Here are all the comments on the scrapped Kuenssberg petition. You know, the petition David Cameron condemned in the House of Commons today because it was accompanied by a storm of sexist abuse? Well, here are the comments in their entirety and out of 35,000 people who signed, there is virtually nobody whose comment can be seen as remotely sexist. See for yourselves. Can you spot the one sexist comment I found?
The comments show the petition was overwhelmingly signed by decent, concerned people who were sometimes quite eloquent. Also that the petition supporters are gender balanced and several specifically identify as feminists, and as supporters of the BBC. But neither Cameron, the Guardian and mainstream media nor 38 Degrees itself has any qualm about writing off all these decent citizens as a misogynist rabble.
The data link was left by a commenter on this site – I strongly suspect a mole within 38 Degrees has got it out. It is absolute proof that the politicians and mainstream media journalists have been pushing a plain lie about the nature of the campaign, and that 38 Degrees have colluded.
David Babbs of 38 Degrees appears to be setting new standards for lying. Now that the comments are public, he has changed his story and told Media Lens the abuse was not on the petition, it was on connected social media. I have repeatedly asked 38 Degrees for the evidence of abuse, but they absolutely refuse to show it. We have had five people searching all day. So far we have one single tweet, which was nasty – it called Laura K by a expletive reserved for women. And it did refer to the petition. But it was sent by a young man, 90% of whose comments referred to football and 100% of whose tweets used similar expletives. I unreservedly condemn what he did, but he was hardly a supporter of Corbyn or member of Momentum, as all the media are telling us. So far that is it – one young idiot – we have found nothing else.
But even if there are more nasty examples of abuse, that is not the fault of the 35,000 good people who signed the petition. And there is a disconnect between two establishment narratives, both unproven. One is that Kuenssberg has been a victim of terrible misogynist abuse since appointment. The other is that the abuse was caused by the petition. I utterly condemn any such abuse, but it does not negate the genuine concerns of the petitioners. Regular readers know I myself receive constant abuse, somethimes death threats. It does not mean I am not frequently in the wrong!
Now the lies have been thoroughly exploded. Of course the fact Cameron has been involved in peddling the lie may now be leading to some creative design, backdating and history creation in assorted Government establishments.
Funny how when one thing goes wrong for them, they can bleat on about it with the help of British media, BBC and mainstream newspapers pleading their case, yet where is the case for truth for us, the paying public? Hmmmmm!
BBC news editor Laura Kuenssberg has announced a new plan to assassinate Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Speaking from behind her desk in a shadowy smoke-filled room at Beeb…
http://internationaltimes.it/bbc-announce-new-plan-to-assassinate-jeremy-corbyn/
Oh, calm down dear.
Quite.
Crap sense of humour you both have have.Shows were you are coming from. You need to get out more.
My instant reaction to the petition was that it was a stupid knee jerk reaction to LKs appallingly biased ‘reporting’ on election night. As soon as it was launched the attention turned away from her presentation of the results to the petition itself. This has been amply demonstrated by this blog, the last 2 or days have seen articles that focus on the petition rather than the actions of LK. Even Cameron has been able to use the petition to defend LK, would he have been able to do that if the attention had remained on her performance?
The best action now would be to put this debacle in the ‘nothing to see here, move along please’ box and continue to expose bias in the media, especially the BBC. Make the BBC reporters and their bosses accountable for their reporting, don’t get sidetracked with petitions that will go nowhere – did anyone really think the BBC would take any notice of it?
So by exposing the bias in bbc reporting, we are deflecting attention away from the bias in bb creporting? Online petitions have been an effective way of garnering support for such protests. That Tory hq have arranged a media-gagging exercise against 38 degrees is evidence of that. What do you suggest we do, give up every time the evil ones fight back?
I have to wonder what they have to hold against the individual in control of 38 degrees. Why did he fold so easily, with zero public evidence against him?
38 Degrees boast in the Guardian that they stood up to sexist abuse when in fact they gave the sexists exactly what they wanted and set a precedent that will work to the advantage of every troll on the internet who wants to sabotage any campaign of any kind.
A petition originally aimed at countering political bias in the mainstream media got relabelled and reframed by “bullies” and taken down. How is that “standing up” to anything? Its more of a climbdown than anything, spun as something else.
Chris, it looks more and more like 38 degrees was quite complicit in this smear campaign against the Left.
Try reading the article before you comment. There is no evidence of sexism in the petition.
I wish the BBC and other news media would be so vigilant at not allowing dissent to be labeled as “antisemitism” which it is not. It is not only possible, but the duty of citizens to point out injustice when they see it, and if that includes a state like South Africa or Saudi Arabia or North Korea or Israel, then so be it. The BDS movement is not antisemitic, it is anti injustice, and anti -occupation.
To label all dissent with something which is clearly an abuse of the principal of Universal Human Rights is itself a violation of human rights and is itself antisemitic because it links the identity of Jewishness with the state of Israel’s inhuman policies.
Such behaviour is unacceptable and MUST be called out. Laura Kuenssberg is doing this. She is wrong. She MUST be denounced, and this bias MUST be dismissed or the BBC risks losing even more its credibility as a broker of honest journalism.
Sexist abuse is also not acceptable, but there are ALWAYS, on EVERY opinion, trolls who abuse the forum. The solution is to block those individuals but not to deny the entire petition based on the few abusers.
Hear hear!
Exactly. It’s fine to patronise a fellow MP, in the House of Commons, because she is female (“calm down dear”), but to honestly criticise a biased journalist is sexist because she is female? Get a grip. That is sexist.
I would not trush David Babbs and 38 degrees as far as I cd throw them, They kept saying in 2010, 2011, 2012 that Disabled and NHS were not important enough and members were voting for them to be ignored re the cuts and deaths and destruction of NHS which everyone in it could see. Then they get on the bandwagon late and start proclaiming how bloody wonderful they are. They are also class bias and discriminatory. Sorry, Disabled have to accept, it is a democracy and 38 Degrees and its members have voted no interest. That is where mass, mob rule and control leaves us.
David Babbs and 38 Degrees are very Politically OK and Careful. Useless as a wet fart. I absolutely hate them for holding back and stopping disabled from speaking up for themselves and being heard and having the right of autonomy to direct our own lives and issues.
White, Middle Class, College educated, Liberal Bastard Lot.
Nice to know you can call someone a white bastard on this site without being moderated
Tip for you Ian. If you’re going to misrepresent something someone says, and get away with it, it’s best not to do it within a couple of screen inches of the original comment which is sitting there in black and white for us all to see.
For the record, I think June is over-egging it, and her comment drips with a certain emotive high-horsery peculiar to wounded ideologues, but she certainly didn’t call anyone a white bastard.
Tip for you Ian. If you’re going to misrepresent something someone says, and get away with it, it’s best to do it on CIF – where the mods can back you up – here you’re just a troll.
Racist.
The whole issue of this petition is not about one or two spurious comments! It is a blatant attack on our freedom to peacefully rebel against the government. It is a narrative the tories are pursuing that all labour members are misogynistic, sexist, anti-Semitic which they apply ad lib instead of investigating with due diligence the reasons why such protests are being carried out.
It keeps the public consciousness away from the real issues. Apologies, O/T, and this is a Guardian piece. No apologies, it’s by Simon Jenkins:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/12/crony-capitalist-corruption-david-cameron-british-tax-havens-avoidance
As Cameron waxes condemnatory about corruption in Africa, and one of his predecessors does the same – in Africa – there is naturally nothing to see closer to home.
I am a 64 year old woman who worked in education in equal opportunities for 30 years. I have never heard such blatant bias come from a supposedly neutral reporter in all my life. It is sickening. I signed the original petition and gave signed the new one. This has nothing whatsoever to do with this person’s gender but rather her agenda which attempts to demand Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party at every opportunity. It is unprofessional and this the BBC into disrepute.
And that bastard camoron has the cheek to have a big meet on government corruption in other countries. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious
Do take a look at the ‘Still Discussing’ Blair Miles thread.
I really do feel that 38 Degrees need to respond fully with regard to their role in this. I will not contribute further to them or their petitions until they do!
Yep. Their behaviour stinks.
We need to be told why they couldn’t either moderate or ban comments altogether, or allow other users to report abusive ones, and instead ripped down the whole petition and crowed over its corpse in the bloody Guardian of all places.
Read the article, did you? No sexist abuse evident. I saw none either.
This is the kind of thing you would expect in North Korea, but Britain??? Shocking!!!
38 degrees are guilty of being naive, incompetent even but that is about all.
If the campaign had been directed at a system or at an organisation, such as the BBC, there wouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t, it was directed at an individual and at an individual who was a member of a group frequently discriminated against.
They put a picture of the person and a call for the person to be sacked, underneath they put buttons so their picture and their words could be quickly and easily shared on social media when they had no control over the comments which would be written underneath them or the type of person they would be directed at.
Guilty of incompetence yes but once they had been informed of the effects their incompetence was having if they hadn’t taken steps to rectify it then they could have been guilty of much more.
Gosh, for once I agree with fred!
That’s as weird as the Welsh Tories backing Plaid’s Leanne Wood for First Minister of Wales in the Senedd.
We live in interesting times, astonishingly interesting times!
Me too. Fred is right on this.
Can somebody provide links to these supposedly sexist comments, because I have seen none.
What your post does not answer is- why with all this ( incompetent) indulgence of people’s capacity to be abusive and sexist to a group that is ‘frequently discriminated against’ were there so few comments out out of 35,000, that were judged to be abusive.
Numbers vary slightly but an approximation of 10/35000= (rounding up)-0.03%.
Now taking into account that there will always be a small element determined to be abusive, because they the balance of their mind is altered, are on drugs, or drunk-that seems not a bad percentage.In reality, if the 35000, as is being suggested, are ‘Corbyn supporters’ then that tiny proportion of oddities is actually rather small, and probably rather smaller than the number of genuinely abusive comments that are regularly expressed on such platforms as the Guardian or Telegraph.
Well said Fred, I agree.
“38 degrees are guilty of being naive, incompetent even but that is about all.”
_____________
Fred if that were truly the case why be so evasive with the offending tweets? no in my opinion 38 Degrees, knew exactly what they were doing, when compelled to remove the petition.
“If the campaign had been directed at a system or at an organisation, such as the BBC, there wouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t, it was directed at an individual and at an individual who was a member of a group frequently discriminated against.”
____________________
Again Fred, if you report on affairs in a openly biased manner, then you must expect a public reaction. Using the “discrimination” card (especially when only one offensive comment was found others pending though don’t hold your breath) is a great way of diverting attention away from the real subject at hand.
It is “we” who are discriminated against, by feeding the public skewed and biased information, to obtain a set of goals against other public individuals the establishement, as a whole including Laura Kuenssberg, should and must remain the focus of our attention, and they must be held to account.
They put a picture of the person and a call for the person to be sacked, underneath they put buttons so their picture and their words could be quickly and easily shared on social media when they had no control over the comments which would be written underneath them or the type of person they would be directed at.
It was completely obvious that this was a petition, something with which the twitterati could also disagree. And did. It’s not as if this is the only Twitterable call for a sacking in history: Exemplum, exemplum…
http://capx.co/dear-labour-mps-please-remove-jeremy-corbyn-now/
All the buttons are there.
There are two points I would make relating to the comments already made and the actual situation involved.
Firstly, the principal reason people are objecting to Kuenssberg is because she is no good at her job of factually and independently reporting on political developments across all shades of political activity in Britain. This is not what TV licence payers are being made to stump up to her in the form of a salary reportedly exceeding £200,000 per year – around the same as that received by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. Is she worth that kind of money? I – and, seemingly, tens of thousands of others – do not think so. She – quite simply – does not represent good value for money. Anyone can sound off with foolish and ill-informed opinions – as she does – but what viewers want is informed analysis, which she is clearly failing to provide. She is not the only one who is crap at her job. I find most BBC main presenters to be of a very poor standard. It is getting to the point where I even find myself preferring Sky and RT coverage to that of the BBC these days. Ultimately, more and more of us are going on-line in an effort to find out what is truly going on and in order to avoid the mis-truths, half-truths and lies peddled by Kuenssberg and the BBC.
Secondly, Cameron would not know the truth if it walked up and smacked him in the gob. You only have to look at the expressions on his face to realise he takes virtually nothing seriously. It is all just one big game to him. He doesn’t care about the impact he and his government colleagues have upon the lives of ordinary people – or “plebs” as one of his former close colleagues referred to the rest of us. He and all the other Bullingdon Boys Club members could not care less about anyone else. As long as their interests are being served, that is all that counts for them. “Sod the rest” is their operational motto.
It is, above all, a deep insult to anyone who has suffered genuine misogynistic attacks.
(Same could be said with regard to the antisemitism tack).
The people who are using these lies and smears for power games are beneath contempt.
Absolutely. But then Cameron has history of sexist abuse in parliament.
Peddling
It is quite common now to see men of Eastern European appearance standing all day in shopping areas. Is this just culture or are they peddling something? If so what? Russian cigarettes? women? booze? Viagra? drugs? I want to ask but I’m shy.
Is it because they feel unloved and unwanted in a society which does not employ spies, but monitors us from hidden offices, so they are making themselves feel at home by providing a presence on the street.
Why does Cameron feel the need to peddle lies in the house of commons? Are elections and referenda not enough for him. I know the conservatives had to endure interminable wilderness frustrations during the Blair/Brown years until they final hatched a plot to bring New Labour down, by breaking the banking system, I know they lost their finest to business in that period, leaving the white snot of snivelling Tory public school educated dross to pick up the pieces of Tory rule.
But what exactly is Cameron so desperately scared of to be peddling lies? You win some , you lose some. At a time Cameron is running the biggest corruption scam ever, the breaking up of the Muslim world by terrorist mafia, Al Qaida and Daesh, he gives the appearance of a murderer desperately trying to conceal body parts in black plastic bags.
What precisely have the Tories got to hide?
Thanks Craig, excellent work. Will share on facebook.
O/T
Uzbekistan: President’s daughter and the Panama Papers
Legal firm’s data dump implicates the inner circle of Islam Karimov’s eldest daughter.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/uzbekistan-president-daughter-panama-papers-160512081956459.html
The offensive comment was the ‘dead cat’ and it served its purpose, just as the ‘antisemitism’ moggy did in the distraction running up to the council elections. I notice however in that case, the cat seems to have miraculously recovered and has scurried off to have another of its lives confiscated as soon as needed.
Hi Craig,
Thanks for the work you did on this. As you probably already know, the Amazon store of the comments no longer exists (at least not at the link given). Is there another copy available?
Regards,
Martin Dimmock
The link in the post has been updated to the google cache copy https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UEe0lzwst0IJ:https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/e83cce2f-9558-4947-b971-3374d1dc1190/BBC-Laura-Kuenssberg-38-degrees-petition-comments.html
Also we have our own copy at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/BBC-Laura-Kuenssberg-38-degrees-petition-comments.html
TRUST US, WE’RE THE ESTABLISHMENT
gangrenous sweetbreads
served up by meatheads
no, we won’t come at them
rather eat retreads
overripe tripe
give it a wipe
wipe off the blowflies
swipe them a swipe
underdone livers
takers not givers
send’em all packing
home in their flivvers
You got to suspect he’s a little too Labour but interesting post from earlier this year. No Kuenssberg but Neil, Paxman, Coulson get a mention.
John Simkin: History of how the Tory Party controls the BBC
These tactics have been used before to bring in line dissenters. This tactic claimed the scalps of Gregg Dyke and Andrew Gilligan and since then the BBC has learnt to toe the line. The next to go was The Guardian who had a visitation from the security service and since then have become a very docile paper. 38 degrees has had some success with its petitions, leading to several changes in government policy and it is now their turns to be good citizens and toe the line. I wonder whether they were lean on?
David Babbs has now published yet another explanation of his actions here
https://home.38degrees.org.uk/2016/05/12/laura-kuenssberg-blog-david-babbs/
He says ‘When the 38 Degrees office team became aware of the accusation that the petition was being linked to sexist abuse, we had meeting to discuss the problem.’ and ‘We saw enough comments on both to feel that there was a genuine problem with the petition acting as a launchpad for sexist abuse.’
I’ve just quickly scanned the comments on FB for one of their recent other petitions for Cameron to Close Tax Havens. Without looking too far I found the following comments (some from women):
prick
The artful c**t
shoot him
the twat in the hat
lying TOSSPOT
My favourite piggy
Dodgy scumbag
I’m wondering if these are acceptable when addressed to a man but misogynistic if addressed to a woman? Presumeably they will be having another meeting then to decide if to pull this petition?
Yes, we live in a patriarchal society, you can get away with saying things about a man which you wouldn’t get away with saying about a woman. It’s generally accepted that women are discriminated against by men, that there are people who hate women because they are women and that our society should protect the rights of women against this.
“we live in a patriarchal society”
We certainly do not.
Not in structural terms anyway, which is all that is meant by the phrase. It’s an organisational structure.
Saudi Arabia is a patriarchal society, for example. There are others.
Men bitching about women does not a patriarchal society make.
Indeed, it might be much better argued that in such bitching men are simply manifesting their obvious loss of power since the post war period.
“Not in structural terms anyway”
Really? Is the Cabinet, the Civil Service, the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, the Treasury, the corporate structure generally, or any other institution of significance you care to name, controlled and directed by women? Or by men?
Is any one of these institutions run by men because women are barred from office?
What’s actually confirmed by your observation is that the expropriators (in Marxist terms, for brevity) are predominantly male, and operate within a patriarchal subsystem. However, the proletariat and little-bourgeois – because both partners now need to work to keep the bubble of the moment pumped up – are increasingly compelled to exist in a fragmented and gender-incoherent matrix. There’s absolutely no discrimination against female cleaners…or male ones.
Matt – no. So what?
“When the 38 Degrees office team became aware of the accusation that the petition was being linked to sexist abuse, we had meeting to discuss the problem.”
How did the team become aware of this? Who told them, why, and in what terms?
and there’s your smoking gun
Has anyone actually seen these abusive tweets? Has 38 Degrees/Cameron or Keunssberg produced evidence of this? If so, how can they prove they are real accounts and not paid Tory trolls (the same gang who made a member commit suicide last year)?
“Has anyone actually seen these abusive tweets? Has 38 Degrees/Cameron or Keunssberg produced evidence of this?”
Nope.
“If so, how can they prove they are real accounts and not paid Tory trolls (the same gang who made a member commit suicide last year)?”
They don’t need to.
They just keep saying it’s so and so it’s believed to be.
Job done.
My Chinese fortune cookie just told me, “You are not paranoid enough.” I agree.
Latest list of comments on 38 degree petition here
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UEe0lzwst0IJ:https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/e83cce2f-9558-4947-b971-3374d1dc1190/BBC-Laura-Kuenssberg-38-degrees-petition-comments.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nl&client=firefox-b
Please download and save
I must live a sheltered life. I followed Craig’s link and used the search function on the document. I tried every swear word that I know, but I couldn’t find the one misogynist comment that Craig talks about. The rudest thing I could find was two writers had called her a “cow”. Craig – give us a clue – what are the first two letters of the worst word in the offending comment? By the way, The folk who signed the petition are the most well behaved group of people I have ever come across! I don’t think I could gather 35 friends who could match the politeness of this group – never mind 35000! Go on, Craig – give us the first two letters?? 🙂
Hi ,
Just sent this to 38 Degrees. I’ll let you know the outcome. btw good site, thanks.
Dear David Babbs and co.,
One minute there is a healthy swell of outrage at the blatant political bias shown by our national tv broadcaster and promoted by yourselves ; the next there is an establishment shut-down of the whole story and , more particularly, you closed the campaign . This was based on no evidence whatever , yet the media and yourselves have condemned the honest views of 35,000 (at least) as no more than the vitriolic , sexist rantings of an ignorant herd of bullies.
At the very least you owe the whole membership of 38 Degrees a full and frank statement – based on fact – of your position in this establishment cover-up and the re-instatement of the campaign unless you can provide proof positive that 38 Degrees voters on this important issue have committed the offences alleged . If you fear for adverse criticism from the establishment in running the campaign might I suggest that you forego comments on this and merely put it out there for an open vote of your members.
My deep disappointment in this so far might be lessened by some form of courageous and honest response but , at present, my support and use of your site is in abeyance.
This is from craigmurray.org. and is self-explanatory :
” The data link was left by a commenter on this site – I strongly suspect a mole within 38 Degrees has got it out. It is absolute proof that the politicians and mainstream media journalists have been pushing a plain lie about the nature of the campaign, and that 38 Degr ees have colluded.
David Babbs of 38 Degrees appears to be setting new standards for lying. Now that the comments are public, he has changed his story and told Media Lens the abuse was not on the petition, it was on connected social media. I have repeatedly asked 38 Degrees for the evidence of abuse, but they absolutely refuse to show it. We have had five people searching all day. So far we have one single tweet, which was nasty – it called Laura K by a expletive reserved for women. And it did refer to the petition. But it was sent by a young man, 90% of whose comments referred to football and 100% of whose tweets used similar expletives. I unreservedly condemn what he did, but he was hardly a supporter of Corbyn or member of Momentum, as all the media are telling us. So far that is it – one young idiot – we have found nothing else. “.
This is a test of just where you stand in the political arena and will , I think , decide the future of your enterprise.
Yours most sincerely,
The Tories seem to thrive on the fact that, as Winston Churchill said, “A lie will be half way round the world before the truth gets its pants on”. I firmly believe I can tell when they’re lying because their lips move!!!