A leading UK gutter press tabloid, the Daily Shitraker, has been barred from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the centuries-old 1688 Bill of Rights.
Yesterday’s House of Conmans order papers contained a question to be answered by a minister later this week.
However the Daily Shitraker is now prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question was, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found in the Hansard record.
The Shitraker is further forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time since the signing of Magna Carta – from reporting Parliament.
Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve secret proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of an unknown client who has threatened to sue the living shit out of anyone who mentions their name.
The only fact the crusading Shitraker can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Fukk who specialise in suing the media for their dodgy clients, which include career embezzlers, war criminals, Third World dictators and despots, terrorist group financiers, celebrity kiddie fiddlers and global corporate felons – not to mention ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTERS.
The right to report the goings-on and daily business of Parliament was the subject of many struggles in the 18th Century, with the MP and journalist John Wilkes fighting every authority – up to the King – over the right to keep the public informed.
After Wilkes’s successful battle the historian Robert Hargreaves wrote “It was now established de facto and accepted that the public had a constitutional right to know what their elected representatives were up to”.
Thus certain critics and conspiracy theorists – in light of the recent MP’s expenses scandal and the efforts of various ‘duck island’ claimant type offenders to prevent the publication of proof of their personal indexes of embezzlement and swindling the public purse – are working overtime turning the gears of the rumour mill and producing tittle-tattle, canards, scurrilous gossip and gross slander of the finest political quality.
The Daily Shitraker has vowed to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting with media lawyer Gerald Snivellington-Snide QC quoting Attorney General Lord Mongoose’s ruling in the 1970s that “whatever comments are made in the House of Conmans can be reported in newspapers without fear of contempt”.
The Shitraker’s editor Armitage Shanks told Pox News “The media laws in this country increasingly place newspapers in a Kafkaesque situation in which we cannot tell the public anything about the crimes committed by our own elected Prime Minister such as Tony Bliar illegally declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq, then having David Kelly murdered to keep the truth from coming out.”
One rumour that was the odds-on favourite with national High Street bookies Shit-or-Bust yesterday focused on the fact of Carter-Fruck being involved in the gagging order then they must – once again – be representing the great celebrity goat-bonking Saudi litigant known around Fleet Street pubs as Sheikh Well Before Using who sued everyone and their dog who even mentioned he was an Arab since he secured Irish citizenship with several high profile investment ‘facilitation fees’ (bribes).
Alas this proved to be a case of flogging a dead donkey when it was pointed out that the camel jockey in question Sheikh Khalid Bin Muffouz – a number one al Qaeda financier – actually popped his clogs last August.
So the Daily Shitraker was stifled in it’s attempts to report the truth – or were they? – as the global scope of the internet’s social media swiftly produced a most interesting reaction to this gagging brouhaha.
The Shitraker may have been prevented from naming the client – although it was allowed make reference to the involvement of media libel specialists Carter-Fruck, which led networking sites such as Twatter, and others – to come up with cybernet postings referencing the case and naming a certain Trafigura – the Dutch-registered company with an office in London which last month announced that it would pay out zillions of pounds without any admission of liability over their dumping toxic waste right along the beaches of the Ivory Coast since 2006 and making the place a bigger shithole than it was to start with.
To wit Carter-Fruck have now backed down firing writs at everyone old enough to read – with a Parliamentary spokesman announcing that the House of Conmans question from Wentworth Gibletts – MP for Old Scrotum – subjected to the reporting ban – was related to the Trafigura toxic waste scandal and whom asked the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by Trafigura and Carter-Fruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Swiss-owned international polluters and environmental hooligans Trafigura.