked of potential immigration from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. This was not unconnected to her ignorant and abusive treatment of one of her fellow panellists.

5 Train Toilets Flush Onto Tracks Shock The press was aghast at the “disgusting” practice of trains having toilets that flush onto the tracks, but they said nothing when those trains were new – thirty years ago.

4 Guido Fawked – Brewer’s Fact Droop The perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog tried to blame the closure of all those pubs  on Pa Broon. They did this by telling a pack of lies. Another fine mess.

3 Don’t Menshn The Duggan Verdict Self-promotion specialist Louise Mensch was instantly all-knowledgeable about the inquest verdict on the Mark Duggan shooting. She wasn’t. No change there, then.

2 Gove’s Free Schools – Now It’s Fraud The head of Bradford’s Kings Science Academy was shown welcoming Young Dave to his school. Now he’s facing a fraud charge. And “Oiky” Gove’s folks may have tried to cover it up.

1 Another Gove Promotion Stumbles This time it was an academy on Tyneside, converted from a loss-making independent school, and that had had its debts paid off that was in trouble. There will be more.

And that’s the end of another blogtastic week, blog pickers. Not ‘arf!

Toby Young’s UKIP Fantasy

Some people like to play fantasy football. Some yet sadder individuals opt for fantasy politics, and one of the saddest is the loathsome Toby Young, unable to wait for the funeral of well-liked Labour MP Paul Goggins before launching into speculation as to the potential outcome of the upcoming by-election in the Wythenshawe and Sale East constituency, which he thinks UKIP might win.

Make election prediction before opening vino

And this is complete and utter tosh: one look at the make-up of the constituency, together with the vote share at the last four General Elections, shows that this one has “Labour hold” written all over it, whether Tobes gets his dream of local Tory and UKIP supporters entering into some kind of informal pact or not. A look at the local Government representation is instructive.

The seat comprises five wards in Wythenshawe (Northenden, Brooklands, Baguley, Sharston, Woodhouse Park) and three from Sale (Brooklands, Priory and Sale Moor). When last contested, these returned three Tory councillors, one Lib Dem, and twenty Labour. So UKIP had some second and third places? They won no seats at all. Zero. Not a sausage. Bugger all.

Mike Smithson of Political Betting considers whether this having been a safe Labour seat may have bred complacency, and talks of declining turnouts, but since 2001 turnout has risen at both subsequent General Elections, and Goggins was a hard working MP whose personal vote will most likely transfer to whoever Labour nominates – especially if it is someone local to the area.

Now look at the likely share of the vote for established parties. The Tories were over 7% ahead of Labour in 2010 and still managed only 25.6%. The Lib Dems were on 23% nationally, and polled 22.3% here. Now Labour is around seven points ahead of the Tories, with the Lib Dems barely in double figures. And the latter’s vote in seats like this is likely to be at least partially soft.

This points to a Labour vote share of at least 50%, which is another way of saying that, whoever comes second, they are not going to lose. Factors like inward migration from other EU member states might be a factor, if there were a significant amount in the area. But the largest number of those coming from countries like Poland came no nearer than Crewe.

“Last night, Lord Ashcroft tweeted that betting on the outcome of the by-election had been temporarily suspended, suggesting that the bookies were busy recalculating the odds of a Ukip victory after several large bets had been placed on precisely that outcome” gurgles Tobes optimistically. But he’s never set foot in the area. Anyone who has knows this is Westminster village silliness.

Bet all you like, Ron Hopefuls. This one is returning to Labour. End of story.

Playing Both Sides Of Benefits Street

There are some rules governing the media that never vary: one is that you should think long and hard before letting the cameras in, especially if there is anything you might find inconvenient if broadcast, and another is that you should never, but never, go to the Daily Mail if you expect to be treated other than just another pawn in the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre’s mission to sell more papers.

What's f***ing wrong with kicking benefit claimants, c***?!?

Both these appear to have been ignored by residents of James Turner Street in the Birmingham suburb of Winson Green, some of whom let Channel 4 in to make its latest documentary Benefits Street – many residents are out of work, or claim other social security assistance – only for others to then go to the Mail as the paper sent its hacks to dig as much dirt as they could find.

“This documentary series reveals the reality of life on benefits, as the residents of one of Britain's most benefit-dependent streets invite cameras into their tight-knit community” says the Channel 4 blurb. Yes, the residents invited the cameras in, and there are a total of five programmes scheduled. But the Mail is in the business of kicking Channel 4, and also kicking the unemployed.

So Dacre’s finest first dug the dirt on as many of the participants as they could, unearthing a criminal conviction for one, before then playing the other side of the field and laying into Channel 4 for making the very series that is enabling the Mail to sell more papers because of the faux outrage already generated. As their unfunny and talentless churnalist Richard Littlejohn might say, you couldn’t make it up.

The scale of Mail misrepresentation is clear from the start: readers are fed the usual outrage-inducing “The ‘majority’ of residents in the 99 addresses are living off the state” before this is modified to “Ninety per cent of residents living in the 137-house street claim one or more benefits”. In other words, many are clearly working, and the Mail can’t even agree how many houses there are!

But this was clearly not enough for the Dacre doggies, and so a resident had to be found: “George Drummond is proud of his home, where he and his wife, a nurse, raised their three children. He is proud of his adopted country, having arrived here from Jamaica in the Fifties and spending the next 30-odd years as a bus driver, barely missing a day at the wheel”. He is therefore ideal Daily Mail material.

The upstanding Mr Drummond is an example of the kind of black people that Paul Dacre will allow into his paper, as he has worked hard, paid his taxes, owns his home, and most importantly can be used to shame his neighbours, not that he will have been told that was the deal. And that he may get stick for going to the Mail is something the hacks don’t care about. They’ve got their story.

And the Mail gets to kick its intended targets once more. No surprise there, then.

Dorries Question Time Foot In Mouth

You know that the Christmas and New Year break is well and truly forgotten when the BBC’s hardy perennial Question Time returns to the screen, and Thursday evening saw the programme at Goldsmith’s College in south-east London. This provided yet more extra-Parliamentary work for Mid Bedfordshire Tory MP (yes, it’s her again) Nadine Dorries, and one interesting debutante.

That was one Susie Boniface, aka Fleet Street Fox of the Daily Mirror, who has sinned twice over in the eyes of the fragrant Nadine, having found work at a paper that regularly gives Ms Dorries a hard time, and also having given her some stick not only on Twitter, but also in her column. As a result, the two did not speak before, during, or after the recording.

Now, as many Zelo Street regulars will know, there are some journalists whom I hold in high regard, and some who I consider to be an absolute shower (on Ms Boniface I don’t hold any particularly strong opinion). But were I to encounter one in the latter category, knowing they would be writing about it afterwards, I’d make the effort to extend the basic courtesies to them.

Not Nadine. And Ms Boniface did indeed write about it afterwards (a rattling good read it is too), telling that fellow panellists Norman Baker, Chuka Umunna, and even UKIP’s Paul Nuttall, were civil, pleasant and welcoming to her. So was the good and great Dimbleby Major himself. Ms Dorries was pig ignorant from start to finish. And then she started slagging off Ms Boniface for the sheer hell of it.

“Being written about by a journalist who can’t hold down a full time proper job and whose colleagues describe her as ‘vapid’ is like yawn ... the thing about journos that always gets me, they love to dish it out – but when it comes to taking it back?” she ranted. So MsBoniface is a freelance? Big deal. She shows in her article that she has no problem taking stick from others.

So when the fragrant Nadine slipped up during the recording, and answered a question on EU migration with “There has been no tidal wave but there might be tomorrow, there might be next year – we don’t know – and that is the problem. We could have a tidal wave from Yugoslavia”, there was ridicule, hilarity, and precious little sympathy. Because she, as usual, hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Twitter loves to kick up a fake storm ... I worked there in the 70s and it will always be [Yugoslavia] to me ... and to most people my age”. Not to this person her age it won’t. What’s her problem? Why not just admit the howler and that sometimes stuff happens? Why be so personally abusive before a word has even been written by the target? Anyone would think that Nadine Dorries has a problem.

They might also conclude that she is not a very nice person. No change there, then.

Plebgate – Press Still In Denial

So the Police officer who claimed to have witnessed the row between his colleagues on duty in Downing Street, and former Tory chief whip Andrew Mitchell, but turned out not to have been there, has owned up: “PC Keith Wallis, 53, admitted falsely claiming to have witnessed a row between then-cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell and police in September 2012”. He will be sentenced next month.

And the Commissioner of the Met, Bernard Hogan-Howe, has said sorry: “I would also like to apologise to Mr Mitchell that an MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] officer clearly lied about seeing him behaving in a certain manner ... I will be writing to him offering to meet and apologise in person”. PC Wallis will tender his resignation from the force later today. But that is not quite that.

The endorsement of the initial Police report on the row, which PC Wallis’ statement, made in an email to Mitchell’s deputy John Randall, who is his MP, was taken as proof by several media outlets that their initial story on Plebgate was correct. In fact, both original and endorsement were single-sourced from Police officers, at least one of which was shown to have made his account up.

When the proper investigative journalism needed doing, it was not the press who stepped up to the plate, but Michael Crick of Channel 4 News, a programme that is a frequent target of the right-wing press, who would rather it report only in the style, and on the subjects, of which it approves. Despite the lavish budgets available to the likes of the Daily Mail, they sat on their hands and did nothing.

Worse, the Mail, their broadsheet pals at the Maily Telegraph, and the Murdoch Sun, were more than happy to let the Police feed them those single-sourced stories, which were then published as fact, before it became clear that someone in the Met had been telling porkies. All then laid into the Police for dishonesty, while being unable to understand that they had been willing participants.

And that continues today, with the Mail covering the guilty plea but still asserting that Mitchell told officers on duty in Downing Street “learn your f***ing place”. The Telegraph notes that Young Dave called the whole affair a jolly bad show, and then has the brass neck to ask “Plebgate: why has one four-letter word caused such a long-lasting row?”, without admitting that it may be partly down to them.

At least the Sun is being a little more circumspect, but then, it’s in the firing line of Mitchell’s libel action. But what the press won’t be admitting is that, like the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Winston Silcott, Colin Stagg, Hillsborough, Orgreave, Blair Peach, and Jean Charles de Menezes, they took a single Police source as fact and were then proved to have got it wrong.

 That kind of press behaviour happens too often. And it’s not good enough.

Guido Fawked – Brewer’s Fact Droop

The saying often attributed to Denis Thatcher – “best to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt” – seems to have been forgotten by the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, as they attempt to retrospectively smear Pa Broon over something that in fact was done some years earlier by their heroine Mrs T.

Yeah I know all about pubs, cos I spend so much time in them, researching getting pissed, shit no, business, yeah, business of drinking, bollocks no, catering. To pissheads like me. Oh sod it

Asserting “Ignore the Spin: 56 Pubs Per Week Shut Under Labour”, the Fawkes folks show an unusual inability to get to grips with the recent history of an industry whose offerings they spend so much time sampling. And it is no good trying to accuse Labour MP Toby Perkins of being “simple” when Staines and his pals show that they are unable to take on board the, er, simple facts of the licensed trade.

“Labour did more to hamstring the pub industry than any other Government” claim the Fawkes rabble. How so? Duty increases and the smoking ban are cited, but they didn’t close “56 pubs a day”. Try again. “The ballooning in pub companies was the direct consequence of Brown’s tax relief for breweries introduced in 2002”. Thus the distillation of ignorance and dishonesty into one statement.

Behold a post of ultimate stupidity

The tax relief for microbreweries – note, only those brewing small amounts of beer – helped start-ups and small enterprises, the vast majority of which did not have a single pub to their name. Indeed, it is the pub companies, and their beer tie, that keeps the product of these small brewers out of many pubs (Crewe’s Offbeat Brewery is prevented from selling to most local pubs because of this).

It gets worse for Staines and his pals: the spinning-off of brewers’ tied estates into pub companies was as a result of legislation enacted in 1989, known as the Beer Orders, which imposed a maximum tied estate of 2,000 houses for any one brewer. That means it happened under Margaret Thatcher. The two biggest PubCos, Enterprise Inns and Punch Taverns, date from 1991 and 1997 respectively.

This disconnect between beer producers and pub owners – so that the biggest PubCos treat their holdings as real estate, rather than outlets for their products – is what has contributed to so many being sold off, as pubs become chips on a real-life Monopoly board. And when PubCos’ share value dips and trade is bad, selling pubs becomes a way of keeping afloat. It goes back to Maggie.

So the Fawkes folks talking about others spending too long in the pub is another case of pot and kettle. They just sprayed their remaining credibility up the wall telling a malicious pack of lies and trying to rewrite history, instead of remembering one basic rule: if you don’t know what they hell you’re talking about, and can’t be arsed finding out, then you’d do well not to say anything at all.

And don’t do that spraying into the wind. Another fine mess, once again.

Delingpole Doesn’t Understand Global Warming

For someone who pretends to use scientific fact to back up his stance on climate change, James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole gives the impression that one of the most basic ones has eluded him. Like his mentor Christopher Booker, who once told “I woke yesterday to find six inches of global warming on my lawn”, Del Boy has a problem understanding one key word.

Definitely not fair and balanced

And that word is “global”. This is most useful for those wishing to pretend that the climate is not changing: to home in on weather events in one part of the world – telling the easily persuaded to “look over there” – while ignoring the whole picture enables Delingpole, and those of like mind, to suggest that they are right, and that all those silly scientists are conning everyone.

So it was as Del sneered “Global warming devastates America”, continuing “See that white stuff floating down past the orange trees and landing on your alligators and manatees, Florida? That's global warming, that is. See that frozen white thing by the harbor [sic] that used to look a green woman with a spiky headdress, New York? That's global warming, that is”. There was more in this vein.

The cat-calling was due to someone writing in Time magazine having the effrontery to suggest that climate change may have contributed to what is termed a “polar vortex” of intensely cold air spilling across the USA during the past week. As usual, Delingpole has the answer: a “Princeton physicist” called Will Happer. He’s a professor. But not in the field of climatology.

Happer is a known climate change sceptic, and his opinions – including the claim (no citation) that a polar vortex occurred in 1777 and miraculously helped the rebel armies to fend off the British – are published by blogs such as Climate Depot, run by Marc Morano, the “Swift boat smearer” who said climate scientists “deserve to be publicly flogged”, and was named “Climate Change Misinformer of the Year” in 2012.

Sadly for Delingpole and those he so enthusiastically cites, global does indeed mean global, and while there has been a cold snap across North America, we in the UK have seen much milder – and wetter – conditions than would be considered average for January. And Australia has seen climate records broken for the second successive year, as Lindsay Abrams has noted.

Even the story of the Antarctic survey ship stuck in the ice, which Del Boy crowed over recently, has ended as that ice has broken up, being mostly older land ice driven by the wind, which has now changed tack. We know this as it was even reported by Del’s pals at Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse). One-off events do not disprove global warming. There’s a hint in the word “global”.

Del’s inability to understand this sprays his cred up the wall. No change there, then.

Gove’s Free Schools – Now It’s Fraud

[Update at end of post]

As if the litany of bad news coming out of his flagship Free Schools programme were not bad enough, Education Secretary Michael “Oiky” Gove now has to contend with a principal at one of them getting himself nicked on a fraud charge. So no wonder that neither his retinue of polecats at the @toryeducation Twitter feed, nor other little helpers like the loathsome Toby Young, are saying anything on the subject.

Yes, you, "Oiky", and it's still our money

Indeed, @toryeducation, the domain of Dominic Cummings and Henry de Zoete, has said nothing for three days, even keeping schtum when Laura McInerney revealed the escalation of her Freedom of Information quest after “Oiky” had blocked it, despite the Information Commissioner finding in her favour. And Tobes has said nothing about matters educational since before Christmas.

Even then, his ramblings were directed only to whingeing about someone at the hated BBC not framing stories in a way which was ideologically acceptable to Himself Personally Now. So who has been nicked, and what’s the back story? Well, this all concerns Kings Science Academy near Bradford, and events kicked off in earnest back in October, as the Beeb observed.

“One of the country's flagship free schools has been accused of serious financial mismanagement. An Education Funding Agency (EFA) report reveals allegations of financial irregularities and even possible fraud” their report told. The following month it got worse: “Three men have been interviewed by police in connection with suspected fraud at a free school”. And which Free School?

“The men were interviewed under caution as part of an investigation relating to Kings Science Academy in Bradford”. And there it stayed until the Yorkshire Post splashed today that “Head teacher arrested in fraud probe at Bradford free school”, with an embarrassingly captioned photo “David Cameron meets head teacher Sajid Raza and children from Kings Science Academy, Bradford on a visit last year”. Oh dear!

This has now been picked up by the Bradford evening paper the Telegraph and Argus, and also the BBC, although the latter is yet to name Raza. And there is a problem for “Oiky” and his pals: the Yorkshire Post is not a publication that can be dismissed as a sundry leftist rag. It is solidly and unswervingly Conservative (Margaret Thatcher’s former spinner Bernard Ingham has a regular column).

The Yorkshire Post has also noted that Gove refused to confirm details of the application process that led to Kings Science Academy opening. Moreover, its latest report signs off with “The vice-chairman of the Conservative Party Alan Lewis is the school’s executive patron and the Kings Science Academy has been built on his company’s land in a deal worth almost £6m in rent over 20 years”.

So that’s another rum business with our money involved. No surprise there, then.

[UPDATE 10 January 1140 hours: it just got a lot worse for the Government: the Yorkshire Post has been digging further into the Kings Science Academy saga, has found that the DfE put the Police off investigating the claims of financial irregularity, and that this may have been deliberate.

When news of the school's problems were first discovered, the DfE claimed it had "informed the Police who decided no further action was necessary".

However, and this is rather a big however, "it then emerged the case had only been passed on to Police as an information report, meaning no investigation had taken place". In other words, the message to the Police was that it had been checked out by the DfE and there was nothing to see.

Only after this was a "crime report" made and a Police investigation started. And the Yorkshire Post has discovered that the DfE "did not pass on its own investigation report into the school or any written findings but reported it with a phone call".

The DfE has said it did not pass on that report because it had not been requested. But it would not be, as they had already effectively told the Police that no investigation was needed.

The more digging goes on, the more ripe this one smells - not just the irregularities at the school, but the impression that the DfE is trying to cover it up. No doubt there will be more soon]

Express Beast From The East Fraud

As the weather quietens down a little after the recent storms, the temperature inevitably falls – because that’s what happens in the middle of winter, folks, and that is where the UK is right now. This is not unusual. No-one need be alarmed. But for the irrepressible Nathan Rao over at the increasingly trashy Daily Express, this is an ideal opportunity to frighten the readers.

And so it came to pass, as today’s headline read “Siberian Snow To Hit Britain”, which would be an interesting sight, as the two are thousands of miles apart. Nevertheless, readers were also told that “Bitter icy blast will see temperatures plunge next week”. This sounds a racing certainty, rather than an outside possibility. So where is he getting his forecast this time?

Ah, but you know that already: “Jonathan Powell, forecaster for Vantage Weather Services, said freezing air from Siberia and North-eastern Europe is due to flood in after the weekend”. Anyone else? “James Madden, forecaster for Exacta Weather, said rain over the weekend is likely to turn to snow with the North braced for a ‘significant’ deluge”. And, as the man said, there’s more.

“He warned the extreme cold and snow threatens to hold out into next month with much of the country in for weeks of winter misery”. Now, I hate to rain (or even snow) on Nathan’s parade, but it is now well known that Vantage Weather Services and Exacta Weather are quacks, and have been shown to be so. So what do the real weather forecasters have to say?

Here’s the Met Office verdict for January 14 to 23: “Through the week it may become cold in the northeast, with strong easterly winds and wintry showers. Western and southwestern parts are probably going to be less cold and cloudier with further rain. Later in the month it is likely to become less cold and more changeable”. And the period from January 24 into February?

“Outbreaks of rain mainly affecting northwestern parts of the UK, spreading further southeast at times but tending to weaken. The best of the dry and brighter weather should remain in the southeast. Some periods of colder weather are likely, particularly in between weather systems, but overall temperatures may well remain near normal”. That was issued at 0400 hours today.

On top of that, the Atlantic Jet Stream forecast (see the Metcheck version HERE) shows no significant high level winds coming to the UK from points east for the next fortnight. So on the basis of that, it has to be concluded that Nathan Rao is deliberately attempting to frighten his readers with another largely fraudulent story. It’s a truly desperate way to sell newspapers. But it’s cheap.

And that means only one thing – it’s another Benchmark Of Excellence!

Don’t Menshn The Duggan Verdict

The inquest into the death of Mark Duggan, shot dead by armed Police in August 2011, an event which triggered rioting in London and other cities, concluded yesterday as the jury found by an 8 to 2 majority that at the time he was shot he was not carrying a gun, but that he had been lawfully killed. This was not well received by Duggan’s family and supporters.

Has she got news for us? Er, not really

Given what happened two and a half years ago (you can see the aftermath of the Manchester riots HERE and HERE), one might expect all looking in to exercise restraint. But for one champion of self-promotion, the benefit to Herself Personally Now overrode such niceties: step forward former Tory MP for Corby and East Northants Louise Mensch, who immediately knew all the answers.

So there was no need for her to bother with trivia such as reading the record of the inquest (see it HERE), which sets out the criteria in law referring to lawful and unlawful killing verdicts. Ms Mensch needed only to think it was right, and then it was. “I think many people will feel that if you have just disposed of one gun Police entitled to fear you are still armed. Lawful killing” she asserted.

Easy, isn’t it? You think that someone feels something and so it’s OK to pull the trigger. Who knew that the law worked in such mysterious ways? And, as the man said, there’s more: “anyone carrying a gun whom the Police believe to be a threat they have the right and (possibly) duty to shoot” she told Diane Abbott and Laurie Penny. This exercise in blatant bullshitting did not impress Ms Abbott.

“If the Duggan jury believe that he did not have a gun in his hand when he was shot, how can they find it was a lawful killing?” she asked (a read of the inquest record may inform her thinking). But it was enough for Ms Mensch to launch an assault on all those rotten lefties. “Complete disconnect from left-wing Twitter over verdict on Duggan. Wholly lawful killing. Jury found marksman thought he had 2nd gun”.

The flannelling continued: “Duggan gang member armed with gun [he wasn’t when shot] and Twitter/Labour axis still attacking the Police. Public is all against you”. Yay those false assumptions! “Labour’s Police blaming over the tragic death of an armed, gun-toting gang member [see above] reminds me why I am a Conservative”. Yay strawman! Yay sample of one! Yay false inference!

And there was still time for the occasional whopper: “Jury determination very clear. ZERO members of jury felt Duggan killed unlawfully. 8 lawfully. 2 open verdict”. Perhaps Ms Mensch would like to read the inquest record to see what “open verdict” actually means. But that might be too much like hard work, and interrupt her exercise in self-promotion (she has a book to flog, don’t you know).

There’s only one beneficiary in the world of Louise Mensch. No change there, then.

IPSO – The Factos They Aren’t Telling You

“Ex-Supreme Court judge on the panel to select Press Watchdog” announced the Daily Mail this morning, as the composition of the panel that will appoint members to the so-called Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) was revealed. This star appointment was Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, whose photo graces the Mail piece. So who else is on the panel?

To no surprise at all, two of the five members are press men, with John Witherow, editor of the Murdoch Times, and Paul Horrocks, formerly editor of the Manchester Evening News, meaning that the Leveson recommendation that this panel has “a substantial majority of members who are demonstrably independent of the press” has been ignored. And, as the man said, there’s more.

The two remaining panel members are Lady Denise Platt and Sir Hayden Phillips. Who they? Well, Denise Platt is a career public servant. She comes from a social care background, having Head of Social Services at the Local Government Association. Her appointment will satisfy those who want some representation from the more generally liberal side of the debate.

Hayden Phillips, on the other hand, is a retired Civil Servant with more than 35 years’ service to his name. As a result he can be considered a pillar of the establishment, and is likely to be innately conservative, if only with a small c. Then we come to Simon Brown, whose presence was so boldly advertised by the Mail. It turns out that the paper has good reason to do this.

Brown is a former Harmsworth scholar. This is a major award given by the Middle Temple, where Brown was called to the Bar in 1961. These scholarships were set up by Lord Rothermere, who was once an “honorary bencher”. Which of the Lords Rothermere made the grant is not known, but one has to assume it was Harold Harmsworth, first Viscount Rothermere, founder of the Daily Mail.

Now, this may not in itself sway Brown towards the press. But these appointments must be seen to be squeaky clean, whiter than white, and this one gives the faint hint of being otherwise. It gets worse. As Gordon Ramsay has pointed out, Ipso, far from being a different entity to the discredited PCC, is in fact the same entity, having the same registered company number of 02538908.

Moreover, as Unity at Ministry of Truth has noted, that company’s directors are Peter Wright of Associated Newspapers, Michael Grade, who declared his support for Young Dave in 2010, and David Hunt, a former Tory MP. So much for that much-vaunted independence from politicians and the press: they control the “new” body. That is a clear meeting of stitch-up and hypocrisy.

And this body is supposed to usher in a new broom for press regulation? No chance.

PMQs – Today’s Itch-A-Sketch

Storms. Floods. Migrants. Perhaps even floods of migrants, storms over migrants, or maybe a little Sturm und Drang as light relief. The potential topics for today’s Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) ranged from A right through to B. But here on Zelo Street there is always plenty to mull over, even from the most monochrome of Q&A: welcome to the first Itch-A-Sketch.

Young Dave opened the batting with a deserved tribute to Labour MP Paul Goggins, and was handed a suitably grovelling question from Simon Burns. This was not to continue, as Mil The Younger, flanked by “Auguste” Balls and wife Yvette Cooper, sent down a straight one on floods and storms. Cameron let the House know that the emergency services were doing jolly well.

Miliband switched to the iffy response of the power distribution companies. This was built into a flood defence googly. Cameron remained assured and firm, assisted by another easy one from his own side. It was all going wonderfully well, and if it wasn’t, it was all Labour’s fault. But then came the Miliband wrong ‘un: fixed odds betting terminals. Dave said these were also Labour’s fault.

A pattern emerged: anyone from his own side, however critical, made an excellent point. The Government should hold to its course. The rotten lot opposite wanted to take us back to 2010. The film Back To The Future was invoked. When this failed to quieten the opposition benches, they were held to be in denial. Dennis Skinner, for one, was unimpressed, and continued to practice his stand-ups.

The touchy issue of migrants was skirted around: Cameron deflected onto those from outside the EU, flannelled expertly about education and encouraging people into work, that tried and trusted code for welfare cuts, which was underscored with the key phrase “hard choices” in case anyone were unsure as to what he was driving at. But what of those foreigners who come here with their global corporates?

Blaenau Gwent MP Nick Smith reminded Dave that he had been damn sure to make them cough out rather more in tax. They had if anything paid even less than before. This was batted aside onto the G8, as if they have anything to do with the subject. But one subject not ducked, to his credit, was climate change, with Cameron leaning towards accepting its contribution to the storms. Well done Tim Farron.

All that remained was for the PM to retain his sense of humour as Glaswegian MP Ian Davidson called him a “home counties toff”, even if he did have a nice haircut. No mention of the Cameron hairdresser getting a gong was allowed in, as he honourably conceded that, for those north of the border, he might not be the best advocate for the Scottish Referendum “No” campaign. And that was that.

It was indeed a little monochrome. But, for Young Dave, a successful half hour.

Another Gove Promotion Stumbles

Recently, a formerly independent school near Newcastle-upon-Tyne was blessed with the good fortune to have its £5 million debt paid off by the Government, as it became an academy and merged, against the opposition of the local council and many families, with a nearby primary school. And now it has lost its head teacher in controversial circumstances.

Yes "Oiky", what you're doing with our money

The King’s Priory School, the result of the merger of the King’s School and Priory primary, is in North Tyneside. Charging fees estimated at around £10,000 a year, the King’s School was in debt and suffering from declining pupil numbers. Other local secondary schools were more popular. So the merger and academy conversion were decided upon, and the debt was gone.

This apparently benign act by Michael “Oiky” Gove and his subordinates was cheered on by Sebastian Payne at the Spectator, who concluded triumphantly “The battle for The King’s School is over, and Labour has lost”  What Payne may not have done is to read what one of his commenters said about Emmanuel Schools Foundation (ESF): King’s Priory’s head teacher came from one of their schools.

ESF has been dogged by accusations of teaching creationism as fact. And it was not long before the heady mood of the opening celebration (attended and reported on by, you guessed it, Sebastian Payne of the Speccy) had given way to conflict: “teachers threatened strike action over their working conditions and there are said to have been frequent clashes with parents over [the] religious focus” it was reported.

Head David Dawes has now stepped down by “mutual agreement” – in the middle of the school year. Why this has happened is not difficult to see after examining the testimony of parents, such as “As a parent tears have been shed and there’s been such anxiety. There’s been no learning support staff for the entire term – that’s 80 children who were previously at King’s getting help with their reading and numeracy”.

Special needs assistance wasn’t the only complaint. Another parent said “[Dawes] wanted to make it highly religious. Christianity comes in lots of different formats and he was forgetting about the other children of faith and of those no denomination. It was creationalist [sic] and this wasn’t what I wanted for my child”. That matches the warning given in the comments on the first Spectator post.

Creationism being potentially taught as fact is one thing. An academy chain – once again – shedding head teachers mid-way through the school year is something else, and Woodard Academies, who run the King’s Priory School, have also lost the head of Littlehampton Academy in Sussex. And then there is the creative accounting that allowed King’s Priory to open debt free.

Thus another of the increasingly routine stories from the Gove education miracle.

Farage Favours North Korea Solution

Fresh from failing to recognise Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech, agreeing with its “basic principle” (which was, more or less, dishonesty, rabble rousing and racism), and then letting it be known that he had been tricked by those rotten lefty broadcasters at Sky News (“first for breaking wind”), Nigel “Thirsty” Farage has once more opened mouth and inserted boot.

The UKIP leader was today appearing before the microphones of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, where he was initially confident, admitting that his party did not have much of an immigration policy, but that a big boy did it and ran away: “To have a total policy solution after the disaster that has engulfed us since Labour came to power in 1997 is no easy matter”. Try spending less time propping up the bar, then.

But he did confirm that he wanted a five-year ban on immigration, at least for those who wanted to settle in the UK, and a five-year ban on migrants claiming benefits, both of which would, by fortunate coincidence, mean flouting the rules of the Single European Market to which all EU member states have signed up. The fortunate part is that it would give “Thirsty” an excuse to leave the EU.

This, of course, comes on the back of the supposed flood of migrants from Bulgaria and Romania, which, as The Independent discovered, meant just one worker joining the Eurolines route 441 coach in Bucharest to make the 52 hour journey to London, which involved a change in Cologne. Germany was the most popular destination, and the man en route to London had already been working there previously.

And, while Farage whines about all those speaking foreign coming to the UK, an El Pais op-ed notes “in the last decade Spain took in another 3.7 million foreigners, raising their total number to 5.7 million (almost 12 percent of the population). Of these, some 800,000 were Romanians; almost as many again were Moroccans, followed by Ecuadorians (more than 300,000) and, surprise, British (312,000)”.

Nige doesn’t have a complaint about this, though he does want to cut off his nose to spite his face: “If you said to me, would I like to see over the next ten years a further five million people come in to Britain and if that happened we’d all be slightly richer, I’d say, I’d rather we weren’t slightly richer”. As the Maily Telegraph has pointed out, it wouldn’t be “slightly”: debt would most likely rise if there were no immigration.

How much? From 75% to 175% of GDP, according to an NIESR study. Steadily impoverishing the UK by keeping out foreigners sounds like the kind of thing a totalitarian dictatorship might favour – like the current dispensation in North Korea. Nige may not want to go as far as Kim Jong-un, but walling off a country is neither practicable, nor desirable. This is just a race to the lowest common denominator.

Migration has happened for centuries. It will continue to do so, despite UKIP.

Michael Gove Is The New Number Six

Those who are usually not backward in coming forward in support of Education Secretary Michael “Oiky” Gove, and their press cheerleaders, have today taken cover and kept schtum, and for one very good reason: there is bad news in store for them and their hero. As both the deeply subversive Guardian and left-leaning Mirror have noted, this is all about information.

Yes, like the central character in The Prisoner, Gove is being harried by hostile forces telling him “we want information”. And, as with the response of Number Six, he is snapping back “you won’t get it”. But on this occasion, when the sentiment comes back to him that “by hook, or by crook, we will”, it isn’t a scarf-wearing Leo McKern, but the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), speaking.

The subject of the argument, to no surprise at all, is Free Schools, and the request by Laura McInerney for a sight of “the application forms sent in by people applying to run free schools, and the letters later sent back explaining whether or not they were successful”. This would inform her quest to discover the criteria the Government was applying in the allocation and spending of taxpayer funds.

The costs are well-known: around £1.1 billion has already been spent on Free Schools, with £241 million of that on schools opening in areas where there is no shortage of places. And unlike all those Astroturf lobby groups who keep their funding streams secret, this is money that has come from the tax-paying public, and passed on whether they like it or not.

Such spending is now subject to Freedom of Information (FoI) rules, but Gove has personally resisted Ms McInerney’s request, despite his appeals thus far failing. The impression is given that the Government is trying to make the process sufficiently expensive to frighten her off. However, and in such cases there is inevitably a however, there are others seeking the same information.

Under questioning from Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, Gove told that it was “important we protect those individuals who made proposals for schools that were not accepted, from the programme of intimidation that has been directed at many brave teachers by the National Union of Teachers and other extreme left-wing organisations. I make no apologies for protecting from intimidation those public-spirited people who wish to establish new schools”.

But “Oiky’s” strange parallel world of rotten lefty intimidation is no less a fantasy than The Prisoner’s village. There hasn’t been any, the reality is that it’s our money, and we’re entitled to know how he and his pals – silent today – decide to spend it. So let’s have that information freely offered up, so we can see what’s going on.

One might ask: whose side is Gove on? Ah, but that would be telling.