A Socialist Worker Party member who claims to have been a journalist at the Telegraph at the time the Galloway dodgy documents story was run and who blogs here gives his interesting take on the Galloway libel victory:
There wasn’t a trace of reluctance in David Eady’s judgement, nor were there any sophisticated caveats. This raises the intriguing possibility that disgust at the conduct of this war – and in particular, at the warmongers’ contemptuous attitude to legality, civil rights and truthfulness – has penetrated deeply into the heart of the legal establishment itself.
Er right. The case was decided on what the Judge thought about US foreign policy was it ? Not the more prosaic explanation that the usual method is to decide things on the application of legal rules and/or evidence then ?
Bat – that’s his blog name – also paints a picture of rising militancy at the Torygraph:
Given this backdrop, us hacks instantly clocked this story for what it was: a politically motivated attack aimed at discrediting an anti-war movement that had unleashed rebellious sentiment across the country, even stoking discontent among the paper’s own staff.
Blimey.
If you got involved in a broad-based campaign like Anti-Apartheid in the 1980’s you’ll no doubt remember graduates from Surrey who had joined SWSS and been instructed by their branch to take jobs after their graduation in hospitals and factories to – you know – get close to the workers. They always turned up at meetings to report excitedly on whatever the subject of the discussion was that:
“There’s a lot of anger on the shopfloor about this ! “
Let’s extend them the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe the workers at the local cigarette factory were exercised about events in Nagorno Karabakh. Perhaps they talked of little else in the works canteen.
But Torygraph hacks nodding their heads sympathetically to a junior Trot’s take on world politics ? Hmmm.
Name names Bat. We want to know if the Telegraph gardening and rugby columnists ripped up their Tory Party membership cards and joined the Stop the War Coalition after a storming speech you gave to them at a packed meeting pointing out that even High Court Judges were beginning to see things clearly now….