Matt Buck’s Hack Cartoons Diary

Not one but two inquiries are announced into the persistent inability or unwillingness of national institutions in the UK to fully investigate long-running stories of child abuse.

The global debate about what constitutes desirable publication in the cross jurisdictional digital world threatens to complicate matters.

Updated: 14th July 2014. There are persistent complaints about the neutrality of Lady Butler Sloss, the eminent judge who has agreed to lead the overarching ‘general’ inquiry into long running allegations of child abuse. She is the sister of Sir Michael Havers who was Attorney General (the government’s chief legal officer) during much of the period that seems to be under discussion.

It is impossible to know what the precise conflict of interest might be (other than the obvious family connection) because the terms of reference for both inquiries announced by the Prime Minister are also yet to be announced.

Updated: 14th July 2014 at 2pm: Lady Butler Sloss has stood down.

Updated: 7th August 2014. A direct appeal  from The East Anglian Daily Times for information about Peter Righton who features in the image above.

Updated: 20th August 2014. The old and important story of Peter Righton, an influential and powerful person in the world of UK social work appears in the mainstream media again (BBC) and he is directly  named as an advisor to the Home Office.

The much-loved Hat Fair festival of street performance in Winchester, Hampshire is on again and provided an interesting opportunity for a swift snapshot of the artist mucking about.

The Prime Minster’s former Head of communications Andy Coulson is convicted of conspiracy to hack phones.

Regular readers who can get to London within the next three weeks might want to visit the ‘Parody, Pastiche and Piracy’ show I wrote about here. It will be a good exhibition with many fantastic contributing exhibitors, many from the UK’s procartoonists.org.

Parody takes many forms and one of the most popular in recent years has been digital short-form video. Indeed, it has produced memes such as ‘Downfall’ in which the excellent movie by Constantin Films became an audio-visual staple for disasters of all sorts.

The attitude of the producers of the film to this wild popularity held up a fascinating mirror to the issues around IP and parody in a global network. Everyone felt they owned a piece of a great film and wanted their own networks to love a bit of it too.

So popular did the internet meme become that eventually content distributors such as YouTube (Google) felt pressured to remove all of the parodies that were appearing featuring the original sequence from the movie.

Happily, however eventually Constantin Films also came to understand this was a self-defeating view even though in law they were or had been correct. The effective ban on publication of such video parodies using this clip was lifted in 2010.

The example above features a UK centric parody by Paul Bernal about the dubious reuse of NHS data in a project called Care.Data.

The long delayed Chilcot Report must be due – and Iraq is going up in flames again.

The football World Cup is upon us once more! Joy!

Patriotism is the refuge as someone wise once observed.

With the World Cup in Brazil now imminent, what better time to read up on the huge and not well understood country. My hat tipped to author Mark Hillary, not least for commissioning me to do the cover image.