At a parliamentary briefing this week on the World Service cuts (five language services to close, end of radio programmes in seven languages, 650 jobs lost), MPs were puzzled about the logic of the government’s actions. Why was the World Service being so brutally diminished when the government is actually increasing its foreign aid spending? Surely Bush House should qualify for some of that funding? There can be no doubt that World Service programmes contribute substantially towards the goals of international development: increasing access to information and freedom of expression around the world, essential for the foundation and health of any democracy. Well, it turns out that the Foreign Office (which has always funded the World Service till now) actually counts £25m of its grant-in-aid to the World Service towards meeting the government’s development goals. At the briefing in Westminster Hall, the former diplomat Lord Hannay declared it was a “con trick” — the World Service helps the government meet its target without entailing any further spending and without actually receiving development funding for its significant contribution. When you consider that the cuts over the next three years are totalling £46m and destroying Bush House’s position as the world’s single largest international broadcaster, receiving £25m would have averted the catastrophic blow that has just been delivered. Bush House has as much claim to international aid as the British Council (which received £40m in international development funding last year via the Foreign Office). The government urgently needs to rethink its strategy and at the very least justify why the Pope is deemed worthy of foreign aid, yet one of our greatest cultural institutions is disqualified: £1.85m of the development budget was spent on the papal visit last year.
Interesting news ahead of a Court of Appeal hearing on security for costs in the Hardeep Singh case. In October High Court judge Lady Justice Smith granted Indian national Sant Baba Jeet Singh ji Maharaj the right to appeal in his libel case against journalist Hardeep Singh.
Ahead of the hearing, scheduled for tomorrow, Jeet Singh’s solicitors Ford & Warren wrote to the Court of Appeal to inform it that they are now in the process of making an application to come off the court record as acting for Jeet Singh.
The case centres on an article that Singh wrote in August 2007 for the Sikh Times, a British newspaper, in which he claimed that Jeet Singh was an “accused Cult leader” whose teachings were not in line with mainstream Sikh doctrine. The article also connected his followers with conflict in UK temples. The claimant — a self proclaimed “Holy Man” — has never visited the United Kingdom.
In May 2010 a High Court judge threw out the case brought against freelance British journalist Hardeep Singh. Mr Justice Eady ruled for a permanent stay with no right to appeal. Eady’s judgment held that secular courts should not make a judgment on a religious dispute.
The claiment’s application for appeal was granted on the limited basis that there are arguable issues in Singh’s article that do not tread on the forbidden area of doctrinal dispute.
If it is true that News International is confronting the phone hacking scandal with a new zeal, we can only welcome it. The pity is that it has taken four and a half years to reach this point, not least because, as any detective or criminal lawyer will confirm, in that period useful evidence is likely to have been lost.
This makes it all the more important that, whatever other investigations may be taking place, there should also be a proper inquiry into how the company conducted itself between the arrest of its royal editor in August 2006 and the onset of this new zeal. A key concern must be the repeated assurances given by company executives that in this long interval they did everything in their power to track down any evidence that anyone on their staff other than Clive Goodman might have been involved in phone hacking.
Les Hinton, former chief executive of News International, gave such an assurance to the Commons select committee on the media in 2007. He repeated it to MPs in 2009. Colin Myler, the editor of the News of the World, gave similar assurances; so did Tom Crone, his legal affairs director, and so did Andy Coulson, editor at the time of Goodman’s arrest. You can read what they said in the oral and written evidence section of the committee’s report here.
That evidence raises a lot of questions. To take a simple example, a point made by Myler and repeated by Hinton was that the internal investigation involved examining 2,500 emails. The implication was that this showed thoroughness, but 2,500 emails in an organisation like the News of the World must be a drop in the ocean. One reporter might receive 2,500 emails in a matter of weeks. So why were only 2,500 emails examined back in 2006-7?
More generally, there is the role of the solicitors, Burton Copeland. Coulson said (Q1719) he brought them in very quickly to find out “what the hell had gone on” and gave them everything they needed. Crone pointed out to MPs (Q1388) that they were “probably the leading firm in this country for white collar fraud”. That sounds very vigorous and thorough. You might infer that this top firm went in and, with full management support, carried out a top-class internal investigation, leaving no stone unturned.
But police evidence to the MPs left a very different impression of Burton Copeland’s role. Detective Chief Superintendent Philip Williams, in a number of answers (see Q2010) portrayed the firm, not as independent investigators or as facilitators for the police investigation, but as lawyers acting in defence of the company’s interests, and he implied that they were a good deal less helpful than the police hoped.
A subsequent written submission (Nov 2009, Q6) by Assistant Commissioner John Yates put it bluntly:
News of the World instructed lawyers to respond to our requests for disclosure and they took a robust legal approach to our requests and provided material strictly based on the evidence against Goodman and Mulcaire.
So that’s another question. Were Burton Copeland there as independent crimebusters called in by the company to track down any possible traces of wrongdoing, as News International executives told MPs, or were they solicitors representing the corporate interest in unwelcome dealings with the police? Whatever it is that they were tasked to do, I’m sure the firm did it professionally and ethically, but we need to know.
This is not a matter of idle historical interest. For one thing, it is reported that Burton Copeland are acting for News International in this matter again today. More fundamentally, questions of this kind are crucial to the public understanding of News International’s conduct and they may have a bearing on the evidence that is available to police today.
So who is going to ask these questions? So far as I can tell they are not within the remit of the new CPS and Met investigations, and we are surely not relying on Rupert Murdoch or the Press Complaints Commission to ask them. The case for a public inquiry gets stronger and stronger.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University and tweets at @BrianCathcart
The government has banned Terry Jones from entering the UK. Jones is the fundamentalist US pastor who threatened to burn a copy of the Koran outside his Florida church on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Before he found fame through “International burn a Koran Day” his Dove World Outreach Centre had just 50 members. Jones is certainly a racist and homophobic Islamophobe — his website sells T-shirts, cups and baseball hats carrying the slogan “Islam is of the devil” — but he is not just anti-Muslim, he is an equal opportunities bigot who also believes Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism are the devil’s work.
It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that the decision to ban Jones comes on the same day as Baroness Warsi’s speech claiming that anti-Muslim bias is now the social norm and calling for tolerance. But the government cannot have it both ways: banning a pastor for extremist views and “unnacceptable behaviour” (to use the Home Office’s phrase) is not the action of a tolerant society.
The government claims that “[T]he use of exclusion powers is very serious and no decision is taken lightly or as a method of stopping open debate”, but it has a worryingly broad basis for denying entry to the country that clearly limits freedom of expression.
Jones was originally due to come to the UK to speak at an English Defence League (EDL) rally in March before he was “disinvited” for being homophonic and racist. Prior to his EDL rejection a smaller group called England Is Ours had invited him to speak to its members.
The England Is Ours website provide links to links to the BNP, the National Front and StormFront. When I spoke to England Is Ours secretary Barry Taylor he said he has “no idea” if Jones is racist but he thought not because Jones has an “Egyptian chap as a pastor and some African–American chaps”. Taylor happily admitted Jones is anti-gay “but that’s a Christian thing.” Jones’s itinerary with the group –– a loosely organised collective of some 30 individuals –– involved two meetings “debating political issues” and an outdoor church service, not exactly the birth of a new political movement.
Surely, a pastor from Nowheresville representing just 50 people invited to speak to an organisation with only 30 members should not be the kind of “threat” that keeps the Home Office up at night as a threat to “community harmony”? The government should think twice before turning cranks into free speech martyrs.
Terry Jones in action below. More on exclusion orders here, here, and here
