UKUncut protest, Demotix
openDemocracy has broken the news that Peter Oborne, the influential chief political commentator at Britain’s Daily Telegraph, has resigned. He does so with sadness and gives his reasons for doing so here. He believes the UK’s leading conservative newspaper has ignored or downplayed stories damaging to HSBC, and that it is letting advertising priorities shape some of its editorial judgements.
These allegations could not be more serious, coming on the back of last week’s revelations uncovered by the work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists along with the Guardian, Le Monde and CBS’s 60 Minutes, that HSBC – ‘the world’s local bank’ – used its private Swiss arm to help hundreds of wealthy clients dodge taxes on an immense scale, a scandal which is now having reverberations across the world.
