As many of you know, even midst my current health woes, I've filed two lawsuits against the UK state censor Ofcom in the King's Bench Division of the English High Court - for their "rulings" against me over my coverage of the Covid "vaccines" and their ever lengthening list of victims. As our friend Dr Ros Jones tweeted the other day:
Can you please show me what other vaccine needs repeating every 4-6 months, doesn't prevent infection and has had more VAERS reports than all vaccines combined over previous 25 years?
Indeed. But Lord Grade and his control freaks at Ofcom are determined to prop up the 2020 propaganda no matter how high the corpse count climbs. Which is why so many of the topics I used to talk about on GB News seem now to have vanished from the airwaves. Seen any reports on the continuing numbers of "excess deaths" among the young and middle-aged on Brit telly lately?
You can read my first Statement of Claim against the censor here, and the second here. But just to keep it simple: The position of 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 broadcasting will shrivel even further. So, even though in my current enfeebled state 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 the wretched Grade, Dame Melanie Dawes and their totalitarian goons get away with it.
By contrast, the unprepossessing management of GB News - Angelos Frangopoulos, Mick Booker and Nick Pollard - chose to kowtow to Ofcom's unlawful power grab. Mr Pollard, incidentally, is a former Ofcom board member and chairman of its "Content Board" hired by GBN as its "Ofcom Compliance Officer" - presumably as a way of keeping sweet with Grade's commissars.
So how's that working out for them? Well, here we go again:
GB News found in breach of impartiality rules
Interview of Jeremy Hunt by Tory MPs on GB News breached rules, says Ofcom
GB News broke impartiality rules when Tory MPs interviewed Hunt, Ofcom finds
For our non-UK readers, this is the husband-and-wife team of backbenchers, Esther McVey and Philip Davies, who host four hours a week on GBN. So it's the thrilling format of Tory MPs interviewing Tory cabinet ministers - which even Fox News hasn't been reduced to: Tonight on The Mitch & Elaine McConnell Show - Mitch and Elaine have an exclusive interview with Lindsey Graham! Tomorrow on The Lindsey Graham Hour: Lindsey has an exclusive interview with Mitch and Elaine!
Unsurprisingly, Ofcom didn't care for it:
Ofcom has ruled GB News breached its due impartiality requirements when two sitting Conservative MPs interviewed Chancellor Jeremy Hunt days before the Spring Budget...
Ofcom said its investigation found that in the discussion, which covered subjects including personal and corporate tax, government borrowing and the cost of living crisis, "the programme was overwhelmingly reflective of the viewpoints of different strands of opinion within the Conservative Party".
After what they did to me, I hold no brief for GBN, and I regard its descent into a Tories'n'trivia channel as pitiful. But on that last point:
Jeremy Hunt is a man of minimal popular appeal who every couple of years fails to get elected as leader of the Conservative Party. He is Davos Man incarnate, married to a well-connected Chinese lady who is a presenter on a state TV show and formerly "recruited" Chinese students for Warwick University, whatever that means.
Last autumn, he was imposed on the actual elected party leader Liz Truss - by "the markets" supposedly - as her Chancellor of the Exchequer, very obviously against her wishes. The elected party leader departed shortly thereafter, and Mr Hunt remained as chancellor after the self-same markets installed as prime minister the guy who lost to Ms Truss, Rishi Sunak.
So, in the context of an interview before his first budget, one can easily make the case, given his sudden and profoundly undemocratic rise to prominence just a few months earlier, that "the viewpoints of different strands of opinion within the Conservative Party" is the chief point of interest re Jeremy Hunt.
Oh, no no no, say Lord Grade and Dame Melanie. What you're supposed to do is go, "But, Chancellor, the Opposition wants to know what you're going to do for pensioners", and reduce it to the same leaden Punch-and-Judy partisan ding-dong that makes political coverage on UK telly such a tedious 24/7 pit of arseholian crapwankery.
Why? Why is this the only way one is permitted to interview Jeremy Hunt?
Well, because Ofcom says so. Ofcom narrows the bounds of political discussion on TV precisely because it results in pointless predictable knockabout that is entirely unchallenging and unthreatening. I make no claims for my own show's tenure on GBN, except to note that on most of the topics we discussed - from Covid to "grooming gangs" to the utter uselessness of the British constabulary - we were at odds with all the parties: Tories, Labour, LibDems, the Celtic nationalists. That's a far more useful kind of "impartiality".
Oh, and while we're at it, go back and read all those Fleet Street stories linked to above. Don't you feel - to coin a phrase - that "the entirety of the coverage is overwhelmingly reflective of the viewpoint of a single strand of opinion within the UK media"? That's to say, that it is perfectly normal for a state institution to rule that an interview has to be conducted a certain way.
Look at the uniform language of the so-called reporting: "Ofcom has found..." "Ofcom has found..." "Ofcom has ruled...", "Ofcom has found...", "Ofcom has found...", "Ofcom has ruled...", "Ofcom has found..."
"Findings" and "rulings" are what judges do. So which judge "ruled" and "found" against GB News?
No one knows. Because England, once the crucible of liberty, land of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, now has anonymous censors conducting secret trials beyond the rules of evidence.
And this is reported by the UK media as if it's perfectly normal. It's not. It's deeply weird - and I mean that not by comparison to the First Amendment (on which topic received opinion in London is sufficiently Europeanised as to regard as a bit absolute for their tastes), but by comparison with His Majesty's Dominions elsewhere. Ezra Levant and I inflicted more damage on Canada's "human rights" commissions and tribunals than anybody in their history (and, at the federal level, helped get the law repealed), but, say what you will about those unlovely bodies, they at least issue their "findings" and "rulings" in the names of individual commissars. Not like the decisions of the faceless judges of Ofcom.
To be sure, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal had a penchant for secret trials. But see yours truly on page 125 here:
I found out about that and with Julian Porter QC whom I referenced earlier, I called Julian after supper -- or during supper, and after supper he filed a motion to open up the trial, the secret trial they were planning on hearing in Ottawa later that week. And the shame-faced disgraceful excuse of a jurist presiding over that trial had no leg to stand on, opened up the trial to public scrutiny.
And that disgraceful and wretched body has never held a secret trial since and actually has held very few trials since.· They are a pale shadow of what they were and I am happy to keep going at them until they are destroyed.
And yet in London the court eunuchs of the media meekly type out "Ofcom has found" and "Ofcom has ruled" as if secret trials by no-name judges are a routine state of affairs. They're not - but they have been permitted to become one, and they will expand their reach ever further if Ofcom's ever more brazen micro-management of UK broadcasting and now the Internet (after today's miserable vote in Parliament) is allowed to continue.
The good news is this latest "ruling" and "finding" prompted GB News management to kinda sorta semi-butch up:
The establishment will not stop until @GBNEWS is off the air.
They have tried ad boycotts.
Social media pile ons.
Hate not hope and it's sister organisation Start funding hate/
Everything.
The communists at @Ofcom are the problem.
Not the free and fair exchange of ideas. pic.twitter.com/TE1KtR0vP4
— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) September 18, 2023
On the other hand, they're thinking of moving Lozza, Neil Oliver and other "controversial" presenters to "streaming".
And anyway, butch-wise, they're a bit late to the party:
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
Whether or not you agree with that, taking a stand on the latest case isn't likely to work out as well as taking a stand on mine would have. Tories interviewing Tories (aside from the angle noted above) is pathetic, and not at all what GB News is needed for. Whereas challenging the suffocating propaganda on the biggest public-policy outrage of our time is a mast worth nailing your colours to.
There are six ongoing investigations into GB News. Oh, sure, they'll probably skate on one of them, just to make Lord Grade and Dame Melanie look "fair". But in the words of Steyn Clubber 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.
The above-mentioned Nick Pollard is Ofcom's enforcer inside the building: he's on their side. But he sportingly invited me to send him my defence of what I'd said on air so he 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 even GBN's indulgent owners Sir Paul Marshall and the Dubai guys must grasp by now, mine would have been the case to stand on. By the way, one of the few things left to cherish about GB News is its grisly double-acts with all the warmth and chemistry of Charles and Di on their last tour of India. Enjoy:
I didn't know that my co-host was going to do this today. I knew we'd be discussing this topic of #RussellBrand of course, but I wasn't prepared for the personal onslaught which is why I look caught off-guard.
To fully understand my position which is difficult to articulate... https://t.co/R3Oc83Lh1V
— Bev Turner (@beverleyturner) September 18, 2023
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.