2023 June – oddrops

‘The Telegraph’s Last Hurrah? Laundering a Hard-Right Think Tank’s COVID Lockdown Claims’ – Byline Times

As the newspaper is put for sale, a widely-publicised report claiming ‘only’ 1,700 lives were saved by lockdown – which was splashed on its front page – is not what it seems

Source: ‘The Telegraph’s Last Hurrah? Laundering a Hard-Right Think Tank’s COVID Lockdown Claims’ – Byline Times

For years now, it has not been a newspaper but instead a fanzine for fantasists and fanatics, a conduit for Government lines, and spittle-flecked opinion pieces penned by a group of scenery-chewers straight from Central Casting.

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Now, the Telegraph records the ravings of the right’s most rabid fringes and encourages them, with columnists like Allison Pearson always keen to amplify and even start conspiracy theories.

DIANE ABBOTT AND A BLACK AND WHITE WORLD

Diane Abbott (1992); photograph © Geoff Wilson/National Portrait Gallery This essay, on the debate about Diane Abbott’s views on race and the Holocaust, was my Observer column this …

Source: DIANE ABBOTT AND A BLACK AND WHITE WORLD,Keenan Malik

If we want to nurture again the kind of radical universalism that once imbued antiracism, we need not just to challenge arguments such as Abbott’s, important though that is. We need also to challenge the malevolent claims promoted by the likes of Jenrick and Braverman, and which carry with them the weight of state enforcement. To challenge the one but not the other is performative signalling at its worst.