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Monday 10 January 2011

Sarah McDermott | 10:18 UK time, Monday, 10 January 2011

Here's Kirsty with more on tonight's programme:

Are the Met and other forces right to send undercover police officers out to infiltrate protest groups, and how many of these officers are there around the UK?

We kick off tonight with exclusive revelations which get inside the mind of Pc Mark Kennedy, AKA Mark Stone, who posed for seven years as a green activist, taking a leading role in big protests.

He says he has resigned from the Met, telling friends he regrets it all.

His decision to recant apparently stems from the case centring on allegations of a conspiracy to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station which was abandoned by the prosecution today, when details of the role Mark Kennedy played began to emerge.

President Barack Obama led a minute's silence today for the victims of the Arizona shootings, which left six dead and 14 injured, including Democrat congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head.

The shooting has started a row over whether inflammatory right-wing rhetoric played any part in the attack in Tucson when a gunman targeted a "meet and greet".

Sarah Palin often uses metaphors about weapons such as "don't retreat, reload," but she is hardly unique in this.

So do the Democrats sense "an easy target" or an opportunity to score a "direct hit" on the Tea Party and, by association, Republicans who now have a majority in the House of Representatives?

On Friday's Newsnight, in the wake of the sentencing of two Asian men for their role in the sexual abuse of girls in the Derby area, former home secretary Jack Straw accused some men of Pakistani heritage of seeing young vulnerable white girls as "easy meat".

Critics say that it is not an issue of race and have condemned Mr Straw's comments. Tonight Jackie Long returns to the story.

And the international economist Dambisa Moyo, whose bestseller Dead Aid challenged received wisdom about Western aid for Africa, is publishing her next big analysis on Thursday, How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly, in which she says if nothing is done the US will end up as a second tier economy.

She brings her arguments to the programme tonight.

Do join us, Kirsty.

Comments

  • Comment number 1.

    I'm surprised the Guardian has still got readership. Well I know the good folk at the beeb are all in a bubble so i suppose they give it a read but I'm amazed this Newspaper still gets printed and delivered to the newsagents.

    Libby Brooks of the aforementioned rag gives her take on the Pakistani white girl grooming story.

    Liberalism is a mental disorder. You have been warned



    Why did the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ bother with this story. Its as old as the hills. Its recognised and logged; we've moved on from this. Looking forward to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ late reporting of all the other issues that have been glaringly obvious to the rest of us.

    Note to Paul Mason.
    The Dollar gets its power bumped and the Euro is gonna fail. If your smart enough you should spot the sequence of events that brings this about as some levers are already getting pulled. If you use the Steph Flanders approach to understanding global economics you'll find yourself all alone on a sinking ship buddy, not so bad if you can play a violin mind.

  • Comment number 2.

    PARADOX

    The Old and Sad by-election came about because a politically-motivated lie, was challenged under criminal law. I have discovered that the political lie, generally, is of no interest to ANY STATUTORY BODY, clearly indicating that Westminster is INTENSELY RELAXED about the political lie.

    I can also report that media, and a wide selection of MPs and Peers, simply refuse to engage with the subject, and yet it is topical and a matter of political integrity. Now what might all that say about LIVING WITHIN THE LIE?

    Westminster is a Citadel of almost unassailable corruption.

  • Comment number 3.

    IF YOU DELETE PAKISTANI MEN AND INSERT IRISH NUNS (#1)

    You get a common factor of girls who have 'FALLEN AWAY' and may be unspeakably abused (with only a small displacement in time) - perhaps in the sevice of ones god?

    I shall resist getting into 'comparative abuse', and simply say that humanity is capable of greater inhumanity than any other species. The capacity of the human brain for aberration, is near-infinite. Our propensity for abuse EVEN TO OUR OWN (and self!) is well documented (Milgram, Zimbardo) and our preparedness to defile those 'of difference' (Tasmania, Iraq, Chagos Islands, and many more) is beyond redemption.

    As always, our shallow, edgy media, are chewing the ‘cud of symptom’, while the deep seated cancer of HomSap spreads uninspected, indeed, ignored.

    Know what I mean Newsnight?

  • Comment number 4.

    Perhaps the Ratcliffe-on-Soar case proves that the eco-fascist protests to close down the said power station were in fact government sponsored. After climategate perhaps the authorities had good reason to stage a high profile mass semi-violent protest in order to attempt to portray that the general public as a whole were fully behind government climate change policy.

    Perhaps also proved by the fact that the judge let those protesters convicted last week off with less than a custodial sentence. It was also interesting to note that the eco-fascist leaning ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ perhaps conveniently omitted to state how many hours the community service sentences were for. The last thing we need is for these green lunatics to be let lose in the community to preach their vile quasi-religion to perhaps the vulnerable groups that their ilk would dispose of in the name of the planet first.

  • Comment number 5.

    welcome the coverage of Old and Sad election by NN. Words fail me as to the collective miopia of the Tory and LibDems over the lies over tuition fees and the rise in VAT, maybe a cross examination by Jeremy can get at the truth but won't hold my breath, I mean, these guys are the coalition,,,

  • Comment number 6.

    WILL COALITION 'PROVE THE LIE' OF WESTMINSTER POLITICS, COME ELECTION?

    I keep hearing Dave or Nick 'explaining' how they will campaign as separate parties. I have heard neither say (as is usual) 'ON OUR RECORD IN GOVERNMENT'. Will it not turn out like Lennon and McCartney - post Beatles?

    Someone should write a pop-song: 'Without me you would have been nothing' (Two male voices in 'coalition'.)

    Oh - Spitting Image - I miss you.

  • Comment number 7.

    ...Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior ...

    A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too.



    seems to me the undercover cop made the group more operationally effective than they would have been by themselves?

  • Comment number 8.

    'SUCCESSFUL KIDS' (#7)

    Discuss?

  • Comment number 9.

    8

    i thought it might be, as the Australian xxxx beer advert says, 'something for the ladies'?

    however there is a wider point. If we take that attitude and apply it to the economy then one can also see why china's worforce are likely to out compete a uk one even if the currency wasn't rigged? They expect the best and believe each person can achieve that whereas we make excuses for failure and defeatism?

  • Comment number 10.

    It will be very interesting to see how Newsnight push the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s multiculturalist agenda by giving airtime to some wet-legged liberal trying to tell us that the sexual abuse of underage girls is 'not an Asian culture thing', when the official stats plainly show it is. Of the 56 men found guilty of child rape (etc) 53 were Asian and 50 were Muslim. How anyone can argue with those figures is beyond me.

  • Comment number 11.

    Why is NN trying to make light of the fact that these men who attacked the children were Pakistani origin muslims? They have been convicted, and others that took part, many dozens I should imagine got away with it. It wasn't just the 7 - 9 that were convicted, now was it. I don't imagine these men introduced these girls to english men do you, so it was more Asian muslims abusing these girls.

    Everybody in Britain knows this is a problem, not just with asian men, but with any race living here. What the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ could do is actually broadcast some decent programmes, not the crap that is Eastenders. My daugher, a teacher, says many of the children she teaches in secondary school try to live by that awful programme, they believe it to be real life, as it should be lived! I'm all for reality, but not the glamourisation of living in a rather tawdry way.

  • Comment number 12.

    10 Andy...the real "culture thing" behind this issue is our own majority culture which grooms children into premature independence and sexual activity via soap opera`s and Sex in the City tuition courses on the telly all the time.

    As for the minority cultures I know for a fact that the usual scapegoats (like health visitors and social workers) have insufficient power to intervene in cases like Victoria Climbie and Damilola Taylor....for fear of "cultural sensitivities" and the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳/Guardian PC wolf pack!

  • Comment number 13.

    11 Ecolizzie...I feel your pain and myself wonder what these soap operas are doing to us...but I think there is an answer.....insist that in our multicultural society it`s only PC to introduce the alleged social realism of "Shameless" into a set of new soap operas made to portray the various effnik communiees with the same realism!
    Abu Hamza and the Forty Thieves? Blow Up?

  • Comment number 14.

    LETS GET PERSONAL (#9)

    My boys have no 'qualifications'. One has a breadth of general practicality and skills that will stand him in very good stead when the sky falls; he is about to give up on Mammon and plough his own furrow. The other son has an instinct for people at all levels that sees him well respected by staff, management and customers alike. My wife left school at 14. She was a dedicated and loving mother and (previously) an empathic 'manipulator' of Gas Board fitters, such that the desperate customers were identified and rescued. I have no qualifications, but built and ran a business that survived several recessions.

    In my experience, not everyone is suited to schooling. How do the Chinese kids fare, who simply cannot perform to requirement? Any data?

  • Comment number 15.

    'ABU HAMZA AND THE FORTY THIEVES' (#13)

    You trying to give me nightmares Jim? Sounds like a cross between Peter Pan and Carry on up the Minaret!

    How did you get that past the Blogdog?

  • Comment number 16.

    14...I`m similarly unendowed Barrie and consoled myself (after years as an artful dodger and truant) with the thought that it takes brains to resist education!

    My later lapse was occasioned by a bout of socialism followed by a social work course at Bristol ...followed swiftly by thirty years hard and thankless labour trying to make sense of the chaos wreaked on the underclass by our multicultural paradise.Missus ran a CAB.

    Older son is in London as a sustainability advisor in Civil Service...but for how long? Younger one works for Royal Mail...but for how long?

  • Comment number 17.

    I feed the dog titbits Barrie....last night I gave him an idea for a new TV fusion programme called "Desperate Housewives`Choice" a new magazine programme for feminists on the pull.
    He was so grateful that the idea was taken down in seconds in case it was pinched like my other idea....a political reality show called "Does my Majority Look Big in This?.
    Every one a winner Baz!

  • Comment number 18.

    RADIO 4 JUST PLAYED A TAPE OF A PAEDOPHILE DENYING HIS ACTIVITY.

    Why? A week or two back, I watched and heard a man being cautioned in his front room. Why?

    Law-n-Order is clearly an addition to showbiz. Monty Python lives.

    What next: televised identity parades with Son et Lumiere? Televised post mortems, with improvised poetry? Ladettes on the town, rigged for live footage of vomiting and getting laid behind the Paladins? Why not?

  • Comment number 19.

    Damage limitation of the highest order on the Pakistani grooming story.
    Nice try newsnight but how effective will it be? about effective as when the then Lambeth head plod and failed future wannabe Liberal Democrat MP Brian Paddick told us of his effective policing methods, whilst over his shoulder residents told of the rise in crime in their area, you know, like Tariq Aziz in Baghdad with tanks in the background, or when the then Met Commander Blair was telling us blah blah blah....

    And can someone please take the Warkster to Primark and get her some new outfits. This woman is reasonable looking -for mid-50s at least - so why is she getting dressed in material that was once curtains ..and curtains from a different era. Come on! that brown patterned number was just plain wrong. IMAO.

  • Comment number 20.

    19 Kev...You are a star! I`ve been banging on about the need to hold Question Time on sink estates instead of Middle England for ages....and wrote to Mentorn about it and a few at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ as well.

    But they all know what a mess they have created with their public school sarcasm and liberality and easy "³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ satirist" cleverness.
    And now the whole enormity of the engulfing social chaos they unwittingly created is plain to them they dare not "investigate" many social issues....for so many PC reasons that soon the NN team will be left sitting in a darkened room unable to face reality of any kind at all!

    Sure they can turn the death of a Brasilian illegal electrician into billion pound industry ......but notice how Ian Tomlinson and the victims of 7/7 got a very different airing and deal at the hands of the Beeb and the wider Establishment?I DON`T wonder why at all.....but it`s only now dawning on the vast bureaucracy of hangers on at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳!

  • Comment number 21.

    By the way Ms Wark`s Woman`s Realm ensemble is "make `n mend chic"....meant to deceive those too stupid to realise that she`s almost as rich as those other "rags to riches" media stars....the Blairs!

  • Comment number 22.

    Why even bother with borders? :p

  • Comment number 23.

    Well Barrie and Jim, are we all oldies on here?! I think Mistress is from younger stock! ; )

    Ms Wark's top I understand all the comments, and remember something like it from the early '70s, probably designer now. Please Kirsty it's 'orrible, and doesn't do you justice. And I never comment on how presenters dress.

    I can't believe what's happened to the "working class" here, a horrible term, but I don't know the numbers they're called. I'm from that stock, and they seem to have collapsed in a heap. Thatcher started it with mass unemployment, and supporting every one a yuppie, and Blair and Brown, who I thought of as saviours, put the boot in even harder. Bringing many many people into the country to exploit, and then to push the "working class" further into the mire.

    What a brilliant idea Jim, QT from a sink estate, instead of the usual suspects pontificating about things they know nothing about. What liberal luvvie has a clue about the working man. The "working class" are just there to be exploited on those disgusting reality programmes, where all their personal life is on show, it is extremely humiliating.

    Those programmes along with the torture programmes of Big Brother, and the Jungle one, are much like the clips from programmes Chris Tarrent used to air many years ago, as look at how the Japanese or other countries humiliated their people on TV. NOW WE DO THAT ALL THE TIME! Disgusting! (Not of Tunbridge Wells anymore, as there has been a huge demographic shift there!)

  • Comment number 24.

    22 Well if we stopped paying the lawyers (like Cherie Blair) and human right`s activists billions of pounds every year from "our" collapsing legal aid budget.... maybe there wouldn`t be so many people crossing countries (where they could just as easily claim asylum) to arrive here......where they make the already miserable lives of our British born underclass even more miserable!

    It`s on a par with our "democratic" presence as a milch cow in the EU ....and as reluctant financiers of American foreign policy all over the world.

  • Comment number 25.

    funny how on the bbc news site its now called 'teenage grooming' rather than paedophile rings? giving a 13 year old drink and drugs and using them for gang banging is not teenage grooming. its paedophiles.

    as for the representation figures. if, historically, pakistani pedo rings are not being prosecuted of course their profile in the figures will be low? so its a false claim to say the current figures represent reality? another 9 arrested today.


    7 years under cover? what procedures are in place to prevent 'going native'?

  • Comment number 26.

    I think it`s very unlikely that the majority of men having sex with underage children are Asian...simply because Asians represent a relatively small proportion of our total population.

    But with the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ insisting that more horrid white men are thrown in gaol on the say so of the women in their lives it was inevitable that the prehistoric goings-on in our foreign-occupied seperate-development apartheid-dominated sunburbs would eventually come to the attention of the feminist crazy gang.

    Now...of course ....they are in a complete tizzy about what to do next!

  • Comment number 27.

    WE SHOULD NOT LOSE SIGHT OF NATURE'S SIGNALS, POST-PUBERTY (#25)

    I am no supporter of predatory males, but I don't think the charge of 'paedophilia' should stand, once a female of our species is exhibiting 'releaser signals' to the male ape. As I repeat (rather tiresomely) we are 'The Ape Confused by Language'. We are also an ape trying to pretend we are not an ape.

    Viable cultures have STRONG TABOOS; we have fewer by the year. Add alcohol, and all opprobrium must, in my view, be severely qualified.

    Our courts are all at sea and law has less and less to do with justice.

    Struggle Britain.

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