UK News

The charade works like this. The government finds (or creates) a charity, lavishes it with taxpayers' money and encourages it to lobby for taxes and regulation. After a few years of astro-turf campaigning by state-funded activists, the government passes laws which punish, stigmatise and exploit its citizens while claiming to be capitulating to the demands of civil society.

Scotland's Daily Record 'newspaper' has hyped up a local story of a routine police raid into the beginning of the end for Pattaya's sexy nightlife.

The paper leads with the headline

Sex sells in world's sleaziest city but Pattaya's 27,000 prostitutes could see roaring trade wiped out. Thailand's first female tourism minister aims to eradicate sex tourism and reinvent the country as a female-friendly destination and cops are now raiding brothels.

And continues:

Every year more than one million visitors a year pass through the Thai resort known as the world's sex capital. Many men are drawn there by one thing only. Pattaya has a reported 27,000 prostitutes, roughly one for every five people living permanently in the east-coast city that has been likened to a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

The resort's infamous main drag, the largest red-light district on earth, is lined with sex clubs and go-go bars. Pattaya alone has more than 1,000 bars and massage parlours, many fronts illegal brothels.

In fact the tourism minister's comments are now pretty old news and the 27,000 sex workers and the 1000 bars have been operating unabated ever since.

Police have been routinely raiding bars regularly for years, and there is nothing to suggest that this particular raid is in any way out of the ordinary.

And on the night after the police raid, the 27000 sex workers and 1000 bars were operating as normal, not even dropping to 999, as the bar being raided seems to have settled its differences with the authorities.

And guess what, a couple of days later there are still 27,000 sex workers plying their trade, but admittedly a couple of bars have closed, more due to the million visitors not quite being enough.

A top celebrity has taken out a so-called super injunction to prevent the press from reporting a story on their personal and professional life .

The extreme gagging order prevents any information which could lead to the identity of the celebrity involved, including their sex, the reason they are famous and information relating to the story.

Officially, the legal measure - which is called an anonymised privacy injunction - has been used by a large number of celebrities including footballers such as Ryan Giggs and John Terry to cover up sexual infidelity.

The latest anonymous celebrity secured a super injunction against the Sunday Times in the High Court.

NatWest has reversed its decision to close the UK bank accounts of the Kremlin-backed news channel RT, formerly known as Russia Today.

The bank wrote to the company that provides RT services in the UK last October, saying it would no longer provide banking services following a review and the decision was final.

However, in a statement this week, NatWest said it had reached a resolution with RT. Natwest is part of the RBS Group which is largely owned by the British state.

NatWest has not said why it decided to close the accounts, but it is understood that the bank's compliance department has closed down the accounts of Russian customers in the past without explanation.

K Cider 500ml Can Complaint

A complaint about the packaging of K Cider promoting immoderate drinking and urging the consumer to drink rapidly or down the product in one, has not been upheld by the Independent Complaints Panel of the Portman Group.

The complainant, Portsmouth City Council, believed that the combination of the strength of the product plus the fact the product is served in a 500ml non-resealable can encouraged consumers to drink immoderately. The council commented on the promotional material:

As once opened [the product] must be consumed or rapidly lose quality of taste etc. This encourages people to drink the entire can in one serving... thus breaching the Portman Group Code under paragraphs 3.2(f) and 3.2 (g).

The product was brought to the attention of the Panel prior to the consultation on the Chief Medical Officers' (CMOs') 2016 Low Risk Drinking Guidelines, and was put on hold until the Guidelines Review had concluded. The Panel noted that the current CMOs' guidelines did not contain a daily or single occasion drinking guideline, and the Panel could not infer from the evidence presented to the CMOs by the Guidelines Development Group that 4.2 units on a single occasion was an immoderate (whether because of increased risk to health or safety or otherwise) level of drinking. The Panel therefore concluded that there was insufficient evidence to find a breach of Code paragraph 3.2(f).

The Panel could not see anything on the packaging that would encourage a consumer to drink rapidly or to down a product in one. Accordingly, the Panel did not uphold the product under Code paragraph 3.2(g).

Secretary to the Independent Complaints Panel, Kay Perry said:

Alcohol producers must be mindful not to encourage immoderate or irresponsible drinking when designing the packaging of their products. If they are in any doubt, the Portman Group Advisory Service is free and confidential, and responds to all enquiries within two working days.

Ministers have summoned media bosses for censorship talks about 'accuracy' in journalism amid growing concern over the rise of 'fake' news. Matt Hancock, the minister of state for digital and culture policy, has asked UK newspaper industry representatives to join round-table discussions about the issue.

The UK government's decision to hold talks on the issue follows Hancock's statement to the House of Commons last November that ministers were considering the implications of the dissemination of fake news on social media sites .

The News Media Association took the opportunity to plug its own brand of 'quality journalism', such as that from the Daily Mail. Lynne Anderson, the News Media Association's deputy chief executive said:

There is now an urgent need to look at the value chain of digital news, and the industry is ready to play a full part in working towards finding a solution which sees the content creators fairly rewarded for their investment in news production. The recent debate around fake news has again highlighted the vital importance of the quality journalism produced by news media publishers which underpins democracy by holding power to account.

In 2016, Professor Joshua Silver complained to West Midlands Police that British Home Secretary Amber Rudd had committed a hate crime while giving a political speech at the Conservative Party conference.

During an interview with Andrew Neil on BBC2's Daily Politics, Prof Silver said:

I didn't actually see the speech but I've read the draft. And I've looked at all the feedback that there was to the speech. I've read the speech carefully and I've looked at all the feedback. It's discriminating against foreigners, you pick on them and say we want to give jobs to British people and not to foreigners. It was interpreted that way..

During the subsequent discussion on the programme, former Conservative Party leader Michael Howard responded by stating:

Of course it wasn't a hate incident... What Amber Rudd said was no different from Gordon Brown when he said there should be British jobs for British workers. I think Mr Silver should be thoroughly ashamed of himself because what he's doing is to bring a well-intentioned piece of legislation into disrepute.

The BBC subsequently reported that West Midlands Police had not formally investigated the speech, but had recorded it as a non-crime hate incident in accordance with national police guidelines

Offsite Comment: Hate crime reporting risks becoming a tool for censorship

14th January 2017 See leader from telegraph.co.uk

Mr Silver's complaint is vexatious. It reveals the tyranny of elite liberal thinking which labels anything that contradicts political correctness as wicked and wrong -- perhaps actionable. Of course actual hate speech is thoroughly iniquitous. But there is a difference between saying something bigoted with the intention of causing distress, and voicing an entirely legitimate opinion.

The police are not investigating Ms Rudd, but this incident will be recorded in the hate crime figures. Hopefully Ms Rudd will now see the error of her department's approach towards hate . If a crime has been reported, it should be investigated. If something is not a crime then why is data on it being gathered? Hate crime rules risk -- as Mr Silver showed us -- becoming a tool for censorship, a way of threatening people with the law simply for their opinions. That cannot be tolerated.

Offsite Comment: We're all haters now

14th January 2017 See article from spiked-online.com by Tom Slater

If a middle-of-the-road speech now counts as a hate incident , we're all screwed.

Amber Rudd's notorious party conference speech 203 in which she floated the idea of employers reporting on the number of foreign and British-born people they employ 203 has been recorded by the police as a hate incident , a new lesser category of hate crime that Rudd herself helped to introduce in July last year. In her desperation to prove she was taking post-Brexit hate crime seriously, she has effectively criminalised herself.