THE END OF THE WORLD

A skit, by Mr William Thomas Stead (with apologies to Mr Christopher Nolan)

Centre Stage: International Illusionist, the great Murdoch

He is reading a tabloid newspaper, which he casually lets drop to his side.

“Ladies and gentleman, for my next trick, I will undertake a feat thought hitherto impossible by anyone in your country or beyond.

“I will fold this newspaper.”

Crowd gasps in horror.

Murdoch breaks into a trademark broad and homely grin. With a wave of his livered hand, he makes a show of damping the general uproar.

“Yes, it’s mine, and I can do whatever I God damned like with it.”

The great illusionist’s ginger assistant smiles rapturously and licks her master’s leathery face as he prepares to vanish the bright red publication into thin air.

Cries from the crowd: ‘No!’

Old woman: ‘But I like reading about pompous showbiz luvvies caught humping dwarves – stop it, no..’

Strident Professor in corduoroy: ‘Wait – we take it all back – we just forgot the News of the World dates back to the 1800s and was name-checked as an integral part of British culture by George Orwell, plus, no-one wanted to sell it to you anyway you only got it because of Thatcher and we just – sort of, forgot, about all that, because we’re so very academic – anyway, stop, No..”

Gaggle of powerfully vain and selfish stars of stage and screen: “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Do it Rupe! We’ve seen the future and it’s fluffy celebrity news. Come over to our side love! Coo-eee!”

Murdoch: “There it is – this limp rag, which once symbolised ebullient and rebellious British working class culture as much as the Times did upper class conformity, until I raped them both, and now before your very eyes I will tear it to shreds in a spectacle never to be seen before – or – ahem – again.”

Wild screams erupt as Murdoch screws up and rips the 68 page colour edition, and tiny reporters fall bloodied and screaming into new jobs with fantastic excuses as to why they left their last one.

But now – a voice booms out from the rear of the auditorium.

‘Rupe’s reach – exceeds his grasp: Rupe’s grasp – exceeds his nerve!”

Hundreds of distressed heads turn to behold an enormous, mollifying satellite television news channel and international film network.

Sun on Sunday reporters witness both events but their stories are spiked in favour of: “All men are probably paedophiles” strap-line “And definitely wife-beaters” byline: Rebekah Brooks, (foreign correspondent – one previous caution: husband-beating)

Ends

Yes, well, you get the idea.

Nobody seems to be able to take their eyes and ears of the terrible, awful, simply terrible awful behaviour of a bunch of tabloid journalists in London, this week, so I thought – if you can’t beat ‘em – join ‘em.

Not the terrible, awful, evil, horrible, nasty reporters of course: No.

No, we’re all agreed now that caving under ‘do it or sign on’ pressure from wicked witch of Wapping Rebekah ‘Innocent’ Brooks to ask, at her specific request, a £150,000 per annum PI, officially contracted to News International by the most senior executives in the building who damn well want their moneys worth, to magically and illegally get the inside track on every big story of the week, or – let’s say it again – be sacked – is a crime punishable by death by Um Bongo, or whatever lynch-mob punishments are being suggested for journalists, paedophiles, or any other group that – (Ironically, do you think? Not sure? Answers on a postcard) – are the current subject of a media vitriol frenzy.

No, not them. They’re scum. I want to join the winning side of sanctimonious, hypocritical, amateur, idiot, Georgie-girl “reporters” at the BBC desperate to make as much capital and viewing rating as possible out of the demise of a long distrusted, envied and genuinely popular rival which kicked the crap out of them every week by being good, and their creepy, dickhead friends from La-La land who object to being shafted by a faux-prurient public after fighting their way up on to the public stage and screaming ‘Take me!’.

After all – it seems there’s no choice. It’s all decided. Posh and Becks and Coleen and Wayne and Steve and Hugh and every other actor, singer, footballer – you know, those intellectual, morally driven people from whom we should all take our example – they’re the people who are going to decide what newspapers we read – not the great uncouth, unwashed – no siree.

From this historic day on we shall all watch the BBC, learn from our elders and betters, read the Guardian, shop at Asda, support corporate charities, and be tucked up in bed at ten.

And I tell you what – on Sunday – rather than read about blood, guts and strumpets in the News of the World like George Orwell’s nuclear family of the 1940s may have done – why don’t we top off this moral crusade by all trotting along to church.

After all, now they’ve sold their Murdoch holdings, we can go up Our Lady Rebekah of the Foreign Climes’ aisle with a clear conscience and a pointed expression, to share a communal sing-a-long to Elton John’s Candle in the Wind, trooping out in an orderly fashion – men to bedsits, women and children to council homes, two nice orderly queues under the banner reading ‘Brave New World This Way’ please, – then spend the afternoon sat stock dead in front of BSkyB footage of bloody football games re-sold to the BBC for the bit after the official news that isn’t censored. Rigged, possibly, but we’ll be unlikely to find that out now – unless those dress-down, drawing room tossers at the Guardian have spent decades building a network of underworld contacts so they can risk life and limb to let us all know.

Or – on second thoughts – maybe I don’t want to live in that particular Fabian Hell.

Maybe there’s something very, very wrong about the end of the News of the World and it’s about time somebody had the balls to say so.

So here goes.

When I chose to invent tabloid journalism, I chose to do so not because I wanted to be rich, not because I yearned to see my name in lights, and not because I gained some sadistic thrill out of seeing famous people embarrassed for doing perfectly harmless fun things we have all either done ourselves – or would do given the chance.

I chose it, because I loathe and detest orthodoxy, and establishments, and enforced consensus gentium, and everybody agreeing that everyone is right.

And I don’t just loathe and detest this – I think it’s dangerous.

This is a perfectly good creed to live by, and one which has motivated far greater minds than mine: Burke, for a start, and you could list the rest all day.

This is why I would now like to see David Cameron, Rupert Murdoch, his horrible son James, and their favourite little dog Checkers, all stuffed up Rebekah Brook’s rear and sewed in until they choked on their combined BS and she exploded.

Because these Godawful people have shafted a vital part of my free press.

Not harmless Daily Star Royal Editor Clive Goodman. Not charming NOTW byline bandit James Weatherup. Not even evil Ian Edmonson.

I don’t care all that much that hundreds of reporters on tabloid papers over the last few decades listened to other people’s phone messages to get stories.

I DO care that Britain’s pretty much oldest surviving scandal-sheet was turned into an instrument of establishment evil and finally horribly murdered by mincing Sorbonne-educated secretary-harridan Rebekah Wade/Brooks/Hucknall, whatever.

That no-one in Murdoch-world stepped in to stop her running a truly revolting, cynical, lying and socially destructive campaign inciting the populous to lynch suspected ‘paedophiles’ is unsurprising.

Sadly, from what I’ve seen after sinking beneath the frozen Antartic wave, ever since William Hearst declared War on Spain, no big-hitting senior yellow journalist or Editor has cared too much if they got innocent blood on their hands – and Brooks did, in Portsmouth, where there was at least one suicide.

But for no-one in the News Int boardroom ranks of former reporters to raise an eyebrow when, at Tony Blair and Special Branch’s specific request – she ran a COMPLETELY made-up story that Fathers for Justice were aiming to kidnap his son Leo, a story specifically aimed at gunning down a civil rights movement that was starting to scare the living daylights out of a corrupt establishment, was perhaps slightly surprising.

That Murdoch himself didn’t sack the talentless, violent harpie when she was later exposed for beating up her husband at the height of a – wait for it – anti-domestic violence campaign she deemed fit to run, was a nasty shock.

But for him to keep her on, after she’s been blown wide open for bugging Millie Dowler’s phone, and have her swooning all around you in public wibbling, like JR Ewing following you round a party with a double-scotch showing off his bullet wound, is surely the madness of his dotage.

People on internet forums keep asking – ‘What must Rebekah Brooks have on Murdoch and son?’

I’ll tell you: nothing. Because Mick Hucknall – I mean Rebekah – No, I can’t even bear to write the witch’s name, let’s just write what we see – Mick Hucknall couldn’t dig up dirt on a mole if you asked her in your nicest pretty please pretty lady voice.

Hucknall isn’t even a journalist. The most cursory Wiki shows everyone she started life as a corporate secretary, and we can only pray she ends life accordingly as a withered old Oxfordshire cat lady who leaves her massive, selfish, empty house to the PDSA.

She knows nothing about, cares nothing for, and is nothing but a massive ginger embarrassment to, tabloid journalism.

Murdoch likes her because she’s like him: she sees a newspaper purely in terms of income.

And like him, she doesn’t understand that if you treat a paper like that, long term, you kill it.

Also like him, she doesn’t give a monkeys.

Until Miss Hucknall got her sweaty-palms on it, the NOTW was pretty much the private citizens last refuge against tyranny and conformity.

Why even my predecessor at the Pall Mall Gazette, the upstanding Mr Greenwood, would not, out of snobbery, bear for even his cook to look at it!

And by the latter part of the 20th Century, long after the Gazette had gone, people still knew the NOTW would work for them, whoever they were, as long as they had a story.

You wouldn’t ring the Guardian if aliens landed on your lawn. You’d be unlikely to ring the Times is the Chief Constable raped your sister. And while there were other newspapers willing to have a pop at the establishment – something told you the NOTW was always the place to turn.

Why? Well for the precise reasons the establishment has now killed the newspaper off.

The reporters of the News of the World have been, since it’s post-War heyday, mad, bad, and dangerous to know, stopping at nothing to nail a tale.

Remember how this whole phone hacking thing started? Royal Editor Clive Goodman got into Prince William’s mobile messages.

Now that’s naughty. Is it wrong? Unless you’re a Republican, yes.

But, right or wrong – and most of us assumed the operation of the News of the World was technically wrong and didn’t care – no-one but the NOTW would have the guts to do it.

That’s why, to their readers, the paper retained the place in your heart reserved for that ‘terrible’ misbehaving relative you invite round for Christmas.

Mad cousin Terry, you know full well, will openly call your mother-in-law an old trout when you’re sick of her and haven’t got the guts.

And like an eternal relative-off-the-rails, the News of the World just never cared who they turned over, how they did it, or what people said about them afterwards.

Also like your favourite wayward cousin, you knew if you asked them to do something, and they agreed, they’d do it – in spades.

The Sun, the Mirror – well, they’re kind of the same. But not really. You can phone them up: they might show an interest in your case.

But if the Sun and the Mirror were a couple of efficient defence lawyers who could get you off a bogus charge then move on, the News of the World was in a different league.

The NOTW was the shyster who would wander into court three hours late, refuse to apologise to the judge, and prove in five minutes that you were innocent, that the policeman who framed you was having it off with your wife, and that the court usher had filmed their sordid liasons and syndicated the footage on the internet to pay the judge’s daughter’s bail on an animal cruelty rap.

You don’t get results like that without going to extremes without a care for yourself or the law, and people in power were – quite rightly – terrified of the News of the World, while people without power – quite naturally – liked that fact quite a lot.

BBC pop-brains citing Chomsky be damned: it’s just not that complicated.

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, people said. And you can’t break a News of the World story without bending a few rules. And everyone knew this.

Hucknall knew it too, up close. She was never interested in it, but she knew.

Just like “the office cat” – as one former reporter put it – knew – and just like all the top brass, apparently now all the way up to the Prime Minister did.

But it’s precisely because she’s thick, and insensitive, and uninterested, that she would have broken the paper’s back with a demand to hack a missing girl’s phone.

That’s not just naughty: it’s not just downright nasty. It’s also thick. It’s the assent of a Manager whose spinal cord is not touching her brain.

It’s got ‘Toxic’ – to re-coin the current phrase – plastered all over it in luminescent yellow. And you’d have to be both a charlatan, and an idiot, to agree to it, still more to request it.

Reporters don’t think like that. Few are that unpleasant, and even less are that stupid.

Paul McMullan, the alcoholic ex-features Editor who kept the grease on the wheels of this self-destructive scandal with his repeated public confessions of phone-bugging, has now repeatedly shown on TV the chasm between what a tabloid reporter is supposed to be like, and what they’re really like.

You Tube is currently offering a 177,000 hit grab of Steve Coogan ripping into this former showbiz editor on Newsnight.

Of course everyone’s voting for funny, popular Steve. But I think it’s McMullan who comes off better, if you do what the NOTW always boasted it did, and look at the truth behind this gladitorial, staged studio interview.

Firstly, Coogan tackles McMullan as a ‘PR Man’ for the NOTW. He is in fact the organisation’s primary whistleblower – so the very opposite – and one who, unlike the hacks married to BBC girls who’ve been knocking out nicely written but essentially token ‘insights’ into their paper in the last few days, has the guts to be named on screen in what everyone keeps saying is tabloid journalism’s ‘darkest hour’.

Secondly, Coogan, whose rampant ego and luxury-corrupted soul are almost as out of proportion with those of an ordinary human being as his intelligence and talent, not only talks made-up, out-dated crap about the paper’s supposedly reactionary politics, but speaks – loudly and in a playground bullying hector – as if the only thing it ever did was gratuituosly expose Steve Coogan’s pathetic personal life.

McMullan on the other hand – when he’s given a chance – is honest to a fault, even when he knows no-one sympathises. You can also tell by his face he knows he’s being set up.

You can see it all here:

Now bear in mind watching this that Steve Coogan is stoking himself to crucify a man in confessional who’s already pretty much done it to himself. Listen HERE to McMullan choosing to tell the world – a world who never asked him and certainly isn’t showing him any sympathy for his honesty – how terrible he feels today about the suicide of Denholm Elliot’s daughter Jennifer, something I don’t think, frankly, he can blame himself too much for, given the state of her mind due to self-inflicted drug addiction.

But that’s how most reporters are. Eighty per-cent drop out after local papers to do jobs their friends and family recognise as public-spirited, because they want to do good, and they’re just sick to death at being misunderstood.

Ok – so the reporters that went on to the News of the World may have not been quite so soppy. But corporate phone-bugging is just that: it needs an executive order.

Reporters can’t authorise £150,000 a year to a PI. And perhaps, like their readers, they didn’t care to know exactly how that PI got the results the Editors who did authorise that £150k – Editors like Hucknall – demanded.

Perhaps they were scared they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t use him: perhaps they were right.

If so – whose fault is that?

There’s a whole ‘only obeying orders’ argument there that I’m not going to get into and which we all know and love anyway.

But make no bones about it – the orders were Hucknalls.

They say social media is eclipsing the press: I’m not so sure. Everyone needs an Editor, and there’s only so much ‘Yaye – got a noo car!’ a man can stand.

But if there is one trend I’d like to see take off in cyberspace it’s #sackbrooks
on Twitter.

Maybe the great Murdoch should wake up, log on, check his Twitter account finally kick his Chief Executive’s freckly behind out.

We all know what he wants: his trick needs a Prestige – he wants BSkyB. And by all accounts, on paper, he can barely be denied it.

Unless, of course, News Int aren’t ‘fit and proper’ people to control such powerful media.

And what’s fit and proper about beating up your husband, using the free press as a Government propaganda tool – and bugging Millie Dowler’s phone?

Tweet

Our dead guest columnist WT Stead

It’s a fair old time since I boomed sonorously from the pages of a good old-fashioned free uncensored scandal-rag, but may I say, that the stark rebellion this week, of the good old-fashioned scandal-rag reading British public, against my old arch-enemies in the bent and perverted secret world of the disgraceful British courts, emboldens me to take a deep and revolutionary Victorian breath and boom once more.

We have a little club up here above the clouds, founded a couple of space-folds back by some luminaries of free speech through the various ages, my humble self included. And I’m glad to say the ‘Olympus Club’ (Honorary Patron: J. Christ), dedicated to those unjustly persecuted for exercising their right to free speech on Earth and taking its name of course from the late Twentieth Century dictaphone, rather than the cruel mythical oligarchy of the Greek Mount, has been a modest success.

Although not much is doing in the way of a recreational club by the standards of my age, it is always fascinating to muse over developments down below, and a post-match chin wag with Zola, Gilbert, Voltaire et al about what it can all possibly mean is always, as our vigorous new member Mr Leary likes to call it, something of a ‘Gas’. It’s refreshingly and rightfully rare that we agree of course, but over the last Earth month, it has proved impossible to differ on one increasingly obvious and rather exciting point.

We see a battle looming in Britain between orthodoxy and reason, between fascism and freedom, between bogus officials and citizens.

Up at Club Olympus, as you may guess, we are firmly for the freedom, and all bets are on.

The mockery that ordinary people armed with QWERTY keyboards made of Britain’s fat, sick and corrupt civil courts this week marks the first real strike home for our side.

And just because it all centred round some dozy git with the brains of a baboon and the tackle of a Grand National winner getting stitched up by a BFH, doesn’t make it any the less of a blow.

What the complete destruction of Ryan Gigg’s stupid super-injunction tells us is that people in Britain are sick of being told how to live their lives.

We, you seem to say, are not daft monkeys. We are free men and women, and it is for no-one but us to decide what is in our “best interest”.

You, the public, have for once asserted to those in power that you are – as your collective name literally suggests – ‘grown ups’ (public, from “publicus”, from‘pubes’ – meaning “adults” – with thanks to our club etymologist Senator Juvenal)

And that means you can all “bloody well decide for yourselves” (attrib: Juvenal – May 2011) what you should and shouldn’t know.

75,000 Twitterers among you decided you damn well deserved to know anything you liked about a juicy sex and blackmail scandal involving a TV starlet and a footballer.

Bizarre beginnings perhaps. But Bravo all the same. And where could, or should, it all lead? Well that’s the interesting part.

Let’s break down this tabloid scandal in full.

Now as your humble muck-raking reporter see it: in the case of Giggs, the decision of old Judge Eady to side with the sportsman was a fairly benevolent one.

Dear old Imogen Thomas appeared to be blackmailing Giggs, and Giggs, rather than go to the police, cried to the civil courts, where Eady took pity on him and his bulging bank account.

But idiots like Ryan Giggs and Imogen Stubbs and their unpleasant private lives are not the point – and they are not the problem.

The problem is a legal culture in which Eady readily believed himself to be right to ban a newspaper from telling the public about this first-rate scandal. And this illness of reason is not just Judge Eady’s disease. It represents a widespread anti-democratic cancer that is well into Stage 2.

Because it’s not just the silly tabloids that are denied their right to free speech by British courts. Millions of people across the country are gagged by secret courts every day. And the growing trend for more secrecy in the remaining public courts stems from this terrifying fact.

In Cornwall, for example, everything that ‘Children, Young People and Families’ (trans: Social Services) do to ‘families and children is secret. And everything that the inextricably linked ‘family courts’ do is secret too.

So most lawyers and council officials operate in secret, and are accountable to no-one.

One of the myriad evils arising from this secrecy, is that the colleagues of the secret officials and lawyers, those who still work under public scrutiny, notice what is going on. And what they chiefly notice, day in day out, is how their less capable colleagues in the secret world never get into trouble, because nothing they do, however wrong, is ever made public, making say, a ‘family’ lawyer or a ‘social’ worker better off in every way than say, a criminal barrister, or transport manager. And these public officials – like Justice Eady – fancy a bit of this magic all-forgiving secrecy for themselves.

Most law firms today live off family cases. This is because the fees are as secret as everything else, so are never held up to public scrutiny. The cases are a doddle too: you just make it up as you go along: after all – what juror is going to disbelieve you, or what reporter expose you for your mad decision about, say, little baby Peter, to the public? There are no jurors or reporters. There aren’t even any pesky old rules of evidence to trouble your wretched excuse for a mind. If tired or grumpy old Judge Elwen sends little Peter and Jane to live with highly-paid foster parents in Stirling in secret and pronounces that father or mother can send them an appropriate message by carrier pigeon at Christmas for no other reason except that he’s got indigestion – so what? No-one will ever be the wiser. It’s just ’10.00am Re: X Court 1’ – closed session, end of story. The press can’t go in, if Mum or Dad go to the press, they can’t publish it, and if they tell their mates, we jail them, and they can’t tell anyone about that either! So we can do whatever we like, for ever, and while there’s no threat to stop us, there is an enormous network of other inter-related ‘family professionals’ with a massive vested interest in keeping this highly profitable system of endemic injustice going.

It’s a sick world in which super-injunctions are the rule and fascism is the result.

Now a secret bureaucracy like this will grow, unchecked by civil society. It will grow, and is growing, like a Cancer, and Justice Eadys coming down with his terrible case of super-injunctivitis is a symptom of the secrecy disease spreading to the other organs of the democratic body politic. The ‘family’ courts and ‘Social’ Services are already completely cancerous and can only be removed, if democracy is to return to anything like its former health. The criminal and civil courts could still be saved. So Twittering Justice Eady’s secrecy out of existence at least provides some palliative respite, if no cure.

Now I’ve quoted Mr Bentham, who as I write sits in his slightly bizarre disembodied state alongside me at the Olympian table, before about this. Mr Bentham put it most neatly when he said simply that ‘without publicity, there is no justice’. But I get the impression you’re quickly forgotten by a media-soaked world, so this time, let me quote from an advocate of freedom who still labours on your Earth, and so commands air-time.

Julian Assange – not by coincidence the victim of a risible attempt by the authorities to stitch him up on a censored prosecution for ‘rape’ – said this to David Frost when defending his publication of secret Government documents on Wikileaks.

“Secret institutions become corrupted in their purpose. They are able to engage in secret plans, which would be opposed by the population, if the population knew about them, and then carry them out for their own internal purposes. So they are not performing the function that the people demand that they perform.”

He could have been talking about how in December 2006 Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys signed a secret document ordering the assassination of Government officials. He could have been talking about how in March 2003 the US Army at Guantanamo Bay secretly denied the Red Cross access to prisoners. But he could just as well have been talking about Ryan Giggs, or Cornwall’s ‘Children and Young People and Families’ council departments and our ‘Family’ courts.

Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys was exposed – for all the difference it made.
Guantanamo Bay should have been closed – but hasn’t been.
Ryan Giggs is on the front page of every newspaper in Britain.
Perhaps the British public could extend that courtesy to Britain’s family lawyers and social workers?

There is enormous pressure for the ‘family’ courts to open but greater resistance from within those courts – for the simple reason that they know it will mean Game Over. The public – and particularly juries – would never stand for the state sponsored child abuse that goes on in the ‘family’ division. Many bloggers and web users do publicise the crimes of the ‘family’ courts and of social workers, and even the old press pushed hard for the courts to be opened. In fact in 2009 Jack Straw did open them – at which point the legislature – in the form of former corporate lawyer and cretin Sir Mark Potter – blatantly and openly defied democratically elected Parliament, by sending a note to all ‘family’ division judges giving them a list of reasons for closing all and any of their ordered-open courts ‘in individual cases’.

In January 2011 Mail reporter Steve Doughty wrote in a news article that “Judges have effectively kept the family courts closed” without fear of any contradiction or press complaint, and his is an exact description of what has happened.

That’s the sort of official misbehaviour any dictator would be proud of: the actions of a bureaucracy completely out of control. Democratically elected Parliament passes a law ordering a group of officials to end their official secrecy – and the officials disobey it, and they get away with it.

The new Government promised a ‘review’ of the ‘family’ division as this farce rumbled on, but a year in, and the self-policing document produced has proven yet another sham, and it’s left to random Twitter users publicising salacious home-grown controversies and public-spirited contributors letting Wikileaks or campaigning websites beyond the grasp of UK law know about international scandals and throw up two fingers to a thoroughly corrupt legal system: fingers that legal system is trying harder and harder to break with yet more and more secrecy and censorship.

It’s no coincidence that the embittered Swedish prosecutor gunning for Assange – whose website exposed him as a lying fraud – is using the device of a censored ‘rape’ prosecution. Rape prosecutions, in Sweden as the UK, are highly secret on your behalf if you’re the alleged victim, but very public if you’re the accused.

In fact the censorship of rape cases is a classic, public and clearly demonstrable example, of how legal secrecy fuels lynch-mobbing and mass hysteria, and supports tyranny. Nobody gets to see the horrible injustices of the ‘family’ court and ‘social’ services, because they simply refuse to obey the law and open up, but we can see, in horrible detail, what has happened in traditionally open criminal courts in rape cases, when just some of the injustices from the secret fascist bureaucracies have crept in.

Political correct legislators excused their decision more than a decade ago to censor the name of the accuser but name the accused in rape cases by saying it would help more victims of rape come forward and get more rapists convicted. Even if you accept this ropey argument for censorship, it’s impossible to see how naming the accused helps spare the accuser her blushes. But arguments and logic were never part of this legislation. It was law based on political prejudice and misandry (a little heard term describing the pathological hatred of men) and drawn from the hysterical belief that rape is a common crime, a lunacy in turn born out of the famously insane assertion of fascistic sixties and seventies feminists that ‘all men are rapists’, which of course makes about as much sense as saying ‘all women are baby-killers’.

Of course, all-but no men are rapists, as we all now know beyond reproof. And the results of trying to unearth, or failing that create, thousands of these rapists of bigoted myth, by abusing the law and censoring the press, have much more closely resembled a medieval Pogrom than an enlightened legal reform. The indiscriminate offer that the law made to millions of women of massive financial compensation, bucket loads of unquestioning sympathy, bulletproof legal anonymity (and as an added bonus from Chomsky’s self-censoring corporate media whores, heroine status and another £2,500 odd quid if after a successful conviction they sell their story), created a sickening witch-hunt, which even its feminist high priests proved unable to justify to themselves, because the statistical results have been the exact opposite of those they proclaimed they intended.

The rate of rape convictions has sunk to an all time low. It’s sunk because Juries (Juries which, it’s probably worth pointing out for the benefit of the many imbeciles who react to any questioning of feminism by accusing the questioner of some antique mythical chauvinism, are almost always dominated by women) throw out wild and outrageous politically inspired or just plain raving claims of rape against innocent men.

So the actual result of censoring and twisting perfectly good laws to prevent and punish rape, laws that previously applied equally well to allegations of rape as to murder, has been a massive nationwide scandal of false allegation, uncovered, to their credit, by vigilant jurors. Rather than lots more guilty rapists being prosecuted, a deliberate and extreme dilution of the definition of rape to include almost every kind of sex has led to officials taking the most ludicrous allegations before public courts. There time and time again good honest citizens untainted by legal or political prejudice have thrown these bizarre cases out, reducing the rape conviction rate yet further to about five per-cent. The only area in which related convictions have risen – is in the few cases where a woman lying about being raped has been inarguably proved to have done so by the police – and the alleged victim has wound up prosecuted for perverting the course of justice. Not that the generally very lenient sentences handed out for this will have proved much comfort to the intended victims of the 21st Century’s rape pogrom: many of the men dropped into the Kafkaesque nightmare of being put on trial for a crime they didn’t commit but which nonetheless branded them as social outcasts killed themselves, and God knows how many lie in jail today convicted of rapes they did not commit, jury scrutiny notwithstanding.

And what has all this to do with Ryan Gigg’s super injunction? It has a lot to do with it.

For a start, there’s a shared principle here, which is that if you censor the law and interfere with open justice, you get secret injustice as a reward.

Everyone who appears in a court in a democracy should be named, or it’s not open justice.
Ryan Giggs is Ryan Giggs, and in a democracy, when he goes to court he should remain Ryan Giggs, not suddenly become ‘CBT’ – as court proceedings called him.

Likewise, Tracey Connelly and Steven Barker, should be named as the parents of a baby called Peter: not ‘Baby P’ – as court proceedings called him.

And in just the same way, the children fed through barbaric secret court cases held in Truro have NAMES – they are not called ‘X’ – as they appear on the censored list.

Until reporters can go into those court cases and name those children, everyone in the court, and report every decision that is made, cruelty and injustice will prevail.

It is not a coincidence that the MP who blew the final whistle on Ryan Giggs and Fred Goodwin was John Hemming.

Hemming is Britain’s primary opponent of the ‘family’ courts.

And – although the old media never reported it – he only named Goodwin and Giggs in order to highlight the case of a constituent subject to a similar gagging order.

Lee Gilliland was the man Hemming named in the same breath as Fred Goodwin.

Social workers and lawyers stole Lee’s home, then banned him talking about it with the usual ‘family’ court super-injunctions, and his MP wants them punished.

To Hemming – as to any right mind – Lee Gilliland was just as much as victim of censorship as were you, the adult public, over Giggs and Goodwin.

In committee last month Hemming revealed an even more mortifying case of how secret courts flout democracy and mock personal freedoms.

The MP told a ‘Bill of Rights’ committee family lawyers had threatened to take away another of his constituent’s children if he spoke to his MP!

Court documents showed ‘Family law barrister’ June Williams telling Andrew France he wouldn’t see his kids again if he went to Hemming with his story.

How does this happen?

Simple: secret courts and secret officialdoms all act together to pervert democracy.

Not by coincidence – What France wanted to tell his MP and the press was how he was falsely accused of rape and wrongly imprisoned after censored court proceedings,

When France won his appeal and was cleared, he tried to clear his name in public.

He demanded to tell his story to the papers about how a social worker stitched him up for a crime he didn’t commit.

The social worker responded with an action to remove France’s child, which because it was heard in the secret ‘family’ court – allowed for the routine press blackout, and made the whole scandal conveniently secret again.

Thrust back into the hell of a secret court, France found himself threatened by his own barrister: threatened that if he even so much as told his MP what was happening, the court would indeed take away his child.

Some barrister: but so it goes in the courts of fascist countries.

Were it not for Hemmings brave constituency work, no-one would ever have known anything about this appalling abuse of power by secret officials.

An unapologetic maverick, the Lib Dem MP is one of the few lights at the end of this depressing tunnel of tyranny, and a man confined to the backbenches.

But – thanks to randy Ryan and unfaithful Fred and daft old Judge Eady – his message is now being heard by MPs with stronger political career prospects.

Conservative MP David Davis is widely held to be the man who should be leading the Tories.

The son of a single mother, a modern man, and a brilliant mind, he is a heartfelt Liberal where Cameron is a scheming fraud.

The parliamentary record of Hemmings ‘Bill of Rights’ Committee shows a shocked Davis asking Hemming to repeat his evidence about France for the stenographer.

After doing so Davis said this:

“What we are seeing, and it has got worse over the course of the past 22 years, is the interests, prejudices and career risks of the organisation dealing with the individual, be it a solicitor or even a family or social services officer, put to the fore-not always, but sometimes-ahead of the interests of the constituent. Those officers of local authorities, courts and so on have put their interests or privileges ahead of ours, and it has happened time and time again. In my constituency, teachers have been accused of sexual misdemeanours which were later proven not to be true, and people have been threatened with their children being taken away-a whole series of areas.
“Our job is to be the defence of last recourse for the individual. We stand between the individual and the misdemeanours of the state or, indeed, the lynch-mob law at the other extreme. That is why, in modern terms, and not just in terms of the ancient rights, our access to information is fundamental to continuing freedom in Britain. Once our right to have that information is taken away, the freedoms of our citizens and constituents are undermined. Parliament itself-its officers and the Speaker-should take a stand and make a statement to the effect that we have those rights on behalf of our constituents.”

Yes. Well, hurry up about it. Because the sooner it’s not just Ryan Giggs we’re naming and shaming on Twitter, the better.

Tweet

Mr Dominic Raab MP has spoken out against the extraordinary oppression of men by state institutions in your modern age, pointing out that single women earn more than men, that men are violently discriminated against by laws that intrude into the home, and that the feminist oligarchy that seeks to cover up its purge of men over the last forty years is peopled by ‘feminists who are now amongst the most obnoxious bigots’

Bravo.

Watching over the extraordinary developments in the society I left behind as I sank beneath the waves of the Arctic Ocean by the Titanic in 1912, I have over the last half century or so, come to first mistrust and then detest British state functionaries of all kinds because of their incredible bigotry against men.

Lawyers, Health officials, Nurses, Civil Servants, and Police Officers all now seem to share a violent misandry that has become common currency amongst those that govern our country.

In the workplace, all good white collar public sector jobs go to women and most private sector jobs, while men are tolerated in a minority. Young men fill junior posts for a short time before leaving because of unpromotion in comparison with their female counterparts, old men are rarely employed anywhere except B and Q, and men in general are given menial blue collar jobs in most organisations; security posts or cleaning. Women are given comfortable jobs and a woman in the workplace expects promotion by dint of the fact that she turns up to work. You’re most likely to find men in the workplace now covering for a woman’s maternity leave before being dropped back into the underclass – as no woman is available to step in at short notice to cover maternity leave because all women who are willing to work are given jobs. This last point touches on the most outrageous discrimination drive the previous Government embarked upon, the creation of completely pointless bureaucratic jobs designed for and tailored to the particular whims of women: Suicide Liason Services (old women) Rape and Advice Centres (mad women) NHS Managers (women who took easy degrees in the humanities), or any number of counselling or advice or support nonsense jobs dreamed up by lunatics in Whitehall.

At home, men have been eradicated. Women divorce without fail because there are so many irresistible incentives to do so. (A house and a family and an income for life with no marital obligations to fulfil – all funded by payments extorted from an absent ex partner with no influence or role in their life at all – very few people can resist an offer like that) So men marry less, because marriage means divorce which means the loss of their house and their family and their income, for life. The Government responded to this marriage migration about seven years ago by extending punitive divorce laws outside of marriage. Men in the know – and many still cling to disbelief that you can lose your house to your girlfriend, but you can – responded by refusing to be drawn into financially mutual or long relationships, to a resulting nagging feminist chorus of cat-calls and insults. Many more young men unaware or unwilling to credit such overt prejudice actually becoming law, still thought just by avoiding marriage they could lead a normal, happy family life, and went ahead to get a house and kids with their girlfriend, to find themselves thrown out of their joint homes like their divorcee Dads and still paying the family mortgage and their bedsit rents.

The end result is a gruesome sight: since they can get jobs for life from the Government or private company jobs wherever they choose thanks to Government legislation making it inadvisable for private companies not to discriminate against men, women, taught by feminist teachers to expect all the best things from society, marry early and divorce early in order to secure mortgage and family and income for life, or if they can’t find a mug to rob, at the very least get themselves pregnant and secure themselves the income part of it. Men meanwhile, get nothing: or rather less than nothing. If they marry, they work for the house they lose. If they’re foolhardy enough to have kids, they work for an income which goes straight to the Government (a form of law Hitler initiated, in respect of the Jews). The resultant society is completely matriachal. The underclass are composed of single men, living in rented accommodation, paying their income directly to women. The uberclass consists of women, living in their own home, enjoying the stipend which impoverishes their old partner, and exercising exclusive legal and social rights over their children, while sharing the marital bed with politically and socially emasculated partners, at first younger men seeking a novelty, then when the youngsters tire or become wary of her, the place is ceded on generally strict terms to an older man ejected from another matriachs home, refugee from the underclass world of bedsits, CSA payments, monitored family visiting hours, poverty, insecurity, hard low paid seasonal work and inevitably, drink and violence.

Overlords of this mess among the masses are, I must confess to my shame, the mass media, bloated bastard children of my noble invention of the bold and fearless tabloid news Gazette: just look at them, spineless toadies to profiteering oligarchs, piping their misandrist fairy tales of paedophiles and wife beaters through television screens and womens magazines and red-topped rags until even many men are actually convinced by them, not a little because the masses this wretched excuse of a press aims to brainwash have been so conditioned by life from cradle to grave in a media soaked world that they perform its poisonous function for it – repeating the propaganda back to themselves like sheep until blatant lies assume consensus gentium and become relative accepted truths.

Except of course none of the feminist, tabloid, smelly little orthodox myths of your wretched society are true, any more than our old fairy tales of white weddings and noble imperialists ever were. I mean, stop reading the press and watching the TV and sit down and ask yourself: how many wife beaters do you actually know? The Government had to change the definition of domestic violence to include refusal to lend money to a woman in order to effect any prosecutions for this mythical crime at all. They say one in four women ‘suffers domestic violence’ – but that statistic is simply not true. From my high purchase in Heaven I can see clearly and instantly that it was dreamed up by a feminist academic at Royal Holloway and Bedford College – a long-time haven for moronic Oxford drop-outs – and has since been completely discredited. How many child molesters do you meet? Again, the Government had to run through hundreds of new laws so that to be a ‘paedophile’, you no longer had to actually interfere with a child – but just looking on a computer screen at sex acts that didn’t involve middle aged women or the positively elderly qualified you for exclusion from society and a general brainless baying for blood. After that, suddenly they started appearing everywhere: because who doesn’t like a bit of porn – really? – male or female – don’t we all like sex? So what’s wrong with pictures of sex? Isn’t porn as old as humanity? What’s the Karma Sutra? Are the cartoons in the Karma Sutra of old people? Knock down ten doors in your street and seize the family PCs and you’ll find porn; porn belonging to nice, worthwhile, upstanding people at whose personal files you have no business looking: knock down a hundred doors and you’ll easily find porn that could be classified as child porn, because porn barons know how to use blind links and few people with healthy sexual instincts are drawn to have sex with old gits. What you WON’T find of course – is actual pictures of vulnerable little children being defiled, because that type of porn – the bogeyman porn of the child porn hysteria – doesn’t exist, any more than did snuff movies, any more than did Satanists on the Isle of Man. The child porn hsyteria was dreamed up by tabloid journalists to increase sales – I know because I was there, pacing the room furiously as an impotent spectre, when they came up with it in Wapping; what an insult to my memory! My completely original, utterly controversial exposure of REAL child prostitution in Victorian London twisted and bent on the rack of ages to be churned out like propaganda sausages for the people by a populist, feminist, fascistic Government in bed with a bunch of pervert press barons so they could all cling on to money and power a little longer: Bah! There are not paedophiles on every corner. There are not wife beaters in every home. These spectres were invented, by nasty. bigoted women, unduly given unchecked power, in Government, precisely because both these spectres are men. And your modern feminists hate men as much as they hate themselves. Because they’re mad, and sad, and dangerous to give power to. And society has come to believe their poisonous tripe because en masse people are without fail stupid. Think of the bigoted chauvinist insults against men that have become common folklore in your matriachal society. Even my only begotten son on Earth Julian Assange – bless him – a single father undoubtedly now the target of a high profile feminist establishment conspiracy to crucify him on a ludicrously unconvincing rape charge – when asked in his youth if he felt he was slightly autistic nervously replied (somewhat to my dismay); ‘Aren’t all men?’ No. The Coroner for Cornwall, one of the most sexist officials it is my displeasure to have to monitor from above, recently actually asked the relatives of a farmer who blew his head off in illness and old age ‘Did he cover up his feelings? Sometimes men have trouble expressing their feelings,’ she explained for the public record. No. They Replied. He didn’t. He always said exactly what he felt. Just as I am when I express my strong feeling that the Coroner for Cornwall is a sexist bigot who perverts the course of justice by trying to cover up the evidence every time there is a suicide of an oppressed man: I know what’s in those suicide notes, Carlyon. But don’t worry – it won’t matter that you don’t read them out – because the suicides themselves belie exactly what the true result of the half a century of extreme political oppression of men in Britain has been and will continue to be until the law is changed.

Think about it. You don’t just go and hang yourself from the rafters because your missus dumped you. I mean, who cares? Very, very. very few teenagers kill themselves after relationships end – and teenagers are much more emotionally vulnerable and volatile than adults, it’s an indisputable chemical fact. So why is it that almost every week in Cornwalls’ Coroners Court there’s a case of a fully grown adult man suiciding after a relationship break up? Well, if you’ve read this far, you know the answer already. Because the ending of a relationship – something that will inevitably happen to almost all of you in life and which, if indeed it need be governed by laws at all – should be governed by laws devised to ease the process rather than escalate it: tragically and quite avoidably this inevitable fact of human life, that people change and start new relationship with other people; is in fact governed by fascistic, intrusive, sickening cod-laws as biased as the edicts of any dictatorship: they mean that when a woman is born into the western world, she can grow up, find a partner, get a house, and have kids. But when the relationship inevitably ends, she keeps the house, keeps the family, and gets a monthly pay cheque from her partner – for nothing, for life! The man, by contrast, loses his home, loses his family, and loses his money – without fail. The tragic evidence stifled daily in the courts by a tyrannical establishment creaking under the pressure of their own censorship clearly shows that such extreme social pressures and injustices are too much for many victims to bear, and that many men commit suicide as a direct result. Feminism has bred successive generations of obnoxious female bigots who have abused the freedom their great-grandparents won, and who now they form the establishment, censor the news like it’s never been censored before . What were once revolutionary ideas in my time have become first recent orthodoxy and now modern oppressions. From having equal rights for women, feminists have lobbied for and engineered a society in which women have all the rights and men have none. If men had equal rights, the suicide rate would halve overnight. It’s as simple as that.

I’m sick of it and I’m sure millions of you down there are too. I’m sick of seeing my inheritors called names and abused and attacked for daring to speak out against it, I’m sick of being right when everyone else is wrong and I’m sick of your politicians being too pathetic and cowardly to speak the truth. So well done to Dominic Raab MP and may David Davis be the next prime minister because frankly, so far, Cuddly Cameron hasn’t impressed much here on Cloudbase Nine.

Lots of Love

WT Stead

Godfather of Tabloid Journalism (deceased).

Born the son of a churchman in 1849 he worked his way to the Editors chair of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1883.

It was there that in 1885 Stead shook Victorian society with the first ever undercover tabloid investigation.

Sold under the headline; ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, it exposed child prostitution.

Stead went straight to beat policemen and brothel madams and their prostitutes to stand up his shocking story.

Then – lest anyone doubt what his sources had told him – he physically completed the purchase – for five pounds – of a 13 year old virgin named only as ‘Lily’.

His resultant, triumphant, and massively salacious serialisation of the first ever sex expose caused near-riots at the newsstands and led to a nationwide moral panic.

The Home Secretary himself – faced with troops of Victorian virgins, clad in white, marching on Parliament – begged Stead to spike the story.

The Editor responded with blackmail, telling Sir William Harcourt he’d stop running the story only if the Government raised the age of consent.

The Home Secretary refused: but eventually Parliament caved, and the law was changed.

The Establishment had their revenge.

In the weeks after the scandal, the broadsheet Times, forced to chase the sensational tale, dug out ‘Lily’ in France.

Their spoiler led to the girl being named as 13 year old Eliza Armstrong, daughter of Elizabeth and Charles Armstrong, a London chimney sweep.

Now publicly shamed, Elizabeth claimed she had been ‘duped’ – believing she was accepting five pounds for her daughter to be taken into service by an ‘old gentleman’ on the continent.

The girls’ father complained Stead’s news team should have got his permission as parent before buying the child – and on those basis both parents sued.

Representing the case put forward by this pair of beauties in court there turned up none other than the Victorian Attorney General, Richard Webster.

The story that came out of the trial was of how Stead had single-handedly invented the modern tabloid investigation in every last detail.

From going through contacts to tap up underworld sources, all the way through to hiding his quarry in a safe house after the story broke – the whole template was there.

It emerged Stead had used the Salvation Army to find a reformed prostitute, Rebecca Jarrett.

Stead sat Jarrett down and convinced her to go ‘undercover’ for him in red-light London, and buy a child for sex.

Jarrett promptly got in contact with a ‘procuress’ she knew from her days walking the streets, who found her Elizabeth Armstrong, a known alcoholic.

Mrs Armstrong, told by Jarrett her daughter would be ‘going into the service of an old gentleman’ abroad, sold her for a Victorian fiver, the equivalent of around £500.

Stead’s ex-hooker then took the girl to a backstreet abortionist to get confirmation she was a virgin and while she was at it, the abortionist sold Jarrett a bottle of chloroform and drugged the youngster up.

The thirteen year old was then dumped at a brothel and Stead tipped off by his source to turn up, posing as a libertine.

He did so, and became the first reporter ever to ‘make his excuses and leave’ for his office, to write up his account.

After the scandal broke and every other paper was on the case, Stead had even ‘tucked the girl up’ – abroad in France – sending her for apparent adoption into a Salvationist family.

In court, the Attorney General ‘s attack consisted chiefly of exposing Stead’s subterfuge, and wallowing in his source’s lurid past until she clammed up in the dock.

The parents were dressed up and sold to the court and on the basis that no-one had actually signed a ‘virgin sale’ contract, Stead was blamed for everything that happened to the girl.

Against this, the Gazette Editor represented himself.

He was, he said, bang to rights: he’d used subterfuge, but had tried to do the right thing, his source had stitched him up a bit, and he asked only to be judged “as a fellow man”.

The jury found him guilty and the judge put the world’s first undercover reporter away for three months, telling him:

“You deluged, some months ago, our streets and the whole country with an amount of filth which has, as I fear, tainted the minds of the children that you were so anxious to protect, and which has been—and I don’t hesitate to say, ever will be—a disgrace to journalism.”

Apparently deaf, Stead did his time, edited the Gazette from his cell in Clerkenwell and emerged unrepentant, publicly thanking the institution a pleasant stay.

He even asked the governer to keep his uniform, and dressed up in it on every wedding anniversary thereafter to celebrate his ‘victory’ over the Victorian establishment.

From that point on, there was no stopping him.

In 1886 Stead gunned for love-rat MP Sir Charles Dilke for having a fling with his brothers mother in law AND her 19 year old, married, daughter, and effectively ruined him.

Four years later, resigning his Editorship, he set up his own paper, the ‘Review of Reviews’ in a similar sensational vein to the Gazette.

A believer in mediums and the after-world, in1893 he launched ‘Borderland’, a ‘spiritualist’ magazine which became the Victorian equivalent of ‘Most Haunted’, and a massive hit.

He then, only about a hundred years before his time, set up the first ‘psychic hotline’ as a money making sideline.

‘Julia’s Bureau’, was a ‘bridge’ between the world of the living and the dead, where punters could call in on mediums, and talk to dead relatives – for a small fee, naturally.

Completely irrepressible throughout his life, even in death, Stead was to prove himself inseparable from sensational news.

On 14 April 1912, he went down with the Titanic.

Exhibiting a lack of tact and respect Stead would have envied, the Daily Mirror reported of his death that its irony was that he was prevented reporting the news story of the century.

But is the spirit of WT Stead dead?

Of course not.

After drowning in the Titanic disaster, WT Stead, like many people of his age, retired to Cornwall, where today he haunts our offices.

Many is the time spiked stories have magically re-appeared on our newslist, sporting sensational crossheads and outrageous headlines none of us ever wrote.

It’s WT Stead. WT Stead, both dead and alive, stalking the CCN newsroom like a – ghost – of WT Stead.

Well there’s only one thing to do with talent like that – give it it’s own show: which is why each month, you, the readers of Cornwall Community News, can read the musings of the grand-daddy of all popular journalists – the great WT Stead.

He’s lurid. He’s confrontational. He’s outspoken. He’s totally deaf to criticism of any kind: and you can’t sue him.

Because he’s dead.

And I might has well warn you now – he doesn’t like the Western Morning News much.

Ed