According to the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee ‘Workfare is transparently unfair to most people, substituting slave labour for big companies.’ Except when the Guardian do it. “The scheme is unpaid…”

You won’t hear much about this from the left today, but Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed is the latest leader to be forced out of office on a wave of protest. It seems he wasn’t a very nice chap and his arresting a judge was the last straw for an angry public who took to the streets. There is surprisingly muted coverage about the incident over at the Guardian. Could it be because Nasheed was until very recently the darling of the green movement?

Mohamed Nasheed once held a cabinet meeting under water in a climate change stunt and it won him hero status in that field. The paper has always sung his praises:

“After his election last year, Nasheed raised the possibility of buying a new homeland for the country’s 396,000 residents with the hundreds of millions of dollars that tourists spend. Earlier this year, he announced that the Maldives would stop using fossil fuels by 2020. The president is also committed to converting an atoll into a UN-protected biosphere to preserve the unique wildlife and fauna found on the 1,100 islands.”

At one point in 2009 the Observer claimed that Nasheed could not only save the Maldives but also the world. Who would have thought a green fanatic would have such fascistic tendencies…  

The Guardian aren’t having a great day.

Firstly Polly this morning, then this, and now it seems Moinboit has gone off on one.

Read the comprehensive take down of the Moonbat here.

Last week’s Private Eye called the  blog of one Dr Eoin Clarke “obscure” and noted “many of Clarke’s musings turned out to be idiotic,” before concluding:

“Not even Eoin Clarke’s would claim his writings are essential reading, but his blog appears to be one of the few places on the interweb to give Ed Miliband a sympathetic hearing – so perhaps that’s why he reads it.”

Well it looks like the good doctor has found another reader. In her column this morning Polly Toynbee takes fear mongering about the NHS to new levels, and she has damning sources to back her up:

“If leaks to Dr Eoin Clarke’s website prove correct, the main risk is of costs becoming unaffordable as private companies siphon off profits and GP commissioners lack the expertise to control costs.”

Always keen to help out, Guido went over to the site, but could not find any evidence of any leaks. No quotes, no documentation, nothing. Here is what Clarke said, and Polly thinks justifies the high standards set by her Guardian colleagues:

“I am told that the reason for this is that the report contains a very serious warning about the long term damage the bill will do to the NHS. “

Polly is publishing on the basis of second-hand, un-sourced “leaks” from a website already widely derided for spouting nonsense. What would Lord Justice Leveson say!

After Guido pointed out the inappropriate smearing of Gove and his links to a Jewish antisemitism Charity, carefully timed for Holocaust Memorial Day, the paper has backtracked and apologised. Not with due prominence in their paper, but in a quote to the Jerusalem Post instead:

“The story does not in any way suggest that the funding ofsecurity guards for Jewish schools was inappropriate, only that Mr. Gove should have stood aside from the grant giving process given his relationship with CST. It was scheduled for publication on Thursday but pushed back because of the volume of news that day. We should have spotted the unfortunate timing and regret any offense caused.”

A textbook non-apology, but interesting that they didn’t see fit to say sorry for including a quote from SpinWatch’s David Miller in the same story. The same David Miller who is rather fond of printing neo-Nazi essays and believes in vast “Jewish lobby” conspiracies. Perhaps the Guardian should have had a look through their own archives before giving Miller coverage. Here’s what they published about him in July:

“SpinProfiles and Neocon Europe are projects that, under the guise of academia, are used to carry out campaigns of smear and harassment by creating selectively produced profiles of people and groups with different political outlooks, often ignoring facts that do not support their agenda. This approach characterises both of Miller’s projects, and to treat them as academic endeavours is to do a great disservice to British academia’s long tradition of neutral and unbiased inquiry.”

One of these factors alone can be spun as an oversight. But two…

A confused co-conspirator whispers to Guido that the Guardian have been working on the story they ran this morning about Michael Gove giving public funds to a group they don’t like for at least two weeks. The latest installment of their campaign against the  education secretary claims that he personally made the decision to give taxpayers’ money to the Community Security Trust despite being, along with fifty others, an advisor to their board. A fair point perhaps, but given that the CST “advise the Jewish community on matters of security and antisemitism”, why did they wait until Holocaust Memorial Day to run the story? Odd, at best…

UPDATE: A source to Gove gets in touch to say said: “It is unbelievable to attack any politician for funding the protection of Jewish children. It is even more extraordinary and frankly offensive to do it on Holocaust Memorial Day.”

UPDATE II: The CST aren’t happy either. They note that the Guardian did not even bother to contact them before running the story and have let rip on their own blog.

Despite Amelia Hill, his crime reporter, being investigated over her rather inappropriate relationship with a police officer, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger thought it fit to have an undisclosed meeting with Hogan Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner yesterday. We’re making this public today because the Guardian was very tight-lipped about it when Guido put it to them yesterday and refused to confirm or deny the meeting happened. We have now double confirmed it via our unofficial and official sources in the Metropolitan Police.

Alan Rusbridger and deputy editor Ian Katz were both at the meeting. Given that it was at 11 a.m. yesterday, alcohol wasn’t a problem, but Guido hopes that in view of the recently issued official advice to coppers on dealing with journalists, that there wasn’t any flirting. The Guardian have had twenty-four hours, but are still not commenting. Just imagine their front page splash if they had discovered that the Sun’s editor Dominic Mohan had met secretly with Hogan Howe…

See also: Ethical Issues Arising From The Relationship Between Police and Media

In his sworn statement the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, tells Lord Justice Leveson that to the best of his knowledge he has never used or commissioned anyone who had used “computer hacking”. Here is the extract from Rusbridger’s witness statement:

Except Patrick Foster on the Guardian media pages. He has twice been caught hacking computers. The latest incident was the disgraceful hacking of the police blogger NightJack’s Hotmail account. The Orwell Prize winning blogger was outed by Patrick Foster when he was on media correspondent of The Times. This was up there with his Oxford undergraduate days when the student rag had to be pulped after he identified the victim of a gay rape. Foster was subsequently fired from The Times on an unrelated matter and now freelances for the Guardian. It is an open secret that Patrick Foster was Guardian Media editor Dan Sabbagh’s nark source at The Times for many “inside Wapping” stories and that The Times’ management eventually figured this out and fired him under another pretext.

Rusbridger really ought to correct his sworn statement to reflect the truth.

Guido is happy to welcome Jacking Ashley into the Don’t Unseat Ed Miliband Association, but he’s not sure she’s doing the cause any favours with this morning’s hysterical hyperbole. While discussing Ed’s critics she compares their behaviour to US Marines urinating on dead Afghans:

“It’s a game that the Westminster village has always enjoyed. Nick Clegg was last year’s victim, now it’s Ed’s turn. If enough pundits treat him as the US marines treated the Afghan dead, and if the public notices and reflects this contempt back through opinion polls, then somehow or other he might collapse.”

They even link back to the Guardian’s own coverage of the incident, just in case you missed this gloriously unsubtle point. Guido is still trying to work out whether the comparison with holding the Leader of the Opposition to account was done with a straight face. He has a feeling it was…

Only the most hysterical of haters are denying the role that the Mail played in the guilty verdict yesterday for Stephen Lawrence’s murderers. The role Paul Dacre and his journalists played is explained here, and even the Guardian have this morning described their 1997 front page as “without question, the Mail’s finest hour.” Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland goes on to give a powerful defence, all be it while wearing a plague doctor’s mask, of the tabloids:

“Tabloid editors don’t deny that they are in the business of entertaining as well as informing: broadsheet editors, if they are honest, will admit they do the same, albeit by different means (though sport and sex feature regularly in the Guardian’s “most viewed” stories online). But one senior executive told me he also believes it is his job to educate his readers, to explain the world in plain, accessible language. Even if that goal is rarely achieved, it is a noble one, one that any true democrat or egalitarian should support. For a true democracy cannot leave knowledge in the hands of the elite few; it has to be spread widely. So, yes, it has made the most gruesome mistakes and, yes, those will require severe remedy – but Britain needs its popular press, now more than ever.”

Given how the Guardian went about their campaign in the last year, many will feel this is either too little too late, or salt in a wound. You have to wonder how popular Freedland will be over at York Way this morning. The elephant in the article is a specific mention to the one tabloid that used to be the most effective of them all at informing, entertaining and holding those elites to account…

Yesterday the Guardian published an article by former burlesque dancer Laurie Penny which claimed that

“Charlotte Church was 15 years old when Britain’s best-read daily newspaper began a public countdown to the day on which she could be legally f****d.”

The claim is totally false.

It was corrected after the Heresy Corner blog pointed out the false claim. This takes the number of corrections to stories published by the Guardian about News International tabloids to 38. All sense of proportion and indeed sense has gone out the window. The allegation was designed to deliberately characterise The Sun in the worst possible light.

UPDATE: They have managed in Grauniad style to cock-up the correction.