Friday 23 December 2016

Impress and the New Blackshirts

In a couple of weeks, with a Parliamentary recess for Christmas reducing the risk of awkward questions being asked, the Culture Secretary will decide whether or not to "activate" Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act. Activation will mean that any newspaper that fails to sign up to the privately owned, state approved press regulator "Impress" will have to pay the legal costs of anyone who sues that newspaper for libel, even if the newspaper wins the libel case in court. In other words, the newspaper will automatically lose (in financial terms) every libel case, no matter how undeserving, that is bought against it.

The vast majority of British newspapers, national and local, want nothing to do with a state regulator. Impress isn't a body owned by the state, however: the state merely "approves" it. Impress is funded and thereby owned by the Formula One Tycoon Max Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley, the one time leader of the British Union of Fascists, who was imprisoned during World War Two for his Nazi sympathies. The then Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was persuaded by cabinet colleagues not to have Mosley senior prosecuted for treason, which could (and arguably should) have led to his hanging. When the war ended, the freed Oswald Mosley went back to his Jew baiting habits and continued business as usual as leader of the BUF. As a young man, Max Mosley attended BUF rallies in Jewish areas of London and was arrested for assaulting people for being Jewish. Oswald Mosley was very wealthy and was able to pull strings to get Max released into his custody, avoiding prosecution and probable jail for assault and affray. Impress is a tool crafted by a man with a history of using his fists to express his (racist) opinions.

In a democracy, members of an official regulator are normally expected to be impartial, but Max Mosley's Impress is stuffed with people who openly express a hatred of the press in general or even specific newspapers, such as the Daily Mail. (Which coincidentally campaigned with some success to bring the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice.) Oswald Mosley had the Blackshirts, Max Mosley has the code committee of Impress. These people are there to destroy newspapers, pure and simple. They are the now elderly Max Mosley's fists.

Some people will foolishly support Impress because they hate the Daily Mail (or the Telegraph, Sun etc.) and hope that Impress will destroy it. Impress will almost certainly oblige, given the chance, but it won't stop there. As a fascist, Mosley has as much reason to hate The Guardian as he does The Mail and The Guardian is probably more vulnerable financially than The Mail. Extreme left wing communitarian organisations such as Common Purpose will support Impress because there are parts of the socialist agenda which national socialists share. They do not share The Guardian's centre left agenda!

In particular it should be noted by all, that Section 40 is not designed to destroy only pro Brexit newspapers like the Daily Mail: it is designed to destroy newspapers in general, including pro Remain ones like The Guardian and The Financial Times. 

Update: 19/5/2017
The Conservative Manifesto for the Election on the 8th of June 2017, promises the repeal of section 40. Mrs May's administration had repeatedly declined to actually implement section 40, which was agreed to by her predecessor, David Cameron, in an absolutely shameless sellout to an openly fascist pressure group.
 

Thursday 15 September 2016

(British) Black Lives Matter

This post is solely about the British offshoot of Black Lives Matter, and no criticism of the original American movement is implied or intended.

It is apparent from the court appearances following the "Black Lives Matter" protest at London City Airport, that in Britain, Black Lives Matter is just the old Earth Liberation Front wearing blackface and its relevance to the rights and interests of black Britons, let alone black Americans, is nil. Just a gang of middle class white people trying to wrap the race issue around their longstanding extreme environmental agenda. Give them time and they will go back to their normal activities of digging up grannies and petrol bombing scientists.

Tuesday 16 August 2016

Legal Stalking

The law firm "Public Interest Lawyers" is to close and more than a thousand complaints which it has filed against British soldiers and marines will be reviewed and probably thrown out. See link to Daily Mail article. For more than a decade PIL instigated witch hunts against servicemen (and it was mainly men) on the basis of what are now known to be flimsy or completely bogus cases of human rights violations. Far from PIL being the victim of an establishment plot, the Blair, Brown and Cameron governments were completely happy to hang ordinary soldiers out to dry and they helpfully established two new investigative bodies to process all the complaints which PIL generated. It was only when judges described evidence from some of PIL's Iraqi clients as "lies" (very strong language for judges) -and the Brexit issue coincidentally swept a lot of human dross out of positions of high office in the United Kingdom government, that PIL was finally held to account. 

Whilst the Daily Mail is to be congratulated for having campaigned against the witch hunts, and for years the response of the liberal establishment to the Mail's campaign was to fatuously heap praise and honours (honourary doctorates and "solicitor of the year") on PIL's senior partner, Phil Shiner, the suggestion by some Mail columnists that Mr Shiner now be prosecuted for treason is probably inappropriate. The false cases represent a serious crime, primarily against individual soldiers and marines and the principle of Justice rather than against the State and the most appropriate charge would, therefore, be one of "conduct tending to pervert the course of justice." If Mr Shiner is to face a court himself, then it is only right that he should do so for what he did to individuals with rights of their own. Which was to persecute them using the law as a weapon, often for years, and almost always with the acquiesence of the successive governments that were willing to send those same individuals into harm's way. (Initially they were sent into harm's way with inadequate equipment, too, because the Blair government forbade the army to make detailed preparations for war because Mr Blair didn't want it to look as if war with Iraq was a forgone conclusion.)

A treason charge would only be appropriate if there was evidence that Mr Shiner acted deliberately to harm Britain as a nation by setting the courts against her soldiers, and even then it would probably need to have been on behalf of a foreign power rather than as a sort of personal hobby horse. So far, there is no evidence of this, though investigations into Mr Shiner have only just begun. 

However, it is true that if an officer of the Russian FSB or SVR had concocted a plan that saw more than a thousand criminal cases being sought against frontline British service personnel, making it seem as if the British Army was somewhat worse than the SS -and had that officer managed to get the British taxpayer to completely fund his destablisation campaign, then that hypothetical officer would receive warm praise and prompt promotion.


Update: 5th of October 2016.
The government of Theresa May has indicated that it will close loopholes in the Human Rights Act which have left soldiers open to malicious prosecution on the flimsiest of grounds. Most European countries had implemented the same basic Human Rights Act without exposing their soldiers to malicious legal action, so it has to be concluded that the governments of Antony Charles Lynton Blair and David Cameron intended that British soldiers would be so exposed.

Both Blair and Cameron denuded the British armed forces of vital resources whilst finding a constant stream of controversial and unwinnable wars for them to fight, and the net result was quite debilitating. It is only possible to conclude that a weakening and discrediting of Britain's armed forces was their objective. "Why" is an open question, but it might have something to do with a europhile agenda too radical to be admitted to in public. The early signs are that Mrs May will have no truck with that sort of thing, but it will take a while for the new government to accept that defence has been deliberately underfunded by a significant extent since about 1992. The turnaround has to start somewhere, though, and hopefully this is it.

Update: 3rd of February 2017.
Phil Shiner has been convicted of several professional misconduct charges. There are now calls for him to be prosecuted for breaches of the criminal law that could see him jailed, but this would require a lot more legal work.