London Bangla A Force for the community…
John Ware
John Ware, the frontman for BBC Panorama’s tendentious film “The Mayor and Your Money” is seen as one of the heavyweights of investigative journalism. He made his name with work in Northern Ireland exposing serious abuses by the British Army and Security Services and his early career includes a string of scoops and awards.
Since 7/7, however, Ware has allied himself with a clique of journalists including Nick Cohen of the Spectator, Martin Bright of the Jewish Chronicle and Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail who, in Ware’s own words share the belief that “potentially – politics and Islam is an incendiary mix.”
This is borne out by Ware’s choice of subject matter over the last nine years. Just a month after the 7/7 attacks, Ware produced the notorious “A Question of Leadership” that attacked the Muslim Council of Britain for failing the stand up to extremism. The film was criticised at the time as a “witch-hunt” and sticks in the minds of many British Muslims as the point where distrust of Islam tipped over into institutionalised discrimination.
A year later, Ware was at it again. Not content with vilifying Britain’s Muslims at a time when community tensions were high, he decided to find a group even less well equipped to defend themselves – the Palestinians.
His 2006 film “Faith, Hate and Charity” focused on Muslim charities sending money to Palestine, alleging that the money was going to terrorists. The program was a new low for Panorama and Ware’s shoddy journalism cost the BBC thousands in libel damages.
As the website Islamophobia Watch points out, Ware’s history of attacking Muslims runs alongside an apparent strong hatred of left-wing politics. His early work includes “Brent Schools- Hard Left Rules” which “sought to portray Labour controlled Brent as a hotbed of left-wing extremists who were supposedly doing serious damage to the borough’s education system.”
In Lutfur Rahman, then, Ware seems to have found the perfect victim: a Muslim left-winger unafraid to professing either his faith or his progressive principles.
Former colleagues describe Ware, alumnus of a minor public school in Sussex, as a corner-cutter who distains bureaucracy and hierarchy and will go all out to get his man. The whistleblower who leaked his “racist” production notes to Rahman describes an incident where the veteran journalist asked her to engage in secret filming, claiming it was “unethical but not illegal” a shocking admission in the post-Levenson environment. His response to the leak itself was to attack the whistleblower in the program and to smear her in the media rather than responding to any of the allegations made against his production’s motives, methods and values.
Perhaps it was only the distressing spectacle of one of the BBC’s most respected journalists attacking a young journalism student on national television that would show Ware for what he has become: a bruiser and a bully whose has retained the anti-establishment chip on his shoulder despite becoming firmly part of the establishment.
Just as fellow Lutfur-basher Andrew Gilligan has gone from almost bringing down a government over the “sexed-up” Iraq War dossier to cyber-stalking a local politician, so it seems that Ware too has been sucked in to the murky world of Tower Hamlets politics and lost his way. He has ended up treating some of the poorest and most disenfranchised people in the UK as if they were as grave a threat to democracy as the British Army death squads he exposed in Ulster.
Ware’s more recent failures should not detract from the very real successes of a career that has brought to light some of the most egregious abuses of power in recent times. His work on Northern Ireland in particular has done a great deal to hold the government to account, but in his later years his methods have become increasingly unsound and his choice of subject matter ever more bizarre.
In 2006, Ware stated in a Guardian article “it’s the last chance for Panorama.” Monday’s programme shows that the last chance has come and gone. It is clearly time for Mr Ware to be put out to pasture before he embarrasses himself, and the BBC, any further.
