A farcical attempt to deflect attention

The Times has an appalling piece today from Israeli Ambassador Ron Prossor, who seeks to deflect attention from the United Nations Human Rights Council's report on its alleged war crimes in Gaza with an attack on the UNHCR itself. He struggles to do anything except accuse the body of hypocrisy and anti-Israeli bias, somewhat handicapped by the fact that the report's author, Richard Goldstone, is Jewish and neither anti-semitic nor anti-Israeli.

Most farcically, Prossor writes:

Difficult issues, including the use of white phosphorus, as reported by The Times, will not be ignored.

Which translates as: OK so we lied about using white phosphorus but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't believe us when we say we made every effort to avoid harming civilians.

Boden as big brother

Another Boden/mini-Boden catalogue has come through the door with a plea to "help us shine a light on troubled wardrobes". If you recommend up to six friends you will be rewarded with £30 of account credit to buy your own middle class lifestyle essentials.

Grass your inadequate mates up to the Fashion Police - it's for their own good. Just hope they don't see the advert themselves and realise that you think their wardrobe "troubled".

Gordon's Iraq Hoax

I've just posted a new story for Index on Censorship online about how Gordon Brown's promise in 2007 to make sure that the Iraq dossier debacle is never repeated turned out to me all spin and fantasy.

It matters who is lying

The awful John Rentoul said yesterday that he thinks calling one's political opponent a liar is "in poor taste and, worse than that, a mistake". He argues - if that is the word - that

"name-calling makes it hard to debate and is more likely to lead to disorder and fisticuffs"

This is just the type of mindless tosh people who are stuck in the political consensus come out with. It's on a par with people who say that using "swear" words (i.e. using more words than other people) means that you have a limited vocabulary. The problem with our political debate at the moment is that politicians regularly lie through their teeth and it's considered "poor taste" or "bad form, old boy" to say to.

Rentoul says that Tory George Osborne didn't actually call Gordon Brown a liar, as billed. But, bizarrely, today's Times says that David Miliband accused Osborne of "the politics of the big lie and the big smear". No comment yet from Rentoul.

The top line of the Times story is that "Treasury officials have accused the man who could soon be their boss of implying that they had broken the law". Senior civil servants are quoted, anonymously of course, as "voicing anger" at this.

Sadly, from the coverage that I've read, I can't work out who's telling the truth. That is what matters. If Brown really did conceal plans to cut spending while making such a virtue of not doing so, it really should change the landscape of politics, as Osborne claims. But the problem isn't that someone has called someone else a liar, it is that the media like the drama of accusation and counter-accusation more than analysis of who's right and who's wrong.

Have Trafigura got away with it

I've been following for a while the massive scandal of how oil Trader Trafigura had toxic waste dumped in Ivory Coast in 2006, injuring thousands of people, and according to Greenpeace, killing 15. After a campaign of dirty tricks, spin, denials and threatened libel actions, Trafigura has now settled a legal case, offering to pay about £1000 to each victim. The total of £30, is slightly more than 10% of the company's reported profits last year. Greenpeace is still trying to get the Trafigura prosecuted in the Netherlands, where the scandal orginated. But, as the Guardian reports,

Although the deal costs Trafigura £30m and does not appear to absolve it of blame for the illegal dumping or resultant injuries, company director Eric de Turckheim claimed today: "This settlement completely vindicates Trafigura."

Four letter words

It's probably trite to point out that spin is a four-letter word but I would make the point that I don't mind what language people use, as long as they don't talk bollocks. In the Independent, Andrew Grice says that Gordon Brown has finally used the c-word, by which he means "cuts" - geddit? You could also make the point - made by many people already - that if you limit the language that people use, you limit their ability to discuss things. Cuts is a simple, short word loved by the media and usually avoided at all costs by politicians. The trouble is, there isn't an agreed definition. Is a failure to increase a budget in "real terms" a cut?

But then, if you say the wrong thing, you get punished. We also learn from the Indy that the "voice of the Shipping Forecast" (or, as the sub-headline puts it "voice of shipping forecast") has been dropped for reasons allegedly unconnected with having said "fuck" after a fuck-up, when he thought his microphone was turned off. Perhaps it should have been.

No comment on that bastard

Someone else who wants to make his point without coming out and saying so is, according to the Telegraph's Jeremy Warner, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King. In this case, King is apparently happy to be quoted, he just wants it understood that he isn't criticising former Monetary Policy Committee member David (Danny) Blanchflower, even if he is.