Last month I blogged about our protest outside the offices of Trafigura. We read from parliamentary proceedings to raise awareness about the fact that Trafigura were suing the BBC over an investigation into the toxic waste they dumped in the Ivory Coast.

It now looks like Trafigura are winning.

The report has disappeared from the BBC's website, and as far as I can see, not a single word has been mentioned about it in the mainstream press. So once again, it's time for bloggers to raise awareness.

Here's the original page from the BBC website, in PDF format, which has now been taken down from the BBC site. And the YouTube videos below are the original Newsnight report. If you have a blog, re-post these yourself, and link to Rich Wilson's excellent summary of the story so far.





As Rich says at his blog, "The mainstream UK media has so far assiduously avoided reporting on the BBC’s climbdown. Yet it’s an issue that raises serious questions about the state of press freedom in Britain, at a time of unprecedented attacks on the media."

They might think they can silence the press, but they can't silence all of us. Let's beat the bastards, and stop Trafigura's attempts to censor the press. Post this on your blog, tweet it, ask other people to do the same, and spread the word. Let's smash them.


PS I don't know who wrote this, but there's a great Wikipedia article on the scandal here.

I collected all sorts of shite when I was a kid. Badges, toy figures, even fucking sachets. I had a big greasy bag full of the salt and peppers of the world. Ketchup, mayonnaise, leaking vinegar - other kids were reading books or playing football, but not me. I was alphabetising my salad cream. Christ knows what I thought I was going to do with them. Maybe take the mouldy old sack of sachets into the Antiques Roadshow so an expert can tell me he recognises the craftsmanship of the American Airways salt sachet to be the work the Johnson Family factory in Weymouth. "See those tiny flames along the perforations? This is a special commemorative sachet that the workers secretly printed in solidarity with the Miners' Strike. That's a revolutionary sachet you've got there, son. That's history you're holding in your hands. I'd recommend insuring that immediately for £400,000."

When I was 12, I gave stamp collecting a go. You could buy international stamps for £4 a bag down at our local market, so I bought a couple of them with a book to file them all by country, then took the bags home and studiously spent the weekend categorising my purchases. And it was only when I stuck the final stamp into the book, at perfect right-angles to the printed grid, that I suddenly realised that collecting stamps was a load of tedious old arse. I binned them all immediately and declared the entire weekend a write-off.

Now here's the thing: my nan saw me filing away my stamps, but didn't see me declare it to be soul-destroyingly boring. The following week, she brought me one of those Royal Mail Presentation Packs. There's a photo at the top of this blog post to show you the sort of thing I mean. You've seen them before, those stamps they put out occasionally with themed pictures on them to celebrate something like North Yorkshire, or the circus, or yachts, or the marriage of Prince Edward and Sophie. If old people lap it up, they'll chuck it on a stamp.

My nan's gift put me in a difficult situation. On the one hand, I didn't want them. On the other hand, my nan was doing something very kind and thoughtful for me. She was being terribly sweet, and I didn't have the heart to tell her that they weren't my sort of thing, especially as she looked so happy to give them to me. So I just said thank you, pretended to read through the sleeve notes while she was there, and then when she left I popped them at the back of the cupboard. I didn't think anything more about it.

As it turned out, that was a monumental mistake, because a month later, she brought me up some more - and she did the same the month after that. And the month after that. And as every month went by, and my collection of Presentation Packs grew, it became increasingly more difficult to tell her that I actually didn't want any of them. So, erm... I sort of didn't say anything.

Skip to 15 years later. I now have about two hundred and fifty of them, from editions 224 to 430, plus the royal and movie special editions. I've got ocean liners, I've got castles and bridges, I've got the Olympics and the Hong Kong handover, I've got royal marriages and Diana's death, I've got Harry Potter and James Bond, I've got fucking Testicles of Achievement, I've got The Proud Cocks of the British Isles, I've got the Queen fisting a dog's arse to commemorate war heroes. I've got the lot and then some. Ladies and Gentlemen, people of the internet, it is time to come clean: For the past fifteen years, I have collected stamps against my will.



This Christmas, the madness ends. I'll tell my nan that I greatly enjoyed collecting them while it lasted, but that I no longer have the room to store them. After that, I'll find a constructive use for them. I've been into a few stamp collecting stores on The Strand, and alas, the news is bleak: almost all of them are worth nothing beyond the cost of the stamps they contain. People frequently buy them at auction to actually use them as stamps, so I plan to use most of them to post things I sell on the internet. I've looked on eBay, and an awful lot of them don't sell at all. But it's surprising which ones are actually worth something. I mean, really? How am I meant to even guess what ones are valuable when fruit 'n' veg is one of the big money prizes? I bet that Prince Edward and Sophie one is worth a grand.

I used to feel guilty about not telling my nan that I didn't want them. The more she spent, the more of a waste of money it all seemed to be. The taller the pile grew, the more ungrateful I felt. But in retrospect, I don't think it was such a waste. She works in a local rural post office, and whenever she gave me that month's stamps, we'd sit down and she'd tell me about all the weird and wonderful characters that pass through her shop. The conversation would go on to her telling me about her work and her friends, and the things happening in her village. As a teenage boy, those were the sort of things that would never have come up in conversation between us, had these stamps not been there to ignite the chat. What I used to see as a needless expense, for which I was entirely to blame, I now see as an (admittedly costly) way of helping me and my nan to bond. Of course, it's possible that I'm just saying that to make myself feel better for not being more honest all those years ago - but I do believe that, had it not been for these stamps, my nan and I would hardly ever have spoken. The Royal Mail has done us a great service. And if I'm smart about how I use and sell them, it won't have been a waste of money at all.

Anyone want to buy some stamps?