There has been an alarming development concerning Ipso, the once steadfast press regulator. In the Spectator, Fraser Nelson takes a deep dive into a new Ipso ruling that upholds the complaint of the Fawcett Society regarding Jeremy Clarkson’s ‘low opinion’ of Meghan Markle, which appeared on page 17 in the Sun several months ago. If unchallenged, this ruling will materially affect press freedom going forward. Activist groups will now wield the power to complain on behalf of others, something that had hitherto been expressly forbidden by Ipso’s charter, effectively turning Ipso into the thought police. Twitter storms and political pressure will replace rationality, and the protection of opinions will become a relic of the past. The battle for press freedom has suffered a severe setback, and the future of free speech now hangs in the balance, says Fraser.
At 10pm on Friday night, the BBC sent out a ‘breaking news’ notification informing millions that a joke made by Jeremy Clarkson about Meghan Markle has been deemed sexist by Ipso, the press regulator. That such attention was given to a few sentences published on p.17 in a months-old article is odd, but the BBC had cottoned on to an important point: the battle for press freedom had just suffered a major setback. Hacked Off, an outfit campaigning for state regulation of the press, reacted with typical illiteracy, trumpeting: “Ipso finally upholed [sic] sexism complaint” marking “the first time in Ipso’s history that it upheld a complaint about sexism”. It is right to say that a bridge has been crossed, a defence of press freedom trampled upon. The activists have finally found a way through.
By upholding the Clarkson complaint, Ipso has torn up the previous protection expressed in its Editors’ Code: that opinion is not regulated. You’re not supposed to be able to complain on someone else’s behalf unless you have found a factual error and this a clause intended to stop Ipso being manipulated by activist groups. “Complaints can only be taken forward from the party directly affected,” ran the old rules. Had Meghan complained? If not, nothing to investigate. Ipso checks accuracy and protects individuals from press misbehaviour – but it was not set up as a thought police. It doesn’t judge taste.
The Clarkson ruling changes the rules. As of now, activists can now complain on someone else’s behalf. As of now, Ipso is indeed in the business of deciding if columns are sexist. And who do we find leading the charge in this new regime? Harriet Harman, the incoming chair of the Fawcett Society who is doing a lap of honour. Fawcett made the complaint (or, perhaps, was used by Hacked Off as a vehicle to make the complaint on behalf of women: the two groups have issued a joint statement). Ipso has, in effect, given Harman an editor’s pen, and one she is unlikely to hold back in using. If the ruling is allowed to stand (a judicial review is perhaps the only tool left to strike it down) then it has chilling new implications for every Ipso-regulated publication, including The Spectator.
What follows is complex, but it matters. The contours of free speech are decided by such technicalities.
Until now, a joke by Jeremy Clarkson would have been a matter between the newspaper and its readers. The digital age has brought informal pressure, where screengrabs allow a publication’s non-readers to vent outrage (the main commodity pushed by Twitter) and demand punishment or censorship. Jokes and satire are targeted the most, often presented as hate crimes. A trivial verbal flourish has been elevated to a heinous assault, one to be punished by the firing of the writer. Large publishers panic. From Iain Macwhirter to Kevin Myers, the mob are used to publications giving them the scalps they demand.
Ipso was designed to withstand the pressure of online mobs. It had, until now, made this clear: if a Clarkson joke offends you, or if you don’t like what the Daily Mail said about Angela Rayner or its ‘Legs-it’ cover with Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon, don’t waste your time complaining to Ipso. It only takes complaints from those referred to. It protects individuals but doesn’t do the bidding of activists. This was an iron rule, repeated time and time again.
Clarkson’s joke about Meghan whipped up a Category-A Twitter storm and 60 MPs expressed their outrage. Until now, their opinion did not count for anything. In Britain, politicians have no writ over the press. But now, that has changed.
Let’s go back to what Clarkson said. He had watched the Meghan Markle Netflix documentary. He was not a big fan.
I hate her. Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level. At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, “Shame!” and throw lumps of excrement at her.
Any Game of Thrones fan will have got the reference and those unfamiliar would have got the idea. Clarkson had a few more things to say, like that Markle used her feminine wiles to make her husband woke, etc. Were his jokes risqué? Absolutely. Was it funny? Sexist? Over the line? Here’s the point: in a free press, no outside organisation can draw that line. It’s between readers and the publications that they choose to buy. The law stipulates what is illegal, and press regulators insist upon factual accuracy. But opinions? They are not regulated in this country and have not been for 300 years. This is a fundamental point upon which free speech and press freedom depend.
The Sun did decide it was a mistake to publish. It apologised (as did Clarkson) and the piece has been purged from cyberspace. But as the Sun is now finding out, apologies only intensify a Twitterstorm: some 25,000 emails ended up being sent to Ipso about Clarkson, the most ever. This figure is of course dwarfed by the 700,000-strong readership of the Sun, but I doubt the latter wrote to Ipso. The asymmetry worked and Ipso crumbled.
In deeming Clarkson sexist, Ipso has – for the first time – imposed on newspaper columnists a line drawn by others (usually those who hate the newspaper). “A big step forward,” says Harman. It certainly is. An independent press regulator, which is supposed to defend the press and readers against Twitter storms and political interference has just succumbed to both.
Worth reading in full.
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In a happier, simpler time, this would have been a rather boring academic discussion about temperature measurements.
Today it’s part of a battle to keep the state out of our lives and be able to live free.
Pretty nuts really.
This academic discussion is being controlled and as far as I can see, discussed less (ie detail) and sensationalised more! Very nuts!
Some time in the late 1980s or very early 1990, I was on a summer holiday on a farm on Bodmin Moor. By that time, it hadn’t rained in this area for 19 weeks in a row and some of the moor farms received water supplies from tankers. That was a generally hot summer, not the five weeks of no rain with mostly lovely temperatures we had this year.
Ha, my lasting memory of Bodmin is failing my first driving test there ( steep inclines + crap clutch control = going backwards when attempting a hill start. Not great when there’s a car behind you.
) but passing second time. I miss Cornwall though.
Real experts manage to do that after passing the test. I’ve recently encountered one (and waited patiently on the pavement until he had remembered which of all these pedals are supposed to be used in what order).
My brother’s instructor used to put my brother’s cigarettes, and later his wristwatch behind the back wheel. Made for really good hill starts!
The Met Office used the “break in the clouds” explanation to explain the Heathrow “record”, ignoring criticism that by amazing co-incidence three jets landed on an unusual approach (West to East) and promptly turned on to a taxiway and blew jet exhausts over the exact spot that the temperature sensor was positioned. These Mexplanations are getting tedious. In other news, some US “records” are held by sensors positioned a few feet from a municipal incinerator, or top of a black roof or in a car-park. They served their purpose, but that purpose was not as a measure of climate, and were then re-purposed to create bogus records to fill newspaper headlines and create climate scares.
More detail on the Heathrow 2015 “record”, including site map and aircraft movements: https://clivebest.com/blog/?p=6721
Don’t know if it’s of any use but by looking at Flightradar24 playback for that day, two RAF Typhoons were operating from that base around that time: Flights CHAOS011 (reg ZJ914) and CHAOS012 (reg ZK377). After a brief exercise over the North Sea, CHAOS011 landed just after 15:10. CHAOS012 landed 15 minutes later.
Of course, it must be sheer coincidence!
A weather event is not Climate.
A normal summer is not Climate Hell.
Putting an electronic measuring device at Heathrow on tarmac, near jet engines, behind a magnifying glass, next to a fire is not science. It is fraud. Move it 5 miles to the countryside and the temp was 36C.
The entire cult of warm and cult of the changing thingy is a fraud.
I had first-hand experience of such temperature anomalies during my working life. I knew this was bs as soon as it was published.
“The Met Office distorts data and lies” is not the surprise. That would be them telling the truth
My kitchen is usually a fairly cool room since it’s north facing. But strangely enough, after I’ve cooked a roast and I leave the oven door open, the kitchen quickly warms up a bit for a while and then fairly quickly the temperature drops again.
Must be climate change – so I’d better stop cooking roasts and start eating raw insects.
All these institutions that have been hollowed out by GangGreen termites must eventually realise that trust, once destroyed, take years of effort to reestablish. Witness also the Zro Covid, Lockdown and “Vaccine” enthusiasts.
So far as the “Climate” scam is concerned, it should be remembered that accurate records for a significant number of years is the exception rather than the rule, so suggesting that some weather event is “Unprecedented” is meaningless at best.
And that is without considering the multitude of proven cases where activist “Scientists” have had their smelly little thumbs on the ‘data’.
So we have Australia’ BOM admitting that under their regime, the temperatures of the past have been ‘discovered’ to be around 1°C colder than originally recorded.
Coming back to 2022 (and before), all the recent ‘unprecedented’ temperatures such as Coningsby are blatantly and deliberately fraudulent. If we had even a few honest politicians, all these MET chancers would have been sacked, long ago.
“Global Temperature” ??? “Warmest year” ???. etc etc . But what does any of that stuff really mean? Is there really such a thing as a “global temperature? If so, how is it calculated?—– But since most of the time we recorded temperatures using thermometers at individual places around the world at different times and mostly only in wealthy western countries (USA, Europe etc), how can we know what temperatures were where we did not have extensive coverage, which was really the case most of the time and over most of the globe? —-The answer is we cannot. Then we started to get temperature data from satellites around 1979, but how can you compare thermometer readings where coverage was sparse from let’s say 1925 or 1845 to satellite data that covers almost the whole planet? —You cannot.. —–So this idea that we have a “warmest year on record” or “warmest since records began” etc is misleading, especially when it is used to promote solutions to some problem that might not even exist, or that might exist but is not much of a problem. On TV I regularly see politicians and bureaucrats, eco activists and assorted “save the planet” people latch onto elements of the unreliable temperature record, like the one this summer where a temperature of 40C was apparently recorded. This ofcourse is what is known as “cherry picking” or “confirmation bias”, where someone only looks for things that support their preconceived idea and ignore everything that doesn’t.— The temperature record of earth is a jumble of data ,adjusted here and there for various anomalies, such as the build up of towns and cities around a site where temperatures may have been recorded for the last 100 years or more, and it is known that towns and cities are warmer, sometimes by several degrees. Out of all of this clutter of guesses, assumptions, missing data and different forms of data collection we are led to believe that some “scientists” know what year was warmer than some other year, often to accuracies of hundredths of a degree, when the thermometers used were never designed for such accuracies. It is also important to bear in mind that if something warms, it does not necessarily mean humans warmed it. To claim humans have warmed something requires evidence, and since there is nothing unusual about current temperatures that would simply be an assumption, and when the assumption is motivated by the desire for certain public policy’s then what we have is a “cautionary tale”.
So either the Met Office lie by sticking to their story, or lie by giving an unbelievable excuse why they didn’t quality check it thoroughly enough?
In 2015 I happened to be in North East New Zealand, when Cyclone Pam caused extreme damage and around 11 deaths in Vanuatu and some damage to other Pacific island states. The MET (using their extreme GangGreen technology) forecasted major problems next for NE New Zealand but, fortunately this turned out to be a nothingburger.
Although we are assured that The Science is absolutely Settled, it is, in reality, anything but. At that time, Richard Betts, now Head of Climate Impacts at the MET Hadley Centre, was presumably charged by his gaffer, Dame Julia Sligo, to occasionally go onto Climate Blogs and fly the GangGreen flag.
On the then excellent Bishop Hill Blog, I pointed out the inadequacies of their forecasts for Pam, the fact that the claimed wind speed was obviously inflated and that severe tropical cyclones were entirely ‘precedented’.
Betts replied pointing out that the attribution of extreme weather arising from burning “fossil” fuels was well established, quoting the UN’s IPCC Report. To which I pointed out that the IPCC’s latest report said nothing of the kind (as contaminated as it is by GangGreen assumptions) and that his quotation was lifted directly from the “Summary for Policymakers”, which is a 100% political document.
We then heard nothing more from Betts, who is obviously not any kind of scientist, just another GangGreen charlatan.