Index on Censorship letter to Metropolitan Police Commissioner
INDEX ON CENSORSHIP LETTER TO METROPOLITAN POLICE COMMISSIONER
"Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police”
London’s Metropolitan Police has called for large businesses and the public to report suspicious anarchist activities immediately. A weekly communiqué (see below) issued by the City of Westminster’s Counter Terrorist Focus Desk said:
“Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”
That was Sunday. The swell of internet-driven murmuring rage brought Project Griffin’s 33-word definition of anarchism and its appeal to dob in your Chomsky-reading neighbours to front page news on the Guardian.
Twitter tweeps retweeted shortened URLs prefixed with disbelief and Facebook folk guffawed about handing themselves in to Belgravia police station. Here was a document from the Metropolitan Police that, in one dinky box decorated with clip art, pushed McCarthyism to the local businesses and public institutions the newsletter went out to. The reds under your bed were back. But this time they wanted a smaller state. No state. A bigger society. A Big Societ…oh. Erm.
Queue the crash of arguments pointing out that the likes of Alan Greenspan, the American Tea Party and David Cameron are proponents of smaller states and stateless societies. Running alongside that is the Orwellian scenario of thought crime. Because you are an anarchist, you should be reported as dangerous. You are here being mentioned alongside Anders Breivik –– the bad man who killed all those people in Norway. You are here mentioned alongside terrorism. It says so. Right here.
Within 24 hours, police issued a climbdown blaming bad wording. “The Metropolitan Police service does not seek to stigmatise those people with legitimate political views. People purporting to be anarchists have caused criminal damage this year to business premises, and government buildings in Westminster. The message we were trying to convey was to gather information on criminal acts to help us prevent crime and bring offenders to justice.”
Here was a document that seemed to have copied and pasted its definition of anarchism from the first line of Wikipedia. Here was a document that, on the same page, asked people to report all sightings of a yellow dot topped with Arabic script as an Al-Qaeda symbol and misspelled “beach volleyball”. Like a badly designed school handout that’s gone a bit wild with a text box, it would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so serious.
Okay. It’s still laughable. But the subtext of their climbdown isn’t. It’s nose-on-face clear that policing priorities lie in the protection of commercial interests and business. Project Griffin is a “product” for raising “awareness of crime and terrorism issues within the business community”.
Opening a document by declaring the UK’s threat level from international terrorism as “substantial” in bold red letters and closing it with the mantra “if you suspect it, report it” in a bright red box cements paranoia. What the Counter Terrorist Focus Desk has done is equate anarchism with terrorism –– a calculation that criminalises a philosophy. By doing that, they have engendered fear. And to do that is an act of terrorism.
As threatening as the word seems, anarchy is rooted in unwavering optimism because it trusts individuals to come up with ethics and freedoms collectively. At the heart of the myriad of anarchist philosophies is a fundamental belief in fairness.
What Project Griffin has taught the wider public is that there is a section of the establishment with dangerously simplistic views of politics. It is the section concerned with running around the yard like a dog barking at anything that moves in the name of vigilance.
Why did News International retreat on phone hacking?
James Murdoch was quoted this weekend as saying in New York that his father’s company has now put the phone hacking problem “in a box” so that everybody would not be “sucked into it”, causing the whole business to “sputter”.
Well maybe. News International has always had a cultish, us-against-the-rest character, so its mind is hard to read, but the truth surely is that the company’s lawyers have known for weeks if not months that they could not win most or perhaps any of the private cases brought by people who believe they were victims of News of the World hacking.
It may be that the decisive moment came a month or so ago, when the judicial authorities made a simple and for them almost routine decision. About 25 separate legal actions were in the works and it was no secret that papers were being prepared for more, so it was thought sensible and efficient to direct all of them towards one judge, who would then be versed in all the common factors and issues. The chosen judge was Mr Justice Vos, who had until then been hearing the preliminaries in the combined cases of Andy Gray and Steve Coogan. For News International this was surely a disaster, because in those preliminary hearings they had road tested some of their most important defences and found Vos unsympathetic to the point of dismissiveness.
Perhaps the most significant moment came during a court hearing in January, when Vos was briskly reviewing matters before ruling on a particular point of procedure. He said this:
The main point argued in Mr Gray’s case was that none of the 12 calls known to have actually been made from Mr Mulcaire’s landlines to Mr Gray’s voicemail box number was long enough to allow interception of Mr Gray’s voicemail messages. The Defendants relied in this regard on the evidence that . . . it normally takes nine seconds to access any real messages when a call is made to a voicemail direct dial number.
Here, in other words was one of the central pillars of the News International case. Glenn Mulcaire had, by whatever nefarious means, acquired all the numbers and codes required to access Andy Gray’s voicemails, but did he actually listen to them? Yes, he had called the relevant number, but the company argued that no proof had been provided of him actually hearing a message; on the contrary, what evidence there was suggested he had failed to do so. By implication, it could not be shown that Mulcaire had breached Gray’s privacy. Here is what Mr Justice Vos had to say about that:
. . .it seems to me that, in Mr Gray’s case, there is abundant evidence that Mr Gray’s voicemails were intercepted, and a strong inference that some misuse will have been made of the confidential information thereby obtained. The 12 calls that have already been proved may well not be the whole story. And at least three of them were long enough for some information to have been obtained …
He added that there was every reason to expect much more data on the telephone traffic to emerge, both from the police and the company, and that in any case he saw no reason to rely on telephone traffic data alone.
. . . the documents from Mr Mulcaire’s own handwritten notes are more than enough to satisfy me that interception of Mr Gray’s voicemails was something that Mr Mulcaire was undertaking regularly.
Vos was equally sceptical about the company’s argument that it could not be proved that Mulcaire, if he really did hack Gray’s messages, was doing it for the News of the World.
. . . since Mr Mulcaire was contracted to NGN, I disagree. Moreover, Mr Mulcaire’s own notes and the reference to “Greg” therein supports that case, even though it remains to be proved that “Greg” was Greg Miskiw, a NotW journalist.
(NGN, by the way, is News Group Newspapers, the arm of News International which operates the News of the World and the Sun.)
If, at the turn of the year, Murdoch’s people thought they could fight their cases against people in Andy Gray’s position with a reasonably chance of success, this sort of rubbishing from a leading judge must have brought them up short. Then, when they learned that all the cases would be heard by the same judge, the outlook must have been transformed. A chance of success became a serious risk of expensive and serial humiliation.
And worse still was the prospect that Glenn Mulcaire would lose the case he is due to bring to court, perhaps as early as next month (and not before Vos), in which he was set to argue that he should not be obliged to reveal whom he dealt with on these matters at the News of the World on the ground that he risked incriminating himself. With Vos already kicking them around, they apparently decided not to wait.
That said, it should be noted that the company’s statement contains some vaguely defiant language suggesting they are not giving up entirely. On the one hand, this is natural: they want to drive hard bargains on compensation and send a signal that they won’t pay out in frivolous, unfounded claims. On the other hand, they may yet take some cases to court to try and define the limits of their liability, because there are a lot of loose ends here. A final note: while Andy Gray is said to be on the list for a compensation offer, Steve Coogan is not. What does this mean? Only that Coogan’s case is less well advanced than Gray’s. His lawyers are gathering information, and Vos appears to believe that they will make it stack up.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He tweets at @BrianCathcart ENDS
Andy Coulson has gone, now let's see News International held to account
Why has Andy Coulson resigned now, after clinging on so long, and just days after David Cameron backed him? If his position has suddenly become untenable it is hardly just because, as he put it, the spokesman needs a spokesman. They could afford a line of 20 of those.
One of the reasons must be the simple one that the “one rogue” defence of his time at the News of the World has collapsed. The suspension of senior news executive Ian Edmondson and the naming of one other former news editor in court documents related to alleged phone hacking have left News International struggling for a form of words to shore up its position. And all the time the lawsuits from angry celebrities continue to pile up.
But you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to ask whether the future of BSkyB is as important in the balance of factors here as the question of how many people still believe Coulson could have failed to know members of his staff were hacking phones.
James and Rupert Murdoch are determined to buy the shares in BSkyB that they don’t already own. It is the springboard for their UK business strategy over the next ten years and compared to this the fates of Andy Coulson and a bunch of News of the World hacks probably doesn’t add up to much.
The Murdochs don’t usually care much about public opinion either, but they need political blessing for the BSkyB deal to go through. In this context the embarrassment of constant stories about hacking (even though most of the press has shabbily ignored them) is most unwelcome, and there is no doubt that Coulson’s presence at the heart of government has made that worse.
Now he’s gone, will the TV deal be easier to pull off? Only if we’re all suckers.
So bad has the phone hacking scandal become that the whole News International hierarchy has questions to answer, and that includes not only Rebekah Brooks but James Murdoch himself — for one thing, he personally approved the six-figure settlement payment to Gordon Taylor which was prompted by the discovery of that infamous bunch of hacked transcripts marked “for Neville”.
If James Murdoch wants to convince us that his company should be able to own BSkyB outright, with all the monopolistic opportunities that affords, then he needs to convince us that the company he already runs is a clean one. And before that can happen we need to see what happens to Sienna Miller, Chris Tarrant, Andy Gray, Steve Coogan and the host of others who are in the courts claiming that Murdoch’s paper breached their privacy.
Read more Brian Cathcart on Metgate here, here, here, here, here and here
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London and tweets at @BrianCathcart