Dorry Ⓥ 🍃🌳🍃

Just in: IPSO has refused to investigate the Telegraph cartoon of Mothin Ali, the Green Party's Muslim deputy leader, grinning over a knife and fork at the severed head of Zack Polanski, its Jewish leader, who is drawn with a hooked nose. Nearly 1,200 of you complained. IPSO's reason: the cartoon is about two individuals, so only Mothin and Zack can complain. How racist the drawing is doesn't come into it. IPSO did not have to do this, and it has done the opposite before. IPSO's rules let it take up a complaint from people other than the person written about, when the breach is significant, and there is a substantial public interest in looking at it. In July 2023 it used that power. It ruled that Jeremy Clarkson's Sun column about the Duchess of Sussex was sexist, after complaints from two women's charities, the Fawcett Society and the WILDE Foundation. The Duchess did not complain. The Telegraph's editor, Chris Evans, chairs the committee that writes the Editors' Code, which is the rulebook IPSO enforces. The Telegraph is still selling prints of the cartoon today. IPSO's rule says it may take up a complaint like this, not that it must. So this was a choice. Picture a school. One boy draws two classmates, a Muslim boy and a Jewish boy. He gives the Jewish boy a hooked nose and puts his head on a plate, and draws the Muslim boy about to eat it. He pins the picture to the noticeboard and sells copies at the gate. A thousand pupils go to the head teacher. She tells them she can only act if the two boys in the picture come to her themselves. So the picture stays on the board, and every Muslim and Jewish child in the school walks past it each morning. The boy who drew it learns he can do it again. And the rulebook the head teacher is reading from was written by a committee his dad chairs. Nobody would say that head teacher is protecting the children. She is protecting the boy who drew it. That is what IPSO has done. It says it regulates the Telegraph, and it has just told nearly 1,200 people that a racist cartoon in a paper it regulates is not its business unless the two men drawn in it come and ask.