304: The Footballer & the Gross Infringement of Human Rights

This post, which should have been done earlier in the week, was going to be oh so controversial with its subtle references to Ryan Giggs, twitter, Imogen Thomas, and gross attacks on freedom of speech committed by obscenely rich immoral boy-men.  Then John Hemming MP (a good ol’ Liberal Democrat – don’t believe the hype, still the same great party they were before the coalition) used parliamentary privilege to ruin my blogging plans: “With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on twitter it’s obviously impractical to imprison all of them...”  But still here is the gist of what I intended to write:

On Monday the front page of the Metro had a pointless little fluff piece entitled ‘The kids are alright’.  It had three pictures of United players celebrating their 19^th league title with their kids.  The pictures of Ferdinand and Rooney were dwarfed by that of Giggs.  Confined to page five is the headline ‘Paper reveals player behind Twitter storm’, which references the previous days Sunday Herald (but makes no mention of who the player might be), a Scottish paper with the following front page:

We are given no direct overt indication by the Metro of any connection between the two stories.  But let’s conduct a thought experiment and assume the following axioms: there is a connection between the two stories, and for some reason the paper has refrained from mentioning them.  We can feed this information into a formula Mp¹+Mp⁵=Hp¹, where Mp¹ is ‘Metro page one’, Mp⁵ is ‘Metro page five’, and Hp¹ is ‘Herald page one’.  This clearly states that were the initial axioms to be true then page one of the Herald would contain answers.

All of that becomes tediously uninteresting since John Hemming MP ignored the ruling of a judge to impose common sense upon a gossiping population.  But the great thing is I can now talk openly about my concerns related to these current events.

The Judge in the Arena, Gerald Scarfe

I in no way support the press’s freedom to root through people’s bins and take up-skirt snapshots.  A massive amount of what passes for ‘news’ is unbearable shite that the world could do without.  But what Giggs tried to do, aided by a Judge was disgusting beyond belief.  It amounts to a minor conspiracy committed by two power-crazed arrogant men; a judge flexing his power and making up laws as he goes along, and a rich spoilt shit throwing his wealth about to repress an individual's freedom of speech, and continue to wallow in filthy lucre and privilege, unbothered by the consequences of his immoral lifestyle.  Together they left a young woman, unguarded by wealth and legions of adoring fanatics and hooligans, unable to defend herself or even to exercise her human rights.

The preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the most valuable and important works of humanity, states “...human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want...”  Actions taken by Giggs against not just Imogen Thomas, but against the entire population of the country clearly remove some of those rights.  It could be argued that Article 12 of the declaration states that “no one shall be subject to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence...” and that Imogen intended to deprive Giggs of these rights.  I would counter that argument by saying that Imogen has also suffered the deprivation of these rights due to her inability to afford the superinjunction that was pocket change for Giggs.

She has received death threats from throngs of small-dicked morons, and been the subject of countless interfering press stories.  Moreover Article One states “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”.  The Judge and Ryan Giggs clearly view themselves as having risen above this due to their accumulations of wealth and influence; to them Imogen Thomas is below contempt.  Not to mention the treatment of the free men and women of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Wherever there is conflict between two of the Articles a resolution should be sought that causes the least damage to individuals and the population as a whole, and which results in the most minor of infringements.  As a result it is clear that the path that has been taken has been a farce; crushing the rights of an entire country, simply so that a single rich man may continue to hide his immorality from some piss-rag newspapers.  All the while, his lawyers and the Judge have made a mockery of the laws of this Great nation.

Of course it goes without saying that the affairs of a ball game playing millionaire are not in the public interest.  But if these superinjunctions continue to be made, and go unbroken, they will soon be being used to hide news that is genuinely in the public interest.  What if they were used by industry to hide negative safety reports, or pharmaceutical companies to hide evidence of dangerous medicines?

While Imogen Thomas’ motives may have been greed, she has inadvertently become a hero in my eyes.  What a fucking weird world we live in.