The Blacksmith Bureau

Soap, water, action!

God, what an unpleasant week. Anyone got any soap? We stayed quiet to let Mr Bennett have his further fifteen minutes of fame without interruption but followed matters through a daily, detailed look at the forums and Twitter, something we’ve never done so exhaustively before. It was like having one’s head thrust repeatedly into a brown and stinking lavatory bowl.

“The McCann affair dirties and besmirches almost everyone and everything it comes into contact with.” How many times have we written that?

So we had a court case which posed a number of questions of principle – important questions and not six year old ones either, not with the Great Paedo Hunt and its associated matters all over Twitter. And Twitter itself isn’t a tiny little room holding a few nutters, not when it reaches up to the self-important dwarf who is speaker of the House of Commons while his wife dishes out the innuendo.

Yes, real questions about libel. How far, for example, should the libel courts be used at all these days? Until twenty years ago libellous books were pulped and overseas newspapers had chancy stories literally cut out with scissors before distribution. With broadcasters taking their cue from the print media the libel was stifled at birth. Not any longer. And for those like Anna Racoon – yes, this week brought many fossils out of the sludge –who think the law will gradually close in on net comment, forget it. Those who have something worth saying will move their sites to extra-judicial places (some are already doing so) and continue just as before. M/S Racoon, by the way, is the entity that gloated so knowledgably four years ago that "European Union law" was about to end all this wicked free speech on the Net nonsense.

With the old UK libel laws satisfying nobody what do we replace them with? And in 2013 how do you balance individual reputations against “free” speech? Hugh Grant and his celebrity circle (who are much more powerful than the aged pasteboard targets like McAlpine and Murdoch that the usual suspects waste their time attacking) want to censor the newspapers directly instead and at this moment have a Leveson-inspired bill before the House of Lords – call it the Safe Suckers Act, shall we?

Kate and Gerry Beckham McCann appear to support their view, not surprisingly since they are pure media creations themselves whose fate, like that of Grant and the rest, has been and always will be tied to their media coverage, offline and on. The whole crowd is led by those with the political nous to know how much you can achieve in the UK by using sob and sentiment stories as a cloak, hence the ruthless use they have made of the Bristol and Downer crimes: nothing succeeds like schmaltz.

Another one: when should a supposed whistle-blower or campaigner, however apparently misguided, be listened to? Wouldn’t it have been better, for instance, if someone had campaigned against Robert Maxwell, the greatest thief in British history, who used litigation as aggressively as the Suffering Duo ? Maxwell, like the McCanns, like so many others, had plenty of onions in his pockets to aid him when necessary, bursting into tears over the Auschwitz fate of family members at strategic moments in the libel courts. Top that! If someone with a bee in their bonnet, even a buffoon, had campaigned against him it might have stopped him stealing the pensions of Mirror employees to buy yachts with, though naturally someone like that has to see it through to the end for it to work. But how do you know if it's a buffoon or a coward if you can't hear what's said?

And then there are questions about undertakings which, in this country, are seen as immensely important. How do you distinguish between a genuine gun-to-the-head argument and simple wriggling? Should the law give more recognition to the fact that a modern UK libel case is a claim for "cost-infliction" rather than damages? The law recognizes inequality of resources, and therefore of bargaining power in the commercial arena – shouldn't it be doing so in defamation cases?

These questions of importance, of principle, hung invisibly above the High Court committal proceedings this week. And what did we get? Something between Alice in Wonderland and Reservoir Dogs, with supporters of both sides deliberately unwilling to put out an objective summary of the hearing – check for yourselves – because they were too frightened or dishonest to do so, while they hurled revolting, inaccurate and fantastical abuse at each other across the Net.* The claims that were put out by both sides had nothing to do with a certain Madeleine McCann or questions of principle and everything to do with their own playground cum vicious street gang emotions, obsessional leadership loyalties and much more important, of course, personal, spitting enmities. "Support" eh? Urgh!

Anyway, once this thoroughly nasty and undignified sideshow without a single redeeming feature has been forgotten, we can return to real life and the muffled drumbeat of the Yard review and Goncalo Amaral’s next move. Next up: May 3 2013. If, that is, the toast doesn’t start burning before then. Now where’s that soap and water?

*We've looked at what's there, a couple on the Bennet/Havern site, one on the "Muratfan site." The former are quite extraordinarily short for a day and a half hearing, the latter suffused with hatred. On both the sound of axes being ground is deafening while anything that doesn't agree with their own "side" is suppressed or elided. What sort of "cause" do either of those two sides have that they can't even try to produce something objective? To take just two examples of this cancerous dishonesty: Muratfan highlighted the fact – one assumes— that Mr Bennett had given a list of "other places" that had said the same things as him without being proceeded against to the judge. He says that list covered 17 pages of A4.

Clearly this leaves some very big questions which the reader can address for themselves. As the writers of the court summary on the Havern/Bennet forum were aware Muratfan has taken this as evidence that Mr Bennett is snitching to take everyone down with him. Both they and other contributors to Bennet/Havern's site have muffled the question of this document in the most laughable way, the former mentioning it, in anodyne terms, just once.

Then Muratfan does the same thing with the evidence of Mike Gunnill who apparently admitted repeated lying, deliberately reducing its impact.

So we don't know what else they've deliberately corrupted. Some summaries! I wouldn't trust this lot to give an accurate account of the time of f****** day.

http://blacksmithbureau.blogspot.co.uk/

Oh, well.

At least he/they found form with his/their January missives.

I struggled to make sense of this and never did succeed, other than to realise he/they don't seem to have fully understood what this week's Hearing was about.

IBS

pennylane wrote:IBS

Doh!

I had to Google that

The End Is Nigh wrote:

pennylane wrote:IBS

Doh!

I had to Google that

The End Is Nigh wrote:

pennylane wrote:IBS

Doh!

I had to Google that

I didn't have to, unfortunately ...

Irritable B*stard Syndrome..........

Not Born Yesterday wrote:Irritable B*stard Syndrome..........

'aged pasteboard targets like McAlpine' NOT a nice way to talk about your dear, gentle friend is it?

At least he was Blacksmiths' dear friend only a few months ago, I wouldn't like to be called an aged pasteboard.
Word of advice: just don't put it on twitter. Could cost you a fiver.

tigger wrote:

Not Born Yesterday wrote:Irritable B*stard Syndrome..........

'aged pasteboard targets like McAlpine' NOT a nice way to talk about your dear, gentle friend is it?

At least he was Blacksmiths' dear friend only a few months ago, I wouldn't like to be called an aged pasteboard.
Word of advice: just don't put it on twitter. Could cost you a fiver.

It would be a fiver well spent!