The Ministry Of Truth

Unbelievable.

{Programme Name:}   Sarah Kennedy
{Transmission Date:}  19 - 11 - 08

{Comments:}
At around 7.10am on 19 November, Sarah Kennedy wondered how, given that ’so many Muslims are called Mohammed’, teachers could differentiate between them in class.  Mohammed is indeed a fairly common Muslim name, but Sarah is a fairly common English name - indeed, I was once in a class with two Sarahs.  My teacher then differentiated between them by calling them ‘Sarah A’ and ‘Sarah M’, cunningly using the first letter of their surnames.  Why would or should this be any different with Muslims or children called Mohammed?  Does Ms. Kennedy consider Muslims to be special cases in some way?  I consider Ms. Kennedy’s singling out of Muslims in this manner to be - at best - passively racist.

Ms. Kennedy has form in this area and regularly comes out with ‘ambiguous’ statements that are open to misinterpretation: indeed, just a few moments before this comment Ms. Kennedy needlessly announced a record by Tanita Tikaram (born in Germany, grew up in Basingstoke) in the sort of mock Indian accent that I thought had died with Peter Sellars.

Given the new puritanism currently sweeping the BBC (and Radio 2 in particular) please can the BBC explain why this sort of output is considered appropriate?

Regards,

[The Minister]

From:  reception@bbc.co.uk
To:    [The Minister]
Date:  Sat, 27 Dec 2008 5:54 PM

Dear [Minister]

Thanks for your e-mail regarding the ‘Sarah Kennedy’ programme.

Firstly, I should apologise for the delay in getting back to you. We realise that our correspondents appreciate a quick response and I’m therefore sorry that you’ve had to wait on this occasion.

I understand that you were offended by comments made by Sarah during the programme concerning children with the name Mohammed. I note that your concerns lie with her comments as to how teachers would differentiate between the many children with this name and that you feel that Muslim children were being singled out in this instance.

The editor responsible for this show passes on the programme’s apologies for any offence caused. He has also spoken to Sarah about this.

I can assure you that your complaint has been registered on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s circulated to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us with your feedback.

Regards

[name removed to protect the innocent]
BBC Complaints
____________________________
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

Stop the presses, we’ve a late entry for Cultural Nadir.

A woman has left her job!

She must be a very important woman in a very important job because Arrivederci Gordon and Posh Boy Dave both deemed the event important enough to record farewell messages for her.

Arrivederci Gordon opined: “Congratulations on the support that you’ve won throughout the country.”

PBD said: “The sofa will never be the same without you.”

Support throughout the country?  A departure that means the end of comfy chairs as we know them?

Who can this be?  A senior Ikea designer?

Oh, it’s Fiona Phillips from GMTV.

So the voluntary departure of an overpaid woman barely anybody knows from a programme barely anybody watches (1.1 million viewers each day is not exactly up there with The Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show 1977 is it?) is deemed worthy of political comment.

Our economy is in meltdown; our armed forces are engaged in the illegal occupation of another sovereign state; and the planet is melting.  Yet our “leaders” (sic) have got enough time to tit around like this.

It’s your vote in 2009: cast it wisely.

For the first time in ages, I think I’m speechless.

The outgoing US vice-president, Dick Cheney, last night gave an unapologetic assessment of his eight years in office, defending the invasion of Iraq, the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, secret wiretapping and the extreme interrogation method known as waterboarding.

In his first television interview since the presidential election in November, Cheney displayed no regrets and gave no ground to his many critics within America and around the world. He summed up his record by saying: “I think, given the circumstances we’ve had to deal with, we’ve done pretty well.”

The last time I saw chutzpah like this, Liberace was still alive.

When even Popbitch has noticed the decline of a once proud newspaper, something’s gone very wrong indeed…

>> Big Questions <<
What people are asking this week

Is the Guardian’s daily “wrapping paper designed by a celebrity” special an elaborate spoof on the vacuous nature of celebrity media coverage or have they gone totally insane?

Cock it.

I agree with Marcel Berlins.

I cannot remember the last time there has been such hysteria over something so relatively minor as the Damian Green affair. Rarely can so many normally reasonable people have lost so many of their marbles.

Marcel clearly must have missed Manuelgate…

The political and media reaction has been stunningly excessive and mostly misguided. The band of columnists and so-called expert commentators fearing the demise of parliamentary democracy - as absurd a slippery slope argument as I’ve heard - or worrying about the decline in our civil liberties, have taken the concept of disproportion to a new level. If I were to look for evidence of our traditional liberties being diminished, it is there in abundance in the laws passed by parliament over the past few years.

Let us look at the reality of what has happened. We don’t know all the facts; indeed, we can be sure of very few. But even accepting a worst-case-scenario speculation, there has been a quite extraordinary over-reaction. I’m not saying everyone involved has behaved perfectly. Mistakes appear to have been made all round. But they do not justify the response that has occurred…

After a flurry of inquiries and furrowed brows, whatever wrongs were committed this time won’t happen again. The Speaker won’t be as accommodating in letting the police into parliament, the police will learn to be more subtle when investigating certain kinds of crime, and the home secretary may learn not to look quite so shifty and terrified each time she appears on television. The unnecessary panic and the suicidally gloomy prognostications will be laid to rest.

What I fear, though, is that this relatively unserious incident will be used to rearrange the relationship between police, politicians and government. This would be damaging.

I’m going to have to kill myself.

You know, I didn’t like Sir Ian Blair until he started locking up Tories.  Shame to see him going now, really…

A political row erupted last night after counter-terrorism police arrested the shadow Home Office minister, Damian Green, after he published leaked documents allegedly sent to the Tories by a government whistleblower.

An angry David Cameron condemned the arrest as “Stalinesque”, after Green was taken into custody at about 1.50pm in his Ashford constituency and escorted to a central London police station.

A Tory source said: “David Cameron is angry.”

I’d love to see that.  I bet his silly little voice gets all squeaky and his chubby little cheeks go all pink.  Does plasticine melt when it gets hot…?

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, told the BBC: “To hide information from the public is wrong.”

Quite right, that man: you should never try to hide embarrassing stuff.

Now Gideon Osborne (for that is George’s real name - he just hides the fact) is, of course, a former member of the Bullingdon Club, the “exclusive” drinking club comprised of wealthy Oxford undergraduates who go around kicking in (other people’s) chairs and knocking down (other people’s) tables for laughs.

That’s the same Bullingdon Club of which his chums Posh Boy Dave Cameron and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson were also members.

(Oh, and that Nat Rothschild chap: he’s the one with the fantastically popular yacht.)

The same Bullingdon Club that somehow persuaded the photographers Gillman & Soame (the copyright holder) to withdraw permission for the reproduction of the group photograph of 1986 Bullingdon members showing Posh Boy Dave and Boris in full Buller costume.

In March 2007, the photographers’ line was that it had taken a “policy decision” not to allow any school photographs they own to be published.

Of course, if Gillman & Soame had copyright issues in March 2007, you have to wonder how this…

…ended up in the Daily Mail a month later.

Not to mention in The Times and Daily Telegraph.  And probably every other newspaper, too, if only I could be arsed to search for it.

Young Gideon is on the left of the photograph looking like an extra from Brideshead Revisited.

That’s the fella!  Devilishly handsome, isn’t he?

Not - you understand - that Posh Boy Dave has anything he wishes to hide from the public.

Oh, no.

I mean, it’s not like the man who would be Prime Minister won’t even answer a simple question about his drug use, is it?

The upshot is that, while Damian Green’s arrest was ridiculous, I’ll take lessons in freedom of information from this particular morally bereft bunch of Tories when the Leader of the Opposition is prepared to allow the electorate to see photographs of precisely what he got up to when he was 19 years old.

And tells the world when he last did blow…

PBD and Gideon interact with some proles, yesterday

I really don’t like Robert Peston.  It’s not yet pathological, like it is with Campbell, but the sheer crap this man spouts takes some beating.  Take his latest treatise:

Although Woolworth had been one of the UK’s weaker retailers for years - propped up by a decade of benign, debt-fuelled trading conditions which we now know to have been unsustainable - it was done in by a sudden deterioration both in the real economy and in financial markets that took hold four weeks ago.

“…debt-fuelled trading conditions which we now know to have been unsustainable…”

“…which we now know to have been unsustainable…”

“…we now know…”

Do you see what I’m getting at?

Here’s a man who is employed because of his supposed expertise in business affairs.

And he is seemingly admitting that, until four weeks ago, he didn’t know that living on tick was no way to run a chip shop, let alone the global economy.

And for this stunning lack of insight, he must be trousering at least £75,000 a year in taxpayers’ money for his day job and supplementing that significantly with books and public speaking events.

Come to think of it, maybe he does know a thing or two about business after all…

Cock it. If ever a radio station lost its way, it’s BBC Radio Five Barely Alive:

BBC Radio 5 Live will make changes to its morning schedule from the New Year, it was announced today.

The new schedule includes a changed role for Nicky Campbell who will once again take calls from listeners in an extended 5 Live Breakfast.

Campbell, who hosted the 5 Live phone-in between 1997 and 2003, will take an hour of calls from listeners on the big news story of the day between 9.00 and 10.00am in a reshaped breakfast programme.

5 Live Breakfast is extended, from 6.00 to 10.00am weekdays, with current co-host Shelagh Fogarty opening the programme at 6.00am, and Nicky Campbell joining her at 7.00am.

Victoria Derbyshire’s programme (weekdays, 10.00am-1.00pm) will focus on original journalism – much of it coming direct from 5 Live listeners.

Midday News on 5 Live is now taken out of the schedule but Aasmah Mir will continue to be an important part of 5 Live’s team of presenters, hosting a range of programmes on the station over the coming months.

Nicky Campbell said: “It’s great to be taking calls from listeners and hosting debate which I love doing, and still to be able to work with Shelagh is a double bonus.”

Still, it’s less time for him to spend on his writing career, I suppose.

Robert Peston - with his bizarrely pompous (some deliciously call it “ragged and querulous”) delivery manner and risible dyed hair - is Britain’s hack du jour.

If there’s a financial story to be broken he’ll break it, despite apparently having the economic gravitas of Derek Trotter.

So it’s amusing to note that, last Friday afternoon, this prediction appeared on Peston’s blog:

So which taxes will rise?

Well my prediction is VAT…  [A] deferred increase from 17.5% to 22.5% in the VAT rate would raise around £20bn.

Captain Darling, House of Commons, 24 November 2008:

I therefore propose to cut VAT from 17½ to 15 per cent until the end of next year. This reduction will come into effect next Monday, 1 December.

Hard to believe the BBC could find a business editor more absurd than Jeff Randall, but…

This is the Ministry’s 500th post.  Help yourself to a cigar.

The fallout from the leaked BNP membership list fiasco continues.

The Register reports that the Wikileaks website buckled last week under the strain of up to 70 requests per second to download the list - more than 2,000,000 requests in the 24 hours after Wikileaks posted the leaked database.

While that might initially seem fanciful, I think I can say it’s probably not complete hooey.

A few weeks ago, I installed at the Ministry’s entrance a traffic-monitoring service called Woopra.  (It’s fantastic, by the way, and I shall come back to it again in a few days.)

Woopra tells me that on 19 November, the day on which I had an active direct link to the relevant Wikileaks page, traffic to the Ministry increased by 975% from the previous fairly average day.

96% of visitors that day were first time visitors to the Ministry since Woopra went live here.

We’re still talking very small numbers - just 130 in total last Wednesday - but the salient point is that I do not advertise or publicise the Ministry at all apart from to personal contacts.  Never have and never will.

Visitors other than the Google, MSN and Yahoo! robots are therefore ordinarily either my friends or family, or are directed here after a specific Google search - and indeed, more than 95% of the Ministry’s visitors last Wednesday came here from google.com, google.co.uk or google.ie.

(Most of the searches, incidentally, were for the name of the “lecturer in human rights” who appears on the list and whom I initially named.)

Although it fell back sharply, traffic was still at more than double its normal level the next day, despite me taking down the man’s name and the direct link to the database early on Thursday morning.

So if one tiny little site on the edge of the t’Internet like the Ministry can see such a spike in traffic simply by directing people to Wikileaks, it’s not too hard to imagine the cumulative effect of the coverage of the story by sites like those of The Guardian and The Register.

It’s also a frightening reminder of the power of Google, but that’s another story.