MPs’ expenses scoop: the inside story
November 16, 2009
The reporters who broke the MPs’ expenses scandal revealed the inside story to University of Westminster journalism students in a fascinating account of their investigation, writes Victoria Maw.
The Daily Telegraph’s deputy political editor Robert Winnett and chief reporter Gordon Rayner told how their team sifted through a million documents in a secret room at the newspaper’s headquarters and endured the wrath of many angry MPs. Some even shook their fists at researchers
Their work for the conservative-leaning newspaper, which has been turned into a book called ‘No expenses spared’ explained how some MPs from across all parties abused the expenses system.
‘Genuinely excited’
Rayner said the cases went from the downright ridiculous and trivial to “bordering on criminality”.
Victoria Maw reads the detail about Elliot Morley
The information was so sensitive that it took the Telegraph a month to build up a relationship of trust with their source.
“It was a big digging exercise,” said Winnett. “A cynical group of journalists were genuinely excited.”
Rayner believes that Prime Minister Gordon Brown damaged his own reputation by micromanaging the expenses scandal. “Cameron showed leadership whilst Brown dithered,” said Rayner. “He [Brown] was obsessed with his image. He was only interested in how it would rebound on him. He poured over the paper late into the night with a pencil,” he said.
Benefit
The spotlight has also fallen on one of the university’s local members of parliament, Tony McNulty. The reporters believe the expenses row will probably wreck the Harrow MP’s political career.
The MP for Harrow East agreed to pay back more than £13,000 in expenses this October after it emerged that he had claimed second home allowance expenses on a house that his parents live in.
The Commons Standards and Privileges Committee found that the expenses were not wholly connected with McNulty’s parliamentary duties and his parents obtained a benefit from parliamentary funds to which he was not entitled. Although McNulty occasionally worked from the Harrow property, the committee said he overclaimed in relation to mortgage interest and council tax. Former employment minister McNulty publicly apologised to his constituents in October.
‘Fully complied’
Winnett said McNulty was “fairly contrite” when he was told that the Telegraph had details of his expenses claims.
“He dealt with it moderately well. I think he even made a joke about it,” said Winnett “but it will probably end his political career”.
In response, Tony McNulty said: “Any fair-minded person who reads the committee’s report will see that I fully complied with all rules and advice given to me at the time and that the commissioner decided he would change the advice retrospectively. He is perfectly entitled to do that and I have absolutely no complaint. It will be for the people of Harrow to decide my future.”
Hostile
Winnett and Rayner say that the clever MPs said very little whereas those who got into trouble defended themselves too publicly. “Nobody had even heard of Margaret Moran before she insisted on going on television. She now may well be replaced by Esther Rantzen, “ said Rayner.
Many MPs were hostile towards the Telegraph over its handling of the scandal but Winnett and Rayner say that most soon realised that they could not afford to isolate the papers.
The story also caused a surge of interest in politics. “This summer people got interested in politics again,” said Rayner. “They took interest in who their MPs are and this can only be a good thing for democracy.”
Rayner adds that the story’s beauty was in its simplicity. “The story was something that kids can understand. It was straightforward and dead simple. Hazel Blears claimed a Kitkat,” he said.
The journalist told students that other papers had refused to buy the story, notably the Times who thought the story was too risky from a legal perspective. Winnett thinks the Telegraph’s new young editor Will Lewis is responsible for the go-ahead attitude.
“There was a will to have a big story and to show that the Telegraph has changed,” says Winnett.
Heated debate on press and privacy
May 21, 2009
A heated debate featuring Nick Davies and Kelvin MacKenzie took place at the Journalism in Crisis conference in a session on privacy and the media heavily criticising the Press Complaints Commission.
Davies and MacKenzie discussed with Jennifer McDermott, Head of Media and Public Law and partner at Whithers and Jonathan Coad from Swan Turton solicitors, the potential impact of recent court judgements on journalism.
The main questions that were raised during the session was whether responsible journalism will become more difficult and whether the current system of self-regulation should be reformed.
Nick Davies, left, speaks at Journalism In Crisis as part of a the Privacy And The Press panel. Listening are panel members Jennifer McDermott, Robin Lustig, and Kelvin MacKenzie
Jennifer McDermott
With the scandal around the MPs’ expenses reaching heights, Jennifer McDermott reminded during this debate how MPs asked a few years ago for the Freedom of Information Act to be amended so that they could hide their expenses. She said that details about someone’s private life should only be published if it is of public concern.
She also mentioned that the privacy law can go too far in protecting private lives, such as in the case of princess Caroline at Montecarlo, but that this was “more an exception than a rule”.
Kelvin MacKenzie
MacKenzie, targeted Justice Eady throughout his speech labelling him as “overprotective of privacy” and “biased against the media”. He argued that privacy law is ludicrous and added: “It isn’t true to say that what you get up to in your sexual life does not have an effect on the outside world.
“As Eady is fighting a one man campaign, I am rather interested in his private life. I’d like to ask him ‘Do you wear French knickers? Thongs?’”
McDermott defended Justice Eady, saying he “weighs up all factors” when issuing an injunction to stop stories being published.
MacKenzie said that the theory against the PCC was “made by conspiracy theorists who only want to get more money”.
Kelvin MacKenzie, right, addresses audience questions during Journalism In Crisis as part of a the Privacy And The Press panel. Listening is Robin Lustig.
Nick Davies
The famous journalist was at his usual passionate best, launching a broadside against the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and criticizing MacKenzie’s stance along the way.
“The PCC is a structurally corrupt body,” said Davies, emphasising that Fleet Street has been embroiled with phone hacking scandals and tapping into private banking data of everyday citizens without reprimand from the commission.” He said that too many claims are rejected upon technical reasons and that the system was “ludicrous”.
He “profoundly disagreed” with MacKenzie, saying “there is no reason for you or anyone else to be filmed while having sex unless it is a crime, and even then you shouldn’t film it, but try to stop it.”
Nick Davies declared that the reason why the press is getting so much into people’s private life is because of the relentless commercial pressure on journalists to give stories. He added that “technologies enable people to pirate emails and hack into mobile phones, something we could not do a few years ago and that give more opportunities to journalists for getting information illegally.”
“Unfortunately, Davies argued, “newspapers are now competing with the internet where there is no regulation at all.”
Jonathan Coad
Jonathan Coad further exposed the PCC as corrupt, and pointed out its “rank hypocrisy when running its own affairs”, in light of the recent MPs expenses scandal. “Parliament make their own rules, but so do the PCC”.
He presented the results of a research study showing that the PCC code is incredibly weak. “We have had a law of breach of confidence, breach of privacy for well over 100 years. The real issue is where should the line be drawn and who should decide where the lines are drawn?”
Q&A
Questions were opened to the floor, and heated debated on whether stories should be published if they cause “harm” to third parties followed.
Kelvin MacKenzie stated he had never considered the potential for harm when publishing a story, and MacDermott went as far as saying that the PCC should become a part of OfCom, explaining that it would enable the same regulations to be applied to all media.
Davies and McDermott agreed that people should go straight to court instead of contacting the PCC since requests are too often rejected and for very questionable reasons.
Citizen Journalism conference
May 21, 2009
The second day of Journalism In Crisis just started and renowned academics gathered in the Old Cinema to discuss the concept of “Citizen Journalism”.
Journalism’s paradigm shifts: a model for understanding long-term change
Colette Brin, from the Universite Laval, Quebec, opened the discussion with a presentation on the patterns of change in the journalism practice.
“The current context of intense and rapid changes is a cause of great uncertainty and concern as to the future of journalism, mostly among journalists themselves, but also among educators and scholars.”
Colette Brin presented a theoritical model of long-term patterns of change in journalistic practice. She demonstrated how the crisis journalism is facing today actually began around the 1970s and has progressively replace the “information journalism” by an emerging “communication journalism paradigm, characterized by intersubjectivity, intense information flow and a hypercompetitive media market”.
She explained her theory in further details by introducing the example of Quebec’s first tabloid newspaper Le journal de Montreal who recently created a website called Rue Frontenac, which illustrates this new “communication revolution”.
Reflections on Journalism
May 19, 2009
Three cheers for Subjectivity: or the crumbling of the seven pillars of journalistic wisdom
Ivor Gaber from City University London and University of Bedfordshire came to Westminster this afternoon to discuss the notion of Subjectivity in journalism.
The base of journalism practice is often recalled as “the inverted pyramid”.
” Students are taught to start a news story with the “5W” (Who, What, Where, When and Why) before dealing with important facts and finish with the background,” he said. “But the most important part, I keep repeating my students, is the ‘So What?’, what relevance does your story have for the reader.”
“Different news organizations will have a different opinion on which angle of a story you should take.”
Ivor Gaber illustrated his speech with Sky’s new unofficial motto: “Never wrong for long”.
He then made an interesting observation on the opposition between journalists and blogger: “The new blogosphere is chattering the journalistic wisdom. Journalists are impartial & interested in the truth, bloggers aren’t. Journalists are unbiased, bloggers are proudly biased,” he declared.
Gaber finished his presentation with the seven pillars of journalistic wisdom that he thinks are primordial to a professional practice:
- Thou shalt recognize one’s own subjectivity
- Thou strive to be fair
- Thou strive to be accurate
- Thou strive to be thorough
- Thou seek verification
- Thou strive to be transparent
- Thou be accountable
One striking example of how our vision of the world is conditioned by the media coverage is well embeded in a research study Paul Shaw mentioned during his speech.
“We asked young children which words best describe the notion of ‘Third World’. The answer was striking: poverty, war, starvation, refugees, death, disease, drought, dirty water.”
Paul Shaw then introduced his “Typology of Negativity” whichgoes as following:
- the act of simplifying the facts of an event for easy comprehension by the audience
- taking things out of context
- the process of seeking out conflict, dissent, disagreement
- news as tragedy
- in the inter-war period, the country lived a professional, moral, financial and identity crisis
- at the beginning of the 1990s, there was a crisis for political, ideological and economic reasons
- nowadays, the emergence of new technologies with the rise of online journalism created a new crisis for French journalism
Police under scrutiny at G20 protest
April 3, 2009
Story by Alberto Furlan, pictures by Andrew Otto
Thousands gathered outside the Bank of England to protest ahead of the G20 summit in London, resulting in 26 arrests by sundown and one injured protester.
Incidents were limited, with five protesters shattering the window at the Royal Bank of Scotland and throwing computers out. One person was injured after confrontation with the police.
Police officers closed off much of the City
The majority of the protests were peaceful as four parades, each one lead by a ‘Horseman of the Apocalypse’, converged from different tube stations to the square outside the Bank.
Once there, thousands sang, waved placards, scaled walls and danced in a general mood of merriment. Some were seeing sleeping on the pavements and making coffee on a campfire.
However, the police tactics of sealing off the entire square and letting no-one out soured the mood as people wanted to move on, needing the bathroom or food.
One policeman said he “did not know when you are allowed out. We are just waiting for orders. Sorry.” He then marched forward and closed the police cordon even further.
War-on-Want campaigners carry a symbolic dead canary at the G20 protests
“This is a dead canary. He is going to Canary Wharf,” said one protester dressed in a doctor’s outfit and carrying a stretcher with a huge model of a dead canary, underlining the good humour of the majority of protesters.
The police were determined not to let anybody through without a media pass, and even that did not always suffice.
While the Metropolitan force did, for the most part, a good job of keeping protesters in defined areas, they were also at times confused. On one occasion orders were repeated a number of times and they still failed to seal off the right road.
A passage between two roads was also left unguarded by the police but the protesters failed to notice and they kept on partying and hassling the front line of yellow-clad constables.
As night descended, more skirmishes broke out as police tried to clear the tents of protesters camped near Liverpool Street Station.
See also
Circus atmosphere of G20 protests
Students split over cheap alcohol
March 18, 2009
Students from the University of Westminster are in two minds over the proposal to impose a minimum price for alcohol.
The Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer has been published suggesting that the best way to combat binge drinking is to charge a minimum of 50p per unit of alcohol.
Business student Andrew Charles said: “I think the majority of the population would oppose the 50p per unit recommendation. As a student I do not have that much money so tend to spend more time drinking in halls than in the pub.
“At the moment I can buy a cheap litre of vodka for around £6. This change would take it up to nearly £20 which I just cannot afford. It would certainly stop me getting drunk.”
Aaron Dixon, a photography student said: “A big part of the student lifestyle is going out and getting drunk with your friends. It’s not always healthy but it’s what we do. If the cost of drinks double, I’d be really unhappy. It probably wouldn’t stop me drinking, I’d just do it less often.”
Alcohol pricing proposals from Journalism students on Vimeo.
But not all students oppose the proposed rise. Amereet Sanga said: “I don’t drink, and sometimes find very drunk people intimidating. By raising the price people would be more sober and more in control of themselves. They would probably be healthier too.”
According to the Guardian, Gordon Brown will probably reject the proposal because he is aware that “with a general election little more than a year away” doubling drinks prices could damage his popularity
Health factor
The British Beer and Pub association say that alcohol consumption fell by about 3% in 2008. They think this suggests that people are becoming more aware of the health risks involved with excessive drinking.
But the report says that if the 50p minimum price per unit was implemented there would be:
· 3,393 less deaths a year
· 97,900 less hospital admissions
· 45,800 fewer crimes committed
· 296,900 less sick days taken a year.
This would save the country around £1 billion a year.
Accident and Emergency Nurse Jess Kyle says: “We get a lot of people coming in with alcohol-related illnesses, and it would obviously be a great benefit if that number was reduced. But why punish the majority who like a casual drink?”
In the report Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson also highlights the issue of passive drinking, where children and babies are affected by other people’s drinking.
Story by Alexandra Murphy
Video package by Rose Hawkins
Remembering the miners’ strike 25 years on
March 17, 2009
Playwright Ed Waugh is celebrating the imminent debut of his play Maggie’s End on the London stage.
He believes bringing the play to new audiences is the perfect way to mark the silver anniversary of the year long 1984-5 miners’ strike.
Maggie’s End begins with Margaret Thatcher’s death and looks at the repercussions of a Labour government deciding to honour her with a state funeral.
The action hones in on one family. Leon is an ‘old Labour’ stalwart with bitter memories of the miners’ strike.
Maggie’s End at the Gala Theatre, Durham. Photo by Peter Skelton.
His daughter, Rosa, is a rising star in the ‘new’ Labour party who struggles to understand why her father is so incensed by the grand funeral she is helping to organise.
Strikes and memories
Waugh is keen to stress that Maggie’s End is not ‘propaganda’, nor a long rant about the injustices of the Thatcher era.
Focusing on the relationship between Leon and his daughter, Waugh and his fellow writer, Trevor Woods, explore differences between generations. The play also looks at memory, both personal and collective.
Similar to his character Leon, Waugh lived through the miners’ strike and the subsequent closures of pits and steelworks. For him and many others it was a life changing experience.
Waugh leant across the table, his face flushed. All of a sudden he looked taller than when he was standing - and he is a tall man. The clatter of the cafe we were sitting in seemed to recede, rendered mute by one man’s emotion.
“The Thatcher years decimated industry - the steelworks, the mines, the shipbuilding,” he said. “She came along, took on the unions and smashed it all without any compassion, without any thought for the community.”
Unions are the key
Waugh’s anger has historical roots which pre-date Thatcherism. A ‘proud Geordie’ with a visceral attachment to the north east’s tradition of industry and union activism he can remember his grandmother pointing out to him people who had refused to support the General Strike of 1926.
His parents taught him that belonging to a union was as natural and essential as breathing.
So how does Waugh see unionism in Britain today, a quarter of a century after Thatcher’s government and the National Union of Mineworkers commenced battle?
“I’ve never felt that the trade unions were beaten,” he said. “I think they can be stronger than ever, if in a different way. Just look at the potential of new technology which can be used to communicate, to reach out to people.
“During the miners’ strike we had no internet, no mobile phones. It used to take us a whole day to produce a batch of blobby leaflets on an old Gestetner machine.”
The lure of the stage
It was a love of communication, using words to reach people that lead Waugh to play writing. He was working as a publicist for the Custom House Theatre in South Shields and became an admirer of Ray Spencer, the theatre’s director.
“Ray was putting on new drama, using local writers. He was really setting the tone for theatre in the north east.”
Waugh says that the idea of Thatcher having a state funeral first hit him as a dramatist, rather than a political activist. “I thought – this is magnificent. It’s a great hook to hang a whole lot of ideas and emotions on.”
The Jarrow Brewery Company agreed and decided to produce a draught beer to mark the premiere of Maggie’s End in Durham. Is it a bitter beer? “Very bitter.”
The hopes of a ‘political animal’
Waugh hopes Maggie’s End will help people to understand how lives and landscapes are changed as a result of political struggle. Leon will be played by actor Mark Wingett who starred as DC Carver in The Bill for 21 years.
Waugh took Wingett on a tour of the north east, showing him the sites of now vanished mines and steelworks.
Wingett, a Londoner, said that of course he had seen the miners’ strike on television. But it took a visit to one of the affected regions for him to grasp the strike’s full resonance, both then and now.
As Waugh prepared to move on to another appointment he fielded one more question. Does he see himself as a hard headed political activist or a Don Quixote, drawn to what some would call lost causes?
He laughed; “I’m a writer and a political animal, not a political activist. Hey, shall we just say I’m Sancho Panza’s donkey?”
Maggie’s End is on at The Shaw Theatre, 100-110 Euston Road, London NW1 2AJ from 7th to 18th April 2009
This article also appeared in the Morning Star newspaper
New exhibition: The Neighbour
March 13, 2009
Bombay-based artist Ashok Sukumaran
Today marks the beginning of artist Ashok Sukumaran’s new exhibition The Neighbour which is now open until Thursday 9 April.
The exhibition takes place in ‘P3’, a 14000 square foot space developed from a vast concrete construction hall and is located underneath the Marylebone campus at the University of Westminster.
The Guardian recently called this underground hideaway “one of the capital’s hidden and most exciting new spaces”.
Ashok was born in 1974 and is Bombay-based. His work recently featured in the Indian Highway exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 2005 Ashok was awarded the first prize of the 2005 UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and also received a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2007.
In The Neighbour two mobile habitats share a space - one is a large mobile 1970’s trailer, and the other is a smaller yellow camper van.
The white trailer moves up and down imperceptibly slowly. One of the artist’s assistants said: “It’s so slow you don’t realise it’s moving until you stand next to the door and it passes you by.”
Part of The Neighbour exhibition
The two mobile homes reflect the complex relationship between obsessive neighbours, each vehicle slyly stalking the other. Ashok said: “We don’t know what to do with people who are neither friends nor enemies.”
The camper van has sets of headphones attached inside where you can hear everything that is happening in the trailer. Ashok jokes that “in here you could say this person has serious fetish for that house”.
It is within these older mobile homes and camper vans that neighbours would mix. Ashok said that it was in these intense traffic - jams that people would have to unite, creating an “interesting moment”.
Now though, we have retreated and society has become “obsessed by safe distance… From the gypsies, from the smokers, from each others.”
The Neighbour seeks to undo this ‘safe distance’. According to Ashok: “The space being open is necessary, for others to be able to enter it, for universality.”
By Charlotte Hanger
Lowering retirement age ‘bad for economy’
March 13, 2009
Relaxing the current retirement age would not be good for the British industry says one of the UK’s leading business organisations.
The Confederation of British industry (CBI) which represent over 200,000 businesses believes that allowing a more flexible retirement rule would not work and could cause more problems for smaller businesses in the recession.
CBI’s deputy director-general, John Cridland, says: “The current system where there is a default retirement age of 65, but people can request to carry on beyond this age, works well. It provides flexibility and our research shows that 81per cent of requests to work beyond 65 are accepted. Companies don’t want to lose good people, whatever their age.”
His comments come after the European courts ruled earlier this month that Britain had not acted illegally by maintaining the retirement age.
Employees aged 65 can be forced to quit unless their employers agree that they can continue. The recession means that people who fall into this age bracket could be hit the hardest financially.
Cridland points out that alternatives to a default retirement age would not work as “companies with small numbers of staff have particular problems adapting jobs to the needs of older workers”.
The cabinet is split on the issue, with some MPs and peers worrying that the recession will hurt the pensions of those approaching 65.
Work and pensions secretary, James Purnell, has launched a review on the recession’s impact on particular groups, including older workers.
Jan Uden, a 63-year-old nurse from Kent says that her husband’s private pension has gone down by one-third in the last few months alone due to the recession.
She continues: “Retirement at 65 is only good if you can afford it. Lots of people my age will want to work as long as they are able and competent. Having saved hard and paid off a mortgage, our savings now earn us none or very little interest and we need this money to supplement our income.”
The government is due to review retirement age in 2011. Uden says: “It seems only government employed people can rely on getting a decent pension these days.”
By Sade Laja
Plenty more fish in the sea?
March 13, 2009
Sustainable seafood organisations have criticised health experts for encouraging people to eat more fish as part of a balanced diet.
While eating fish has substantial health benefits, fish stocks have been reduced to just 10 per cent of what they were a century ago and demand for seafood is still rising.
“There is a place in our diets for certain meats and certain fish, but we are consuming too much,” said BBC2 chef Oliver Rowe.
Climate change is also impacting fish numbers. Warming waters are forcing coldwater fish to find new habitats and rising acidity levels in the ocean are affecting fish reproduction.
Sustainable seafood
Sustainable fishing is being encouraged
A 2006 study by the International American Food Policy Research Industry concluded that the average person eats 17.4kg of fish a year. This may be good for the health, but it’s certainly having a negative impact on the environment.Certain fish quantities though, such as cod, cannot recover fast enough to comply with consumer demand. This means that the population of such species are rapidly decreasing, and scientists have predicted that the only edible seafood available by 2048 will be the jellyfish.
“There are not plenty more fish in the sea,” says Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) spokesman James Simpson, but he does think that conditions are improving.
The MSC is an international charity which certifies fisheries that promote sustainable fishing, based on three criteria: the sustainability of stock, the environmental impact and how effective their management is. Their certification has become highly desirable for consumers and retailers and in January, the UK’s biggest fishery received MSC certification.
“Fisheries have changed the way they fish in order to certify,” said Mr Simpson. “It’s making an enormous difference.”
With the success of MSC, it is hoped that it will change standards throughout the entire fishing industry and will encourage fisherman to think more about their environmental impact.
Eco-friendly fishing
“Fishermen are individual entrepreneurs,” said Seafish secretary Philip Macmullen. “They have to understand what standards mean.”
It is hoped that environmental certification will encourage fishermen to be more eco-friendly and to encourage restaurants and shops to source fish which is sustainable.
This aside, Philip believes that attitudes towards sustainable fishing are changing: “In the mid-90s nobody wanted to know,” he said. But he has seen a “180 degree turn” in attitudes.
Environmentalist Johnny Grimond, who writes for The Economist, says that one of the biggest problems is the actually process of fishing. “Methods that fishermen use to get them out of the sea are not environmentally attractive.”
He speaks specifically about the use of trawlers, which is a method of fishing for species that live on the bottom of sea. Trawlermen use large fishing nets, weights and rollers to catch species such as cod, haddock and pollock – but consequentially destroy underwater habitats.
Another reason for the depleting numbers of fish is climate change, which forces some coldwater fish to find alternative habitats.
Global warming is also having an effect on the acidity of the ocean, making it harder for fish to mate and destroying the delicate balances in fragile environments, such as the coral reek. Acidity is also affecting shellfish by dissolving their shells and only the soft and the blobby will survive.
Conflicting messages
While we can sustain seafood in fisheries, the carbon footprint of these businesses is potentially damaging the ability for fish stocks to recover naturally. Chef Oliver Rowe says that it is consumers that need to make the change by buying sustainable products with a low CO2 impact.
It is his belief that educating people about sustainable seafood would mean less confusion over conflicting media messages. “Some are saying we’re doomed and others are saying everything is fine,” he said.
Rowe’s ethos is about locally sourced and environmental produce and he only uses local ingredients in his kitchen at the Prince Albert in central London.
While it may not seem a practical place so find fresh fish, they can be sourced from nearby Essex and Suffolk. For shellfish, scientists have recently discovered that the Chinese mitten crab, which can be found in the Thames, is safe to eat.
Consuming this alien species will help to control the crabs’ rocketing population and will protect British wildlife and habitats against their aggressive nature.
Mullet, gurnard and pollock are also regarded as sustainable, cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and according to the top chef, “delicious”.
By Helen Varley