Lame spin

I've just posted a piece for Comment is Free about the disappearing Kingsnorth review. Another lame piece of spin I've identified is a claim from Kent's chief constable Michael Fuller that the protestors wanted to "break into Kingsnorth power station and stop power supplies to more than 300,000 people in Kent".

Fuller should know that the National Grid doesn't work like that.

That explains it!

Bill Cash has now explained why he had to rent a flat from his daughter in spite of having a flat of his own nearer to Westminster. According to the BBC:

He told the BBC he could not have stayed at his flat in Pimlico because his son was living there, rent free at the time.

"He was then living there and I had the option of going somewhere else, so I took the rented property from my daughter which was a reasonable rent and in accordance with the tenancy agreement I had entered into," he said.

So the taxpayer effectively provides a rent free home for Cash's son. But Cash says that:

"I don't believe that therefore that there was any disadvantage to the taxpayer."

It is really worrying that Cash thinks that this is a sensible approach. He clearly isn't fit to be an MP, not just because he is crooked but because he thinks everyone else is as stupid as he is.

This was, by the way, an incredibly inept interview from the BBC. Surely the point on which Cash should not have been pressed is that he shouldn't have given up his own flat if it meant generating additional expense.

More eco-towns spin

The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that an advert in support of an eco-town scheme was potentially misleading, in that it made four claims that it could not substantiate.

Kingsnorth cover-up

I've done a new - and I think important - story today for Index on Censorship, revealing that the Home Office and Kent Police have colluded to bury a report on the policing of last summer's Kingsnorth climate camp.

Having shelved the report by National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA), the government and the police force are pretending that a new review is being carried out by the NPIA, presumably hoping that no-one will see the join. Unfortunately, both the NPIA and South Yorkshire Police, whose assistant chief constable is carrying out the new review, have made clear that the NPIA are not involved.

Mainstream monopoly

Buried in the Telegraph's amazing story about Bill Cash using his expenses to rent a flat from his daughter while he already had a Westminster home is a bizarre comment from Ed Balls.

Cash simply won't explain why he couldn't live in the home he already had but chose instead to use public money to fund his daughter's mortgage while she lived elsewhere.

But it is Balls' comment that really takes the biscuit:

With European elections approaching, Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, urged voters to continue backing the mainstream political parties rather than fringe organisations such as the UK Independence Party or the BNP.

“Whichever mainstream party they [voters] are going to vote for, they should go out and vote and not allow minority parties to gain,” he said. “Obviously I want them to come out and vote Labour, but it is very important that people come out and vote for the mainstream parties.”

Saying "don't vote for Nazis is one thing" but to tell people that they should only vote for the "mainstream" parties who between them have a stranglehold on the political process is arrogant and dangerous. UKIP might be a bunch of cranks but they are a legitimate party. What about the Green Party? Is Balls saying people should vote Conservative rather than vote for them?

Hidden Massacre

The Times reports that "more than 20,000 Tamils were killed in last throes of the Sri Lankan civil war". But it looks as if the Sri Lankan government will get away with it:

On Wednesday, Sri Lanka was cleared of any wrongdoing by the UN Human Rights Council after winning the backing of countries including China, Egypt, India and Cuba.

Here is its astonishing explanation:

A spokesman for the Sri Lankan High Commission in London said: “We reject all these allegations. Civilians have not been killed by government shelling at all. If civilians have been killed, then that is because of the actions of the LTTE [rebels] who were shooting and killing people when they tried to escape.”

The claim that the Tamil Tigers were shooting their own people looks pretty far-fetched, but to say that absolutely no civilians were killed by government shelling is entirely unbelievable.

It's a conspiracy!

What is amazing about the Guardian's story about Ruth Padel resigning as Oxford's professor of poetry is that she is claiming she has done nothing wrong and a host of women writers are queueing up to claim that she is the victim of a conspiracy:

Ruth Padel the first woman elected Oxford's professor of poetry, has resigned following claims she tipped off ­journalists about allegations that her chief rival for the post, Derek Walcott, had sexually ­harassed students.

Padel won the vote nine days ago. But in a statement tonight she said: "I genuinely believe that I did nothing intentional that led to Derek Walcott's withdrawal from the election. I wish he had not pulled out. I did not engage in a smear campaign against him, but, as a result of student concern, I naively – and with hindsight unwisely – passed on to two journalists, whom I believed to be covering the whole election responsibly, information that was already in the public domain."

She said she had acted in "good faith"

It seems to have been the fault of the journalists for using information that Padel gave them. Clearly she had no idea that they would do so.

No more convincing are the claims of women writers like Jeanette Winterson that it's a sexist stitch-up. Surely they must realise that crying "sexist" on such a weak case damages their credibility.

It appears though that the writer of this piece Charlotte Higgins, is also on Padel's side:

The so-called smear campaign saw up to 100 Oxford academics sent ­photocopied pages from a book detailing a sexual ­harassment claim made against Walcott by a student at Harvard in 1982. Widely felt to be the favoured candidate of the Oxford English faculty, the Nobel laureate resigned from the race on 12 May.

If sending photocopied pages to 100 academics is not a smear campaign, it's hard to imagine what would qualify. Padel is in any case claiming that this act was nothing to do with her. It's presumably just a coincidence that she was tipping off journalists about the same allegations.