Salon.com > Barry Neild

British xenophobia on the rise

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:17:00 +0000

LONDON, UK — At the Bestco International supermarket on central Edgware Road, British customers can stock up on staples of Twinings tea and HP sauce. Muslims can buy freshly butchered halal chicken, while homesick Poles can buy distinctly non-halal pork kielbasa imported from Silesia.

Browsing local store shelves offers a simple way to gauge the ethnic mix of any London neighborhood. With its eclectic range of East European and Middle Eastern fare, Bestco is typical for catering to the various nationalities that have recently flocked here to forge new lives.

Unscientific as they are, such snapshots reflect a more detailed picture that emerged last month when the government published the results of its first census in a decade. It was a moment in which Britain looked at itself in the mirror — and barely recognized what it saw.

8 shocking takeaways from the UK media ethics inquiry

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 21:00:00 +0000

  LONDON, UK — A staid courtroom may seem a world away from the glamour of Tinseltown, but in many ways Britain's Leveson inquiry into media ethics was not unlike a Hollywood blockbuster.

Commissioned by Prime Minister David Cameron in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal at the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World tabloid, the independent judicial probe by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson had a multi-million dollar budget and an all-star cast with performances from the likes of Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller.

The investigation delivered its findings on Nov. 29. As with most modern movies, it was too long, featuring 378 separate testimonies. But it had a riveting plot with startling revelations about the pervasive influence of Britain's press, and witness performances that ranged from tear-jerking to hilarious.

Ultimately, just like the latest movie releases, it failed to deliver what it promised. Its inconclusive ending left audiences feeling dissatisfied and opened up the depressing possibility of a sequel.

Sex abuse scandal rocks BBC

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:38:00 +0000

Here is the BBC news: The UK’s leading broadcaster is in a state of turmoil after one of its legendary celebrities was exposed as a predatory sex offender, a revelation critics say undermines the public trust it needs to safeguard its future.

The alleged crimes of Jimmy Savile, a radio DJ and television personality who died last year, would be enough to prompt widespread outrage and revulsion under any circumstances. Police have described him as a “sexual predator” who may have raped or molested dozens of underage girls.

But Savile’s behavior is seen as especially scandalous because he was a prominent children’s entertainer whose status afforded him unsupervised access to a near-endless supply of potential victims. To make matters worse, it’s alleged senior figures at the BBC who were aware of his predilections chose to turn a blind eye.

The dark accounts of Savile’s assaults over four decades from the late 1950s have prompted claims of a wider culture of sexual harassment at the BBC after several female personalities recounted how their complaints about being molested were treated as a joke.

British spy agency feeling shaken, not stirred

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 14:45:00 +0000

He may have held a license to kill for 50 years — but in the chiseled form of actor Daniel Craig, James Bond has never looked better. If only the same could be said for his real-life counterparts.

Friday has been named James Bond Day to mark half a century to the day since Sean Connery first brandished his Walther PPK revolver onscreen, and movie theaters worldwide will screen “Skyfall,” 007’s latest big-screen outing, in coming weeks.

But while the rest of the world revels in hoary old Bond clichés, staff in the corridors of MI6 — the organization whose officers and agents are charged with safeguarding Britain from foreign threats — are likely to be too shaken and stirred by their own problems to join the fun.

Hit by a series of allegations that threatens to disrupt its clandestine operations, the British spy agency — officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) — is currently undergoing one of the most troubling periods of its hundred-year existence.

Prince Harry, popular as ever?

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:13:00 +0000

LONDON, UK — Here’s a fun game to play: Try to imagine a scandal Prince Harry can’t shrug off.

Far from destroying his reputation, saucy cell-phone snaps of him playing strip billiards in Las Vegas earlier this month made many believe the third in line to the British throne to be cooler than ever.

It wasn’t his first time to have embarrassed his family with an indiscretion that captured global attention — or emerged even more popular.

Now there can be very few people with an internet connection who aren’t familiar with Harry’s torso since the gossip site TMZ published fuzzy photos of the young royal baring all while cavorting with scantily clad women in a hotel suite.

Although the pictures stirred media outrage at home and a somewhat farcical debate about whether British newspapers should refrain from publishing photographs that everyone has already seen, many reacted by showing support instead of scorn.

Phone-hacking charges approach Downing Street

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:41:00 +0000

LONDON, UK — Prime Minister David Cameron is under growing pressure from the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal after prosecutors today brought criminal charges against seven journalists and a private detective, including two people with whom Cameron is particularly close: Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson.

Coulson was Cameron’s communications chief until the scandal prompted his resignation last year. Brooks, the former chief executive at the newspaper’s publisher News International is a close friend. Both face charges connected to the accessing of messages to Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old schoolgirl who was murdered after her disappearance in 2002. Brooks and Coulson will be prosecuted for “conspiring to intercept communications without lawful authority” between October 2000 and August 2006, during which time both served as editors of The News of the World.

CERN’s expensive science

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 13:29:00 +0000

London, UK — Nearly four years after the launch of one of the largest and most expensive experiments ever conceived — to prove or disprove the existence of the “God particle” — scientists this week gathered to make a heavily hyped announcement:

They’ve found something, but they’re still not sure exactly what it is.

You can be forgiven for being slightly underwhelmed. The online buzz has been building for several weeks in anticipation that the quest to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang and the very fundamental structure of the universe would deliver something a bit more conclusive.

Instead, from Fabiola Gianotti, an Italian physicist in charge of one of the two main experiment teams, we get this: "We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV.”

Translated into Earthspeak: The Large Hadron Collider — the complex equipment built to find the particle known to scientists as the Higgs boson — has recorded strong indications that what they’re looking for exists, but they’ll need to study it further to know exactly what it is.

Watch out, Silicon Valley

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 01:50:00 +0000

LONDON, UK — The Old Street traffic circle doesn’t look like a place you’d want to linger. A three-lane gyre of fast moving vehicles built over a gloomy subterranean shopping precinct and a forgettable metro station — this is surely London at its most unprepossessing.

So you could be forgiven, as your black taxi cab whizzes across on its way somewhere decidedly less prosaic, if you fail to realize that you have just passed through the epicenter of the most technologically innovative business community in Britain, perhaps even Europe.

Any doubts about the credentials of Old Street were put to rest this month when the Silicon Valley Bank — which claims a role in seeding Californian tech brands such as Cisco and Mozilla — announced it was launching a full UK service to capitalize on this burgeoning start up scene.

Skinheads eye Euro 2012

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 04:15:00 +0000

LONDON, UK — Soccer is often referred to as the beautiful game. But the furor over racism at the Euro 2012, which kicks off on Friday in Poland and Ukraine, is as ugly as it gets.

Images of skin-headed extremists are being used by the media to warn of terrible abuse awaiting non-white fans for the championship, one of soccer’s biggest events.

One English former star said black or Asian supporters should stay home or risk “coming back in a coffin.”

Such claims have generated predictable outrage from the host nations, particularly the Ukraine, whose government had hopes for positive press from the tournament has already been hurt by criticism over its imprisonment and alleged abuse of opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.

But is there really a risk? Or has the ability of these former Eastern Bloc nations to stage a successful tournament been unfairly besmirched due to a handful of far-right trouble makers, the likes of which are the scourge of stadiums across Europe?

The truth, say experts, is somewhere in between.

Murdoch’s murky future

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:07:00 +0000

LONDON — How do you solve a problem like Rupert Murdoch?

That’s the issue now facing sections of his media empire after a damning British parliamentary report labeled the powerful press tycoon unfit to run a major international company.

A committee of British legislators who have spent months investigating the phone hacking scandal involving one of Murdoch’s leading UK newspaper titles concluded this week with a majority verdict that the 81-year-old was “not a fit person” to be at the helm of News Corp.

Their findings grabbed attention not just in the UK but across the Atlantic, where headlines in the New York Times, Washington Post and Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal must have made uncomfortable reading for News Corp. staff and shareholders.

The committee’s judgment carries no threat of sanction, but with lawsuits pending in the US over hacking and the threat of possible prosecution under the powerful Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, it will offer little in the way of reassurance.

Murdoch’s empire strikes back

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:50:00 +0000

LONDON — Last year, Rupert Murdoch struck a contrite note to U.K. lawmakers over the phone-hacking scandal involving his newspapers. He told them it was his “most humble” day.

The scandal cost him one of his most lucrative titles — the tabloid News of the World — and resulted in possible criminal charges for his trusted lieutenant Rebekah Brooks and the arrest of a dozen reporters on his beloved Sun newspaper.

Now, Murdoch appears to be fighting back.

He and his son James were in the U.K. this week to face the Leveson inquiry, a judicial investigation into press standards, begun last year in the wake of revelations that journalists at Murdoch’s U.K. titles illegally hacked the voice mails of prominent public figures.

This time, he and his family appear to have turned on the British establishment, pressuring Prime Minister David Cameron and putting a key minister in the spotlight over a controversial business deal.

Can this woman save Sarkozy?

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:42:00 +0000

LONDON, UK — Campaign strategists for both Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande will be scrambling on Monday to make sense of a first-round presidential vote that left neither with a clear path to victory — and showed a surprise level of support for a far-right candidate.

As many analysts expected, Socialist Hollande scored higher than incumbent Sarkozy in Sunday's election, but thanks to a surge in the popularity of Marine Le Pen of the anti-immigration National Front party, a easy win is no longer the foregone conclusion that many predicted.

Hollande took 28.8 percent of the vote against Sarkozy's 26.1 percent, meaning they will face each other in a run-off vote on May 6. But what was expected to be a simple referendum on differing plans to rescue France's struggling economy has been complicated by Le Pen's showing of 18.5 percent.

As horse-trading begins for the support of those who voted for the eight lower-polling candidates now eliminated from the race, the problem now facing both Hollande and Sarkozy is how they can capitalize on the far-right turnout.

What are Murdoch’s American misdeeds?

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 12:15:00 +0000

LONDON -- In Britain, the phone hacking scandal at the heart of Rupert Murdoch's media empire is a yarn that seemingly never stops unleashing juicy new details.

As the week began, a letter emerged alleging that senior News Corp. editors routinely discussed phone hacking -- suggesting that executives likely knew about their newspapers' illegal eavesdropping on voicemail messages of celebrities, politicians and crime victims. That revelation called into question whether Murdoch's son James, a senior executive, misled Parliament in his recent testimony, when he said he was unaware of the practice.

Then on Thursday, U.K. officials arrested a Hollywood correspondent for News of the World. The reporter had worked as the paper's Los Angeles based editor. That brought the scandal tantalizingly close to U.S. law enforcement, although the Guardian indicated that the alleged misdeeds took place in the U.K., before the suspect had arrived state-side.