The S*n's attempted hatchet job on Richard Burgon is spectacularly idiotic

Let's start with a fact that everyone should know. The S*n is a despicable hard-right propaganda rag that nobody should read. They have no respect for the truth or basic human decency. If they decide to attack you for any reason, they will print lie after lie to smear you, even if you've just survived a horrific football stadium disaster at the hands of a negligent police force.

On evening after The S*n mocked a footballer with black ancestry by comparing him to a gorilla and attacked the city of Liverpool on the eve of the Hillsborough disaster, hacks at The S*n decided to turn their fire on the Labour MP and Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon.

The S*n's political editor Tom Newton Dunn attacked Burgon for supposedly joining "a heavy metal band that delights in Nazi symbols". Everything about the story is fact-averse nonsense.

Burgon hasn't joined the (not very famous) band Dream Troll, they're actually some of his old heavy metal mates from his teenage years in Leeds. He still knocks about with them now that he's an MP and they invited him to sing on one track for their latest album.

The band are not Nazi sympathisers in any way.

The cited "Nazi symbols" in the S*n article relate to Dream Troll's "We Sold Our Souls For Rock n' Troll" album cover.

It is so obviously a tribute to the legendary 1975 Black Sabbath album "We Sold Our Souls For Rock n' Roll" it's ridiculous. (judge for yourself).

Before they went to print The S*n hacks were sent a copy of the Black Sabbath album cover, but they denied that it was relevant to their story and published their misleading hatchet job regardless 

The S*n even got rentaquote Tory MP Charlie Elphicke to put his name to a load of sanctimonious drivel criticising Richard Burgon for hanging out with his old mates, calling it a "terrible misjudgement", accusing him of "sending the wrong message" and demanding that he "distance himself from this band as soon as possible".

That lot would be sanctimonious enough in its own right, but it comes from a guy who Tweeted furious condemnation of anti-fascist protesters, but said nothing to criticise the actual fascists they were opposing.

When picking a guy to condemn someone for his old mates' totally made-up fascist sympathies, it's probably best not to pick a guy who (like a lot of other Tories) is clearly a lot more sympathetic to extreme-right fanatics than those who oppose them.

A badge of honour

Burgon is a target for hacks at The S*n because he's one of the few
MPs who criticise the ruinous neoliberal economic dogma that
Rupert Murdoch and The S*n endlessly propagandise in favour of.

Anyone with any sense will know that Burgon and his old heavy metal mates have no extreme-right sympathies, and that the S*n story is a woefully misleading hatchet job that was still published despite the idiocy of it being pointed out to them before it went to print.

The problem is that an awful lot of idiots read hard-right propaganda rags* and allow themselves to be influenced by this kind of spiteful and ridiculously dishonest hatchet job.

Even if gullible people have been convinced into hating Richard Burgon by this smear-job, it's quite telling that this piss-weak fabricated nonsense is the best they can come up with to attack him.

If this embarrassingly lame rubbish is the worst they can sling at him, that just goes to show that he must be a pretty good guy that they couldn't find anything else.

Additionally, the fact that Burgon still knocks about with the mates he's known since he was a teenager, rather than going out on junkets with lobbyists and corporate executives in his spare time like a lot of other MPs do, is another quite strong indicator that he's a pretty decent bloke.

Burgon should see this embarrassingly lame fact-free character attack from bitter black-hearted hacks at The S*n as a real badge of honour. 

Burgon's response

Richard Burgon posted a response to the hatchet job on his Facebook page. Here's an extract.

"When The Sun hates you and what you stand for, they'll come at you. That's not right, but it's what The Sun does to people like me who have different views and principles to those of Rupert Murdoch, Kelvin MacKenzie and the rest of them.

But The Sun should leave my mates out of it. They are not politicians and they shouldn't have their lives intruded upon in this way. They are mates and they will always be my mates. In places like Leeds, we stick together.

The Sun doesn't get that. They'll make up stories about innocent people dying at Hillsborough and not care.

They'll attack trade unionists.

They'll attack police officers for getting a lunch break.

They'll attack immigrants and asylum seekers.

They'll attack people who are looking for work and people who can't work because they're ill.

Don't ever let The Sun become "The Voice of Britain" - because if it does, we will all become victims of the hate of those who run the show at The Sun." 

Boycott the S*n

On the 28th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster it's worth reiterating that no true football fan would ever touch a copy of the S*n or be seen dead sharing links to their website on social media. How could anyone imagine that The S*n wouldn't have printed the same kind of disgusting lies if it had been their club that had lost 96 fans to appalling police negligence that day?

Even if you don't like football, there's still no excuse for supporting Rupert Murdoch's disgusting hard-right propaganda empire by actually paying money to read the utterly misleading bile he's intent on spoon feeding his readers, or giving him free publicity by sharing links to The S*n website.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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* = Reading a tabloid newspaper has a worse effect on your English language skills than not reading a newspaper at all!

Amber Rudd didn't even bother looking at the evidence before refusing the Orgreave inquiry

On the 18th of June 1984 police launched an unprovoked mounted charge against striking miners at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire. The so-called "Battle of Orgreave" has been mired in conspiracy ever since.

The inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster highlighted the fact that several police officials who had been involved in the Hillsborough cover-up had also been involved at Orgreave. This revelation hardly seems surprising given that the two incidents both included acts of mass perjury by police officers, deliberate victim-blaming, attempted cover-ups, interference by the Tory government and mainstream media collusion.

Orgreave provided one of the most famous examples of mainstream media manipulation in British political history. The BBC News footage broadcast into millions of homes that night reversed the events of the day to show striking miners throwing stones at the police followed by the mounted police charge. The evidence is absolutely clear that the mounted charge came first and was unprovoked, then the stone-throwing came afterwards as an attempted fightback against extreme and unprovoked police violence. However despite the repeated revelations that the BBC News team had reversed the events of the day in order to paint miners in a negative light, just like with Hillsborough, there are still people out there to this day who insist on believing the mainstream media's distorted victim-blaming version of events.

A former Merseyside police officer who had been drafted in at Orgreave claimed that South Yorkshire police had been "anticipating trouble and in some ways relishing it and looking forward to it" and that when the violence erupted "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was just seeing police officers attack people. These were people on the ground and even if they weren't doing anything – just walking away – police officers had their batons and they were just hitting people".

Despite having instigated the violence themselves, the police then attempted to prosecute 95 miners for rioting and violent disorder, but the trial collapsed when it became clear that much of the evidence presented by police was fabricated.

At the time Michael Mansfield QC called the malicious attempted prosecution "the worst example of a mass frame-up in this country this century", while the miners' solicitor Gareth Peirce claimed collusion between the objectives of the police and Thatcher's government by saying the malicious prosecution had been launched in order to "to make a public example of people, as a device to assist in breaking the [miners'] strike".

In June 1991 South Yorkshire Police paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution. No police officers were ever prosecuted for any of these offences.

In 2015 a review of court papers from the malicious trial of Orgreave miners by the Independent Police Complaints Commission found "evidence of excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers".

In May 2016 the PCC for South Yorkshire Alan Billings admitted that police conduct at Orgreave had led to a longstanding high level public mistrust towards the police in the region and claimed that the battle was the closest the UK had ever come to having "a politicised police force" acting as a paramilitary wing of the government.

It was then revealed that Margaret Thatcher and her Tory cabinet had attempted to intervene in the malicious Orgreave prosecutions in order to speed them up despite Thatcher's own assurances lies to parliament that "it would be quite wrong for politicians to interfere in such matters".

Despite ever mounting pressure for an inquiry into Orgreave (especially the fabricated evidence during the malicious prosecution, the attempted cover-up and the links with the Hillsborough disaster), Theresa May managed to stall it until she was anointed Prime Minister by her fellow Tory MPs, leaving the job of refusing to hold an inquiry to her successor Amber Rudd.

Rudd's refusal of an inquiry led Labour MP and Shadow Lord Chancellor Richard Burgon to claim that "the Conservative refusal of an Orgreave Inquiry is not about protecting the police of the past - it's about concealing orders and interference from the Thatcher Government".

In the week following Amber Rudd's refusal to hold an inquiry into Orgreave the Guardian revealed that she hadn't even bothered to review the evidence collected by the IPCC, nor the evidence held by South Yorkshire Police. The Home Office then flatly refused to detail what evidence Rudd had actually reviewed (if any) before making her decision to torpedo the expected inquiry.

It's absolutely extraordinary that Rudd could have decided that there was no grounds for an inquiry without even bothering to request or review two fundamental tranches of evidence. In fact it looks an awful lot like vindication of Richard Burgon's accusation that the Tories are still playing self-serving party politics.

The released cabinet papers have already demonstrated that Margaret Thatcher was intent on playing politics with the justice system by pressurising those who were conducting the malicious Orgreave prosecution to hurry it up, and now Amber Rudd is demonstrating that even after 32 years the Tories are still intent on playing party politics with the justice system by refusing to hold an inquiry into the undeniably appalling and unlawful police conduct at Orgreave.

What you can do ...

If you believe that Amber Rudd's decision to refuse an inquiry is completely unacceptable then please consider signing this petition.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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