Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

27Sep/105

Housekeeping 2 – What a charmer

You'll remember the story about the man 'of Somali origin' who was arrested on suspicion of terrorist offences, labelled as a terrorist by the media... and then released without charge, to a great deal less attention than he received when it was thought he might be 'one of them'.

I looked at the Liverpool Echo, as they had done some good coverage of the story (the man had originally flown from John Lennon Airport). I know I shouldn't have looked in the comments, but I went and did, didn't I? And then I saw this charmer:

Umm... except he wasn't plotting to blow up a plane full of innocent people - he was released without charge. And why is it racist to mention that he was 'of Somali origin'? Because you just know that a pink person wouldn't get the same nudge-nudge-wink-wink treatment from the authorities if he'd been arrested under similar circumstances. "Yet again a black screams racism..." - yes, I can't imagine why, can you?

21Jun/1014

Rentaprick

Hi! In these busy credit crunch times, it's not always easy to get some prick onto the TV when you need to. Well worry no longer, because Rentaprick now offers a selection of self-important wittering talking-head cockwipes to liven up any debate, at a moment's notice.

Need some dick to come on and ruin a perfectly rational education debate by appointing himself as an expert on schooling? No problems, we'll bring you just the guy you need

to turn an otherwise interesting discussion into a self-absorbed pile of nauseating claptrap, devoid of any interest or intelligence.

We're just a phone call away. Whatever your needs - whethere you require some loud-mouthed pain in the arse to come barking along about how they're so much cleverer than you

or you just want a tedious nonentity to jabber on about their awful trolling views

we have a range of pricks to suit any budget, any time. Within seconds of your call, a motorcycle courier will pick up any miserable wankstain you need to fill a chair on a debate show, turning it from something that could provide genuine insight

into the same old jowly faces barking away at each other, reducing all debate to a series of smug wanky yaps that add nothing whatsoever to anyone's understanding.

But don't take our word for it. Listen to this testimonial from a satisfied client, Mr X of the BBC's Annoyingly Pointless Talking About Stuff Department:

"Sometimes it's late in the day, and for whatever reason you need someone so lacking in depth and yet so provocatively antagonistic that you end up wanting to headbutt the TV screen and then carve a great big X on your face with the broken glass, to remind yourself of the pain. Rentaprick can do that. With just one quick call, they sent me a complete cock who managed to wreck an otherwise worthy but unpleasantly cerebral debate, rendering it into a pulverised mess of shouty imbecile comments, instead of anything remotely approaching wit or insight. Job done. Sure, there are programmes that want celebrities who can actually offer something to the viewer - but not us. We just want the same old bunch of wankers making everything pointlessly repetitive and hateful. And let me assure you that Rentaprick can do just that."

Call us NOW. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We can destroy any legitimate discussion with a self-important prick who is mystifyingly invited back time and time again, despite never providing any meaningful contribution whatsoever. All we ask in return is that you slaughter a goat, drink the fresh blood from a silver cup, and join us in a mass for Satan himself. What could be fairer than that? Exactly. Those Question Time seats aren't going to warm themselves, my friends...

29Mar/104

PCC discovers ominous milk tooth

It's a bit of a cliche to describe the PCC as toothless, or a "toothless bulldog", or ineffectual, or feeble, or a cargo cult construction, or pointless, or a verisimilitude of regulation that doesn't actually do the regulating it claims to, or meek, or a mild-mannered knee-knocking milquetoast knocking on the dragon's door and asking it to please not set fire to the village again, or a waste of time, or hopeless, or like trying to fight off a knife-wielding maniac with a cream bun, or depressingly predictable, or like asking footballers to decide whether they were offside or not rather than a referee, or useless, or not fit for purpose, or a man with a bucket and spade trying to clear away the Sahara, or dismal, or shit. All of this is a cliche. And wrong. Well some of it's wrong.

Anyway, today it appears to have found a milk tooth, with what might turn out to be a rather radical decision, upholding a complaint against Rod Liddle. Then again, it might also be a decision that augurs very ominously for some of the rest of us. But more of that later.

In what will hopefully never be called 'Goat currygate', Liddle typed in a late-night Friday evening rant on his Spectator blog saying that "the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community". He was wrong. Lots of people got annoyed by him saying this; others got annoyed that people got annoyed by it.

The Spectator did attempt a defence against the complaint under Clause 1 (accuracy), using as its sources the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. Scoff at that choice if you like, but the key thing is that these articles mentioned 'accusations' and 'proceedings' rather than convictions. An important distinction when you're trying to claim proof for an assertion like the one Liddle made. Have a look at Five Chinese Crackers's stellar post 'Rod Liddle - more racist than the BNP?' from 2009 for a good analysis.

Yes, it was a poisonous, vile little rant from an awful little man; but the important point to make is that he was wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, he may be a polemicist, and yes, he may be trying to provoke rather than inform, and yes yes yes, all of that. But he said something was true when it wasn't, something which could bring about a misleading perception of one racial group in society. Toxic, destructive and dirty. But also wrong.

Interestingly, the PCC have previously ruled against complainants who have accused newspapers of inaccuracies vis-a-vis comment pieces, saying that because these are columns, they won't be taken seriously as sources of factual information by readers. The PCC said last June:

While the column had been phrased in stark terms - the journalist had made one claim which was prefaced by "the fact is", for example - the author's claims would nonetheless be recognised by readers as comment rather than unarguable fact.

So is this a sea change from the PCC, then? Or is it simply a case of there being two different adjudications in two slightly different articles? A blogger in that instance had complained about articles regarding gay adoption, so it's a similar complaint about potentially discriminatory inaccuracy. It's a similar argument: present something as a fact in a column, reader complains about accuracy.

There is another possibility: that if the Spectator had defended its article by dint of it being an opinion piece, rather than on factual grounds, it may well have succeeded. But it didn't: as well as the factual evidence they used to defend it, they  said that Liddle's article was a blog, and that meant that the factual dissection could take place in the comments rather than in the article itself.

Now, blogs as such - like this one, or yours, or any - aren't covered by the PCC at present. But I wonder if this decision might be leading us up that path. Look back to November of last year when the PCC's Baroness Luscombe said:

Rather, a system of self-regulation (such as exists by the PCC for newspapers) would be more appropriate, if any bloggers wished to go down that route.

And now, here's the PCC dealing with a complaint about a 'blog', or at least what the Spectator called a blog rather than a paid column by a salaried journalist which happens to support comments and be regularly updated by the authors themselves.

I wonder if there might be some mission-creep going on, or whether we're in the foggy world of "What is blogging and what is journalism?" which, frankly, I'd rather not go down again if it's all the same to you, for the sake of my sanity. Perhaps I am a little paranoid and there's nothing in this. But perhaps the line between 'blogs' on sites like the Spectator's and elsewhere is a little more blurry. Who decides who should be covered by the PCC and who shouldn't? It's voluntary as far as I am aware, but voluntary so that regulation isn't enforced.

At present, we don't subscribe to the PCC or an equivalent regulatory body. Should we? Who should and who shouldn't? Does it make you a better blog if you are? But who can afford the time to answer dozens of PCC complaints that might arrive in your inbox, possibly vexatiously from people who simply don't like you, without the time and resources of a professional publishing outfit to do it?

Some might say the bloggers who rejoice in Liddle's discomfort the most might want to look over their shoulders, because they could suffer the same kind of thing themselves soon. I don't think it's quite time to panic. Not just yet. But as the delineation between the big shots and the little shots gets ever more confused, might the pressure not grow for there to be a regulatory body for blogs? And might, then, those of us who cheerily demand teeth for the PCC be walking into a ruddy great bear trap?

So has the PCC found a tooth? And is it ominous for bloggers? I'm not so sure, on either case. Liddle has been correctly told off, but it's not so much a stinging slap on the wrist but a wagging finger. Hmm. For now, I can't help being delighted that Liddle's been made to look like the odious little man he is.

Will it make a difference to his output? I should cocoa. It might make him think twice. Will there be an apology, a correction, anything like that? We'll see. The PCC has no powers to enforce one. Remember, it's the 'shame' of being ruled against that is meant to be such a big deterrent from getting things wrong (not just wrong by mistake, but let's make it clear this Liddle's post was wrong, misleading and highly offensive). Let's see how much shame the Spectator suffers, if any. And then let's see how worried we should be.

3Mar/1012

My BBC plea

Seeing as we're all coming to the BBC with our own personal shopping lists for things that we think need to be changed, or amended, or scrapped, or whatever, I thought I'd bring along mine. It just goes to show we're all different and we all have different views.

Mine's quite simple though. All I want is one thing. I've narrowed down my choices to just a single plea. It's not even something I think is particularly controversial, and while it wouldn't save that much money, I think it would make the BBC a much nicer place altogether.

Never let Kelvin MacKenzie on again. Not on radio, not on TV, not anywhere. Ever.

There, that should be simple enough, shouldn't it? He's not exactly the sort of cove who brings about loving adulation at the best of times, is he? This post by Robin Brown ably demonstrates just what people thought of his cheeky-chappie barking at the Beeb over on Newsnight last night (I think it may be on the iPlayer, if you can face it ) - why put him on the fucking telly at all? Or the radio, or anywhere? Does he ever say anything remotely interesting, or valuable? How he's managed to carve out some kind of career as a Littlejohn-lite "he's a cunt, but he's quite an affable cunt, isn't he?" pundit popping up everywhere to rabbit on about anything and everything is beyond me. Is there anyone who sits at home and says: "Ah good, it's MacKenzie on Newsnight, or Question Time, or whatever BBC programme he's managed to weasel his way onto this week, I can't wait. There's going to be some really reasoned and intelligent input from him, and make no mistake."?

Surely not. If there is, they're beyond help. What kind of place has the BBC become when this jowly bumgrape is the go-to guy when you need a bluff cockney geezer to cut through the crap and 'tell it like it is'? Except he doesn't tell it like it is; he comes out with a miserably misdirected salvo of slime aimed at entirely the wrong direction, fighting against the usual PC bogeymen. If I wanted to hear shit like that I'd buy the Sun or read one of Littlejohn's books. Why the fuck should it be on the BBC? For balance? Balance against what, humanity?

I know the two major arguments against this policy of letting MacKenzie fade into obscurity and rotting away on Sky, where I'm sure they'll be delighted to hear his inane ranting rather than anyone with a real fucking brain talking about anything. The first is that not letting MacKenzie on would be a form of censorship. Balls to that. There are about 60 million people in Britain who don't go on Newsnight or Question Time every week; it would simply be making him one of them.

If you must have some kind of ogrish prick coming on to provide a 'counterpoint', then let it be someone else. Grab some shouty landlord out of a rural pub and bring him on instead. It couldn't be worse. Nothing could be worse. MacKenzie is the nadir of all this. Someone, somewhere thinks he's good value, but that's bollocks. To imagine that he's somehow the voice of the anti-PC common man, as some Tristran at the BBC possibly does, shows complete contempt for working class people, and everyone in the country. MacKenzie doesn't speak for anyone except MacKenzie.

The other argument is one I have a little more time for, but I think it's one that gives a little too much credit to the BBC. It goes like this: the reason why MacKenzie gets selected for these things is that he's your bogeyman; he's exactly the kind of chippy jellied-eels-in-a-pint-glass hatemonger that leftie-liberal-wishy-washy bastards like you would rather piss on than help out of a burning building - and yes, there is a kind of point to that. I would be secretly delighted if I thought that bringing MacKenzie on was a deliberate plot to make liberals so angry and annoyed that they rose up and did something; or that he's so witless and offensive that he discredits the counterpoint arguments that he's trying to make, and that's exactly why he's been chosen. I wish that were the case, I really do, but I don't think it is. I just think someone, somewhere, thinks he's good fun, and he can talk 19 to the 12, and he's looked at fondly by working-class people (except those in Liverpool, I might add) and therefore he's worth having on TV programmes.

Well, he isn't. He's a piece of shit. Always has been, always will be; it's never going to change. Every single time I see his sneery jowls wobbling with the sheer hatefulness of what's coming out of his smelly gob, I get the urge to destroy the TV, the people responsible for the programme he's on, and everyone who ever decided it was in any way a good idea to invite him onto anything ever. If the BBC really do want to win over hearts and minds in the weeks and months ahead - and god knows they need to - then they'll win me over straight away by telling Kelvin "thanks, but no thanks". Or better still "Fuck off, twatface - you know where the fucking door is". They won't, but I like to think they might. Or might want to, anyway.

15Feb/1032

Dirty thieving bastards

I'm writing this post in the hope that the dirty thieving bastard scumbag sons-of-bitches at legal-sleaze.com (please don't visit the site - the fuckers don't deserve any traffic of any kind whatsoever; and it's full of adverts and will slow your computer down) will chimp-mindedly go and copy it word for word and put it on their site, just as they have done with every other fucking post I've written in the past few days. Every. Single. Post.

Here's the thing. I don't mind if people ask, and they want my posts to put on their own commercial sites, so long as they give me a link back. I've done so before with Liberal Conspiracy, New Statesman and Anorak. Happy to do so. Don't mind at all. So long as it's the odd post here and there, every now and then. But the scum at legal-sleaze.com have decided they can't even be fucked to do that - they'd rather just C&V the entirety of someone else's work - presumably because they haven't got any fucking ability to write anything entertaining or interesting of their own, and because they've got no fucking manners at all. I mean, look at this, in their 'humor' section:

Don't they look exactly the same as posts I did over the weekend? It's one thing to nick the odd post - we can all overlook that - but the whole fucking blog? That really takes the fucking biscuit. So here's a challenge to legal-sleaze.com - if you want to use every single post off someone else's blog on your ad-heavy site without asking them permission, occasionally even pretending it's your own work by saying it was written by 'admin' rather than by me, you'd better be prepared to be kicked in the balls. Go on, stick this fucking post up, saying what a shower of total cunts you are. Go on. I dare you. I fucking double dare you.

You know what? I pity you. I feel sorry for you that you don't have the talent, or skill, or simple ability to work hard at something, to do it for yourself. You'd much rather just use other people's hard work - believe it or not, writing this shit three or four times a day takes time that could be spent doing more productive or interesting things - and then plonk it all on your site, copying everything down to the related posts, which aren't even tremendously related. I feel sorry for people who don't have the ability to write anything interesting themselves, and would rather harvest other people's output for use on their site, because they're lazy, and noncreative, and probably smell of wee. There! There, I've said it! Now you'll be angry!

Two years' work, this fucking blog. Don't you dare think you can just go and copy it all, and I won't get upset. Fuck you. Fuck you, and all your friends, and everyone you've ever met, and your families, and everyone that knows them as well. Fuck everyone you bump into in the street today. Fuck all of them. Fuck you, most of all. Jesus, it's not even as if I don't understand; we all need to get a bit of content from somewhere, sometimes. But harvesting the entire output of a blogger, just because you can't think of anything to write yourself? Fuck you in the eye. If you think I'm good enough to put on your site, you should think I'm good enough to write a polite email to, asking if you can put posts on your site.

And do you know what? If you had done that, I might have said yes. But no - you couldn't even be fucked to do that. You couldn't be fucked to bother with any kind of interaction with another human being. That would be too much fucking effort for you. You fucking piss-drinking slags! Take my content down now, you fuckers, and we'll leave it at that. Keep nicking it, and I'll just have to get nasty with you.

*update* The stupid fuckers must be doing it automatically, because...

...and it's on their front page as well.

18Jan/104

The Liddle Defence

He's doomed. He's finished. And it's his own fault.

Ever since Rod Liddle started getting so near the knuckle he'd gone down to the marrow, people have been defending him. You see racism everywhere where it isn't there, they say. He isn't racist, they say. It's not racist to be ignorant about crime, they say. It's against freedom of speech to want someone more skilful than this boorish twit from being a national newspaper editor, they say.

And now? Now he's left with his own feeble wafer-thin defence. Vile and racist things were posted to internet forums from his password-protected account, yet his story is they weren't put there by him, and he still carried on being a member of the forums and not asking for posts to be removed under his username, nor deleted them himself seeing as he had the fucking password and it was his account, nor switched username... well you can believe all that if you like, but god bless you if you do. There is a flimsy, teensy-weensy possibility, after all.

Go and have a laugh about the jokes about Jews being burnt at Auschwitz, you'll love it! Still not racist enough for you? Still a big leftie witch-hunt? How about calling Turks 'semi-house trained Muslim savages'? That one tickle you? No? Still thinking it's all a bit conspiracy against the big cuddly uncle? How about 'niggermeat'? Do you think that's a hilarious and clever word? Do you? Still not racist somehow? Do me a fucking favour. Whoever wrote that should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves as a human being. Even if he didn't write them - and there's a teensy-weensy possibility he didn't - he let them stay up on the site, under his username. He's gone. He's doomed.

Props to Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy for digging into the sewer and finding the really unpleasant examples, which the Mail on Sunday couldn't bring to its readers at the breakfast table.

It's a good investigation by the Mail, though with some caveats. Obviously, Liddle is referred to as a 'former Today editor' despite losing the job several years ago, just to get the BBC reference in first. Second, they complain about Liddle having a go at black-only organisations, which is a bit rich when you consider Richard Littlejohn was doing exactly the same in their own daily paper on Friday - and getting it entirely wrong. And finally, the story attracts some delightful comments like:

His language is appalling but his sentiments are spot on. They are not racialist but commonsense.
- Mike, Heraklion,Crete, 17/1/2010 12:02

How about the burning Jews joke, Mike? That one 'spot on' as well?

20Oct/0910

Nick Griffin’s weaselly voice

No doubting what's going to be the star of Question Time this week - Nick Griffin's weaselly voice.

I have to admit I hadn't really heard it very much until earlier today, when he popped up on the radio to whine about how the BNP are 'non-PC' (that's 'non-PC' in the sense of 'actually being racist', I think) and why it was well within their rights to use images of Winston Churchill and a (Polish!*) Spitfire in their election communications.

I've said before how I don't think there's anything to fear from Griffin being invited onto Question Time - and, as I wrote earlier, the BNP love to be victims. The Griffinfuehrer would love to walk into the QT studios covered in freshly-chucked eggs and claim that 'the Left' was trying to silence debate. He loves playing the victim as much as all racists do and will make the most of anyone trying to physically stop him from attending the broadcast. That in turn will bring even more attention to the debate - which, let's remember, is Question Time; not Griffin Time - whereas it would be better for it to slip by, as every other episode of the programme generally does, rather than it being a big deal.**

And when I heard him on the radio earlier, I thought: hang on a minute. He sounds rubbish. Not just the content of what he says - that's objectionable enough, of course, but I had expected that - but there was something inherently ridiculous about the way he sounded. It's like those days when Gerry Adams was on telly and the pointless broadcasting rules (let's not forget the right can 'silence debate' just as stupidly as the left) make him look like someone out of a 1970s dubbed martial arts film, albeit beardy and Irish. When you finally heard his real voice you thought to yourself: Oh, how dull.

And it's similar with Griffin. The BNP thrives on a bit of mystique, if you can call it that. They love not just being victims but also the idea that they're a bit naughty. Do you know what I mean? It's the 'No-one likes us, we don't care' attitude. But once their leader turns out to be a whiney twerp who sounds like a very tiny moped over-revving at traffic lights to try and overtake a milk float - the only other public figure I can think of with such a laughably terrible voice is Mike Tyson, but his job was never to present political statements - some of that toughness and mystique will fade away.

Griffin's nothing special. Sure, he's private-school educated, went to Cambridge and had a clever idea to try and mask the BNP's inherent racism and cruel streak for minorities with a load of specious waffle about disenfranchised working classes - but I can't help wondering if keeping him out of the limelight has done the BNP a bit of a favour. All the enormous potholes in his logic notwithstanding, his presentation is pretty pisspoor. His weaselly voice makes everything he says sound like a rather irate mosquito bubbling with rage, not an insightful politician trying to speak for anyone other than himself.

Will this all backfire, and Griffin produce a sparkling display of rhetoric that will delight the QT audience, and the wider TV audience? I doubt it. Probably what will happen is that there'll be a bit of disruption before, maybe even during, and possibly after. Griffin wants that. He wants to get the headlines for being the stoical defender of free speech, attacked by all sides - because the truth is that he's a whiney bastard, a racist and a fool, who looks like an idiot and sounds like an idiot. It's great to protest about him, but let's not give him what he wants. The public can see him for who he is - and what he is.

* The Griffinmeister later claimed this was a deliberate move to celebrate the role of Polish pilots in the Second World War. Which is of course absolute toss.
** "Aha!" you might well say. "Then why are you writing this? Won't your impenetrably dull blog contribute to a sense of anticipation about the tubby bigot's appearance on Thursday night?" - to which I say, I can see where you're coming from on this one, but no. So much noise is already being created about this matter, and I think a lot of it is needlessly panicky; that awful turd turning up on the QT panel isn't going to be the end of the world, and we mustn't get ourselves into a tizzy about it. Chill out. Think of some nice images. Kittens. Puppies. Racists dying in horrific accidents. See? You're feeling better already.

15Oct/090

Why I’m not worried about Griffin

So, that one-eyed racist bastard Nick Griffin is appearing on Question Time tonight next week. So many people seem to be worrying about what his appearance might mean; they're worried that he'll come across well, that he'll sparkle in the debate and outshine the other panelists.

I don't worry so much. Sure, he's highly educated, intelligent and very good at debating - that's how he became leader of the odious BNP, and why his mission is to veil his party's inherent racism and hatred with sophistry and weasel words.

But this is Question Time for heaven's sake. Who watches that shit any more? It's one of the many reasons why people don't like politics at all - all those stuffed suits blethering on and on with so little clarity and ability to relate to ordinary people; with the audience perpetually (regardless of the Government) honking like seals to whatever the opposition politicians say, because it's easier to make promises when you're not at the controls, and it's easier to get angry when it's not your lot who are in charge.

I mean, I like politics. I'm interested in news and current affairs. But I think Question Time is a miserably outdated format, the 'town hall meeting' where candidates have come to bring their cleverness to the proles. This is the kind of thing that happened before television, which really ought to have dreamed up some better way of reflecting politics and debate than to wheel on the usual suspects from the parties which are widely rejected by the people - plus a token joker from somewhere or other, Will Young or some other atrocity like that - and tell us that that's as good as it's going to get.

Griffin won't change that. He won't reach out to the working class in a way others can't - he's a private schoolboy who went to Cambridge for one thing. And those extra viewers who turn up to watch him because he's on will have pretty much binary views of him anyway - some like me will think he's a disgusting face of evil; others will think he's standing up for ordinary people. Not a great deal of that is going to change when we find out his opinions on the budget deficit, though I assume it might get some idiots on the right sparking up with their "Aha, he's left-wing really" bullshit again.

And it's not the Nick Griffin Show. It's a fairly bland format which doesn't make any one person the star - and it certainly shouldn't if that one person is Griffin. By all means let him have his say - there's been plenty of debate this week about 'freedom of speech' and that applies to appalling scumbags like him as much as anyone else - but let's not think we need to have someone up there arguing specifically against him, because we don't. Anyone with half a brain thinks the BNP are racist, unpleasant, dangerous and damaging; Griffin will be in the minority, unless he's up there with John Denham.

Yes. John Denham, who - and remember for a minute if you will that this is a man representing a Labour Government - decided to target white people and tell them that immigration, not his Government, was responsible for them not getting a job. Sound like anyone we know, who might be on the Question Time panel soon? Well see if you can spot the dog whistles in this:

"Work has changed, migration may have changed the communities, people feel that there a lot of competition for social housing and other resources in the community."

(It's those dirty foreigners coming over here, and do you know they go straight to the front of the housing queue? Mm, yes!)

And though the rest isn't in direct quotes from Denham, you can see what the message from the Government is by the way in which the BBC and the Daily Star have covered it. BBC:

Many of the areas to be targeted are predominantly white and working class where traditional jobs have gone amid dramatic social changes.

Some have seen a rise in far-right political activity or long-term anti-social behaviour problems.

Others have seen a collapse in trust in local authorities and services and resentment over the arrival of Eastern European workers.

Star:


Families believe they are being treated unfairly compared to the migrants who have flocked to Britain from the EU and further afield.

Labour is trying to outflank the BNP by trying to listen to racists and understand their pain. I don't want to understand racists or turn them around, nor do I want to win their hearts and minds by not telling them it's bullshit that foreigners go to the front of the housing queue, or by not telling them that the reason they can't get a job is because the economy's fucked and it isn't anything to do with the fact that a few Poles have turned up. There's a whole load of dishonesty going on, and it's not just the likes of Griffin who are perpetuating the myths - the Government, a bloody Labour Government, has decided to give racists a nice pat on the head and tell them their fears are justified.

So who should the left really be complaining about? Griffin on Question Time, or Dog-Whistle Denham?