http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=611209 http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/story/0,12123,1415083,00.html Don'y say sorry ken..then the bastards win...that being The Evening Standard/Daiy Mail.
I agree with you here Matthew, never thought I'd say that! The Daily Mail is a disgusting paper, and Livingstone's criticisms of it are more than justified....
Sorry what was the reason for him saying that?? ... im a bit behind in the news and i read the top link and didnt quite understand.... sal can you explain it fleassy style please?
He did not say sorry The point of the story is .. Ken has had shit of these papers for years and years.. he happens to say something granted a bit unsavoury if he had realised before hand that the reporter was a jew. The reporter and now half the nation it seems wants a aplogy... but this imho is not needed of course groups reading this story through certain prisims will say yeah say sorry .. but take the acusation literaly .. these friggin reporters are as mean and vicious as the stereotypical Nazi gaurd.. The Daily Mail were quite fair printing what went on.. They blatantly and consciously failed to see the obvious unitention of the remark to cause offence to the jewish community...just to be overly sensitive about it all. They managed to slip in the fact that he was attending a party organised to celebrate 20 years of another politician 'comeing out' and happened to find some 'critics' to question if £4000 was a waste of tax payers money ?.. homophobic/pandering to nasty trails of thought by the readers.. of course not.
He also mentioned that the paper had been quite anti-semitic in the past, and that it would have been in the front line for collaborating with Hitler is he had won the war. Jewish groups have condemned him because Ken was speaking out against the paper because of its criticisms of him, and they feel that likening his own problems to the suffereng of the Jews cheapens the issue. That's a fair criticism, but I don't really care how the paper had personally offended Ken, his own political problems aren't that important to me. But he does highlight that the Daily Mail is continuing a trend of racism, through its early anti-semitism, to its scapegoating of asylum seekers, which is frankly disgusting....
The Daily Mail supported The British Union of Fascists in the 1930's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail I dislike a lot of ken Livingstone's hypocrisy ... for instance his taxi bill comes to something like £400 a week ... so much for the congestion charge eh? Still, in this instance he was not in in the wrong ... The Nazi war criminals always used the excuse "I was only obeying orders" and he was comparing it with the journalist's attitude of "only doing his job". The press has a lot to answer for, with it's reactionary, scare mongering reporting on issues such as immigration.
A pretty cool article I just read on it from a Londoner... Those of you outside London might not know it but our beloved Mayor, Ken Livingstone (that's not sarcasm, by the way, he genuinely is quite beloved of many of us here in the capital) is in fairly serious trouble, and rather unfairly in my opinion. Basically, Ken told a journalist from the Evening Standard to sod off (I'm paraphrasing, but that's roughly what he did) when the journalist tried to ask him some questions. Respect to the Ken for doing that because the Standard, sadly London's only "local" paper, is a shite paper. I mean really shite. To give you some idea of just how shite and nasty it is, it's owned by the same people who own the Daily Mail - Associated Newspapers. Yeah, see? That shite. Ken knows this, and has never gotten on with the Standard - they both hate each other. Any story about Ken in the Standard, 99 times out of 100, will be to slag him off. So the fact that the Standard is making such a big issue about Ken's latest antics is no surprise whatsoever - it must have felt like Christmas and their birthday all rolled into one. Because what Ken did was to tell the reporter that his paper was a nasty fascist rag and that its owners (owners of the Daily Mail too, remember) supported the Nazis back in the '30s. Which is 100% documented truth. The Mail is on record back in 1938 as saying Hitler was a great man with some really good ideas (some things never change, although these days they're not allowed to mention Hitler in this context). When the journalist pointed out to Ken that he was, in fact, Jewish Ken retorted by saying that his working for Associated was like his being a concentration camp guard. Strong stuff, indeed, but not anti-semitic, as so many people with another - completely different - axe to grind, are saying. I take it to mean that for a Jewish man to work for a company that supported the Nazis (that's the important point here) is, well, a bit wrong, to say the least. It seems to me that Ken's comparison of the Standard journalist to the sonderkommando of the concentration camps is perhaps a misjudgement only in degree rather than kind. And given the Associated's current views on things like immigration, asylum seekers and people of other religions (mainly Muslims) it's hard to rationalise it by saying Associated has changed its spots since then and been a paragon of anti-racist virtue, because it hasn't. All kinds of folk are crawling out of the woodwork now demanding apologies from Ken for his outburst; none of them are asking for the owners of the Standard to apologise, or for that matter to stop printing the crap it fobs us off with as news. Ken, to his eternal credit, is standing up for himself, refusing to apologise for saying what he regards as the truth and continuing to assert his story that the Standard and its owners are a pack of unpleasant, racist hypocrites, which they are. Anybody else would have backed down ages ago - would have been beaten into submission by the media, fortunately Ken isn't anyone else, he's Mayor of London. Make him Life Mayor, I say!
Here's Ken Livingstone's latest statement on it: There will be no apology Ken Livingstone Mayor's Statement, 22 February 2005 A week ago I said it was not my intention to apologise to the journalist from Daily Mail group or his employers. Upon a further week of reflection in which I have read everything written in the press about this controversy and after considerable debate with many Londoners I have decided to stand by that position. There will therefore be no apology or expression of regret to the Daily Mail group. To the Daily Mail group journalist I say this. You are responsible for your own actions. That you are paid by Daily Mail group to do the job you do is not a defence for your behaviour. Pursuing me along the pavement thrusting your tape recorder at me whilst repeatedly barking the same question when I had clearly indicated I did not wish to be interviewed by you is not acceptable behaviour by you or any other journalist. Indeed a member of the public behaving in this way could find themselves arrested for a breach of peace. Many other journalists will confirm I have made similar comments to them over the last twenty-four years. You are the first to complain. If you feel that my comments are too harsh or robust then you are most probably in the wrong job and certainly working for the wrong newspaper group. Whilst this journalistic technique of door stepping may be appropriate when dealing with people who do not make themselves available to the media this is not a complaint that can be levelled against myself. Every week my press conference is open to any journalist from Britain or abroad and I have never yet left a press conference before I have answered every question journalists wish to put to me. For issues that arise urgently I am invariably able to accommodate requests for information with a quote and more often than not a radio or a television interview as required. To the Daily Mail group I say that no-one in Britain is less qualified than they to complain about anti-semitism. Their papers were not, as some have reported, guilty of "a brief flirtation" with Adolf Hitler in the l930s. In truth these papers were the leading advocates of anti-semitism in Britain for half a century. Beginning a hundred years ago with their campaign to stop Jewish refugees fleeing to Britain from Russia they carried on right the way through the rise of Hitler and even after the start of World War II still felt free to peddle the lie that Germany's Jews had brought the holocaust upon themselves. I have set out in detail the record of the Daily Mail group in my formal response to the London Assembly. Whilst it is true the Mail group no longer smears Jews as bringing crime and disease to the UK it is only because they have moved on. After a decade of pandering to racism against our citizens of Black and Irish origin they have moved on and now describe asylum seekers and Muslims in similar terms. For the Mail group the victims may change but the intolerance, hatred and fear pervade every issue of the papers. What was the motive of the Mail group in whipping up this media fire storm? If insulted why did the Daily Mail group journalist or the editor of the Evening Standard not get in touch and say they thought I had gone too far? If the Daily Mail group journalist had expressed regret for his behaviour on the street I would have been happy to withdraw my comments and assure him I bore him no hard feelings. If the editor of the Evening Standard could have explained why in five years of mayoral receptions this was the first one at which they had chosen to photograph every guest as they left, I might have been persuaded by her answer. Instead the editor held the story back from the Wednesday and Thursday editions. This is rather surprising in the light of the Evening Standard's claim to be "first with the news". When the story finally appeared on Friday it was with a screaming headline claiming my words were "a race slur". In all the tens of thousands of words devoted to this story in the last two weeks no paper has been able to show that my words contravened any clause in any of the Acts of Parliament that deal with racism, or anti-semitism or that they were anti-semitic or racist. Is it the case that whilst not racist or anti-semitic my words were so offensive they should never have been uttered? Clearly the the leading Jewish newspaper the Jewish Chronicle does not think so. On February 7th 2003 they published a letter accusing Professors Hilary and Stephen Rose of being kapos (concentration camp inmates serving as guards). The Roses complained to the Jewish Chronicle and the Press Complaints Commission. The Press Complaints Commission rejected the Roses complaint on the grounds that the Jewish Chronicle had printed a letter of rebuttal on the Roses. Clearly, the Jewish Chronicle and the Press Complaints Commission did not feel that this term diminished the holocaust. If we want to see an example of an inappropriate use of the term holocaust we need look no further than the Daily Mail writer Quentin Letts who described Labour MP Andrew Dismore as "a Holocaust bore". I refer to the holocaust because it is the most extreme example of evil in my own array of moral reference points. Over the last two weeks my main concern has been that many Jewish Londoners have been disturbed by this whipped up row. I do not equate the actions of one reporter with the total abdication of responsibility shown by those who were complicit to whatever degree in the horrors of the holocaust. But I do believe that abdicating responsibility for one's actions by the excuse that "I am only doing my job" is the thin end of the immoral wedge that at its other extreme leads to the crimes and horrors of Auschwitz, Rwanda and Bosnia. I have been deeply affected by the concern of Jewish people in particular that my comments downplayed the horror and magnitude of the holocaust. I wish to say to those Londoners that my words were not intended to cause such offence and that my view remains that the holocaust against the Jews is the greatest racial crime of the 20th century. Something that has been disgraceful over these past two weeks has been the way in which the Daily Mail group have worked hand in glove with the chair of the London Assembly and his Conservative colleagues. Betraying his wider political agenda Brian Coleman has in his many appearances tried to widen this issue to include my views about the policies of the Israeli government. Given Assembly member Coleman's own record of disparaging Irish travellers, Somalis, foreign students and participants at the Notting Hill Carnival his new found interest in the sensitivities of London's minorities is impossible to believe. Now this issue has been referred to the Standards Board for England. Most Londoners will be surprised to discover that the person they chose to elect by a substantial majority last summer can be removed from office and banned from public life for five years for breaching the subsection of The Local Authorities (Model Code of Conduct) (England) Order 2001 which says that councillors "must treat others with respect". It has always been my view that respect has to be earned. To quote Andrew Alexander writing in the Daily Mail last week "Freedom of speech, if it means what it says, involves the right to irritate, annoy, dismay and shock anyone who listens. The only sensible limitations should be on speech which leads to violence, affray or disorder." This code is a threat to freedom of speech. Clearly Londoners share my view. I have lost count of the number of times I have been approached by Londoners over the last two weeks and have been urged very forcefully not to apologise. Since this row erupted we have received over 1500 letters and emails from the public. 74 per cent have expressed their support for me, with 26 per cent against—a margin of support of three to one. Not for the first time in my years in public life the views of ordinary people on the street are overwhelmingly at odds with much of the media.
