Bullying, The Sun, and David Cameron
@GracieSamuels
David Cameron is trying to make political capital out of cyberbullying.
I would point to Mr Cameron, that he, George Osborne and the entire British right wing press and broadcast media bullied former prime minister, Gordon Brown, viciously and relentlessly for over two years. Mr Brown was openly and continually lied about, negatively spun against and personally and psychologically abused in one of the worse cases of political bullying I have ever seen. It was an absolute disgrace and embarrassment and slur on the reputation of this country, especially as Gordon Brown is held in very high esteem everywhere else in the world! It is only in this country he is constantly castigated and ridiculously and bizarrely blamed for the global recession and banking collapse. I’d remind the Tories and their mates in the right wing press that it wasn’t Mr Brown that lost this country our triple A credit ratings from two major credit agencies was it? In 2009 at the time this country was battling through the effects of the worst *Global* recession for over 80 years in what felt like a economic tsunami, and the *Global* problems were causing turmoil in all financial services in all countries, George Osborne decided to play politics, talk the British economy down and calmly announced that being placed on negative watch by the credit agencies was grounds for calling for a General Election!
Osborne 2009
“It’s now clear that Britain’s economic reputation is on the line at the next general election, another reason for bringing the date forward and having the election now…For the first time since these ratings began in 1978, the outlook for British debt has been downgraded from stable to negative.”
So he thought it was pretty serious, so serious in fact Osborne was calling for an early general election! Then perhaps he and his bullying lying PM and the bullying lying right wing press could explain why two years later they didn’t think that it was that serious that his (Osborne’s) measures lead to this country’s credit ratings being placed on negative watch? The same measures and negative credit watch that finally lead to the loss of our triple A status from the two largest credit ratings agencies a year later! Apparently this wasn’t important at all well not when George Osborne was to blame anyway, but if it were Gordon Brown, well we would have been measuring the press response on the Richter scale! So why didn’t David Cameron call an early general election on the basis that his chancellor has lost us our triple A rating? Especially as Osborne specifically asked to be judged on him keeping our AAA ratings.
Now we are all supposed to rejoice that Osborne has pulled off some kind of economic “miracle” (so we are told) because he has managed to restore 0.6% of growth of the 2.7% growth he inherited from the Labour government in 2010 and subsequently lost sending the country into a double dip recession. We are also currently being primed to forget about the taxpayer funded credit and housing bubble that Osborne is currently pumping up for Tory election purposes, and told that the very thing that helped nearly push the global economy off the edge of a financial cliff in 2008 is a “good thing”! (You really couldn’t make this up)
Let’s not forget either that the bullying of Gordon Brown was encouraged by David Cameron, in fact it was CCHQ that supplied the right wing press with much of their tittle tattle. The Sun newspaper ran a campaign where they literally whipped up hatred for Mr Brown over troops overseas. The newspaper got Britain’s most highly decorated soldier, Johnson Beharry to give them a story about how he refused to shake the hand of Gordon Brown and how he felt like punching Gordon Brown in the face. Mr Beharry said it was because Mr Brown could not look him in the eye, no of course he couldn’t because Mr Brown is partially sighted, he has a false eye and the vision in his remaining eye was deteriorating something the Sun “forgot” (accidentally on purpose to inform Mr Beharry of). But this didn’t stop the Sun exploiting Mr Johnson Beharry, they actually took that story from Mr Beharry almost a year earlier and sat on it and brought it out and published it when they thought their bullying attack on Mr Brown could cause maximum damage to him! This is despicable dirty journalism. I often wonder what Mr Johnson Beharry makes of what David Cameron and the Tories are now doing to the military!
The Sun ran a vicious campaign aided and abetted by Cameron over our troops, despite the fact that Mr Brown and the former Labour government tried to provide them with everything they needed. Why hasn’t the sun exposed that since becoming PM, David Cameron has reneged on every single promise he made on our armed forces, from the supply of Chinook helicopters to making thousands of troops redundant by email?
When in opposition Cameron slated the Labour government for not providing enough Chinook helicopters to troops in Afghanistan, he promised if he became PM he would increase the number but what Cameron actually did when he became prime minister is slash the number of Chinooks the former Labour government *already had on order* from 22 to just 14. Cameron also axed troops by email, forze their pay, scuttled our only aircraft carrier in a devastating attack on our military. Where is the Sun’s campaign to expose how David Cameron smiles in the faces of our troops while stabbing them in the back? Why doesn’t the Sun newspaper expose the shocking treatment of our troops over the Tory government’s bedroom tax?
Where are the news stories to point out that actually Mr Brown both as chancellor and PM, tried his level best to treat our troops properly and that all the good the previous Labour government have done, is now being undone?
At the time that Gordon Brown was PM the Sun was always running a deeply personal nasty campaign on Gordon Brown about one thing or another, they ran what they called “exclusives” over the most ridiculous petty things as well as more serious issues, they used the drip, drip drip subliminal suggestion method to get into the psyches of their readers. Once they ran a really vicious campaign because Mr Brown, insisting on a writing personally to a mother who had lost her soldier son, instead of letting an aid send a standard duplicate copy letter, it was a deeply personal thing to do, yet because Mr Brown is partially sighted in his one remaining eye he made an error and mistook the name Janes for James and because of this he was castigated for days on the front page of the Sun and was the subject of relentless bullying by this vile newspaper, bullying that David Cameron not only encouraged, but joined in with.
Over the past three years, the Sun newspaper (and other right wing newspapers) have constantly spun that Gordon Brown makes money from his speaking engagements since his return to the back benches. Yes he does, he makes a lot of money from speaking engagements, (his talents are appreciated elsewhere if not in his own country), he makes a lot of money from his books etc, but what the Sun newspaper and the Daily Mail *DELIBERATELY* negate to tell you, is that Mr Brown and his wife Sarah, donate every single penny they make to charity. They live on his MPs salary. I wish that previous PMs were so conscientious from Thatcher and Major to Blair, they may have helped improve the public’s opinion on our politicians instead of damaging it still further.
What the right wing press also didn’t say in their newspapers is that when Gordon Brown was PM he used to get up hours earlier than need be in order to write a book about the loss of his baby daughter Jennifer, to try to reach out to others going through similar grief and again he donated all the proceeds of his book to charity.
The Sun newspaper also splashed across its front page the medical history of Sarah and Gordon Brown’s son revealing to the world that the lad suffers from cystic fibrosis, despite the fact that they had tried desperately to protect their son from press intrusion. Gordon and Sarah were forced into revealing this by then then Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, who they thought was a friend in order to maintain some control over what Brooks was going to publish anyway.
Turns out that Rebekah Brooks was no friend of the Browns, sensing that Labour were going to lose the 2010 general election she had dumped the Browns and gone onto pastures new and had become the friend of the Camerons, and had joined forces with David Cameron to bully Gordon Brown, using anything, even the medical history of Mr Brown’s little boy to get at Mr Brown so Cameron could have his job as PM.
Then there was Andrew Marr debacle on the BBC who during a televised interview ambushed and bullied Mr Brown on air asking if he suffered from depression and if he was on antidepressants – absolutely appalling.
The personal attacks and bullying of Mr Brown were relentless and they were aided and abetted by David Cameron, George Osborne and the Conservative party.
The press and the Tory party have completely airbrushed history and that what actually happened as a result of the global recession and managed to blame Brown for it. In truth if it were not for Labour’s Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, who came up with a plan to rescue the world’s financial markets at the eleventh hour, when every single other country remained clueless and stumped about what to do about the ensuing financial disaster just hours away, then goodness knows what would have happened. Yet somehow the Tories and their banker mates who all donate to the Conservative party and their friends the shadow bankers etc (who were the real culprits and to blame for this mess) and the right wing press, have managed to blame Labour for the problems in the global economy! It just isn’t true Labour were not to blame and because Osborne and Cameron, the banks and the right wing press have occluded what really happened from us, we are now hurtling towards another economic catastrophe – who will they blame for this one?
What a sad indictment on us as a society that we allow the rat infested sewer right wing press and Conservative party to spread such malicious unfounded gossip about a man, whose only fault was to be human and completely ignore the huge successes Gordon Brown had as chancellor (10 years of stable growth ended only by greedy profiteering bankers) and the immense amount of good he did for the ordinary working person of this country and how we have allowed him to be bullied, intimidated, abused and insulted.
Now the right wing press and David Cameron are repeating this process and are trying to do exactly the same to leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband. What has happened to Ed Miliband over this past 2 weeks simply because he was on holiday with his family is just tantamount to lying distortion of the truth misleading and plain bullying. Where was the press asking where Cameron was when he took two months unscheduled time off from parliament immediately prior to the House rising for the summer recess? When he missed 8 PMQs? Why are they castigating Ed Miliband for taking two weeks scheduled holiday with his young family?
It’s bullying – pure and simple!
If David Cameron wants to stamp out bullying, then he needs to look closely at himself before he looks anywhere else, or does anything else, because without doubt, Mr Cameron is the most unpleasant deceitful, lying, bullying misogynistic prime minister this country has ever had and until he cleans his own act up, he should shut up about others because he is just as bad, if not worse!
