The Guardian on China and spying

Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

A shorter version of this piece first appeared as a Guardian comment in response to the Editorial: The Guardian view on China and spying: we need less heat and more light, 13 September 2023. This version published at Anna Chen, 15 September 2023. 

As no charges have been brought against the parliamentary researcher after all these months since his arrest and release in March, all that’s left is smear and innuendo where balanced coverage might have yielded the additional light aspired to in the headline.

Despite no evidence of spying, the Guardian insists, “… whatever the truth of this case, there are reasons to be particularly concerned about Chinese intelligence efforts and Britain’s response. One is simply that China is increasingly powerful, forceful and hostile to the west, and more repressive at home.”

But it’s not so “simply,” is it? America spends as much on its military might as the next nine nations put together, including China. It surrounds China with a noose of hundreds of bases, Obama strangling it further when he started embroiling its mainland neighbours in his Pivot to Asia, having wrecked the Middle East and Libya. Trump bludgeoned China with an unnecessary backfiring trade war and other unpleasantness, doubled down on by Biden’s “not on my watch” objective and a $500m a year propaganda bounty.

Only an idiot would have read THAT room and not taken measures to defend its citizens from the economic and hot warfare being aimed at it. And the Chinese are no idiots.

Self defence is no offence.

You’d have thought the press would have learnt their lesson from the embarrassment of the stray weather balloon, shot down in February last by excitable Don Quixotes tilting at windmills, which it turned out wasn’t collecting intelligence after all (China has perfectly good satellites). Balloons can be sent higher or lower. However, they have no engines to determine horizontal direction so that’s a pretty useless bit of spy equipment. Unlike Pegasus or any of the other surveillance the West is so good at, as attested to by Edward Snowden and the NSA files.

Why would China have wanted to screw things anyhow, just as they were raising 800 million out of absolute poverty, creating a middle-class almost twice the size of America’s entire population and building stunning infrastructure for themselves and around the world? The rising superpower was doing very nicely, catching up with the US without a shot being fired in over 40 years, fattening western corporate profits and providing affordable goods.

Wonderful trade deals with China were promised to Brits once we exited the EU. The UK was riding the wave of China’s rise. They even saved the world economy from America’s greed-fuelled Great Crash of 2008. No-one had any interest in hostilities except for the declining hegemon glowering in the corner.

Cue US pressure to nobble the rival. Trump raged at Boris Johnson in February 2020 for not ceasing trade with Huawei and ripping out billions worth of 5G infrastructure as instructed to by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo the previous February, and in May 2019, a US delegation to the UK yelled at GCHQ in a five-hour “hair-dryer” treatment. US Vice President Mike Pence said darkly that the Trump administration had made its disappointment with the UK “very clear to them”. Former British ambassador to the US, now Lord Kim Darroch, says there were no “compelling technical arguments that undermined GCHQ’s case” and that the US case was “political”.

Johnson finally caved in, ripped out the Huawei 5G we’d paid for, and it was all downhill from there, unchallenged by the media. We were left nailed to the USS Titanic, torpedoing our global lifeboat and growth engine.

The poisonous tone of the broadsheet’s editorial hit new depths in a line straight out of the 1930s, pointing out who the targets were. “Those who were born in China, and those of Chinese descent, are often most at risk from espionage.”

Good grief. Pogrom, much? What’s the ratio of light to heat here? Are there no grown-ups in the room who will call this out?

Oh, and that 9-dash line was originally the US-approved 11-dash boundary for its Republic of China/Taiwan ally, based on a 1935 map. Later reduced to nine by the CPC.

* * * * * See Shakedown: A Timeline of America’s 21st Century War on China — the Opium Wars on steroids

My Asia Times column 29 September 2023: Don Quixote in the White House – Hollywood deconstructs the narrative

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN

The Taiping Rebellion: What the British Museum's Hidden Century exhibition leaves out

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN

British Museum: posseses the Complete Map of All Under Heaven Unified by the Great Qing, China

What the Guardian's review of the British Museum's Hidden Century exhibition doesn't tell you about the Taiping Rebellion

The Guardian's review of the British Museum's Hidden Century exhibition continues the 19th-century mindset rationalising British imperialism in China past and present while omitting the driving force behind the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864).

Hong Xiuquan's Taiping Rebellion was a popular effort by millions of suffering Chinese to rid themselves of a decaying Qing government during Britain's brutal Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) and create a fair new society for the masses out of the wreckage.

Hong can be can be seen as China's first communist. Initially inspired by the teachings of Christ, he rejected the ossifying strictures of Confucianism and instead sought the abolition of landlordism, the redistribution of wealth for all, and the prohibition of prostitution, bound feet and the smoking of opium, transforming society into Hong's vision of a 'Heavenly Kingdom'.

This movement was opposed not only by the Qing dynasty it sought to depose, but also by the British whose interests were best served by the corrupt royal court even though they were at war with each other. As with today, the West would rather destroy social progress in China than see its people flourish.

The British had become massive consumers of the tea, silks, spices and porcelain sent to the great ports of Liverpool, Cardiff and Tlbury. Running out of gold bullion to pay for their chinoiserie, British merchants, protected by the armed forces, turned narco-capitalist and launched the Opium Wars in 1839. China was forced  — literally at gunpoint — to import cheap mass-produced industrial quantities of opium grown in Bengal to pay for the trade.

Not content with transforming what had been an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction, the British army joined forces with the Qing government to crush the popular Taiping movement and ensure their dominance could continue unhindered. Anti-Hong forces were trained and led by American businessman Frederick Townsend Ward, and later by the British officer Charles George Gordon. They finally defeated Hong at his last hold-out in Nanjing in 1864. 20 to 30 million died, along with his dream of a revivified society — the Heavenly Kingdom.

At the end of the first Opium War in 1842, the Nanjing Treaty, the first of the unfair 'unequal' treaties imposed on China, ceded Hong Kong to Britain. Others would create five ports — Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo), and Shanghai — and divide the spoils among British, French, American, German and Japanese concessions.

The British East India Trading Company's army-backed predations had been joined by the French. In 1860, British and French troops had already looted and burnt down the Summer Palace.

The Boxer Rebellion, a renewed wave of Chinese resistance to foreign occupation at the end of the 19th century, was also met with military might in the Eight Nation Alliance — Britain, the US, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, Italy and Austria-Hungary — which ganged up to crush the Boxers and enforce the continued pillage of China.

Today, the current US-led assault on China has AUKUS and the G7 countries taking shape in yet another alliance to "contain" (read: '"carve up") the new superpower just as it gets back onto its feet.

The Taiping Rebellion and other attempts by the Chinese to give birth to themselves as a stable, developed, thriving nation have always been met with dehumanisation, character assassination and violence. Chinese people have the same potential for raised consciousness, and a willingness to fight for a better way to be, as any other oppressed group anywhere else in the world. We know of Spartacus and the slaves, peasants in the 17th century English revolution and Civil War, Quaker pacifists. You see these sparks and shifts of consciousness throughout history. Yet Chinese people's desire to take the same road to liberation is trashed unless it is a mirage whipped up to serve colonialists who won't leave them in peace.

Unfortunately, the Taiping rebellion was crushed by a combination of backward forces, including the rapacious British Empire whose self-justification and twisted narratives continue to this day.

We're currently seeing a repeat of the same lash-up of imperialist forces to suppress by all means the rising superpower that hasn't had a war in 40 years, all aided by Biden's huge anti-China propaganda budget of more than $500 million a year ($800m a year total) on top of vastly increased war machine funding of $1 Trillion for 2024.

Watch this space.

The British Museum Hidden Century exhibition 18 May 2023 - 8 October 2023

James on Twitter just sent me this fascinating story about my family namesake.

One of the Taiping rebels, a man named Ah Chen, escaped from China in the face of massive man-hunt of the rebel remnants. He became an indentured labourer in the West Indies, eventually landed in Trinidad, and married a local girl.
They had six children. The eldest, Eugene became Trinidad’s first Chinese lawyer, and a very successful one at that. He married Alphonsine A Gantheaume, a local beauty whose family was wealthy.
Eugene heard about Sun Yatsen, and moved his family to London to see if Sun needed his help. Eugene helped Sun in many ways, putting out newspapers, unravelling the dense legalese at the Paris Conference of 1920.
Alphonsine died very young in the 1920s.
He and other revolutionaries, eg Sun’s widow, Mme Song Qingling, considered themselves the true vanguard of Sun’s San Min Chu Yi. And they abhorred Chiang’g betrayal of Sun’s legacy. Both went to Russia to escape the 1927 Nationalist Revolution.
Eugene did not leave China when Japan invaded. When Japan couldn’t persuade him to endorse the puppet Nanking government, he was was executed in 1944.
His son, Jack, who spent his youth in Trinidad and came to China at age 17, didn’t speak Chinese. Jack married former Red Guard, Yuan-Tsung, who helped to translate for Jack when under interrogation during the Cultural Revolution.
I read Yuan-Tsung Chen’s book: Return to the Middle Kingdom, published in 2008, by Union Square Press. The author went to teach at Cornell in 1972. Her book gives a timeline on the Chen’s family, beginning with Joseph Chen (Ah Chen’s Christian name), including the spouses, the children, and the in-laws.

Anna's website: ANNA CHEN

Cuddly liberal Guardian claims first hand transplant for whites

The world's first succesful hand transplant was carried out in China when microsurgery was being pioneered in the 1960s. My dad came back from a China visit with a fascinating set of black and white photos (wonderfully gruesome for a kid to pore over) of a male worker who'd lost his hand above the wrist in a factory accident. The first photo was him sitting calmly with his arm resting on a table with the severed hand placed inches away from the stump. Over the course of photographs you saw the various stages of attachment, exercise and training. The final one was taken months later of a smiling patient with his new working hand and the happy medical team that carried out this remarkable operation.

When I was old enough to talk about this, I was angrily told by jingoistic white geezers that this was an impossibility. "How could you sew all those nerves and blood vessels together?"

If you thought we were living in more enlightened times, here's the cuddly, liberal Guardian all these years later claiming this breakthrough for European white civilisation.

This Guardian story by Nicola Davis reads: "Clint Hallam, the patient who received the world's first transplant 1998 ..."

A thing doesn't exist unless white Europeans invented it. Like hydraulics, the multi-tube seed-drill (2ndC BC), printing, the crank handle, suspension bridge, stirrup, masts and sailing, gunpowder (850AD) and the humble cup of tea. [See Joseph Needham and Robert Temple.]

Shouldn't we be talking about the achievements of human endeavour and give credit where it's due? Isn't it time to jettison this soft white supremacy?

It's an attitude that's inscribed deeply in our culture, perpetuated by white liberals who really should do better research. The late black historian and writer Alan Mitchell was adamant that it needed challenging as it's been going on at least since the ancient Greeks appropriated Egyptian knowhow as their own discovery.

And it still goes on from the macro to the micro. F'rinstance, I've been told by leftists of all people, such as writer Ian Sinclair (The March That Shook Britain), that I couldn't possibly have done the pioneering presswork for the left that I did. Lucky I kept all my press releases, photos and notes, eh, Ian? Eh, Seumas?

All white at the BBC: South Africa would be proud of Newsnight

I've had the good fortune to be one of the few ethnics who have slipped through the cultural net and been able to make a few good programmes at the BBC, having a great face for the radio. But it's shameful that there's still so much unconscious racism as inadvertently exposed in a recent BBC recruitment film which neglects to mention their Black Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) audience and production staff (absence of). That's how unaware they are in this age of diversity. After all, the Beeb is based in a city that's 44 per cent non-white, so what is their excuse?

"I set the general editorial direction of travel," says Newsnight editor Ian Katz at a meeting rammed with white faces.

I found it useless trying to talk to Katz when he was editor of the Guardian's G2 supplement in 2000. They'd run a controversialist piece by Charlotte Raven about the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon which was storming the box offices: " ... Because they were oriental, everyone presumed this was understatement, rather than woodenness. ... In Chinese, delivered inscrutably, it seemed to contain multitudes."

My disappointment wasn't so much that one writer had written this casual othering of a racial group but more that the G2 editors — the Guardian institution — hadn't sounded alarm bells. I can only guess at how richly ethnically diverse they weren't. I was met with hostility for raising the issue, so I'm hardly surprised that Katz now works in an all-white environment at the BBC. (Here's how it panned out.)

When working on my my play for Radio 4, Red Guard, Yellow Submarine, drawn from my memoir of the same name about being brought up by Chinese communists in Hackney, I walked through Broadcasting House with my producer, Pam Fraser-Solomon, who is Black, and it was notable that the only other non-white face at the time was the cleaner.

It's assumed that white folk do everything best and that any person of colour is there as a token.

Every time we stick our heads up the dominant white establishment tries to shoot us down. East Asians actors were give four minuscule roles out of 17 in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Chinese classic, The Orphan of Zhao — which the RSC then had the cheek to market to Chinese audiences. Trevor Nunn wants to produce all-white Shakespeare histories in the interest of verismilitude, minus the bad teeth and buboes, of course.

The latest lazy dismissal in the Guardian of a rare project made by a non-white team, Reggie Yates: Race Riots USA, would indicate that the liberal media are in nightmarish free-fall into some inner apartheid hell zone. I mean, accusing the lovely calm Reggie Yates of the crime of swagger? How submissive must a Black man be to assuage the white writer's fear?

I suggest they seek help. And I said, "seek help", not "sieg heil".

The Independent: Behind the scenes Newsnight new show blows the lid on the lack of racial diversity on the BBC.

Reggie Yates Race Riots USA review: white liberal Guardianista requires smelling salts

Reggie Yates: Race Riots USA review

BBC3 Tuesday 29 Sept 2015

There's a lot of shark-jumping going on down Fleet Street. You may have observed the liberal press laying into the resurgence in progressive politics of late with a hysteria largely missing in action when it comes to the current assault on the poor, about which they are remarkably sanguine. I haven't seen such a screeching mess since the Mogwais were last fed after midnight.

Bankers break the economy and lie about Libor; the top percent double their dosh since the crash while the poor are driven to debt and suicide to better recapitalise the system. However, it's not the brutal transfer of wealth from poor to rich that's driving them to frothing fury, but Jeremy Corbyn's vest. How dare the new Labour leader lack vanity, have principles and, at long last, give hope to the weakest after three and half decades of Thatcherism?

When the oppressed and their champions mount a challenge, the liberal press turn out to be not quite so liberal after all. Just as the French government put their war with Prussia on hold in 1871 to team up with their 'enemy' to massacre the Paris Communards, you can barely squeeze a cigarette paper between the Guardian and their New Statesman stablemates on one side, and the Daily Mail et al on the other when it comes to maintaining the status quo (emphasis on status. And privilege.)

It's crept into every nook and cranny of the culture like the noxious diesel fumes invisibly killing us while someone makes a profit.

And lo, black Londoner Reggie Yates makes a thoughtful piece about the killings of black men by police in America — Race Riots USA — and what is the Guardian's chief concern? "Yates can’t seem to decide if he’s supposed to go with the poker face or let rip with his own opinions." Or as the headline has it, "an impartial observer's indignance leaks through." (Did they mean 'indignation', by any chance?) Uppity Reggie! Heaven forfend that a journalist is able to tell this story from the inside out like a human being, not a robot. What does he think this is? Jezza's vestgate? He's reasonable, puzzled, enquiring and moved rather than the easy-to-dismiss raging black man some of the media might prefer.

In case that didn't convince you to move along, nuthin' to see, the Guardian chips away with the flimsiest justification: ' ... “It could have been me” pronouncement while a driver holding a “Reggie Yates” sign meets him at the airport and takes his bags to the car. It confuses his status: is he the inquisitive everyman, there to guide us through the subject, or a celebrity who doesn’t carry his own bags?'

Perhaps it shows him as an ordinary dude who has booked a cab to meet him at the airport and, as is common practice, the driver's waiting with a hand scrawled sign of his passenger's name. It begins the story with his arrival and makes the point that he is from the outside ... and yet not.

Unarmed men and women are being murdered by white police and will never receive justice because of the colour of their skin, a skin they share with Yates. Some 176 in one year alone. Neither are women and children safe: a pregnant woman thrown to the ground; a bikini-clad adolescent manhandled by a cop at a pool-party; the boy with a toy gun shot dead; the teenager killed in the back of a police van. And still they keep on coming.

It is a scary, distressing and enraging catalogue of horrors. But the author of the Guardian review is most concerned about Yates getting above himself at the airport. Such was her snide hostility that I thought this couldn't possibly be a white writer as any halfway competent editor would have spiked such naked spite by a representative of drearily dominant whiteness, and that this must have been written by one of the house slaves. But no, Julia Raeside is white. And protecting her patch.

It is a bullshit piece. Obtuse, deliberately not understanding the issue. How could a journalist write something so hostile, so blatantly ignoring what Yates has done here? He's taken us into the belly of the beast and introduced us to its ugly complexities so effectively that, despite herself, Raeside almost praises him, but then catches herself and has another snipe in parentheses:

'When the rally is approached by two young black men, one in a Peace & Unity T-shirt, both of them filming with their phones, the unease is palpable. But a quick intervention by Yates (he gets away with a lot here by having a camera crew in tow) begins a dialogue between a blonde woman and the T-shirt pacifist, in which they largely agree on the need for cooperation.'

Yates also performs a fine journalistic function (unlike Raeside) in revealing that filthy lucre, not just blind prejudice, plays a key role in the collective tragedy that is Black America. The police force, which is around 94 per cent white, pays for itself with the fines on the Ferguson community, which is 70per cent black. Some of the people dragged into court owe five thousand dollars in what is an institutional shakedown with menaces. And on the day that Yates visits the court, they are all black. See what happens when you have a service based on profit? Which brings us neatly full circle to Jeremy Corbyn and yet more reason Labour must make the crucial challenge to austerity, exclusion and privatisation.

How often do you see a black person in Yates's position with a VOICE, who isn't a white person's stereotypical creation? The Guardian piece, people of colour, is the slap down you get for doing white folks' job and doing it well. Can't have young black people inspired like this. They might start demanding equal rights and opportunity. By the way, I'm delighted to note that Reggie and I went to the same school: Central Foundation Boys (in Old Street) and Girls (Spitalfields).

One question I would like answered is whether this wave of killings of unarmed black men and women has risen since Obama became President. His ascent to power seems to have driven Republican whites mad and you wonder if, unable to reach the interloper in the Oval office, the grim truth is that any black person will do.

EDIT: even sweeter, this was filmed, directed and produced by Ruhi Hamid and produced by Kandise Abiola, two women of colour aiming to "reflect the mood of Ferguson ten months after the riots and protests that followed the fateful shooting of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson."

Postscript: Julia Raeside thought it was a good idea to advertise her nasty clickbait piece with this tweet. I looked from Guardian to Daily Mail and back again and already it was impossible to tell which would look better in a cat tray.

Britain's "liberal" media and UK Chinese: from London Chinatown to the general election

The Guardian has always been sloppy about China matters, but its publishing stable now appears to have given up any pretence of writing about UK Chinese issues informatively.

"It was a genuine community built by the emigrants from Hong Kong who, having been bombed out of Limehouse in the East End in the 1940s, made this patch of London, with its cheap commercial rents, their own," writes Daniel Boffey in the Observer about Soho's Chinatown

Er ... I don't think so. I know we all look the same to the "liberal" media but it was Cantonese and Shanghainese sailors and their families living mainly in the two streets of Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway, not Hong Kong migrants, who were bombed out during the war: a large number were rehoused in Poplar.

My father was an early Chinese occupant in Soho's Chinatown from 1947 when it was mostly Indian and Jewish. It wasn't until the 1950s — but really the '60s — that waves of Hong Kong migrants got the takeaway industry going after the domestic washing machine rendered laundries largely obsolete. They bought up the fish 'n' chip shops that were going under and started serving their own food.

You wouldn't find many HKers in that early Soho mix. A few Kuomintang diplomats finding new ways to make a living and former Cantonese and Shanghai sailors, but hardly anyone from HK.

In the ten-part series Chinese in Britain, which I presented on BBC Radio 4 in 2007 (repeated last year), we looked at the history of UK Chinatowns including Limehouse and Soho, but the pattern of not allowing ethnic minorities to tell their own story persists in some organs which continue to get it wrong.

At best, invisibility is thrust on us; at worst, the Chinese are still defined as villains. From the yellow-peril Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer to the BBC's Sherlock reboot, where even innocent Chinese passers by in Soho Chinatown were portrayed as sinister and "other", the Chinese are dehumanised and excluded. Yet none of the liberal media paused for breath between BAFTAs and plaudits to question why, well into the 21st century, the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation was breathing life back into what should be moribund racist tropes.

In Channel 4's recent  debate concerning the role of the ethnic vote in the imminent general election, chaired by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, only one single solitary east Asian face could be seen in the audience — placed on the corner in the seat nearest to Krishnan where he stood more chance of being picked up by the cameras, presumably after someone panicked on the night at the oversight. None on the platform. Yet Chinese are Britain's third largest Black and Asian minority ethnic minorities (BAME) after South Asians and African Caribbeans.

In a piece for the South China Morning Post magazine last October, I outlined how the ethnic vote could swing results in the marginal seats, with the Chinese key to the outcome in 36 seats including Barnet in May. Still, here are the Chinese being excluded yet again.

So when the Chinese are next accused of being the authors of their own exclusion ... think on.

My article on the Ming Ai Chinese in Britain project for the South China Morning Post magazine.

Pic from Red Scarf

Ethnically cleansing working class history: my Guardian article

Photo: Great Western Hospital workers have been on strike against Carillion for a year.

My article in the Guardian today

People of colour like me have been painted out of working-class history

It's shocking how even voices on the left mythologise the history of Britain's labour movement as an all-white affair

Black people have lived in Britain at least from Roman times, and some historians claim that north Africans were here as much as 3,000 years ago. We know that Indian people were here as far back as Shakespeare's time. The first Chinese visitor we know of was the Jesuit priest Shen Foutsong, who communicated in Latin when he worked at Oxford's Bodleian Library in the 17th century. His portrait still hangs in the Queen's collection. People of colour have been part of the fabric of British society for centuries, but you won't find many in official histories – either from the right (look at Michael Gove's draft national curriculum) or, more shockingly, from the left.

Ken Loach's feature-length documentary, The Spirit of '45, is one recent example. A documentary about the creation of the welfare state and its legacy, it presents us with Loach's vision of the British working class, united in the struggle for a better Britain. And though it covers the period from the 1930s up to the Thatcher era, everyone featured in the film is white – it's as if people like me have been bred out of the working-class gene pool.

In this Loach is swimming with the tide. Both Maurice Glasman (of Blue Labour fame) and David Goodhart, the former editor of Prospect magazine, are very influential in Labour's thinking – and both nostalgically emphasise the importance of continuity and community values in the British working class, as against immigrants, who threaten that continuity. While the working class is rarely discussed in mainstream left circles these days, the "white working class" is endlessly debated. "Working class" becomes indivisible from "white" in such debates. ...

... Examples of cross-race class struggle are many: so why impose such a filter? Who gains? Constructing a narrative palatable to a constituency increasingly susceptible to the dishonest blandishments of the right is a divisive and dangerous game, especially in the current atmosphere of immigrant bashing and fear of the other. Harking back to a fictitious golden age when everyone was white represents surrender to an antagonism stoked up towards "outsiders", with polls showing that increasing numbers of us blame immigration for dwindling resources, though facts prove otherwise.
> > >
READ MORE HERE

Clarification: although the Grunwick strike feels in retrospect like a victory because of the massive support received by the strikers whose struggle became a cause celebre, it actually ended in a defeat for the courageous women who stuck it out. I should have called it a "famous strike".

Liverpool and its Chinese seamen — history of the forcibly repatriated Chinese.

Chinese mariners forcibly sent back to China leaving families behind.

Blood and Treasure: not quite the Spirit of '45.

Guardian Black History month timeline.

Wilf Sullivan on black workers and the trade unions.

Dr Evan Smith with an illuminating response to my article: the British left and BME workers.

Indian suffragettes march for the vote.

Carillion hospital strikers out for over a year so far are mostly South Asian women.

Ken Loach talks about Spirit of '45 on BBC R4 Night Waves.

Ian Bone: That John Rees correction in full.

The monstering of Ye Shiwen: my article in the Guardian

There's something about the principle of fair play that's taking a knock during these Olympics. What happened to the presumption of innocence until found guilty?

An unpleasant wave of hostility has picked on one group of athletes while others in the Western camps are rightly praised for their stunning performances. Teenage swimmers Ruta Meilutyte (Lithuania) and Katie Ledecky were allowed their outstanding wins while Ye Shiwen has undergone a pitched psychological battle in front of the world.

People keep arguing that China has the fastest, highest, longest record of sports doping despite only rejoining the Olympics in 1984 after the Cold War hiatus. Yet, after an unfortunate period when China did what everyone else had been doing for years, they changed their policy in the late 1990s and now come down hard on anyone they find breaking the rules. For those who keep insisting that China's the Big Bad in this, while the nation of Ye's accuser US swimming coach John Leonard is squeaky clean, I recommend you read these articles: here, Dr Wade Exum's report here, and here and here and here.

When British Olympic Association chair Lord Moynihan and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) exonerated Ye, BBC's Newsnight was one of several news outlets that changed tack and brought in experts to prove that China could possibly be using genetic science to cheat. If China is creating an army of genetically modified super-freaks, then why aren't they smashing their way to golds in every sports discipline? Where are China's champion runners?

If evidence arises proving that an athlete has been doped, then do throw the book at them. But let's not go down the Minority Report road of sportsmanship. That way madness and prejudice lie.

The Guardian published my article on Saturday — 2nd August 2012

The monstering of swimmer Ye Shiwen says much about declining superpowers

Chinese Olympic athletes are people, not comic book villains. Something's going on when one nation is so singled out

It's not cricket, you know. There's something fiendishly cruel about the monstering of 16-year-old Ye Shiwen, who won a swimming gold in Saturday's 400m individual medley. First she was labelled a cheat in front of a global audience and then refused an apology when repeated drugs tests show up clean as a whistle.

First off the block was the host nation's BBC commentator Clare Balding, who sprinted to the worst conclusion on zero evidence within seconds of Ye's record-breaking win with her loaded comment: "How many questions will there be, Mark, about somebody who can suddenly swim so much faster than she has ever swum before?"

With the starter pistol thus fired for the media witchhunt to find Ye guilty of winning while Chinese, in they all piled. ...

More HERE.

Another interesting incident you may have missed: in fencing, South Korea's Shin A Lam lost her gold opportunity due to us putting a 15 yr-old volunteer in charge of timekeeping. The kid allowed more than the one second left on the clock, a sudden extension that allowed Shin's German opponent to strike the hit and knock her out of the contest. And then the judges allowed it to stand!

Brendan O'Neill In the Telegraph on Chinese as freaks and robots.

Musa Okwonga in the Independent: If they're Brits we call it tactics.

China In Britain at Westminster Uni: Anna and Charles Shaar Murray on the bill

I'm performing this afternoon at the China In Britain event at Westminster University, 4.45pm. It's a talk with performance extracts from my shows and a bit of poetry. The wonderful Charles Shaar Murray is my musical accompanist, playing guitar.

I'll be referring to various topics so here are the links for you to explore further.

Anna May Wong Must Die! here

Suzy Wrong — Human Cannon here

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon row with the Guardian here

Foot and Mouth Disease campaign here

The Copenhagen Climate Change Summit gamesmanship here

Sherlock — The Blind Banker review here

Niall Ferguson Civilisation review here

Review of Julia Lovell's The Opium War here

The Steampunk Opium Wars here

Anna's arts website here

Anna's YouTube

Translating China website
The Old Cinema, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW
Wednesday 18th July 2012

Murdoch and the breaking of the News International omerta

Rupert Murdoch has poisoned political life in Britain since his hero Margaret Thatcher elevated him to power when she was Prime Minister.

Why is it that Labour mutated into New Labour when in 1997 they would have won the landslide election even with a chimp in charge?

Seumas Milne writes in the Guardian today:

But Murdoch is a case apart, not only because of his commanding position in both print and satellite TV, but because of the crucial part he played in cementing Margaret Thatcher's political power and then shaping a whole era of New Labour/Tory neoliberal consensus that delivered enfeebled unions, privatisation and the Iraq war. His role in breaking the print unions at Wapping in the 1980s by sacking 5,000 mostly low-paid workers is still hailed in parts of the media as a brave blow for quality journalism.

... several of these opportunities [ ... to weaken the unaccountable corporate power that has dominated the British press and create the space for a freer, more diverse media] have come and gone. First the official deception of the Iraq war, then the collapse of a deregulated banking system, then the exposure of systematic sleaze in parliament revealed a growing crisis in the way the country is run. Now that crisis has been shown to have spread to the media and police. Official Britain isn't working. Sooner or later, pressure for change will become unstoppable.

This is a brilliant piece. Please read it in full.

Meanwhile, former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith asks why Ken Macdonald, former Director of Public Prosecutions (later employed to write for the Times by NI), and the police commissioner at the time neglected to widen the investigation into the phone-hacking, limiting the case to the prosecution of Goodman and Mulcaire when evidence pointed to the illegality going further.

James Murdoch has been contradicted over the "for Neville (Thurlbeck)" email (which implicated the News of the World newsroom) by sacked legal director Tome Crone and former editor Colin Myler following his assertion he knew nothing when he was questioned by the Commons select committee on Tuesday.

David Cameron has had to admit that BSkyB was mentioned in conversations with News International executives despite his attempts to evade the issue in PMQs yesterday.

We now know why Cameron wouldn't give the name of the company vetting Andy Coulson. He wasn't, or at least not to an appropriate level of security clearance given his role at the centre of government. One wonders if this is because someone knew what a closer look would reveal.

We are noticing that the lower down the food-chain, the more culpable you are. Those at the top knew nothing while those at the war-front weren't even following orders — they were making it all up by themselves. Who knew there was such anarchy in the heart of the News of the World?

The Guardian us running an exhaustive Hackgate live-blog every day. Thursday here.

UPDATE: Today in the Guardian — 12.58pm: The Law Society has been contacted by solicitors who say the police have notified them that their phones may have been hacked by News of the World journalists.

Also in today's Guardian: 12.25pm: Paul Owen writes: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the US department of justice is "preparing subpoenas as part of preliminary investigations" into Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The subpoenas relate to alleged foreign bribery – presumably News International's alleged payments to police in Britain, the subject of the Metropolitan police's Operation Elveden – and alleged hacking of the answerphone messages of 9/11 victims, a story reported by the Daily Mirror which has not been confirmed elsewhere.

On Craig Murray's excellent website today, a comment from "Mary" who writes:

"On another topic, the Torygraph no less is reporting that Judge Leveson is a friend of Matthew Freud the PR guru who is married to Elisabeth Murdoch and has been to their parties. Also that Geo Osborne was in NY recently and had dinner with Rupert Murdoch.. Note his other contacts whilst there. Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley etc etc"

Madam Miaow on Hackgate:
Jon Stewart on the Murdochs: David Cameron PMQs in Parliament today Live Blog 20th July 2011
Rebekah and the Murdochs in the Thunderdome 19th July 2011
Hackgate: what I've learnt from Twitter 19th July 2011
Rupert Murdoch: Ain't our democracy wonderful? 17th July 2011
On #hackgate in Twitter

Now China blamed for BP oil spill. I mean: Hunh?

Pic from Don't Tea On Me

The latest in the Guardian's increasingly demented run of attempts to blame China for every disaster screeches out: "BP oil spill: failed safety device on Deepwater Horizon rig was modified in China". Tim Webb's article then goes on to admit:

There is no evidence that the significant modifications to the blowout preventer (BOP), which were carried out in China in 2005, caused the equipment to fail. But industry lawyers said BP could be made liable for any mistakes that a Chinese subcontractor made carrying out the work. It would be almost impossible to secure damages in China, where international law is barely recognised.

No evidence, but I guess the Guardian lives in hope.

In contrast, over at the Observer, their stablemate/rival, Tim Webb dispassionately reports the fact that there are moves afoot to "pass the buck" for responsibility away from BP's awful health and safety record, th'awl bidness's general screw-you to local communities, Halliburton's dodgy cement, and JR-style cronyism with ambitious/influential politicians, to China! When in doubt, blame the Chinese.

The Observer has learnt how Cameron [International, not Dave] will try to pin the blame on BP for the failure of the BOP: lawyers will claim that BP ordered Transocean to modify the BOP in China so significantly that the remodelled component no longer resembled what Cameron had originally manufactured.

A different emphasis entirely.

When the Western nations' duplicity over the secret Danish Text at the Copenhagen climate change summit was about to hit the headlines last December, The Guardian and Ed Milband led the field in switching attention (hey! Look over THERE!) to supposed machinations from China, in order to protect a deal that would have left the US still producing four times per capita the carbon emissions of the Chinese. My own attempts to join the debate and present an alternative argument at the Guardian's CiF (Comment Is Free, irony duly noted) resulted in my comments being deleted and my being banned.

In 2000, when the government's mishandling of the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in the UK resulted in pyres of culled livestock across this green and pleasant land, The Guardian was one of the loudest in suddenly accusing the UK Chinese of starting the outbreak (while the Independent was alone in maintaining a healthy scepticism). When this lunacy resulted in an apology and vindication from Nick Brown, minister at the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, the story melted away, with the late Hugo Young conceding in an email exchange that there were wheels within wheels, and one Guardian reporter telling a UK Chinese defence campaigner that there had been a dressing-down at the very top with the instruction that this should never happen again. If only Young were still with us and on watch ...

Isn't it about time the Guardian acted like a newspaper and offered us unbiased news reporting so we can make up our own minds? What is their agenda? What are they warming us up for? With the US conducting military exercises in the Yellow Sea and Cameron's statement that nuclear war with China is an option during the General Election campaign, is the West seriously building up to a conflagration with its giant economic rival? Could China's relationship with Iran be a factor, perchance?

As if we haven't had enough wars started by the West. Still, no war news is bad news if you happen to have arms industry companies in your share portfolio.

UPDATE: Note that both articles were by Tim Webb but with a different emphasis. The Observer's homepage featured the more sober headline and standfirst: "What lurks below the surface for BP? Even amid the 'cowboy culture' of offshore drilling, BP's operational record raises concerns BP safety device was sent to China"

The Observer piece acknowledges the buck-passing strategy currently being employed and makes it clear that "BP ordered Transocean to modify the BOP in China so significantly that the remodelled component no longer resembled what Cameron had originally manufactured." The implication is that the Chinese subcontractor only worked to BP/Transocean's money-saving specs.

The Guardian's home page, however, had the headline: "BP oil spill: failed safety device on Deepwater Horizon rig was modified in China." The piece by the same journalist implies that any fault — which has yet to be determined forensically — was down to Chinese work alone despite there being "no evidence" that any modifications had anything to do with the BOP failure at all.

It would be interesting to to know if either of these versions represents the actual views of the credited journalist.

UPDATE 2: Monday 19th July. As both articles seem to be good examples of objective reportage, containing some interesting material and placing the blame for the oil spill firmly with BP/Transocean, I am left wondering why the Guardian Online chose to foreground the China angle even though the article itself makes it clear that, "... the modifications were carried out at BP's request and "under its direction" ... '. It looks as if both headlines and standfirsts were written by eds at the Observer. The Observer home page led with the "What lies beneath the surface" angle, focusing on BP, and which features China as only part of the equation. Take out China and replace it with anywhere else in the world (India and South Korea also get these jobs) and you are still left with a cost-cutting scandal that is the responsibility of the oil industry. But the majority of the subsequent blizzard of Tweets didn't reflect this, homing in instead on China.

The Observer newspaper published the China angle on page 7, and the "Beneath the surface" article on page 36. So what is going on?

Neither the Guardian nor China: Madam Miaow globally banned

So, the commie tsars of the Guardian Trust and the Beijing regime join hands to prevent my words polluting the precious bodily fluids of sensitive liberals and impressionable proletarians alike.

I'm now banned at The Guardian's Comment Is Free as well as by the Great Firewall of China. C'mon guys, make your minds up. I'm either an apologist for the excesses of the Chinese regime or an imperialist running dog seeking to drag it into the mire. Which is it?

I just tried to post at Martin Khor's excellent article on the Copenhagen failure and attempts to blame China. What I wanted to write was a point about fiendish oriental villainy:

Thanks Martin and John Prescott for adding some balance to the mix. Phew! Now I can stop twirling my moustache and stroking my pussy.

But post there came none.

Was it this that upset them?

Oceania and Eastasia have always been at war.

Here's another stunt they pulled when I was shortlisted for the 2010 Orwell Prize — please read the thread.

Sinophobia and Copenhagen: open letter to the Guardian's Mark Lynas

PREVIOUSLY: The story so far ... One moment we were told there was a scandal brewing with the leaking of the 'Danish Text', a stitch-up of the poor nations by the wealthy, with the US and Britain among those implicated (8th Dec 2009 onwards), the next moment, this happened.

The Copenhagen blame game continues with the media reaching a hysterical pitch in their attempts to demonise China over the disappointing results at the climate change summit.

The Guardian publishes another lurid smear, this time by someone called Mark Lynas and titled: "How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room"
Starring Mark Lynas as Sax Rohmer which, I guess, makes me Fu Manchu. (I recommend you read all the comments on the Guardian thread.)

UPDATE Wednesday 23rd December : Comment is free but only if you agree. The Guardian removed my comment below from their thread, posted 22nd December 9.23pm. Not only mine, but I notice some other very good posts robustly rebutting Lynas's assertions and errors have been removed. Now I'm BANNED

Dear Mark,

So the cold war is alive and well.

Western spin is really pulling out all the stops, perhaps because we are onto you as the various blogs and forums show.

if anything, China got strong-armed into signing a weak deal when it should have held out as Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba and others have said.

The US and the rich nations use up almost all the carbon allowance in the atmosphere over the past 160 years, the US dithers over ten years of Bush, they refuse to ratify Kyoto, the Danish summit chair has to resign when she's caught fast-tracking the rich nations' deal, the West fail in their Kyoto pledges, Canada rips up its Kyoto deal and proceeds with exploiting its huge reserves of dirty oil, the US will only reduce emissions by 4% against the 1990 base year and not the 17% you describe as "serious cuts", while China makes real strides in green technology, and so on.

But it is all China's fault.

Hillary Clinton bursts into the conference demanding China eat merde when the US didn't even have anything to offer. They knew that the terms of the "verification" they demanded was an exercise in humiliation and China would not stand for it. The US can't get anything meaningful past their senate, which includes some "wholly owned subsidiaries of the energy industry" (Monbiot) and resorts to sleight of hand.

But China is the villain.

As for Merkel, she is a massive hypocrite when you look at what her government's been doing.

Even John Prescott pointed out that we've had our industrial revolution yet the poor countries have to halt in their tracks and people live on an average of $2 per day. [Update: see Prescott's take here.]

But according to you China twirls its moustache and strokes its cat as it eats the planet for breakfast.

What other country has an entire city using solar powered appliances? Who else has planted such huge tracts of forest while loggers tear down the rest? China aims for 15% of its energy from renewables, it has revolutionised wind-turbines, makes a key component of electric car batteries, and so on. We in the UK can't even meet our Kyoto promise.

The world says it'll pay $100 billion into the global kitty. Yet how much does the US spend each year on wars? Something like a million dollars a day on petrol alone.

This game of smoke and mirrors is shameful. Dividing the world into angel and devil does not help, neither does throwing a hissy-fit when China baulks at signing the rich nations' deal which condemns the poor nations to a slumdog future. At an early stage in its industrial development China is moving onto the right track. By all means criticise them when they screw up but give them credit for what they're getting right. The future of the planet is too important for these political football games.

Seasons greetings, although seasons may soon be a thing of the past if the rich nations get their own way,

Anna

Practically a lone voice in the Guardian, George Monbiot writes:

Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal that outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation: either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown. ... Pushing a strong climate programme through the Senate, many of whose members are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the energy industry, would have been the political battle of his life. Yet again, the absence of effective campaign finance reform in the US makes global progress almost impossible.

Almost forgot, Naomi Klein: Copenhagen's failure belongs to Obama

UPDATE 2: A recent comment (not mine) at the above Guardian CIF thread:

The Guardian writer was trying to confuse the public by omitting the fact that the EU couldn't even agree to its binding emission cut targets even by 2020 and they couldn't fill that blank. He also omitted the fact that the US also refused to have its emission cut target by 2020 included in the draft. An 80% cut by 2050 on a global scale obviously would have painted a big panckage in the sky. When the rich countries have not honored their pledges to the Kyoto Protocol to cut their emissions and they couldn't set binding short-term emission targets, how do we expect them to honor a long-term emission cut targets by 2050? In fact, Yvo de Boer in his last press conference said that the commitments to cut GHG emission by individual developing nations combined are far larger than those of the developed countries combined.
They want 80% cut by 2050 written into the accord so they could pressure the developing nations, because after all, the developing nations are the ones whose emissions will have to grow and peak as the year 2050 gets closer.
Above all, the writer didn't even tell how the US and other rich nations were pretty successful in detrailing and deviating the negotiations over the Long-term Cooperative Action and amendments to the Kyoto Protocol, especially the Kyoto Protocol, the two documents that have legal binding over the rich countries. The writer didn't even have the courage to mention the two most important documents, upon which any political declaration should have been based on.
It is the rich countries, the US, particularly, which has hijacked the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. That much should be clear to us all.

Wonder how long that'll stay posted.

The real reason Copenhagen failed.

UPDATE 3: AAARGH! Just read at a debate here that I have a typo. The international kitty is, of course $100 BILLION not million. Apologies. And thanks to the peeps at www.metafilter.com/87766/General-Tsos-Climate

UPDATE 4 (sigh!): A very clear article on what went wrong at Copenhagen.

"But what was this ‘deal’ that these obstinate rascals obstructed? “A 50% reduction in emissions by 2050 and an 80% reduction by the developed countries,” laments Mr Milliband. “Both were vetoed by China.” What he refers to of course is none other than the infamous Danish Text. But what he carefully omits from his account is the reason why this deal was ‘obstructed’.

"The Danish Text, which had been secretly put together by the US, the UK and Denmark, revealed the true aim of the rich countries in Copenhagen. There was to be a gesture towards cutting emissions, sure there was… on condition that the natural order and balance of the world remains unaffected, that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, that growth and accumulation continue unhindered. The proposal would have sidelined the UN by handing power and control to the rich countries themselves; it would have entrenched global inequality by allowing the rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes of CO2 per capita while granting developing countries only 1.44 tonnes; it would have handed control of climate change finance to the World Bank; it would have locked the world into a disastrous system of carbon trading; it would have attached tight strings to any financial aid; and it would have abandoned any interim 2020 targets. All in all, the ‘deal’ would have condemned the world, and the South in particular, to a climate catastrophe of unimaginable horror."

Big thanks to Harpymarx, Socialist Unity, Liberal Conspiracy and Sunny at Pickled Politics.

The BBC says

John Prescott on China at Copenhagen

Martin Khor in the Guardian on the Copenhagen failure

George Monbiot on what the US has to offer

Global Comment with something useful to say on sinophobic hypocrisy

Madam Miaow banned in the Guardian, Comment is Free. Free speech, much? Here's another stunt they pulled when I was shortlisted for the 2010 Orwell Prize — read the thread.

Anna Chen on BBC World TV on the opening day and the final day of the Copenhagen summit

Ed Miliband accuses China.

Guardian admits China's green plans leave US red-faced.

March 2012 and the Guardian acknowledges huge investment in renewables.

NOTABLE CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE (CCS) PROJECTS IN CHINA

Support the striking posties: save Royal Mail

It always depresses me when otherwise smart, kind, compassionate people put those qualities on hold when it comes to strikes. Knee-jerk union-bashing abounds with few asking exactly why it is that a postal worker would sacrifice thousands of pounds in salary and overtime in order just to have a barney with the management and annoy the public.

Victoria Coren wrote a brilliant piece in yesterday's Observer arguing powerfully for supporting the posties as they fight to save yet another bit of the family silver from being privatised by greedy bosses and a discredited Lord nobody voted for.

When the dickheads who run Royal Mail cancelled second deliveries, sacked postmen and made a £321 million profit from a crap service made even crappier, did they pass this on to the hard-working posties or the public? Did they invest? Did they heck! They froze wages and awarded themselves giant bonuses with the proceeds. Coren writes:

'So the profit benefited neither the postmen nor we hapless post-receivers – all of whom are, technically, the owners of the Royal Mail. It's a national company. It's ours. But we'd have been better off if our business had carried on making a loss. The profit simply inspired further cuts and a worse service. It's like telling your wife: "I got a juicy £5,000 bonus this year, so we had better cancel that holiday."'

When will the anti-union public geddit, that the much vaunted "modernisation" as promoted by Lord Mandelson of the Dark Side, means cutting spending by running down the service and treating workers like coolie labour, calling the money they save "profit" and then awarding it to themselves. What sort of society puts up with that?

Some 76 per cent of posties voted for the strike. Is three-quarters of the workforce mad, bad and masochistic? Or is there something else happening that we never get to hear?

Luckily, most people have wised up to yet another privatisation scam and support the strikers. Good luck, guys and gals. Save our Royal Mail.

Hat tip Bill Greenwell

Thanks to Hagley Road To Ladywood for this great piece by a postie on the causes of the strike and the myth of shrinking mail volume as claimed by Fraud Mandelson, and the true nature of the competition.

'None of these companies has a universal delivery obligation, unlike the Royal Mail. In fact they have no delivery obligation at all.'

And Harpy Marx provides this link to John Pilger's New Statesman article, The postal strike is our strike.

'Since coming to office, New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a highly productive public institution valued with affection by the British people. ... The truth is, the Royal Mail offers a quality service at half the price of its privatised rivals Deutsche Post and TNT. ... Postal workers deserve the support of all honest, decent people, who are reminded that they may be next on the list if they remain silent.'

Support the striking posties: save Royal Mail

It always depresses me when otherwise smart, kind, compassionate people put those qualities on hold when it comes to strikes. Knee-jerk union-bashing abounds with few asking exactly why it is that a postal worker would sacrifice thousands of pounds in salary and overtime in order just to have a barney with the management and annoy the public.

Victoria Coren wrote a brilliant piece in yesterday's Observer arguing powerfully for supporting the posties as they fight to save yet another bit of the family silver from being privatised by greedy bosses and a discredited Lord nobody voted for.

When the dickheads who run Royal Mail cancelled second deliveries, sacked postmen and made a £321 million profit from a crap service made even crappier, did they pass this on to the hard-working posties or the public? Did they invest? Did they heck! They froze wages and awarded themselves giant bonuses with the proceeds. Coren writes:

'So the profit benefited neither the postmen nor we hapless post-receivers – all of whom are, technically, the owners of the Royal Mail. It's a national company. It's ours. But we'd have been better off if our business had carried on making a loss. The profit simply inspired further cuts and a worse service. It's like telling your wife: "I got a juicy £5,000 bonus this year, so we had better cancel that holiday."'

When will the anti-union public geddit, that the much vaunted "modernisation" as promoted by Lord Mandelson of the Dark Side, means cutting spending by running down the service and treating workers like coolie labour, calling the money they save "profit" and then awarding it to themselves. What sort of society puts up with that?

Some 76 per cent of posties voted for the strike. Is three-quarters of the workforce mad, bad and masochistic? Or is there something else happening that we never get to hear?

Luckily, most people have wised up to yet another privatisation scam and support the strikers. Good luck, guys and gals. Save our Royal Mail.

Hat tip Bill Greenwell

Thanks to Hagley Road To Ladywood for this great piece by a postie on the causes of the strike and the myth of shrinking mail volume as claimed by Fraud Mandelson, and the true nature of the competition.

'None of these companies has a universal delivery obligation, unlike the Royal Mail. In fact they have no delivery obligation at all.'

And Harpy Marx provides this link to John Pilger's New Statesman article, The postal strike is our strike.

'Since coming to office, New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a highly productive public institution valued with affection by the British people. ... The truth is, the Royal Mail offers a quality service at half the price of its privatised rivals Deutsche Post and TNT. ... Postal workers deserve the support of all honest, decent people, who are reminded that they may be next on the list if they remain silent.'

Madam Miaow in the media: Guardian and BBC R2

Phew! A busy day today. My piece on Martin Bashir's strange outburst at a journalists' event in Chicago is in The Guardian's G2 section.

And I spoke on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show at 1.10pm about the Beijing Olympics. Available online for seven days.

Madam Miaow in the media: Guardian and BBC R2

Phew! A busy day today. My piece on Martin Bashir's strange outburst at a journalists' event in Chicago is in The Guardian's G2 section.

And I spoke on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show at 1.10pm about the Beijing Olympics. Available online for seven days.

Deportation Resistance: Glasgow community defends neighbours

Jean Donnachie, Kingsway flats, Glasgow Scotstoun

In this Guardian G2 video (Friday 13th June 2008), a Glasgow community organises to protect friends and neighbours from forced deportation. Moving and uplifting. A rare example of a media report that doesn't present the working class and immigrants as beasts but shows humanity at its best. Report by Rachel Stevenson and Harriet Grant — well done!

Guardian G2 article on deportation resistance
Harpy Marx on forcible deportations
Evening Times local report

Deportation Resistance: Glasgow community defends neighbours

Jean Donnachie, Kingsway flats, Glasgow Scotstoun

In this Guardian G2 video (Friday 13th June 2008), a Glasgow community organises to protect friends and neighbours from forced deportation. Moving and uplifting. A rare example of a media report that doesn't present the working class and immigrants as beasts but shows humanity at its best. Report by Rachel Stevenson and Harriet Grant — well done!

Guardian G2 article on deportation resistance
Harpy Marx on forcible deportations
Evening Times local report