Crash Bang Wallace
Libertarian political blog from Mark Wallace; political opinion, breaking news and exclusivesGuardian runs adverts from tax avoidance experts
Posted on September 06, 2011The Guardian’s view on tax avoidance by others is well known – they regularly and deliberately conflate tax evasion (a crime) and tax avoidance (not a crime), and take the position that everyone should go out of their way to pay as much tax as possible. Regardless of how whether you pay what the law demands, the Guardian will be the final and ultimate arbiters of whether you pay your “fair share”.
However, their own affairs are less than consistent with the high standards they demand of others – as Guido has documented in the case of Polly “you should pay more tax, but why should I?” Toynbee, and their own record of careful tax avoidance through offshoring and other mechanisms.
Not content with hectoring others whilst practicing tax avoidance themselves, the Guardian has now taken things a step further – profiting by running advertising for firms of specialists who offer advice to tax avoiders and even how to deal with an HMRC tax investigation. This is a screengrab of their “Reading the Riots” web page – take a look at the ad circled in red at the bottom right:
Appleton Richardson, the advertisers in question, describe their service as “tipping the scales of justice in your favour”, will help you learn “how to play the game” and offer help to “survive a tax investigation by HMRC”. They absolutely rightly say that tax avoidance is perfectly legal, but in Guardian land it is unacceptable – how do the champions of high taxes square taking advertising from a firm like this with their crusading morals? Or is it just yet another case of Guardian double standards?
PS you’ll note that with further delicious irony the other two adverts are for Personal Injury Lawyers and, yes, a Scientology magazine. The Guardian: where Comment Is Free, but principles can be bought.
Posh loner who liked poetry but not sport “definitely didn’t do it”, confess media
Posted on August 01, 2011You may recall a post I wrote back at Christmas about the case of Chris Jefferies, the landlord who was arrested but later released during the hunt for the murderer of Jo Yeates. The post was titled “Posh loner who liked poetry but not sport ‘obviously did it’, say media“. The point was that he was enduring an appalling trial by media, with papers heaping suspicion on him on ludicrous grounds which included looking odd, liking poetry (he was an English teacher), never having married, being a Lib Dem and not liking sport.
It remains the worst example I can think of of the growing trend to pre-judge cases by desperate smear.
By that point in the case Chris Jefferies hadn’t been cleared, and indeed I got a bit of flak from some for somehow supporting a killer when I wrote the piece. In truth, it concerned me a bit that I was likely to be given little quarter should he turn out to be guilty, despite the fact that I was just arguing for justice to be allowed to run its course fairly, but I pressed the “publish” button anyway. Many of the papers involved have now deleted the articles from their websites, but you can find the original quotes of their scurrilous reporting in my original post here.
We now know that Jefferies was not the killer, and instead it was Jo Yeates’ neighbour Vincent Tabak who did it.
I’m a little late writing this up but it’s really pleasing to see that on Friday several papers have finally admitted that they libelled Jefferies and have paid him an out of court settlement.
There’s a fundamental principle here that we must not forget. Even if Jefferies had been guilty, it would still have been wrong for the papers to report the case in the way that they did. Had he been guilty, they would do well to remember that their appalling coverage could well have jeopardised a trial.
As it turned out, he was innocent but his reputation was given a public beating all the same – no cash settlement can ever possibly set right the harm that was done to him.
BBC gives phone hacking 7 times more exposure than the Euro crisis
Posted on July 20, 2011The BBC are obviously smarting from the growing number of allegations that they have covered the phone hacking scandal so much that crucial issues like the increasingly likely collapse of the Euro have been neglected.
Of course many of those allegations are made by people who are themselves uncomfortable politically with the embarrassment being caused by the hacking issue, and of course the phone hacking scandal is absolutely rightly big news. However, if the Euro was to fall over next week with catastrophic economic consequences I suspect much of the public would be wondering how it all happened so suddenly, when in reality this crisis has been brewing for months and years.
The BBC’s Foreign Editor Jon Williams (who is, by the way, well worth following if you’re on Twitter) just said:
Surprised at claim #BBC covered #hacking to exclusion of other stories. Arab Spring, Italian Euro crisis & #eastafrica drought all prominent
It may be an exaggeration to say that other stories have been excluded entirely, but if you look at the evidence it’s pretty clear they’ve been eclipsed by the hacking coverage. Here are the results of searching the BBC News site for references to “hacking”, “euro” and “libya” over the last week:
Libya: 23 mentions
Euro: 32 mentions
Hacking: 246 mentions
As I say, hacking is a huge story and it does deserve large amounts of attention – but it’s hard to claim the BBC hasn’t taken its eye off other major issues while it’s been going on.
Unlike others I don’t necessarily think that’s solely because the BBC is threatened by Murdoch; it’s also because hacking is a media-village story taking place within the world most journalists inhabit. However the BBC in particular has a Charter responsibility to consider the public interest. That isn’t served by neglecting to cover the Euro crisis properly.
The Ed/David Media Mili-Mix-Up Part III
Posted on July 18, 2011Despite the big impact he’s generally recognised to have made on the hacking issue over the last fortnight, it seems Ed Miliband is still having some serious recognition issues even among the political media. After the Today Programme and the internet itself mixed him up with his brother David, and the Telegraph did the same, the effect is spreading.
Guido picked up on the Daily Mirror’s Mili-mixup:
Now the BBC website has managed to follow suit in their live coverage of PMQs:
This is quite funny, but it leaves Labour with a serious question: if even now, at the height of his performance, journalists mix up Ed Miliband with David Miliband what hope is there that the public know who he is?
Invasion of the superblogs
Posted on July 15, 2011I wrote when Iain Dale closed his personal blog about the potential future for the blogosphere as the balance of power shifted. As well as the upheavals in the mainstream media, the last couple of weeks has seen the first big change in the UK blogosphere for some time: the arrival of the superblogs.
With the launch of Huffington Post UK and Iain Dale and Co we’re experiencing the first tests of whether group blogging will succeed, and whether it will replace or complement the more atomised blogosphere that we’ve seen to date. My personal view is that it will be complementary – an online equivalent of the mainstream media which can afford to provide more regular and broader updating than individual blogs, but inevitably lacking the personalised character and focus of individuals (like yours truly).
For that reason, I’m pleased to say I will intermittently be contributing to both HuffPoUK and Dale & Co – writing about politics for the former and about media and culture for the latter. Needless to say, this blog will remain my focus, and the location of the vast majority of my writing. My first articles on each superblog have gone live this week, so please give them a bump by rating and commenting if you’d be so kind!
Here they are:
Iain Dale & Co: “Science Fiction should be abolished”
Huffington Post UK: “A new English politics is emerging – but which party will harness it?”
Media moguls past and present
Posted on July 13, 2011An interesting bit of background has arisen with today’s announcement of the inquiry into phone hacking. It’s to be led by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, one of the most senior lawyers in the land and unquestionably someone with a huge bank of knowledge and experience to draw on.
Within his long and prominent career, it seems, is a previous brush with a powerful media mogul. According to this archived article from 1997:
Sir Brian has also been involved in serious complex civil cases including acting for Milford Haven Port Authority following the running aground of the Sea Princess and in hearings connected with the Robert Maxwell scandal.
I can’t find any transcripts from the hearings of the time as yet. It may be that his experience is one of the reasons for his appointment, or it may be that it’s totally irrelevant, but it would be interesting to know what his views on media owners were at the time.
All eyes on the Eurozone crisis
Posted on July 11, 2011While all eyes have been on the News of the World, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis has deepened severely over the last few days. Italy’s stock market has taken a hammering, Chinese ratings agencies are warning of a potential credit downgrade, and a new corruption scandal has emerged which may potentially threaten the Finance Minister’s position at a crucial time.
EU President Herman van Rompuy has called an emergency meeting to discuss how to prevent the contagion worsening.
The problem the EU is discovering is that no matter how many times you say things are fine, you can’t buck the basic reality of the markets. If you don’t have the cash, then eventually you’re bound to come unstuck.
It’s remarkable that this story isn’t getting more attention in the UK. If you doubt that it’s a big one, try this quote from the embattled Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti for size:
If I fall, then Italy falls. If Italy falls, then so falls the euro. It is a chain.
Can it get much bigger than that?
The 96 year old feud between the Murdochs and The Guardian
Posted on July 08, 2011The hatred between the Guardian and the Murdochs is a thing of legend, but I hadn’t realised until today quite how far back it goes. Via the ever-excellent Willard Foxton, I came across an intriguing article which incidentally sheds a bit of light on the history of the titanic struggle between the two.
The piece recounts the story of how Rupert Murdoch’s father Keith Murdoch, sent as a war correspondent to cover the disastrous Gallipoli campaign against Turkey in 1915, attempted to expose the military failings which were feeding thousands of British, Australian and Kiwi soldiers into a meatgrinder in the Dardanelles. His and other journalists’ reports were heavily censored by the military authorities on the ground, and eventually Murdoch decided to smuggle a letter to Prime Minister Asquith to bring the mess to light.
(It’s worth noting at this point that the normally excellent Willard Foxton referenced this story on the Huffington Post as an instance of the Murdochs “doing damage to the allied cause in WW1″, whereas I’d personally view it as an example of a journalist doing what they should – investigate and expose serious issues in the public interest, but we’ll have to agree to disagree on that.)
The bit that caught my eye was what happened to Murdoch while he was trying to smuggle the letter back to Britain:
He got as far as Marseilles, but there was detained by a British officer with an escort and warned that he would be kept in custody until he handed over the letter. He had been betrayed…by H. W. Nevinson, the correspondent for the Guardian.
And 96 years later, here we are again, watching the Guardian and a Murdoch kick lumps out of each other. I can’t imagine after this week’s events that there’s any chance that peace will be declared in the next 96 years, either.
Thank you
markwallace | 7 Comments » Posted on September 14, 2011Here’s the Top Ten (with last year’s ranking in brackets):
1 (1) Order Order
2 (3) Conservative Home
3 (4) Spectator Coffee House
4 (26) Archbishop Cranmer
5 (81) Crash Bang Wallace
6 (5) Daniel Hannan
7 (-) The Commentator
8 (18) Talk Carswell
9 (17) EU Referendum
10 (10) James Delingpole