Forgetting Sarah Marshall - a close friend of demo & Sheffield Socialist Party organiser Sam Moorcroft

A pretty young woman dancing carelessly at a demonstration seems to have caused uproar at Hope not Hate and one of their funders, the NUJ.

The woman at the protest - is this Sarah Marshall?

Last week, the Casuals United blog, operated by people you wouldn't want to run into in a dark alleyway, posted what they claimed was the Facebook profile of just that - a young woman dancing carelessly at a demonstration. The young woman - who they allege was called Sarah Marshall - was also seen to be throwing flowers. None of this would have mattered except for several salient points.

Sarah Marshall - if it was she - is also a trainee reporter on the Doncaster Free Press, and was sent there to cover a demonstration and the expected conflict between members of Casuals United and the EDL on one side, and anti-fascist protesters on the other. The demonstration centred on the Cenotaph in Sheffield. It was alleged that Ms Marshall joined the Antifa protesters, and the flowers she was throwing were flowers which had been laid at the Cenotaph in private acts of remembrance not connected with the demonstration. Sadly for the maybe Ms Marshall, she was also caught on video.

Since then, a war of words has erupted. The Casuals United blog outlined the case against her, and asked that people contact her newspaper to see if they approved of their journalists taking part in events they were supposed to report. This appears to have degenerated into a series of threats against someone who is after all young and inexperienced and who may well be the victim of a case of mistaken identity.

Meanwhile, the NUJ has waded into the row, issuing a statement exonerating Ms Marshall and clearing her of any part in the demonstration, while calling for the 'EDL thugs' who are persecuting her to be prosecuted.

For the Doncaster Free Press, it originally tweeted that it was investigating complaints against Ms Marshall. It then apparently cleared her in another tweet, but the link it gave went dead almost immediately and the posting linked to was removed. Since then, the newspaper has refused to comment, and has removed all previous comments.

All of which leaves us no closer to knowing the truth. Was the young lady pictured Sarah Marshall or not?

Ms Marshall's Facebook front page
before access was restricted

Contrary to the squeals of outrage from the NUJ and Hope not Hate, there is more than a passing resemblance between Ms Marshall and the woman at the demonstration. The Casuals United blog also alleges that Ms Marshall acknowledged it was her on her Facebook page before changing the privacy settings to prevent others seeing it, although they offer no proof of this allegation, and no screen captures.

On the other hand, sections of Ms Marshall's Facebook account remain public. While her Facebook front page did show her support for both the NUJ and Unite - both of whom fund Hope not Hate - her 'likes' are equally revealing.

Sarah Marshall 'liking' items on Sam Morecroft's page -
Moorcroft was one of the Sheffield Socialist Party organisers
who sought violent confrontation at the demo

These include 'Socialist Party - Yorkshire',  'Socialist Meme Caucus', 'Yorkshire Youth Fight for Jobs and Education', 'Sheffield City Council - Bring Back our MMA', 'VI Lenin', 'Socialist', 'Karl Marx', 'Re-elect Dave Nellist', 'Sheffield Socialist Party', 'Occupy Liverpool', 'Occupy Sheffield', 'Occupy Shropshire' and others in a similar vein.

Is this Ms Marshall - centre?

The Sheffield Socialist Party was according to their website responsible for the confrontation with the marchers at the wreath laying on June 8th, and actively sought violent confrontation with what it classed (rightly or wrongly) as the far-right. The Sheffield Socialist Party for Sheffield South is run by someone called Sam Morecroft who, like Ms Marshall, is originally from Shrewsbury. Marshall and Morecroft are friends, both on Facebook and in real life, and would appear to have been since their days in Shrewsbury, as it looks like Ms Marshall in the picture of 'Shrewsbury Socialist Party' which features Mr Morecroft as well. There is another photograph of an inebriated Ms Marshall and Mr Morecroft posted last year which according to a comment by Ms Marshall was 'about 6 years ago'.

None of this proves anything one way or the other, and it is all just speculation and deduction. It does raise a number of questions which the various statements issued - and in some cases subsequently removed - fail to answer. In summary these are

• Is the woman at the demonstration Ms Marshall?
• Whether or not Ms Marshall was the person in the photograph, given her closeness with the organiser of the protest, was it wise to assign her to this event?
• Would Ms Marshall have been sufficiently neutral to abide by the NUJ's own code of conduct for journalists, point 2 of which states that a "journalist strives to ensure that information disseminated is honestly conveyed, accurate and fair"
• Why has the Doncaster Free Press apparently removed its defence of Ms Marshall, and why is it now refusing to comment?

There are other questions, but these are enough to be going on with for now.

A drunken Ms Marshall and Sheffield Socialist Party organiser Sam Morecroft

With all that said, even assuming that Ms Marshall is the person at the demonstration the campaign of harassment against her seems excessive, particularly given her youth and inexperience: she is only a trainee reporter after all, and it is difficult to see what is to be achieved by proving all the worst stereotypes of the far right correct.

So after all that, is the woman at the demonstration Ms Marshall? We don't know, but we suspect that it is. If we had to guess at a sequence of events, they would go something like this:

• Ms Marshall volunteers to cover demonstration because she knows one of the organisers
• Ms Marshall gets carried away, possibly after a beer or two, as the AntiFa demonstrators are friends of hers from the Sheffield Socialist Party
• Ms Marshall finds herself taking part in the demonstration rather than reporting on it.
• Ms Marshall acknowledges her part on her Facebook, and then hastily removes it and changes her privacy settings when she realises she has been caught out
• When Casuals United first published their information, she was called in by her editor and flatly denied it was her, knowing that it was unprofessional in the extreme.
• Her editor defends her and repeats her denial.
• The NUJ saw an opportunity to make political capital and, forgetting its own code of conduct, accepted her assurance while not caring if it was true or not.
• Her editor realised that the accusations on the Casuals United blog were actually true and therefore deleted his defence of Ms Marshall and refused to make further comment.

All of which leaves almost nobody looking good. What started as an informative post by Casuals United descended into a series of veiled threats against a young woman. The Doncaster Free Press found itself unwittingly caught in a lie, and couldn't withdraw without risking the wrath of the NUJ. The NUJ knows it is lying, but doesn't care - who will take it on? And it is not a funder of Hope not Hate for nothing, while its leadership belong to assorted far left political parties, and it is depending upon the principle of 'might is right' to force its lie on the world.

This is of course all speculation, but speculation based on fair comment and research which links Ms Marshall to the organiser of the AntiFa demonstration. We do not advocate violence or any further threats against Ms Marshall - there is nothing to be achieved, and which media organisation will print it anyway? What is interesting is the way that apparently all of the groups and individuals involved  are either lying or covering up a lie, but the truth has come a distant second to the opportunity to make political capital.

 

 

 

A 'cut out and keep' guide to Danes and Somalis for Hope not Hate

Readers of Hope not Hate's Facebook page who were busy attacking the far right after a suspect package was left at the Al Rahma mosque in Liverpool may be wondering why their comments - and the story - disappeared overnight.


A visit to Hope not Hate's main website provides the answer - for now. Despite Hope not Hate crossing their fingers and wishing that the perpetrator was a far right activist of some sort, police initially stated that the man arrested was actually Danish. This was then corrected yesterday when it was revealed that the man who had been arrested and released with a caution was in fact Somali.

Hope not Hate will no doubt consider it a job well done in any case. While the initial posting appeared on Facebook and allowed their followers to speculate as to who was responsible, the correcting article appears only on their website, and even then with no accompanying explanation. Still, this is what happens when truth and harmonious inter-community relations come a distant second in a race to justify your own existence.

In order to help prevent Hope not Hate from making a similar mistake in the future, we have attached a handy 'cut out and keep' guide to aid them in distinguishing between Danes and Somalis in future.

It would be foolish to believe that the next time a visitor to a mosque forgets to take their laundry with them that Hope not Hate will not use the opportunity to do their best to stir up fear and hatred. Tomorrow, we will include the dictionary definition of 'hope', as they appear to have forgotten what it means.

Does it really take a £1m organisation to combat people saying rude things about Islam on the Internet?

Hope not Hate last night reposted a Channel 4 news article headlined "EDL 'linked to a third' of

Data based on 'Tell MAMA's figures -
but they are losing their grant because
of doubts about their accuracy

online anti-Muslim incidents".

The report, by the Centre for Fascist Studies at Teeside University, runs to 30 pages of analysis, but suffers from a serious drawback: its data is based on information provided to it by the 'Tell MAMA' campaign. Tell MAMA, which was founded by Fiyal Mughal last year and funded by the government, has just lost its central government grant because its figures were unreliable. In an article on June 9th in the Sunday Telegraph, Andrew Gilligan wrote:

"A controversial project claiming to measure anti-Muslim attacks will not have its government grant renewed after police and civil servants raised concerns about its methods.

The project, called Tell Mama, claimed that there had been a “sustained wave of attacks and intimidation” against British Muslims after the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby, with 193 “Islamophobic incidents” reported to it, rising to 212 by last weekend.

 The group’s founder, Fiyaz Mughal, said he saw “no end to this cycle of violence”, describing it as “unprecedented”. The claims were unquestioningly repeated in the media.

Tell Mama and Mr Mughal did not mention, however, that 57 per cent of the 212 reports referred to activity that took place only online, mainly offensive postings on Twitter and Facebook, or that a further 16 per cent of the 212 reports had not been verified. Not all the online abuse even originated in Britain.

Contrary to the group’s claim of a “cycle of violence” and a “sustained wave of attacks”, only 17 of the 212 incidents, 8 per cent, involved the physical targeting of people and there were no attacks on anyone serious enough to require medical treatment."

 The Teeside report focuses on incidents over a longer timescale, but the figures are broadly in line with those since the Woolwich incident. In the period 1st April 2012 to 30th April 2013, Tell MAMA has recorded 584 anti-Muslim hate crimes, of which 434 took place on-line, as opposed to 150 in the real world. Of these real world incidents, only 8% - 12 - involved 'extreme violence', although there is no indication of what extreme violence means. This is not to downplay the seriousness of assaults, but to show that of the 584 incidents recorded by Tell MAMA, only 2% involved anything more than what amounts to name-calling or insults.

HnH would like you to think that this is commonplace -
but even Tell MAMA's figures show this is not so

Of the real world incidents, only 29 out of 150 involved an identifiable link to the far-right, or 19.3% - a figure the report refers to as 'nearly a quarter', when it is actually 'nearly a fifth'. By 'far-right', the report refers to the BNP, NF and EDL and its offshoots: it specifically excludes UKIP (HnH take note).

There are several gaping holes in this data. Most noticeable is the lack of any indication of how many of the real world incidents which resulted in violence also had connections to the far-right, which leads us to believe the figures were pretty evenly spread. This would mean that statistically only 2.4 violent incidents took place with far-right links of the 12 recorded. Online, the situation was clearer, with 300 out of 434 incidents having links to the far-right, although even here the methodology was not clear - was passing on an internet 'meme' which could be considered anti-Muslim sufficient? As EDL membership is self-selecting and not limited to the UK, it is also not clear to what extent the data is valid.

What is interesting is to turn this data around the other way. Hope not Hate and its associated groups

Once again, HnH prove inept at
sorting data which doesn't fit
their agenda

have an annual turnover approaching £1m, and a significant number of staff. For the past year, it has involved itself in opposing hate crimes primarily against Muslims living in the UK. But that really highlights the scale of the problem facing Nick Lowles and Ruth Smeeth. On Tell MAMAs figures since the Woolwich incident, HnH's expensive organisation has essentially spent the last 6 weeks going after 40 EDL members who said rude things online about Muslims, and a further 17 people who shouted rude words at a Muslim in the street. According to the data in the Teeside report - and merging it with that released by Tell MAMA since the Woolwich incident - it means this expensive organisation has been chasing a mere 796 incidents, the vast majority of

Ruth Smeeth - may have
to step off the HnH
gravy train

which - 554 - amounted to Muslims being called rude names in internet postings. Of the real world incidents, only 12 - or 1.5% - involved violence, and only 2.4 - 0.3% -of those involved the far right. This does not seem to justify the scale of resources which Hope not Hate deploy, and explains their desperation to find another target before their own supporters begin to ask the same questions.

Without UAF to hide behind, Weyman
Bennet is just another political thug

The same problem is also facing the other supposedly anti-racist organisations, chief amongst which is Unite Against Fascism and its various offshoots. Many of these groups like UAF are simply front organisations for other political groups such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who use them for spreading their own propaganda. If organised fascism is seen to be defeated, this audience is lost to them and that
they can not afford to happen.

Hope not Hate is not all about the money. It is about the influence and the power that brings: the access to media which unquestioningly accepts what they say. It is a heady brew, rubbing shoulders with sympathetic MPs and Ministers, editors and journalists. By selectively using statistics, they are not combatting the problem of anti-Islamic attacks, they are making it seem worse than it is, and diverting efforts away from the majority of perpetrators of real-world incidents who have no connection to the far-right. If there is a better example of Hope not Hate failing in its primary task, we have yet to see it.

All of this adds to the evidence that many of the supposed racist incidents are orchestrated not by the far right, but by anti-racist groups desperate to hang on to their positions and bands of thoughtless followers. Incidents such as the careful desecration of Islamic graves we reported on yesterday appear increasingly calculated to extend what HnH and UAF define as 'far-right' into the political mainstream. We have seen continually decreasing attendances at EDL marches which the EDL leadership has attempted to combat by ever more desperate political stunts. We have seen the collapse of the BNP, with its own attempts to hijack the Woolwich incident descend into farce. The English Democrats attempts to harvest disillusioned members has resulted in the collapse of the party. Andrew Brons and his new political party have disappeared.

UKIP should be on their guard. Lowles, Smeeth, Bennett and Smith will not let power slip through their fingers, and will resort to almost any means to prevent their followers seeing their own irrelevance to the political debate. They recognise that unless they successfully convince their own followers that UKIP is more than a political threat, their ride on the gravy train is approaching the terminus, and we should be aware from past experience that there are almost no depths to which they will not stoop to avoid having to step off onto the platform.

 

 

The respectful desecrators and a history of HnH and UAF disinformation

On our Facebook page this morning we covered the South Wales Argus' story about a racist attack on

Hate slogans carefully daubed while flowers and borders
remain undamaged and unmolested?
A strange sort of hate crime.

Muslim graves in Newport's Christchurch Cemetery overnight on Saturday. Graves in an area set aside for Islamic burials were daubed with 'Lee Rigby Murder', 'BNP', 'NF', 'UKIP', 'Kill the Muslim Pakis' and swastikas.

Our first thought was what a disgraceful thing it was to do.

Our second - who was responsible? - got us to thinking.

The picture shows that while the graves were daubed with paint, flowers, plants and solar lights mounted on the graves were all intact and unmolested, and in the image shown (above) the graffiti artists appear to have painted around the flowers on the headstone rather than apply a hefty kick to free up space. It is a pretty remarkable hate crime indeed where the perpetrators daub violent slogans and yet appear to have set out to do as little damage as possible: surely if you're desecrating a grave and you really mean it, you'd kick it to pieces as well? Nice, well brought up middle class vandals, perhaps? At least - unlike most 'far right' graffiti - it is all spelt correctly.

Then there are the omissions. The graffiti mentions the BNP, NF and UKIP and yet fails to mention either the EDL or its Welsh equivalent, the WDL. Coming just hours after the high profile arrest of Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon and Carroll in London, it struck us as strange that only political parties were mentioned rather than the rather more high profile groups who had been making news headlines all that day. An extension of these thoughts is that UKIP bars anyone associated with the other two groups - or any other far-right group - from membership, while the BNP & NF have a mutual loathing for each other which far outweighs their loathing for Islam. The idea that someone would paint the names of the three organisations as a gesture of support is absurd, given that the BNP and NF regards UKIP as 'race traitors'. A much more likely scenario is that it is an outrage designed to link UKIP and the far-right, which makes it unlikely to have been carried out by anyone on the far-right.


 Richard Purssell (l)
and Dan Cole (r) - both
allegedly UAF activists

There is also the location of the cemetery. Christchurch cemetery is relatively remote, separated from the nearest houses by the M4 motorway and in a relatively rural and difficult to reach location. This was not some midnight drunken prank: carting paint and brushes to such a location required some thought and advance planning rather than a spur of the moment decision, otherwise how would the correct graves be found in the middle of the night out of the many thousands there? How would the slogans be daubed so carefully without torches, and if it was done by torchlight, how come there is no sign of accidental trampling of flowers or other ornaments unless great care was taken?

This brought us back to thinking of several other recent events. On Saturday, we had two UAF supporters dressed as EDL members attacking the EDL leaders on their publicity stunt. Initial reports and tweets from UAF and Hope not Hate indicated that the 'far right were fighting amongst themselves': there has been little reporting of the assailants since. If reports on far-right websites are true the assailants were UAF activists Richard Purssell and Dan Cole dressed in what has become the unofficial uniform of the EDL.



Wood was cleared by a police investigation of making these
statements - they were either made on a duplicate account
or were photoshopped.

This in turn lead us to think about the story of Alex Wood, the UKIP candidate who was splashed across the front page of the Daily Mirror allegedly giving a Nazi salute. With his left hand. He was also alleged to have made comments about Africans living in mud huts, and to have admitted that the picture was of him making a Nazi salute. Hope not Hate devoted considerable time to attacking his claim that his account was hacked, and yet a police investigation subsequently discovered that Wood had not in fact made either statement, and that alleged screenshots in his name appeared to have been created either on a duplicate account created by somebody using his name, or to have been photoshopped. While the original discussion that took place on-line on the Hope not Hate Facebook page appear to have been removed, it is interesting to note that what remains of HnH's participation is hedged by 'allegedly' and 'apparently':

Note the use of the word 'apparently'

We have been unable to find another example where Hope not Hate while condemning the web postings of someone they claim to be far-right hedged their libel bets in such a way. The suggestion must be that 'Simon Cressy' - a pseudonym for HnH staffer Carl Morphett - had some idea that the quotes were not genuine, and yet was prepared to use them anyway. Wood may well prove to be guilty of other offences through his association with failed Tory candidate Joshua Bonehill, but on these, he appears to be innocent, the victim of a 'frame up' which Hope not Hate appeared aware of and yet chose to ignore.

If those who at first glance appear responsible for these actions were not behind them, the question must be 'Cui bono', or who benefits?

It is not difficult to imagine that the pictures of 'UKIP' scrawled on an Islamic grave alongside a swastika will appear in Labour Party election literature, and quite possibly in Lib Dem and Plaid Cymru as well, and even the Tories wouldn't surprise us.

Alex Wood was used by the Daily Mirror (who part fund Hope not Hate along with a number of trades unions) and Hope not Hate just before polling day in the local elections once it became clear that Labour were also suffering badly at the hands of UKIP.

It would appear that the 'beneficiary' of these actions though is primarily Labour. There are undoubtedly ties between senior Labour Party figures and the 'hard left' anti-fascist groups, including HnH and UAF. And as HnH features the Newport story on their webpage, we see the first of the 'dog-whistle' political comments appear:




From Hope not Hate's facebook page
 

Sarah Evans also operates a blog, just in case you thought this was a random comment from a concerned member of the public - Sarah Evans Labour - and was the Labour Party candidate for North West Hampshire in the 2010 general election. She frequently features Hope not Hate on her blog.

So who is responsible? We suspect we'll never know. There are unlikely to be any arrests, but already we see Labour Party activists using the attack to make political capital. It is not difficult to imagine that whoever was behind the desecration has some ties to the anti-fascist movement. Such fascist tactics are increasingly a part of their repertoire.