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As I write, with over 75 percent of all yesterday’s English local election results in, Labour has a net gain of 55 councillors compared to the high water mark of the 2014 result in these wards, while the Tories have a net gain of one seat against a 2014 result which was regarded at the time as disastrous for them, and led the Daily Telegraph to editorialise “David Cameron Must Now Assuage the Voters’ Rage”. Yet both the BBC and Sky News have, all night and this morning, treated these results, in which the Labour Party increased by 3 percent an already record number of councillors in this election cycle, as a disaster. What’s more, they used that false analysis to plug again and again the “anti-Semitism in the Labour Party” witch-hunt. Of course, it was the continuous exacerbation of this mostly false accusation by Blairite MP’s that… deliberately on their part… stopped the Labour Party doing still better. The Blairites are all over the airwaves plugging this meme again today. What’s more, Labour achieved this result despite the complete collapse of the UKIP vote, which collapse pundits expected to boost the Tory Party. In fact, the net loss of over 100 UKIP seats hasn’t resulted in overall net gains for the Tory Party, even though those ex-UKIP voters demonstrably did mostly split to Tory. The very substantial UKIP voter reinforcements simply saved the Tories from doing still worse. The Liberal Democrats are showing some signs of life.
Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and the tendentious media misrepresentation of the election results reminds me why I couldn’t get excited about it. A media with the extremely concentrated ownership we see in the UK can never be free, and certainly does not represent a wide spread of political opinions. Even the views of the official Leader of the Opposition are almost entirely outside the Overton window. In Scotland, the Scottish government is subject to unreasoning media attack, day in and day out, which contrasts strikingly with the treatment of Westminster ministers and issues.
There’s a seriously worrying example from Leeds of the decline of free speech, where Leeds City Council disgracefully banned a meeting discussing the bias of the corporate and state media because of its content. We aren’t allowed even to get together to discuss media bias. Retired Ambassador Peter Ford, Professors Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward, Vanessa Beeley, and Robert Stuart were to address the meeting at Leeds City Museum entitled “Media on Trial”. I can’t sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it’s right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers because it questions the government and Establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead.
Truly, British society has changed fundamentally if a former British Ambassador to Syria is banned from speaking in public premises on his area of expertise. What’s still worse is the tone of this sneering report from Huffington Post, now firmly a part of corporate media, in which Chris York libels the speakers as “Assad supporters”, interviews none of the speakers and nobody to make the argument for free speech, but does manage to interview the “founder” of the jihadist “White Helmets”. In terms of banning dissent whilst simultaneously ramping up the official narrative, York has won himself top Establishment brownie points. The man… and I use the term loosely… is unfit for polite company.
4 May 2018
Craig Murray
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/37463/
Voices from Russia 
Freedom No More
Tags: Conservative Party (UK), Corporate Media, Election, elections, England, EU, European Union, free speech, freedom, Great Britain, Huffington Post, HuffPost, Labour Party, mass media, media, Media bias, media spin, political commentary, politics, UKIP, United Kingdom
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As I write, with over 75 percent of all yesterday’s English local election results in, Labour has a net gain of 55 councillors compared to the high water mark of the 2014 result in these wards, while the Tories have a net gain of one seat against a 2014 result which was regarded at the time as disastrous for them, and led the Daily Telegraph to editorialise “David Cameron Must Now Assuage the Voters’ Rage”. Yet both the BBC and Sky News have, all night and this morning, treated these results, in which the Labour Party increased by 3 percent an already record number of councillors in this election cycle, as a disaster. What’s more, they used that false analysis to plug again and again the “anti-Semitism in the Labour Party” witch-hunt. Of course, it was the continuous exacerbation of this mostly false accusation by Blairite MP’s that… deliberately on their part… stopped the Labour Party doing still better. The Blairites are all over the airwaves plugging this meme again today. What’s more, Labour achieved this result despite the complete collapse of the UKIP vote, which collapse pundits expected to boost the Tory Party. In fact, the net loss of over 100 UKIP seats hasn’t resulted in overall net gains for the Tory Party, even though those ex-UKIP voters demonstrably did mostly split to Tory. The very substantial UKIP voter reinforcements simply saved the Tories from doing still worse. The Liberal Democrats are showing some signs of life.
Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and the tendentious media misrepresentation of the election results reminds me why I couldn’t get excited about it. A media with the extremely concentrated ownership we see in the UK can never be free, and certainly does not represent a wide spread of political opinions. Even the views of the official Leader of the Opposition are almost entirely outside the Overton window. In Scotland, the Scottish government is subject to unreasoning media attack, day in and day out, which contrasts strikingly with the treatment of Westminster ministers and issues.
There’s a seriously worrying example from Leeds of the decline of free speech, where Leeds City Council disgracefully banned a meeting discussing the bias of the corporate and state media because of its content. We aren’t allowed even to get together to discuss media bias. Retired Ambassador Peter Ford, Professors Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward, Vanessa Beeley, and Robert Stuart were to address the meeting at Leeds City Museum entitled “Media on Trial”. I can’t sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it’s right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers because it questions the government and Establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead.
Truly, British society has changed fundamentally if a former British Ambassador to Syria is banned from speaking in public premises on his area of expertise. What’s still worse is the tone of this sneering report from Huffington Post, now firmly a part of corporate media, in which Chris York libels the speakers as “Assad supporters”, interviews none of the speakers and nobody to make the argument for free speech, but does manage to interview the “founder” of the jihadist “White Helmets”. In terms of banning dissent whilst simultaneously ramping up the official narrative, York has won himself top Establishment brownie points. The man… and I use the term loosely… is unfit for polite company.
4 May 2018
Craig Murray
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/37463/