letters

UPDATED:
Correspondence with Evan Davis

Good old BBC. Let's try as hard as we can not to make the banks look too bad.

Nearly all outlets are reporting that Barclays paid out less than 1% of its stupendous profits in corporate tax:

The Guardian
Sky News
FT (uses Barclays' own initial declaration of 11.6 bn in profit, which gives the 1% figure for corporate tax.)
The Daily Torygraph (yes, even them)
The Mirror
The Daily Mail (uses 11.6 bn figure)

The Independent ... manages to bump it up to 4.5%

And the BBC?

This page on the BBC says 'Barclays has revealed it paid £113m in corporation tax to the UK in 2009, 2.4% of its £4.6bn global annual profit.'

This page (BBC) says 'Barclays has said it paid £113m in corporation tax in 2009, which was 2.4% of its global profit.'

Evan Davis reveals all in his morning chat with Joe Lynam on the Today programme:

ED: First just tell us what the profits are, because the Guardian calls it 11.6 billion pounds of profit
JL: ... and Barclays say that was correct for 2009. But then they changed the number when they released their figures this week on Tuesday, so they .. they're now saying that the official figure that they should have said last year was £4.6 billion. Both the Guardian and Barclays are correct, because they sold a huge management company called BGI for around 7 billion, they then took that back off the profits that they had ...
ED: So let's call it ... let's call it 4.6 billion, be generous to Barclays, which makes it a rate of 2.4%...

'Let's be generous to Barclays'!!?

Incredible.

Israel inquiry finds Gaza aid flotilla raid 'was legal' (BBC news online)

Not, incredible, of course, that Israel found itself to have acted legally. Incredible that the BBC writes a long piece about how Israel found itself to have acted legally, and their idea of 'balance' is to offer the information that a UN inquiry found that... the navy had shown an "unacceptable level of brutality"!

Even a pretence at balance ought to mention not just that the brutality was 'unacceptable', according to 'a' UN report - but that the said UN report concluded that

Such conduct cannot be justified or condoned on security or any other grounds. It constituted grave violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law.

Fact-finding mission to investigate Israel's attacks on the Gaza flotilla, by the Human Rights Council

Much more importantly, the 'balancing' fact to Israel finding that its actions were legal has little to do with brutality: it is surely that the UN report found they were illegal.

My complaint:

Dear Steve Herrmann (etc)

This page, about Israel's report on the Gaza flotilla, contains the following claims:

1. 'An Israeli inquiry has found the country's navy acted legally'

2. 'in the report released on Sunday, the Turkel Committee said: "The imposition and enforcement of the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip does not constitute 'collective punishment' of the population of the Gaza Strip."'

As 'balance' to the first claim, you offer the following two pieces of information:

a) 'A separate UN inquiry last year said the navy had shown an "unacceptable level of brutality".'

It was a little over three years ago that David Cameron first called for the Human Rights Act (HRA) to be abolished and replaced by a British Bill of Rights. His intervention was prompted by the revelation that Learco Chindamo, the convicted murderer of the head teacher Philip Lawrence, would escape deportation to his native Italy because this would breach his right to family life in this country. The then Leader of the Opposition did not mince his words: "It has to go. Abolish the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights… The fact that the murderer of Philip Lawrence cannot be deported flies in the face of common sense."

Learco Chindamo: Britain must make its own human rights laws, 'Telegraph View'

David Cameron is a fool. So is 'Telegraph View' for believing him, and not bothering to do any research at all. Although it might have been the case that human rights law would have prevented Chindamo's deportation, in fact the law that was used was EU immigration law, not the Human Rights Act (or the ECHR). We wouldn't have been able to deport Chindamo whether or not we were bound by the ECHR: under EU law, we could only do so if he was thought to be a 'risk to the public'. The tribunal that considered his case thought he didn't present that risk.

Dear David Cameron

Nobel prize-winning economists have criticised both the necessity and the wisdom of the cuts your government has proposed. They are not panicked by our debt, they are panicked by your response to it. They know that UK debt has grown as a result of systemic problems mostly caused by a financial sector so overblown that it can hold the country to ransom and offload the cost of risk to the UK taxpayer, while pocketing the profits. You supported the policies which led to the bubble of greed, and you supported the bailout with tax-payer's money when the bubble inevitably burst, plunging the world into recession – and this country into debt.

You know as well as those Nobel-prize economists that the reason for the levels of debt are unconnected with public spending, which is smaller than in many other European nations, and was lower in the UK for most of the 2000s than at any point since the 1960s. Yet you lie to the public that this is the root of the problem.

You try to tell us that we are too impoverished a country to be able to afford to look after the long-term disabled, the homeless, the jobless. You brainwash the public into thinking that it is the fault of those people that they are disabled and homeless and jobless – and that if you remove everything from them, they will suddenly discover their inner resources and sense of responsibility and apply for a job cleaning toilets for £3.50 an hour.

UPDATED - latest response

• Original complaint
• Round robin response from the beeb
• Laurel and Hardy (with comments)

Jane Corbin: The elite Israeli force that seized the Mavi Marmara is training for its next operation. I’ve had unique access to this top secret unit. Naval Commandoe 13 has never been filmed by the media in action before. Israel says these commandoes had to fight for their lives on the ship that night. Turkey accuses Israel of an act of piracy. They called it Operation Sea Breeze, but what these Israeli Naval Commandoes encountered on the Mavi Marmara was anything but a breeze. It caused a storm of international condemnation - but did Israel fall into a trap? And what was the real agenda of some of those people who called themselves ‘peace activists’ aboard the Free Gaza flotilla?

From Death in the Med

A trap... ! Trapped into venturing out into the high seas. Trapped into storming illegally a boat full of 'peace activists' and firing at them with live ammunition. Trapped into killing 9 and injuring hundreds more, although the wily victims - those 'peace activists' - possessed no weapons of their own. Trapped, no doubt, into trapping the Gazans inside their own territory and trapping outside the Gaza borders the necessities they need to survive.

I trapped them into killing me! A wily trap indeed. I took no weapons with me, and made sure to stay in international waters on my own vessel. They fell for it.

But perhaps it all depends on whether you set more store by the UN Fact Finding Mission's investigation, or the BBC's dramatic version, reported breathlessly by Jane Corbin, Special Expert on Making Things Sound Dramatic and putting questions which are quite irrelevant.

The programme can still be viewed here, and a transcript of the breathy Jane is available here.

My letter to her breathlessness:

UPDATED - with ECU finding (and response)

• Original letter of complaint
• 1st response from the BBC
• 2nd Response from the BBC
• My response (2) (includes request to ECU)
• My request to the BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU)
• ECU finding
• You are stooges (my sign-off letter)

2 months on, and several letters later, the BBC is still determined not to tell us that the Gaza blockade may be a crime against humanity - ie one of these:

Article 7, 1 (k) ... inhumane acts ... intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court

It is not a violation of the Geneva Conventions - and definitely couldn't violate this bit:

No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

4th Geneva Convention, Article 33

And it is not a war crime:

Article 8, 2 b xxv: Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions;

Rome Statute

In the BBC's view, the important thing about the siege, the label that deserves official attribution to UN officials is that the siege is grim and deteriorating.

Ah, grim. We grin and bear grim things: they cannot be crimes.

John Humphrys has just made a programme, 'Unequal advantage', on social mobility and education - or so he thinks.

In his words: 'I've been making it for the best part of a year and the question it looks at is why is the social gap not narrowing.'

But the whole programme is built on the assumption that education is the key - and the only means - to narrowing that gap. No other possibilities entertained.

There's also an interview with Humphrys here. A couple of interesting quotes:

Interviewer: Is the problem just within education?

JH: No it isn't. The fact that we now have so many single-parent families, that's a predictor of social mobility. But the biggest predictor is income. If you have a low income you are less likely to get out of your social class; it's poverty of ambition and all kinds of things. Why should that be the case? I suppose it's because the social mores have broken down... if you move away from what we had after the war – a small 'c' conservative society – the consequence is that you are much less likely to have two-parent families.

Interviewer: What is the significance of fewer two-parent families?

JH: According to some estimates, 40% of children now are born out of wedlock, which is a staggering figure. And the chances are that if a child is born out of wedlock there will be less money in a household. The rest follows from that....'

Ah right. Everything follows from the social mores breaking down. Or is it that it follows from too many single parents.

I don't follow. But in any case, and despite the fact that the 'biggest predictor' of social mobility is income, the idea of acting on income inequality directly doesn't deserve a mention in the hour long programme.

Then there's this quote:

Even Jonathan Steele is perfectly happy with IBC.

The [Chilcot] inquiry closed its public hearings last month after seeing 140 witnesses but none dealt specifically with civilian casualties, which the IBC calculates as between 97,000 and 106,000.

Other groups have produced much higher estimates but the IBC, a UK-based organisation set up by volunteers to track deaths in Iraq, prides itself on working carefully with data drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGOs and official figures.

Gosh that sounds scientific. In contrast to all those 'other groups'. Careful working, data, lots of cross-checking, different sources...

Dear Jonathan Steele

Just over 2 years ago you wrote a detailed account of the different 'estimates' of Iraqi dead, and you even quoted the chief scientific advisor to the MOD, who described the Lancet study as 'close to best practice'. You may also be aware of a recent report put out by Landmine Action – A State of Ignorance – which reveals a number of other comments about the Lancet study, from sources inside the civil service and inside government. Here are a couple of quotes:

1. Part of inter-ministerial email correspondence leading the 17 November 2004 House of Commons and Lords statements about the Lancet study:

'I’m still worried about where we may be heading. Obviously if the estimate of 100,000 is wrong, we must make that clear. But for every flaw identified, there is testament to the study’s sound methodology. The Economist quoted Scott Zeger, head of department of biostatistics at John Hopkins that the clustered sampling is the rule in public health studies. Death by epidemic also varies by location. If this is how these people usually calculate the effects of epidemics, we need to be careful about criticising it, especially when we have made no attempt of our own to make an estimate – a very major weakness.'

2. A 'restricted' letter from ministry's chief economist, Nov. 2004:

"It might also be possible, as Gerald Russell has suggested, to try and validate the study’s preinvasion estimate of mortality by checking it against unpublished MoH health figures. But there is (a) no certainty at this stage that this kind of work would invalidate the Lancet findings, or (b) any guarantee that if it does produce a difference answer, that the rejection of the Lancet findings would be conclusive."

It appears from many of the FOI requests which appear in this report that those working for the government were far from confident that the Lancet study could easily be dismissed. Indeed, the general picture is that they were likely to be reliable, but needed to be rejected.

Are you yourself confident that the IBC's figures are close enough to reality to make them quotable in every case of discussing deaths in Iraq as a result of the war? If they are likely to be out by a figure of 5 or 10, or if it is even possible that they are out by factors such as these, are you happy for the figure in the public mind to be that of IBC?

I am aware that your article was about IBC, and you therefore had to quote their figures; and you did also mention 'other studies'. But you must be aware that the IBC figure is the one in everyone's mind, and that every instance of mentioning it, and of failing to give other studies at least an equal profile, only reinforces the perception that this is the authoritative figure.

I would be interested to know your comments.

Thank you
[*]

Correspondence with Johann Hari concerning his article about Megrahi...

Dear Johann
You may be interested, if you don't know it already, in Gareth Peirce's analysis of the Megrahi case at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/gareth-peirce/the-framing-of-al-megrahi. I know you mention in your article that 'there are some serious commentators who argue that Megrahi was framed', but it seems fairly clear that you don't go along with that. I'd be interested to know how you feel confident enough to dismiss it - which is effectively what you do by referring to Megrahi as 'a convicted terrorist - the worst in modern British history'. (You also say that 'Megrahi was sent home to Triploli to be greeted by cheering crowds after serving eleven days for each person murdered'.)

I also think that for those few people who still don't acknowledge that Iraq was about oil (and surely they're relatively few by now, aren't they??) I'm not sure that what I understand to be your main argument will be all that convincing. You seem just to be saying that Blair is unscrupulous (which we knew), that he was prepared to trade a convicted terrorist for oil, therefore he must have been prepared to go to war for oil. (A simplification, of course, of your words, but isn't that the essence?). In a way, I think that by linking this single example of Blair's duplicity and self-interest to the Iraq war, you are almost less likely to convince detractors: what is important in the case of Iraq (and indeed Megrahi) is surely the context, including the history of US and British actions in the Middle East, rather than the intentions and actions of one individual.

If one does accept that Megrahi was almost certainly framed, then it seems to me that there are far more important issues than those addressed in your article. These include: