Or Starmer …..
The Spectator
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Or Starmer …..
Starmmer was too quick to u turn and ended up losing credibility. Burnam is going to be much more subtle.
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It is well worth reading the whole of the foreword of the report, written by a former political editor of the magazine,
He begins
Founded in July 1828 The Spectator is the oldest surviving magazine, not just in Britain but the world. During the course of its magnificent history many British prime ministers have written for it: Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Macmillan.
Another PM, Boris Johnson, edited it. Great writers from Rudyard Kipling and Evelyn Waugh to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from TS Eliot and Philip Larkin to Ted Hughes, have been published in its pages. Literary editors have included Graham Greene and Peter Ackroyd. It has given space to public intellectuals, including Bertrand Russell and Noel Malcolm, Ferdinand Mount and William Dalrymple.
The magazine has generally been on the right side of history. Under its founding editor Robert Rintoul, it helped drive through the Great Reform Act of 1832. It supported Robert Peel over the Corn Laws. It was clear-sighted and moral over the First Opium War, one of the most squalid episodes in British imperial history for which Britain is paying a price today. After some dithering, The Spectator backed Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War when most British papers supported the slave-owning confederate states.
David Butterfield, the magazine’s historian, records the heavy cost: “subscribers fell below a thousand for the first time since the paper’s very early years and the title almost collapsed.” Butterfield also records that The Spectator stood out from much of the British press by seeing straight through Oswald Mosley and calling for a ban on the Blackshirt or any political uniform: “Blackshirts, like the Daily Mail, appeal to people unaccustomed to thinking. The average Daily Mail reader is a potential Blackshirt ready made.”
Though a Conservative title, The Spectator opposed the Suez invasion, and backed the Wolfenden report, condemning Britain’s “utterly irrational and illogical” laws on homosexuality. The Spectator was one of the leaders of the campaign to end capital punishment.
In the 1960s, under the editorship of Iain Macleod (a future Chancellor of the Exchequer), The Spectator exploded the anti-democratic rules and secret procedures that governed Tory leadership battles. Under the editorship of Nigel Lawson (another future Chancellor) The Spectator opposed the Vietnam War. It immediately condemned the “dangerous nonsense” of Enoch Powell’s 1968 “rivers of blood” speech, saying that it played into the “politics of hatred”.
Out of this history, a coherent picture emerges. For the bulk of the last 200 years The Spectator, a profoundly important voice in British politics, articulated decent and civilised values. In recent years something has changed, as this thorough and scrupulous report from the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) demonstrates. Today’s Spectator obsessively mocks Britain’s minority Muslim population. The attacks come week after week, sometimes several in the same edition. The magazine detects the malign influence of Muslims in the most unexpected places. Almost anything, however random or innocent, can trigger The Spectator.
Describing their fixation on Islam as “unhinged” (although to be fair they have also gone in for Holocaust denial and Blood Libel) he then cites a number of examples, and concludes:
For almost two hundred years The Spectator stood for a tradition of good writing and civilised and often bravely heretical discourse. It used its voice to articulate, and sometimes to lead, our national struggle for tolerance. Today, as it approaches the 200th anniversary of its foundation by Robert Rintoul, The Spectator has become one of the most influential British media apologists for bigotry, hatred and racism: an upmarket version of GB News. For those of us who loved, revered and were guided by the old Spectator this is a national tragedy. British Muslims have every reason to feel threatened and intimidated by such rancid, repetitive, irrational and apparently uncontrollable hostility from a hugely respected magazine at the heart of the British establishment.
He begins
Founded in July 1828 The Spectator is the oldest surviving magazine, not just in Britain but the world. During the course of its magnificent history many British prime ministers have written for it: Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Macmillan.
Another PM, Boris Johnson, edited it. Great writers from Rudyard Kipling and Evelyn Waugh to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from TS Eliot and Philip Larkin to Ted Hughes, have been published in its pages. Literary editors have included Graham Greene and Peter Ackroyd. It has given space to public intellectuals, including Bertrand Russell and Noel Malcolm, Ferdinand Mount and William Dalrymple.
The magazine has generally been on the right side of history. Under its founding editor Robert Rintoul, it helped drive through the Great Reform Act of 1832. It supported Robert Peel over the Corn Laws. It was clear-sighted and moral over the First Opium War, one of the most squalid episodes in British imperial history for which Britain is paying a price today. After some dithering, The Spectator backed Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War when most British papers supported the slave-owning confederate states.
David Butterfield, the magazine’s historian, records the heavy cost: “subscribers fell below a thousand for the first time since the paper’s very early years and the title almost collapsed.” Butterfield also records that The Spectator stood out from much of the British press by seeing straight through Oswald Mosley and calling for a ban on the Blackshirt or any political uniform: “Blackshirts, like the Daily Mail, appeal to people unaccustomed to thinking. The average Daily Mail reader is a potential Blackshirt ready made.”
Though a Conservative title, The Spectator opposed the Suez invasion, and backed the Wolfenden report, condemning Britain’s “utterly irrational and illogical” laws on homosexuality. The Spectator was one of the leaders of the campaign to end capital punishment.
In the 1960s, under the editorship of Iain Macleod (a future Chancellor of the Exchequer), The Spectator exploded the anti-democratic rules and secret procedures that governed Tory leadership battles. Under the editorship of Nigel Lawson (another future Chancellor) The Spectator opposed the Vietnam War. It immediately condemned the “dangerous nonsense” of Enoch Powell’s 1968 “rivers of blood” speech, saying that it played into the “politics of hatred”.
Out of this history, a coherent picture emerges. For the bulk of the last 200 years The Spectator, a profoundly important voice in British politics, articulated decent and civilised values. In recent years something has changed, as this thorough and scrupulous report from the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) demonstrates. Today’s Spectator obsessively mocks Britain’s minority Muslim population. The attacks come week after week, sometimes several in the same edition. The magazine detects the malign influence of Muslims in the most unexpected places. Almost anything, however random or innocent, can trigger The Spectator.
Describing their fixation on Islam as “unhinged” (although to be fair they have also gone in for Holocaust denial and Blood Libel) he then cites a number of examples, and concludes:
For almost two hundred years The Spectator stood for a tradition of good writing and civilised and often bravely heretical discourse. It used its voice to articulate, and sometimes to lead, our national struggle for tolerance. Today, as it approaches the 200th anniversary of its foundation by Robert Rintoul, The Spectator has become one of the most influential British media apologists for bigotry, hatred and racism: an upmarket version of GB News. For those of us who loved, revered and were guided by the old Spectator this is a national tragedy. British Muslims have every reason to feel threatened and intimidated by such rancid, repetitive, irrational and apparently uncontrollable hostility from a hugely respected magazine at the heart of the British establishment.
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Yes, I particularly noted the part that suggested the use of the term 'grooming gangs' was discriminatory.
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Christ on a bike, no wonder they are so ill informed, bitter and twisted.
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Are you prepared to quote what the report actually says, with full context?
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I've started. I have not commented on anything I've not yet read.
I've looked at some of the mentions of "grooming" in it.
Hence
Spoons have kicked out early I see.
Well read more or read it more thoroughly, then come back and argue about it.
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More Pakistani rapists in the news...
www.dailymail.com
Bravo the likes of the Daily Mail and the Spectator for keeping these cases in the public eye.
3 British Pakistani men are charged with rape against 10 girls in Bury
The accused, who are all British Pakistanis, are said to have committed offences in Bury, Greater Manchester, between 1996 and 2001 against ten girls who were then aged between 14 and 16.
Bravo the likes of the Daily Mail and the Spectator for keeping these cases in the public eye.
More Pakistani rapists in the news...
3 British Pakistani men are charged with rape against 10 girls in Bury
The accused, who are all British Pakistanis, are said to have committed offences in Bury, Greater Manchester, between 1996 and 2001 against ten girls who were then aged between 14 and 16.
Bravo the likes of the Daily Mail and the Spectator for keeping these cases in the public eye.
The Centre for Media Monitoring will be updating their stats as we speak, they can't print stuff like that!
