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January 6th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
Daily Mail Comment
Last updated at 12:14 AM on 6th January 2012
Chilling: Dame Elizabeth Filkin has ruled that police officers must keep a record of any conversation with journalists
On Wednesday, as sentences were finally handed down for the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, police were being issued with draconian new guidelines on when they can talk to the Press.
In a truly chilling report Dame Elizabeth Filkin, who had previously earned deserved praise for her job scrutinising MPs’ behaviour, ruled that all officers – even whistleblowers exposing corruption – must keep a record of any conversation with journalists, and expect it to be subject to an ‘audit’.
She also recommended police should avoid chatting over drinks with journalists in case their ‘tongues were loosened’.
Anybody considered by their superiors to have behaved ‘improperly’ would face the sack or criminal prosecution.
Dame Elizabeth may have intended to ensure there can be no perception that the police have ceased to be impartial or trustworthy.
But, in reality, she risks creating a ‘closed shop’ in which police are too scared to pass on information, even where it is of huge public interest, in case they are subject to a witch-hunt by senior officers who it suits to conceal inconvenient truths and restrict all communication to official channels.
Journalists will be treated as a potential enemy best avoided – despite the overwhelming majority of reporters being interested only in exposing wrongdoing, helping the police to bring criminals to justice (as the Mail demonstrated so vividly in the Lawrence case) and, vitally, defending the public’s right to know.
Example: The Mail has demonstrated how journalism can help bring criminals to justice
Yes, the intimacy of relationships between some of Scotland Yard’s most senior officers and the now defunct News of the World raised profound questions of judgment.
Indeed, that’s what led Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Met’s new Commissioner, to say that, following the phone hacking scandal, he wanted a more ‘transparent’ relationship between his force and the media.
Real transparency is what engenders public trust in the police, Press and our democracy.
All the Filkin proposals are guaranteed to do is seriously undermine that trust.
A chance for growth
Yesterday’s economic headlines were dominated by more tumult in the eurozone. The value of the euro fell, the cost of French borrowing increased, and Spain conceded its banks may face up to £41billion in new bad loans.
Yet, in Britain, came the positive news that the service sector, which accounts for more than 70 per cent of our entire economic output, grew in December at its fastest rate for six months.
Earlier this week, there was also better than expected data released on both the construction and manufacturing sectors, with the latter boosted by orders from Germany, China and eastern Europe.
Success story: John Lewis delivered retail cheer with a bumper rise in festive sales
Meanwhile, a slew of high street stores have reported healthy increases in sales over the festive period – with analysts suggesting that growth in the final quarter of 2011 may now be a lot better than even George Osborne could have hoped.
With the euro crisis deepening, and banks still failing to lend, only a hopeless optimist would get carried away by this.
But ministers should be far more active in promoting this week’s figures, to offer at least some counter-balance to the relentless, confidence-sapping doom-mongering of the Labour Party and the BBC.
More importantly, Mr Osborne must finally seize the opportunity to produce a growth strategy worthy of the name.
True, ministers have taken impressive action to reduce the deficit.
But the Chancellor must now focus on finding ways to transfer scarce resources from the public sector, where they are spent inefficiently, to the wealth creators in private enterprise, who are over-burdened with taxes and red tape.
2012, thanks to the hard work of the private sector, has begun encouragingly. Now the government must play its part.
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