Tag Archives: daily mail

Mail readers angry at paper’s Nazi slur

This is how two Daily Mail readers reacted to today’s attack on Nick Clegg by the paper (via Radio 5):

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LibLink: Stephen Tall – The tabloids’ desperate attack on Liberal Democrats

Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free website, LDV Co-Editor Stephen Tall looks at the hysterical over-reaction of the rightwing press to the Lib Dems’ poll surge. It has got, he argues, “the rightwing papers running scared and flinging so much mud it insults their readers’ intelligence”. Here’s an excerpt:

Ever since Nick Clegg’s victory in that debate six days ago, the right-wing press, much like the Tory party, has been utterly paralysed, unsure whether to launch a full-tilt attack on the Lib Dems, or to patronise the party’s surge as the teenage tantrum of an electorate which should jolly well just grow up. …

What really worries the Mail and Murdoch about the Lib Dem poll ratings is this: they understand Nick Clegg’s party is a direct threat to the cosy status quo with which they are so comfortable. Don’t take my word for it: former Sun editor David Yelland made the point quite explicitly on these very pages just a couple of days ago in his explosive article, Nick Clegg’s rise could lock Murdoch and the media elite out of UK politics.

Will the Mail/Murdoch attacks work. Only time will tell, says Stephen, but notes that the newspapers are (to their chagrin) no longer as important as they might have once been:

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According to the Daily Mail, I’m a foreigner

Given the Mail on Sunday’s story casting aspertions on Nick Clegg for not being properly British in their eyes (“His wife is Spanish, his mother Dutch, his father half-Russian and his spin doctor German. Is there ANYTHING British about Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg?”) now seems a good time to revive a post I wrote on a previous occasion when the Mail took to defining British:

As Sunder Katwala has pointed out, the Daily Mail has said it thinks it is a mistake for people who were born here but whose parents where born overseas to be counted as

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Daily Mail: big boost for Lib Dems in poll – but editorial line even more striking

There’s straight-forward good news for the Liberal Democrats in today’s Daily Mail:

A Harris poll for the Daily Mail, the first in-depth survey of the public response, showed him decisively ahead of David Cameron and Gordon Brown on measures of energy, honesty and strength.

The survey of over 1,000 people who watched the clash found 32 per cent intended to back Mr Clegg’s LibDems – level with the Tories – and just 26 per cent Labour.

Those poll results are dramatic – and reflect what we’ve seen in other polls too. But most striking is the Daily Mail’s …

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Daily View 2×2: 19 March 2010

It’s 19th March and LDV Towers will shortly be taking delivery of an enormous cake for Co-editor Stephen Tall’s birthday. Rumour has it he will be leaping out of said cake, and if he does, we’ll be first with the news and photos.

In the meantime…

2 Big Stories

Clarke fails to toe line on party pledge

David Cameron last night overruled Ken Clarke, after the shadow business secretary appeared to backtrack on a Tory commitment to spell out details of a core tax policy ahead of the general election.

The Conservative leader acted after Mr Clarke told a London event that the party could not decide until it was in power whether it would reverse the one percentage point rise in national insurance that is due to take effect in April.

The Tory former chancellor said the party needed to have “the reins of power” before it could make Budget decisions such as the potential tax reversal. “We will only know if we can afford it in the 50-day Budget,” he told a business audience. “The Budget is not just something you knock off for a TV programme.”

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Daily View 2×2: 10 March 2010

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

  • Tories in Devon and Cornwall set themselves a target of raising £13,000 in an Obama-style online donate-now campaign, perhaps in an attempt to wean themselves off the Ashcroft millions.  How much did they raise?
  • Stephen Glenn picks up on the news that Lord Paul has said he will voluntarily end his non-dom status from April, whether required to or not, and asks what it means for the Tory “they do it too” defence.

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.

2 Big Stories

Short term prison sentences don’t work

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Did all the complaints to the PCC over Jan Moir achieve something?

It’s a fair question to ask: lots of complaints made over Jan Moir’s piece on the death of Stephen Gately, none upheld.

However, as Enemies of Reason points out, that isn’t the only measure of success:

But I would like to hope – hope against hope – that the storm the Daily Mail found itself in after Moir’s ill-judged and venomous article made them, in some small way, feel they were a little more vulnerable to the outside world, and their own readers, than they were before. It’s easy to dismiss the rantings of a few pointless troublemakers like me, for example,

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Daily View 2×2: 24 February 2010

On this day in 1920 (according to the nice people at Wikipedia), the Nazi Party was founded.

The days when the Daily Mail publically paraded its sympathies for the Nazis are long gone – their interests lie elsewhere these days…

2 Stories

The story Mail hacks have been waiting for

This story must have felt like Christmas and Easter rolled into one for reporters at the Daily Mail – it’s got everything.

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Daily Mail: it’s a scary place

As a paid up member of the liberal élite that’s ruining our country, I do like to pop over to Daily Mail Island every now and again to see what’s exercising the minds of Britain’s tablerati.

This week had two eye-poppingly awful pieces that I just had to pick up on.

Firstly, Leo McKinstry’s sensitive, and thought provoking piece deftly picking at the complex moral issues surrounding the execution in China of Akmal Shaikh: HEROIN TRAFFICKERS DESERVE TO DIE.

No, wait, sensitive and thought provoking it is not. For a line-by-line demolition of the mountains of crud streaming forth from the piece, …

Posted in Humour and News | Also tagged , , , , , , , and | 10 Comments

Stephen Gately’s partner complains to PCC over Moir article as a “connected party”

From the BBC:

“Stephen Gately’s civil partner Andrew Cowles has formally complained to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) over a Daily Mail article about his death.

Mr Cowles claims Jan Moir’s column, published in October, breached guidelines on accuracy, intrusion into grief or shock, and discrimination.

A PCC investigation will also consider the 25,000 complaints about the piece.”

As Mark pointed out in October the Press Complaints Commission’s remit states:

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What should be done with the PCC?

That’s the question asked in today’s Media Guardian, following the controversies associated with the Press Complaints Commission in the last month.

First, there was the PCC’s ruling that the Daily Mail didn’t owe Iain Dale an apology for branding him ‘overtly gay’. Then there were the record-breaking 22,000 complaints submitted to the PCC following the Daily Mail’s publication of a snide piece by Jan Moir attacking Boyzone singer Stephen Gately’s lifestyle and implying it contributed to his death.

And then the PCC’s new Chair, Baroness Buscombe, delivered a lacklustre and confused address to the Society of Editors, before setting any number of hares running by suggesting the PCC might have a role in regulating blogging.

Finally, the Guardian’s editor Alan Rushbridger quit the PCC’s oddly named Code Committee after the regulator’s pusillanimous response into allegations of illegal phone hacking by a number of tabloid newspapers.

All in all, a busy month for the PCC.

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Jan Moir: the dilemma for the PCC (and what you should say in your complaint)

The reaction to Jan Moir’s article about the death of Stephen Gately has been widespread and swift. Fuelled primarily by Twitter and Facebook, complaints about homophobia flooded in on the Daily Mail, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and the firms who were unlucky enough to have their adverts appearing on the page. The headline was changed, the PCC’s website crashed, the adverts were pulled and many members of the public got a taste of how effective a simple tweet, email or phone call can be.

The big dilemma now is for the Press Complaints Commission because, although many of the messages urging people to complain to the PCC were helpfully specific about which clauses of its code should be referenced, the real issue for the PCC to decide is not in the code itself.

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Because homphobia is gay when it’s against Tories, too

The Lib Dem blogosphere has a bit of a love-hate relationship with arch Tory blogger Iain Dale.

Some regard him as little more than a self-promoting tribal propagandist who plays a clever game of appearing impartial when it suits him. Others believe him to be a nice fella for a Tory, who spreads round a lot of blogging link-love, and maintains a prolific, usually entertaining blog, which through hard work and determination has brought him mainstream celebrity. My view? As a Lib Dem I think there’s a bit of truth in both verdicts (though, truthfully, I incline more towards the latter).

But …

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CommentIsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable on the surveillance state

Vince Cable’s latest column for the Mail on Sunday is out and this time it’s about civil liberties:

A quarter of a century has passed since 1984, the titular year of George Orwell’s novel which described a world constantly spied upon by an all-powerful dictator, the fearsome Big Brother.

It never happened. Orwell’s nightmarish vision was realised, for a while, in communist Eastern Europe but the Stasi and similar agencies have now gone.

And yet in a quiet, insidious way our own democratic society is producing a surveillance state that Big Brother would have been proud to call his own.

You can read

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CommentIsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable doesn’t know when the economy will recover

Our Vince penned a piece for the Daily Mail yesterday with the  delicious title “The economy is now sitting up and showing signs of recovery

In it, Vince made the startling admission that he is not, in fact, an all-seeing mage with black powers over the future of the economy:

I am often asked to play the part of Nostradamus. Since I had been a reasonably successful prophet of doom, I am now assumed to know when the economy will turn round. I don’t. No one knows.

It does seem likely, however, that a major disaster has been averted. We are no

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Daily View 2×2: 31 July 2009

Welcome to this, the final summer edition of LDV’s Daily View – the feature will return again at the beginning of September, as will the various members of the LDV editorial collective.

2 Big Stories

Treasury select committee slams Government’s “largely cosmetic” banking reform plans

Here’s what the BBC has to say:

The government’s plans for reforming the regulation of banks are “largely cosmetic” and “lack clarity”, MPs in the Treasury Select Committee say.

In its report on the banking crisis, the committee says that responsibility for strategic decisions and action remains “a muddle”. The report also says that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) “failed spectacularly” in supervising banks.

More importantly, here’s what Vince has to say:

This report rightly underlines the need for high quality and transparent regulation if we are to create a stable financial system. We must not create a regulatory system that just deals with the current crisis but one which is fit for all the challenges ahead.

“The cross party report also exposes the sheer folly of George Osborne’s proposal to hand all power back to the Bank of England. While it is true that breaking up the banks will be complex, it is also necessary. A bank which is too big to fail is simply too big.

“The secrecy in which the White Paper was created shows the extent of the deteriorating relations between the Bank of England and the Government and does not bode well for the future.”

Gary MaKinnon loses US extradition court battle

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Twitter and the rise of new media

Something fascinating happened yesterday. I was browsing through one of the internet forums I regularly visit when I noticed someone posting that people should go to the Daily Mail poll page on their website and vote yes to the poll that asks “Should gypsies jump the queue on the NHS?” in order to mess with them.

When I got to the page and duly voted “Yes” I was astonished to see that the poll was at 93% Yes and 7% No. The forum I refer to has nowhere near enough people to make a dent in the thousands who vote in …

Posted in News and Online politics | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , and | 8 Comments

George Osborne: he was for cracking down on public sector pay before he was against it reviewing it

Poor old George Osborne. It’s a tough job being Ken Clarke’s deputy the Tories’ shadow chancellor, desperately walking the tightrope between keeping happy your right-wing, Hannan-worshipping party activists (and that’s the majority of them), while trying not to scare away the voters for whom a right-wing, Hannan-worshipping party is a nightmare spectre (and that’s the majority of them).

That, at least, is the only explanation I can come up with for George’s current confusion about whether or not he’s in favour of a crack down on public sector pay and pensions. Here, for instance, is the Financial Times which …

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Nine out of ten people spied on by local authorities are innocent

From today’s Daily Mail, following up the story about the widespread using of snooping powers by councils (as covered yesterday by Home Office Watch):

Nine in ten of 10,000 spied on by councils using anti-terrorism powers are innocent
The revelation intensified the controversy over local councils using anti-terror powers to spy on those suspected of ‘crimes’ such as putting their bins out on the wrong day.

The legislation, which allows secret filming and even the trailing of suspects by undercover officials, has been used by councils at least 10,333 times over the past five years…

Others targeted under the Regulation of Investigatory

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Somehow I think that if this was a Lib Dem council, there would be a whole load of Tory bloggers hurling insults…

From the Daily Mail:

They’re never going to have to deal with a difficult route across country, or conquer the maze of an inner city.

In fact, the trickiest test of navigation they are likely to face is getting from one side of a field to the other.

But that hasn’t stopped council chiefs buying a set of sophisticated satnavs – for their fleet of lawnmowers.

They spent £6,000 hooking up the devices to 14 mowers because gardeners claimed they kept getting lost in long grass…

Launching the system this week, David Parsons, leader of the Tory-led council, said wet weather and

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According to the Daily Mail, I’m a foreigner

As Sunder Katwala has pointed out, the Daily Mail has said it thinks it is a mistake for people who were born here but whose parents where born overseas to be counted as British.

Here’s the comment I’m submitting to the Mail’s story:

I was born here. I’ve lived here all my life (nearer to 40 years now than I wish to think). I’ve been to school here. I’ve been to university here. Twice. All my jobs have been here. All my homes have been here. I celebrate Christmas. I munch chocolate eggs at Easter. I was confirmed in the …

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Evan sticks up for drug adviser in ecstasy row

As the Guardian reports:

The government’s drugs adviser last night apologised for saying that the risk in taking ecstasy was no worse than in riding a horse. Home secretary Jacqui Smith had yesterday carpeted Dr David Nutt over comments that emerged 48 hours before his committee was expected to recommend downgrading the drug. …

Smith’s attack on Nutt, the new chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, comes when this week it will publish a report expected to recommend downgrading ecstasy from class A to class B. Smith has made clear she will veto the council’s view as

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CommentIsLinked@LDV: Vince Cable’s 2009 Almanac

Over at the Mail on Sunday, everyone’s fave Lib Dem (including the readers of Iain Dale’s Diary), has published his predictions for the year to come. As the Mail puts it, “He was right about 2008, so what does he think will happen next year?” You can read it in full here, but here’s an excerpt to tempt you:

… Pain will be concentrated on those whose businesses have gone to the wall, those with insecure jobs and those with excessively large mortgages and other debts. There is a danger of a big gulf opening up in society between those who are not touched by the recession and those who are seriously damaged by it.

The Government is getting credit for taking action, belatedly, but it must not throw around taxpayers’ money carelessly; ultimately we all pay in higher taxes or inflation or both. That is why the temporary VAT cut was a bad idea – it gave the impression that £12billion of revenue could be tossed away to pay for a Christmas binge.

That is why we also have to worry about Ministers waving a chequebook around when failing companies come visiting. It is easy to sympathise with those in the car and car component industry appealing for government help. But if cars, then why not cement or chemicals, or shops for that matter? Are Woolworths’ workers any less deserving? Governments simply cannot go down the road of propping up every industry in trouble. …

A better idea is carefully targeted public investment that creates a long-term asset for the taxpayer, generates employment and, hopefully, does something useful such as improving the environment. In America, President-elect Obama has shifted the balance of argument in favour of governments acting decisively rather than watching the crisis unfold. His ‘green New Deal’ has the right flavour and we should aim to do something similar here. There is plenty of scope for investing in the overcrowded rail system and alleviating the dreadful shortage of affordable housing for families on average incomes.

The absolutely central task for the New Year is restoring normal bank lending.

Posted in LibLink and News | Also tagged and | 1 Comment
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