16 Sep 2011 by Dave.

Coulson, the former Director of Information for the Conservative Party and Govt. Press Supremo, and currently under arrest, has been spreading it like manure again. It seems he left News International under a ‘Compromise Agreement‘ and continued to receive payments from his previous employer while serving as a senior employee of the Conservative Party. It has been suggested that these payments are a de-facto and thus undeclared donation to the Conservative Party. If true, this would be against the law.

The electoral funding laws are supervised by the Electoral Commission who in a story run by the Guardian seem to believe,

there was no evidence that the payments related to his political activity with the Conservative party in any way. 

This may formally be true, if somewhat incredible, given News International’s immense expense on lobbying government, however there are two further questions. Mind you, while a bit of a diversion, it reminds me of Alan Hansen’s comment about the offside law and  the ‘not interfering with play’ caveat.

“What’s he doing on the field if he’s not interfering with play?”

Coulson was working full time for the Tory Party while receiving significant payments from a media organisation that had significant commercial interest in the manifestoes and result of the 2010 General Eelection. If these payments weren’t a subsidy to the Tory party, what was he doing?

On the other hand it has to be said, that these payments were made on the basis of work he had done for News International. It is equivalent to redundancy payments.  Not everyone in this county will be familiar with compromise agreements, since they are an agreement by an employee to waive any financial rights in the circumstances of the termination of employment. Of course, not everyone in this country will be familiar with redundancy rights as many small employers will bully people into inferior dismissal terms if they are so inclined and think they can get away with it. Compromise Agreements are rarely agreed during a resignation; the employer would need some quid pro quo as it’s very rare that a resigning employee has any further claim on his ex-employer. The most common trade is a silence clause, either about business practice, which one would expect to be covered by the contract of employment, or the terms of the employment or termination contract. The latter is often because the employer doesn’t want the cost and publicity of an unfair dismissal case.  N.B. You can’t sue for unfair dismissal if you resign.

So Question No 1, what were the rights Coulson gave up in the compromise agreement?

And Question 2,  what were the confidentiality clauses agreed?

The staging of the payments, if that’s what happened,  also seems odd. Why were they staged? Were they conditional?

The Civil Service, and most employer organisations that look to use the employment contracts to protect trade secrets and their own commercial and organisational  integrity state that one needs permission to work for another employer. To these organisations, its important to understand that employees have only one employer. Did and do the Tories place this duty on their employees? If not, why not?

Voters and Tory party members need to begin to ask, who’s paying for the Tory Manifesto?

Posted in notw, hackgate, murdoch, fit and proper, law, uk, politics | No Comments »

09 Jul 2011 by Dave.

Goodbye, News of the Screws. It came as a bit of a shock to hear that Murdoch has closed the News of the World, but typical of our times that I first heard of it on Twitter. The twitterati and today’s print press are all predicting the launch of the Sun on Sunday, and now that News International doesn’t own the “Screws”, it hopes it’s free to be able to buy the outstanding public shareholding of BSkyB.

Plus ca change, plus la meme chose!

It seems that firing 200 people is a small price to pay to get hold of BSkyB.

The Government, at the time of writing, are stating that they are constrained by law from taking into account if News Corporation are ‘fit and proper’ to own the UK’s largest private broadcaster. But just because the News of the World has gone, doesn’t mean that the investigation into these crimes should or will stop. News International management and management systems permitted these acts to occur and couldn’t allegedly discover them when originally asked by the police and courts. Is this a fit and proper organisation to own BSkyB? The least the Government should do on the BSkyB takeover is delay the decision and ask Ofcom to investigate if News International is a fit and proper organisation to own BSkyB.

Furthermore, the wrong doers need to be brought to court, and if guilty punished. Part of the wrong doing is, like after the Watergate burglary, the cover up. There are allegations that police officers were paid corruptly by News International, and questions as to the direction of the Met’s early investigations.

The tsunami of public outrage is caused by the allegation that agents of News International illegally hacked a murder victim’s phone, deleted messages and hacked the phones of war heroes, their families and the families of victims of the 7/7 Al-Queda attacks in London. If they’d stuck to royalty, politicians and celebrities, then Boris Johnson’s comments that this was a storm in a teacup stirred up by the left wing media &  the Labour Party, an issue he dismissed as “Codswallop”  might have held, but this is not the case. In fact, News International’s paying off of the first twelve celebrities, authorised by their European chairman, James Murdoch, might have been, and now seems  more clearly to be a cynical attempt to close off  judicial enquiry.

So we need to ask, “What did James Murdoch know about the hacking of Milly Dowler’s, the 7/7 victim’s and the War Heroes’ and their families phones?”, when he paid off Sienna Miller and some of the other famous victims.  Was it a genuine attempt to apologise to the wronged or a cover-up?

The investigating police force in this sordid affair is London’s Metropolitan Police, which has not exactly uncovered themselves in glory. The Metropolitan Police is led by an appointed Commissioner and supervised by the Metropolitan Police Authority, whose members are appointed by Boris Johnson, the tory Mayor of London. Ken Livingstone, Labour’s candidate for Mayor next year, has 10 questions to ask Johnson about if he has acted on his view that what has become this great scandal is still “#Codswallop”. The de-facto chief executive, the Deputy Mayor for Policing, Kit Malthouse, is appointed by Johnson; he was elected to the London Assembly as a Conservative. The Tory leadership of the MPA will argue that they have no right to interfere in operational issues, but Johnson appointed both the Deputy Mayor and the Commissioner. He needs to answer Ken’s questions.

The worrying thing about Livingstone’s fears is that the Met are the only police force in the UK with such a political/democratic oversight. Given the example of the last two years, and what we are about to find out, we, as citizens, need to ask if we want any more ‘democratic’ control of the Police. The Coalition Agreement’s  Crime & Policing section proposes more of this sort of thing, with police oversight undertaken by ‘directly elected’ individuals. This must at the least be re-considered.

The actions of News International have placed the questions of personal privacy,  journalistic standards, corruption and police supervision at the centre of today’s politics.

It’s not over yet, and shouldn’t be.

Posted in notw, codswallop, hackgate, bskyb, murdoch, mayors, press freedom, fit and proper, politics | 1 Comment »