I have never been a regular Guardian reader. The paper is so disingenuous, enjoying its reputation as the serious paper of the Left, without doing much to earn the position.

 

Even when such as Polly Toynbee and Owen Jones moved from The Independent to The Guardian, I did not follow them, although missing them. David Aaronovitch was no loss.  He found his fitting home at Murdoch’s Times.

Now The Guardian has lost all credibility, having sold its birthright for a mess of pottage.

The UK’s security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by Edward Snowden in June 2013.

The leak revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by NASA and GCHQ.

This brought the UK government’s D-Notice Committee into action. Despite the fact that the D-Notice system is advisory, rather than mandatory the truth is that, by means of it, the government seeks to censor the media whilst claiming there is no censorship. (How very British.)

The D-Notice issued in respect of the Snowden leak was effective. The FT and Times did not mention the initial Snowden revelations and the Telegraph did so only briefly.  The BBC, desperate to have its Charter and licence fee salvaged, ignored the story.

The Guardian, at first, remained uncowed.

On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials entered The Guardian offices.  What followed can only be called a violent raid. Watched by the GCHQ spooks, the paper’s deputy editor and others spent 3 hours destroying lap-tops and other digital records using angle-grinders and power-drills.

Following this visit, the deputy editor, Paul Johnson, accepted an  invitation to become a member of the D-Notice Committee.

 

In March 2015, Alan Rusbridger retired as Guardian editor and was replaced by Katherine Viner as Editor-in-Chief in June 2015. It is true that she inherited a rocky financial position, but it must also have pleased the spooks that Viner dismissed the Guardian’s team of investigative journalists.

 

She was seduced by the spooks and rewarded for being such a soft touch by being fed by MI5 and MI6 with harmless exclusives on such topics as Russian  interference. She was given an exclusive with the Met Assistant Commissioner, Neil Basu, the force’s most senior counter-terrorism officer

Articles even the least bit critical of the security services are now  a rarity. The paper covered the Panama papers story, including Putin’s involvement in underhand deals, but let off the hook was David Cameron’s father. The story of his massive tax dodges was sat on.

Then came the really rich pay-back for the ruling class. In 2015, soon after Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, the Sunday Times reported a serving general as warning: “There would be a direct challenge from the Army and mass resignations if Corbyn became Prime Minister. The Army wouldn’t stand for it.”  The Army would not allow Corbyn to jeopardise the security of this country. “People would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that.”

Any reaction to the story from The Guardian? No.

On 20 May 2017, just before the General Election, The Telegraph was fed the story by “a source close to MI5” of Corbyn’s alleged links to the IRA. The Guardian has fully exploited its readership among traditional Labour supporters by giving massive coverage to the concocted smear campaign about widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Fifty such articles have appeared since the start of 2019.

The Guardian, once a natural outlet to place stories exposing wrong-doing by the security state, has flipped and  become a platform, trusted by the security state to amplify its dirty tricks operations.

 

This blog is based on an article published on 12 September 2019 in the Cape Town paper, The Daily Maverick.