Programming note: Steyn's Tales for Our Time are back! Please join Mark tonight, Tuesday, for Part Three of Out of Time.
~As many of you know, even midst my post-cardiac health woes, I've filed two lawsuits against the UK state censor Ofcom in the English High Court for their "rulings" against me over my coverage of the Covid vaccines and their ever growing number of victims. You can read my first Statement of Claim here, and the second here. But just to keep it simple: The position of me and my eminent King's Counsel, Gavin Millar, is that what Ofcom did was unlawful. It does not have, in law, the powers to act as it did.
That's quite a big deal, and, if they're allowed to get away with it, the already shrunken parameters of permitted discourse in UK TV and radio will shrivel even further. And on the Internet, too - because, in a final up-yours to its voters, Britain's hideous pseudo-Conservative government plans to extend Ofcom's jurisdiction to cyber-space. Which means that vaccine widows such as Vikki Spit and Charlotte Wright and all the other victims will be un-personned even more than they already have been. So, even though I need the stress of a new legal battle as much as I need gender-affirming surgery from the NHS, I can't in good conscience let Lord Grade and his totalitarian goons get away with it.
Unfortunately, the unprepossessing management of GB News - Angelos Frangopoulos, Mick Booker and Nick Pollard - chose to kowtow to Ofcom's unlawful power grab.
How's that working out for them? Well...:
Ofcom opens four new due impartiality investigations into GB News
That brings to seven the number of active Ofcom investigations into the post-Steyn GB News. You can read more in The Guardian and the UK Press Gazette.
The latest cases are over The Esther & Phil Show, hosted by two sitting Tory MPs, and The Lord President of the Privy Council Hour, hosted by the Rt Hon Sir Jacob Rees-Moggadon, PC, MP, plus an edition of the Laurence Fox show, guest-hosted by former Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney.
As Dan puts it:
They lost the very best presenter they had in @MarkSteynOnline . The ONLY one who told/tells it like it is. They left him swinging in the wind & now they're all being eaten by the Ofcom monster. https://t.co/GNT4nPzdOF
— Dan (@SteelShodLever) August 7, 2023
And Gord:
Myself & many others remember GB News trying to appease the 'crocodile' by throwing @MarkSteynOnline under the bus. It didn't work did it?
They will keep coming for you over anything they can interpret as 'iffy.' They won't stop until *they* are in control or they shut you down.
Indeed. A month ago, the prescient Kathy Gyngell of the indispensable Conservative Woman website expanded upon the point:
Every time I tune into [The Mark Steyn Show] and enjoy his idiosyncratic talent my fury and dismay erupts all over again at GB News for hanging him out to dry as they did, at the unprincipled appeasers who run the show there, who think this will save their dollar. It won't. By giving into Ofcom's selective censorship GB News sealed Steyn's never-to-broadcast-in-Britain-again fate, just when he is most needed. They may well find they sealed their own too – the Ofcom bully is already back on their patch...
Far from the 'demonopolisation' of broadcasting leading to more freedom of political expression, it has catalysed an ever greater imposition of conformity – an 'authorised' view as determined by the new State censor, Ofcom, across all channels.
One more from Chris Davies:
More @Ofcom investigations into @GBNEWS It started with @MarkSteynOnline Appeasement has seemingly only brought more opprobrium (and investigations).
No amount of kowtowing to censorship commissars will satisfy them. They want to shut you down. Time to fight instead? #GBNews
Or as some obscure colonial said a long time ago:
Once you get a taste for shutting people up, it's hard to stop.
Don't look to GB News management to man up, Chris. Of the woeful troika named above, Nick Pollard is the GB News "Ofcom compliance officer" (a title that would shame any self-respecting broadcast network). He's a former Ofcom director and chairman of their so-called "Content Board". In other words, he's Ofcom's enforcer inside the building: he's on their side.
So, when Michael Grade and his censors announced their first investigation into me over certain disturbing statistical trends re the "efficacy" of the Covid vaccines, Pollard invited me to send him my defence of what I'd said so GBN could forward it to Ofcom. Only one problem:
He never forwarded it to Ofcom.
(Pollard, by the way, is the man who "investigated" the BBC's "coverage" of Jimmy Savile.)
As for his two colleagues, as anybody other than them could have foreseen, tossing me to Lord Grade, Dame Melanie and the other slavering sharks only seems to have worked up their appetites. Imagine that.
At some point, presumably, even the craven Floppadopoulos and his indulgent owners Sir Paul Marshall and the Dubai guys will feel obliged to push back.
The problem for GB News is that these latest cases are far less sturdy than mine would have been. I'm many things but I'm not a party pom-pom girl. I'm a "niche Canadian" who despises all the current lineup of UK political parties, but the governing Tory party most of all - because they're the most contemptible: The Labour Party is at least openly in favour of the uniparty's nation-destroying agenda. A man like Rees-Mogg votes for it all when it counts, but then goes on his TV show and purports to have grave misgivings over everything he was gung-ho for during all his years in cabinet.
So I don't really fit in to Ofcom's "due impartiality" model, because I have no interest in the pathetic, trivial Punch & Judy knockabout of so-called political debate. On the Covid vaccines, on the industrial-scale child-rape gangs of English towns, on "refugees" and "asylum-seeekers", I'm at odds with all Britain's political parties: I'd like to talk about things that matter, as we did on my show until Floppadopoulos brought on my heart attacks.
Since then, GB News has degenerated, as one of my producers likes to say, into a "politicians' channel" - in part because they work cheaper than most professional broadcasters. So Tory MPs Esther and Phil interview the Tory chancellor, and Jacob Rees-Moggadon, recently knighted for services to the Tory Party, interviews his GBN colleague and deputy chairman of the Tory Party, Lee Anderson.
This is self-evidently absurd. In the UK, GBN is derided as "Britain's Fox News", but, whatever one thinks of Rupert Murdoch, he hasn't yet descended to The Lindsey Graham Hour or Morning Merrygoround with Mitch and Elaine McConnell.
GB News would have done better to stand by me and push back against Ofcom - in court if necessary. Instead, they emboldened Ofcom and will now be investigated to death. Sad.
GBN has been a very instructive contrast with my corporate overlords in my battles with Canada's "Human Rights" Commissions fifteen years back. Maclean's was as mainstream as you can get: it was the country's bestselling news magazine and a staple of every dentist's waiting room. So, when my editor, Ken Whyte, told me that the parent company Rogers (who own the dominant TV network, the leading email provider, etc) had scheduled a conference call with our brilliant QC Julian Porter and various senior executive vice-presidents, I had less than minimal expectations.
It was all chugging along, and I emphasised my theory of the case - that, when a state censor moves to censor you, it's not you that's the issue, it's the censor. And eventually some executive suit from the subsidiary of the subsidiary of the subsidiary of the parent company asked us all: "Okay. So what's the end-game here?"
There was a long pause, and eventually, just to break the silence, I said: "To get the Canadian state out of the censorship business."
And the legions of vice-presidents considered it for a moment, and then murmured variations of "Works for me", "Let's do it", and so forth.
We succeeded in that goal: On June 26th 2013m, the Canadian Parliament's repeal of the relevant law received Royal Assent.
Floppadopoulos pretends his Tories'n'trivia station is a "disruptor". A real disruptor would have taken the line of those Canadian execs: A censor is trying to censor us, so we're going to make the censor the issue - and then we're gonna put him out of the censorship business. And they would have been standing on the right to vigorous open debate over what is without doubt the biggest public-policy scandal of our time: the Covid regime and its casualties.
But Ofcom's enforcer is inside the building, so butching up was never an option.
On balance, I'm glad I'll be fighting this one alone.
~Mark has been touched by how many readers, listeners and viewers have inquired about how to support his important free-speech lawsuit against the ever more overbearing censors of Ofcom. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a chum a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of Steyn's latest book The Prisoner of Windsor. You won't regret it.
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds and, in the last, a significant chunk thereof go to a grand cause - and you or your loved one gets something, too.
