Whoever named the Police trawling operation in the wake of the Savile allegations ’Operation Yewtree’ had a sense of humour. The Yewtree is famous for its slow growth and longevity, and its raucously attractive fruit which appeals to little birdies – but contains a deadly poisonous seed. Operation Yewtree has certainly lived up to that.
That seed was spawned yesterday. The private company ACPO – The Association of Chief Police Officers - are expected to approve a ‘National Scoping Panel’ to review complaints of sex abuse not pursued by Police or Prosecutors. ‘Not pursued by Police or Prosecutors’ could merely mean those cases which were reported to Police but not proceeded with because of lack of evidence, the unwillingness of alleged victims to give evidence in court; a nationwide ‘cold case’ review to see whether the guidelines for prosecution of today can be retrospectively applied to historic cases.
It could also mean another offspring of Operation Yewtree which resulted in the joint NSPCC/Metropolitan Police report ‘Giving Victims a Voice’ and trial by media and public opinion of the outpourings of hundreds of people who had been encouraged to come forward with their laughably spurious claims of satanic rituals and the detritus of severely damaged minds being given the same credence as children who really had been sexually abused.
If it is the former, then I am all in favour of it – with some reservations.
The first, and most important is that it should be conducted with the same level of secrecy afforded to, say, cases in the Court of Protection, where the lives and traumas of the mentally ill are not considered a subject for public conjecture. Those subjected to sexual abuse and those accused of that most heinous of crimes should be afforded the same dignity. It should be an outright offence for anyone, media, blogger, armchair detective, to identify any party to the proceedings, on pain of contempt of court, ahead of any successful prosecution.
Recently, allegations of sexual abuse have become a national game rivaling ‘Big Brother’. Who will be next to be outed from the ‘decent human being’ house by publicity hungry armchair detectives keen to feed the appetite of their army of sad Queens and sour Widows who hang on their every tweet? It has to stop. Sexual abuse of children is too serious a matter to be allowed to fuel celebrity television ambitions.
If this is to be a national scoping exercise to encompass every allegation of sexual abuse from every alleged victim regarding every alleged perpetrator then there is simply no requirement for publicity. The only possible justification for past trawling exercises was that victim (a) might not know that alleged perpetrator (b) was being investigated – however, if this is to be a series of regional panels examining every and all allegations by professionals in a calm and intensely private environment then there is simply no need for publicity.
No need for anyone to go to the media with their unresolved allegations, no need for prime time television to conduct their own half-baked investigations, no need for any leaking of names under investigation to be given out to publicity hungry would-be television pundits. No need to wait until someone is dead before voicing misgivings about their behaviour.
My second reservation would be – who is to serve on these National Scoping Panels? Dedicated and trained professional Police Officers; or is to be yet another Quango, leaving room for every empire building charity with a vested interest in demanding funds to cope ‘with the scale of the problem’ – I haven’t forgotten how hard the RSPCA lobbied to be allowed to enlarge their remit, once permitted we were treated to a series of TV ads bemoaning the fact that ‘Parliament had increased their work load’ and they now desperately need ‘more funds’ to cope with the work ‘forced upon them by legislation’.
Are we to have self appointed ‘child protection experts’ sitting on these panels? I was so fascinated by the fact that after 11 years on the beat, ‘child protection expert’ Mark Williams-Thomas had quit the force a matter of months after finally making it into CID, a unusual action to say the least, that I went to considerable length to track down his former Commanding Officer, now happily retired. So much for his ‘glittering career’, it took several attempts to jog his memory to even recollect who MWT was before he finally said ’Good God, is that the same man?’ I had been expecting to find that the ‘glittering career’ might have proved slightly tarnished hence the early retirement; but no, it was utterly unmemorable! Keen students of the Pollard report have been amused to find that the BBC paid this man £500 of licence payers money to use his ‘expertise and contacts’ to find out whether Surrey Police had taken the original ‘groping’ allegations from Duncroft seriously and investigated, only to see that he ‘e-mailed Surrey Police media department’ to ask them that very question. One of the researchers could have done exactly that, and saved the licence payers £500…crikey, a humble blogger could and would have done just that.
If Keir Starmer is serious, and intends to set up regional panels where anyone who believes themselves to be a victim of sexual abuse can go and have their allegations heard by calm professionals in a secure environment with absolutely no question of leaking to publicity hungry empire builders, news starved media employees, or self appointed ‘lay advisors’ dragging them round meeting halls to discuss the presence or otherwise of genital infections, then I am all in favour. It’s what we used to call Police Stations, but I quite accept that the reputation of Police Stations as a place where you expected to have your allegations taken seriously has been tarnished in the minds of some, and if renaming them ‘National Scoping Panel’ and putting them in a different building, with a wider remit will help, go for it.
It is not just the damage to reputations of those dragged in to the Savile net by media and public hysteria that concerns me – it is the damage to those genuinely sexually abused who must now feel that if they are one of the 90% of abuse cases that involve humble family members or the local plumber/bus driver/care worker that no one will be interested and that the only way to have your trauma taken seriously is to name a celebrity and invoke the public court of media.
The Home Affairs Committee in 2002 said that: ”A new genre of miscarriages of justice has arisen from the over-enthusiastic pursuit of these allegations”. That was in response to the last ‘moral outrage’ in the late 1990s when many were wrongfully convicted following allegations of historical child abuse in children’s homes and other institutions. There is a sense that the Police have become over cautious as a result, and a new approach is required.
Let that approach be uncontrovertibly professional and discrete; no more TV parading of victims half disguised in the shadows, no more media scoops; no more self appointed experts.
Ms Raccoon lives in the Monbazillac area of South West France, renowned for its fine wines and gourmet food, so she frequently finds better things to do than sit in front of a computer all morning. She is liable to take off traveling at a moment's notice. Consequently this blog only gets updated these days when it is raining - and it doesn't rain very often round here...
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Given that this new found zeal to find sex offenders has come about from ‘Britain’s worst sex offender, Jimmy Savile’, then do you really think these reviews will be conducted in an atmosphere of professionalism and strict privacy?
The Yewtree report was so poor and so biased in favour of finding against Savile that I am surprised nobody in authority has said ‘this is not good enough’. Compare it with the USADA report into Lance Armstrong’s bicycle rail cheating, which he could have contested in a tribunal had he desired. It vexes me that so much is coming from Yewtree.
I would be worried if I worked with ‘vulnerable’ teenagers right now. Teacher at a dodgy school? Worker at a youth drug project? Car home for troubled youth? Forget it.
“I would be worried if I worked with ‘vulnerable’ teenagers right now. Teacher at a dodgy school? Worker at a youth drug project? Car home for troubled youth? Forget it.”
Absolutely. Once upon a time if I had come across a child alone in distress when I was on my own there would have been no question that I would have done whatever necessary to help them without a seconds thought.. I hope and I think that I’d still do the right thing, but I’m ashamed at the realisation that I would at least have in mind that I was potentially ruining my life by doing so and I don’t know how much that might alter my actions.
I find it harder and harder to blame any man who walked away.
JohnS,
But these weren’t kids making the accusations that have inspired this action, it’s adults doing it retrospectively, often never having given anyone any reason to believe they’d been abused by the man until very recently and in some cases actually appearing to have liked or maybe spoken well of him in the past.
These policies are to make it easier for those who don’t have a leg to stand on – get away with it undetected I think, the authorities don’t seem to be able to admit that sometimes people just lie….
The Yewtree report was so poor and so biased in favour of finding against Savile that I am surprised nobody in authority has said ‘this is not good enough’.
Me too. The report was a joke and didn’t even do what it said on the cover–Giving Victims a Voice–because I did not get a sense of the voice of any of the victims in the “report”. It was just a summary of data in an Excel database of uninvestigated complaints. To make allegations that Savile was guilty of 30 rapes without giving any details of any of them is just an incredibly shoddy piece of work.
Of course the truth is that the Yewtree report was just a foregone conclusion from the very start and there was never any intention to investigate the veracity and probability of the allegations.
Jonathan Mason,
Yep, that just about sums it up….
I though yew trees were associated with the souls of the departed, that’s why many graveyards have yew trees at their entrances and exits. I’m not sure if they are meant to keep the good spirits in or the bad ones out but either way it’s interesting symbolism for the enquiry.(if it can actually be termed an enquiry).
According to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7288489.stm, names are picked so as to be ‘completely neutral’.
Yew trees are associated with graveyards which used to be walled off so cattle cannot get in and eat the poisonous plant.
Since this operation was concerned with resurrecting cold cases, the connection is obvious.
Woodsy42,
Yes, because ‘Operation Yewtree’ was associated with the ‘departed’ too.
But this whole Jimmy Savile thing has been totally unbelievable from start to finish.
There was no need to show either programme, the one for Newsnight or ITV Exposure. The man was not only dead, but had just died and all the ‘witnesses’/'victims’ were unreliable to say the least….
You were required, by law, to have Yew trees in the village for the making of longbows. And as Jonathan hinted, the graveyard was usually one of the few essentially communal places walled off so it is where the Yew trees usually went.
If they want to go ahead and do that, then do that, but they better watch their backs and be careful they don’t convict too many innocent men or they could end up facing the consequences or a rebellion on their hands.
What does actually anger me is that they constantly feel the need to drag Jimmy Savile’s name into these things when the man has had no trial, none of these allegations have been proven beyond reasonable doubt or EVEN INVESTIGATED, there has been no case for the defence (should that not be a human right…?), and, i’m very sorry, but it’s my belief that most, if not ALL, the accusations made in that first ITV Exposure programme were false and that could be found out with the slightest investigation, that the police have been unprepared to do. Mark Williams Thomas himself has bragged that the accusations started with that programme (The Surrey/Sussex police investigation aside, as most accusers that were a part of that were part of the axed Newsnight ‘investigation’ and, in turn, a part of this, give or take maybe one).
What right do they actually have to publicly lable a man and say they are making policies on the back of his ‘crimes’, when they haven’t bothered even attempting to prove that these so-called ‘crimes’ even happened and aren’t just recently concocted fantasy storys?
This is scandalous.
I’m sure the absurdity of it HAS been noticed, but there is something suspicious going on and no one has been permitted to publicly voice those opinions….
There has been more public debate about whether the ref got it right in sending off Nani last night, than about whether the Met and the NSPCC got it right about Savile.
Duncan Disorderly,
Their wrong and they know their wrong, cos they know the made most of it up – with a little help from others, but it was them who made it up.
You aren’t suggesting the ref was bribed are you?
Duncan Disorderly,
Not the ref.
But something strange is going on with this Savile thing.
How can there be ‘too much’ focus on whether the ‘victim’ is telling the truth or not? Does it not matter whether that particular accusation is true or not? Just so long as someone else can be found somewhere to show a ‘pattern’ of sexual deviency by alleging you tried to snog her some time in the dim and distant past when you were totally drunk and can’t even remember?
Oh well, if you did that 20 year’s ago, then this allegation of rape MUST be true too even though we’ve no evidence for it. Your record of sexual deviency speaks for itself.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve ever met this woman, or whether you’ve got an alibi for the period in question – you ‘sexually assaulted’ a woman before, therefore you must have raped this one, the corroborate each other (even though they are 2 totally different complaints of incidents 20 years apart and aren’t even similar).
Is this logical…?
Is it me whose mad??? :/
There are enough live cases on the go now that will reveal something about the future pathway of the legal process. All except the Corrie guy’s are very historical. If the Gadd and Fowell cases are not proceeded with, then questions may start to be asked. I suspect the government response is the right one. If there are historical allegations, then let’s see them and hear them, and the evidence as well. The oxygen of being examined in the public domain will only be a good thing. It may also be that this higher profile will do the many ordinary folk who have been subjected to these laws some good.
I would very much NOT want them to happen in private. I think the nature of privacy encourages the petty complaints, such as we have seen in the Rennard matter and if people who consider themselves victims are willing to go public, then they should have the right for the matter to become public, and anyway the entire police strategy relies on “scoping” or “trawling” and you cannot do that without publicity.
I’m willing to bet that Jimmy Savile would have been very content indeed to have faced all his accusers in a public forum. I cannot see how the pernicious nature of modern “internet gossip” can otherwise be tackled.
None of what is proposed is aimed at the way actual children are protected today. These changes are all about “historical allegations”. The likes of MWT are misnamed, he’s not a “child protection expert”, he’s more of a “pensioner protection expert”…
……… Mind you, now Esther is setting up the Silver Line for abused old folks, the party has probably barely got started.
Moor Larkin,
I see your point, though I think these things should be done privately without interference from the public, but if there is foul play going on, who can spot it if it’s private…?
I don’t like the idea of trawling for ‘victims’ by advertising for them in the media. If someone has a genuine complaint it’s upto them to come forward and go to the police and make a complaint about it – if true they shouldn’t need the idea put into their heads by the media, if they don’t report it, it has to be assumed that they wish not to report it.
If ‘victims’ report incidents individually and off their own backs, especially if they’ve no connection with each other, without being advertised for or having the idea planted in their head by any other means – there is much more chance that this person is to be believed, and then, perhaps the stories do ‘corroborate’ each other depending on the individual situation. Thats just my opinion…
I do see reason to approach many of the accusations of the type that have been made against Jimmy Savile with great ‘caution’ i’m afraid. I know thats not a nice thing to hear but it’s true, so people who make up stories about this type of thing to get someone in trouble, get sympathy or get money are being very cruel to real victims of abuse, and are actually ‘abusers’ themselves. It’s a sad situation.
The Jimmy Savile thing is an absolute disgrace as far as I can see….
It will never “die down” either – not whilst Williams-Tosspot is building a career upon it. That shoddy “Exposed” garbage has actually been winning awards in recent weeks – staggering.
The bigger picture of course is a lot bigger than Jimmy Savile is or ever was – and certainly bigger than our hero, the hand-wringing “6ft 2 Detective” offering soundbites, quotes and “interviews” to any “news”paper or tin-pot TV show yet singularly failing to answer any questions relating to misconceptions people have over his witch hunt.. A cursory glance through his Twitter reveals he is very much part of the ‘Daytime ITV Family” and is also being courted by the likes of Edwina Major-Currie and Nicholas Andrew Argyll ‘Judas’ Campbell. His fingers are deep into the media pie of trash television. He is a ‘child protection expert’, a ‘detective’ and a ‘journalist’ – and yet strangely he is none of those things.
This has been ‘created’ (and however much Jones, MWT or anyone else wants to accept blame it was – as Anna discovered early on – a conspiracy by almost all of the UK Media including the toothless BBC) to fulfil many criterion. Mainly the ‘growth’ of the UK Law Industry by the wholesale corruption of law by the very legal eagles at the heart of government – a campaign to make ‘historic abuse’ claims easy and commonplace, practically undefendable and – thus – all sides ‘needing’ expensive solicitors. Everyone’s a winner there, and the lowish-paid graduates entering law now from Generation LOL won’t know or care how much they are making the industry in return for a living wage. Factor in also the ‘death of culture’ – sane people now know if we look back 20/30/40 years that give or take a few handy devices, life and living was much better and significantly less corrupt and our life experiences all the more *richer* for it – but if we expand the chasm that is the new ‘generation gap’ of the past 15/20 years by convincing all that the second half of the 20th Century was full of hairy molesters and other stereotypes than that won’t be so much of a problem – people will just thank The Paedohunter for their X-boxes and get on with the silly games. Can anyone here seriously imagine UK citizens appreciating classical music, great literature or even more ‘recent’ culturally highbrow genre’s like Jazz, or even fine art in any serious number?
Also, if we look seriously at Jimmy Savile’s life – he did it his way. It is an attack on true individualism – yes, he raised money for charity and hob-nobbed with Royalty and Thatcher etc, but he did it on his terms. A dangerous precedent to have in relation to the clones of today, so best to destroy him now he’s dead.
Another point I’d like to make is how the Savilegate affair has hoodwinked the “conspiracy theorists” who, led by David Icke, have always been led to believe JS was a be-jeweled Satan, putting those pesky swines at cross-purposes with a genuine conspiracy – played like fiddles.
Interestingly, Our Great Defective is ‘secretly’ putting another ‘Exposed’ into production, this time someone who’s name has been linked to ‘that guesthouse’ but who is also unattached, male, elderly and, in the eyes of the young, risible. It seems he’s so buoyed by his Savile Exposed, Tosspot has now got himself a crying talking sleeping walking Livin’ Target.
Once it’s been screened, it won’t matter if they are true or false – his career will be dead in the water.
Unless the show is stopped in its tracks.
Chris Barratt,
He’s certainly a strange character that Mark Williams Thomas…
Were did you hear about his next Exposure show though?
If it’s gonna be about who I think it is – I won’t believe it (though why anyone should believe anything coming from Mark Williams Thomas’s Exposure shows is beyond me anyway, given the standard of the 2 Jimmy Savile ones….
I very much doubt he has the guts to go up against a living doll.
I hope I’m wrong though.
I would have thought that anyone who appeared in the movie titled The Young Ones would, by today’s standards of proof, be guilty by definition until their dying day, and possibly thereafter.
That’s a Serious Charge……..
Jonathan Mason,
Don’t go givin him evidence!!
You’ll get Sir …. into trouble, lol
I’ve actually seen this guy being slandered on the net months ago along with the Kray twins and a few others….
I would have thought the other famous bachelor boy on the “Vote For Icke” sites, would be a far more likely target. After all he was well-known for his playing his organ in churches up and down the land.
His main advantage though is that he’s very, very dead.
Moor Larkin,
Why not the queen and the rest of her family…?
You don’t have to search very far on the net to see what their being accused of once you google ‘David Icke’….
No WAY!! I think there’s a new album in the works from that person. You’ll have to google it. Big tour going on as well.
Mewsical,
Just in the nick of time for Mark Williams Thomas then – all the more sensational…
If that’s what he is planning and MWT goes ahead with it, I hope the man in question sues for damages.
David Icke needs sorting out too, lol
Well, Batman is so excitable it has slipped out in his boastful ‘interviews’ – how the Savile show was researched & produced in secret “like a police operation” and he has already commenced with a show on a ‘high profile well loved figure’ which will ‘shock people’ who has ‘connections’ to the Elm/Fernbridge “scandal” – I may be wrong, which is why I speak in code, but I certainly think you-know-who’s “people” should be informed of this (if they aren’t already)
As in the original JS show – all he has to do is present things in a certain way, make inference with tone of voice, interview people who “might have seen/heard” something, and then let human nature take its wicked course again. Remember the golden rule – only go after those who don’t create “too much” wealth (ie ‘big in America’) and this guy is neither much of a songwriter (publishing fills many a pocket) not big Stateside so is “fair game”.
Chris Barratt,
I hope he forgets ‘living targets’ can be libled – that’ll teach him, lol
Is this ‘living target’ someone who has been slandered by David Icke also….?
I am just sick of the whole thing. Impossible to prove historic allegations so what exectly do they think will happen? The compensation game I suppose just hope nothing is paid without at least some evidence.
Carol42,
Although it is sometimes possible to disprove them…
I think they’d have all (or at least a good few)complained years ago if any of them had genuinely been ‘abused’ by Savile, if they wanted to. There was nothing to be ‘scared’ of and nearly all the allegations go back several decades….
The first record of a complaint the police could find was in 2003 and that was made 30 years after the alleged incident, the papers had been hounding and trying to set him up with something like this for years, the David Icke’s Slanders gone on for years (since before the first recorded police complaint) and is it not funny how at first both the BBC and the hospitals were quite sure they’d had no record of complaints?
The dishonesty of the media over this whole thing is glaringly obvious. I wonder were this is supposed to be leading…?
I think someone knows…..
I am betting that whoever MWT has in his sights for his next Exposay is DEAD.
If they are not, then at last we will get a chance to actually air the allegations in a court of law. That’s what it needs.
If they are indeed defunct then the risk is that he will simply run away with his certainties once again, and the media will follow with craven acceptance.
While the media – both mainstream and online – may be largely silent about any worries over the truth of the Savile allegations, people I speak to are not so accepting. There is a good deal of largely unspoken disquiet, which only emerges if people are speaking privately. There’s a feeling that to air it publicly risks criticism for being unfair, old fashioned or something much much worse. But many people know something is seriously wrong.
I Love The BBC,
Nobodies like me (and perhaps you, I don’t know if your a nobody
) risk far less criticism than people in the public eye though. Anyone i’ve suggested to that I think the thing against Jimmy Savile may be a set up seem happy to consider the possibility, knowing that this sort of thing has been done before for political reasons e.g: Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette, Julian Assange…
The media seem to be ignoring the blatantly obvious, there has been no trial, an NO actual investigation into these accusations – so how do they know he was a “prolific, predatory, child sex offender”…?
I wonder how long MWT thinks he can get away with making documentaries about dead people though before his fan base get fed up…?
And some dead guys families might not be as accepting as Jimmy Savile’s….
That’s true, people in the public eye are pretty much terrified of breaking rank over it. Which is a very sad state of affairs indeed.
I Love The BBC,
It’s scary, people should feel free to speak their minds if they feel they are being honest about something. Every living person is allowed to defend themselves – or should be.
Though things like this, or worse, have happened before e.g the McCarthy trials, the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews and the propaganda surrounding them, so this is just a small taste of something that has actually probably happened quite a lot really….
Despite Anna’s great wordplay i’m sure that the police don’t pick the operation names to be relevant to the crimes being investigated.I think they are issued like hurricane names,alphabetically without meaning (but not just female ones obviously!).
Anyway can’t stay long i’m busy working on Operation “Nonce from the 70′s”.
More and more it seems that this whole pedophile ring thing is taking on the elements of a classic delusional witch hunt, not least because the focus is on entertainers and politicians, who have one obvious thing in common–that their names are known to many people.
I have no doubt that pedophilia exists, because I worked for a couple of years in an institution for the treatment of sex offenders and met and knew many people who had done frightful things. However they never seemed to work in organized gangs and I think that is the giveaway. It would just be too difficult in real life to put together pedophile rings, because you would never be able to keep it secret for long.
Yes, I know about the Pakistani taxi drivers, but I doubt whether they really thought what they were doing was pedophilia. I think from their point of view, and apparently also that of social services, these girls were prostitutes and that was the end of the matter. I also have no doubt that back in the days when homosexuality was illegal and there was no possibility of homosexual marriage, that there were plenty of teenage boy prostitutes who provided “a bit of rough” for toffs missing their public school fags and that there were places where clients and male prostitutes were able to meet.
The other factor is that the men I knew did have children and adults complain about their unwanted sexual behaviour. It is just too hard to believe that someone like Savile could get away with 34 rapes and no victim ever went to the police because of his fame. It is too hard to believe that no one came forward for 30 years in the cases of so many individuals like Jim Davidson, an unnamed Australian, Freddie Starr, Max Clifford, Dave Lee Travis, Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and all the politicians because of their fame.
It’s the redefinition – and diluting – of the term ‘paedophile’ that is also dangerous, and also being done for a reason.
The kind of behaviour JS is accused of, and Yewtree is dealing, is not it. Yet it is being reported as that, and defined as that by people who should – and do – know better.
Think about the ways they are confusing Mr Icke & co here – because the very cases he and fellow conspiracy theorists have tried to highlight involving high-end politicians & judges etc ARE shocking paedophilia (of the sort involving real pre-pubscent children, not fertile teens).
This is what I mean when I say this is a massive can of worms for many reasons – and those many reasons have bugger all to do with Savile or ‘the happy happy sound of Radio 1′. There is much more than meets the eye going on here.
Chris Barratt,
So do you think David Icke and co are telling the truth about somethings…?
I don’t know much about what David Icke is alleging, but I think Byrn Estyn and Haute De La Garrenne were for teenagers/adolescents aswell.
That’s why I found claims I saw on the internet that “milk teeth” and “children’s shoes” were found at Haute De La Garrenne and were ‘evidence’ that children were murdered there – I thought, well if during the period the abuse that was being investigated is supposed to have taken place the home apparently housed 11-15 year olds then the “milk teeth” and “children’s shoe’s” are probably not likely to have been from that time (if they exsisted at all), I can’t remember when I lost my last tooth, but it can’t be much past the age of 11 and I was a British size 6 at that age (shoe sizes vary I know, but still…)
If those shoes and teeth exsisted, they were probably from another time period than the period under investigation for abuse, could be the same for the coconut shell, and the ‘graves dug for a ‘graveyard’ scene in Bergerac in the 1980′s when Haute De La Garrenne was used for filming the police station…
Where does David Icke get his information from? Does he believe what he says or does he actually just make it up…?
I think Icke has been on the right lines about some things – there’s no doubt in my mind that high level conspiracies go on, involving an ‘elite’. The “closed book” element of Savilegate also proves this goes on.
The existence of Bliar & Mandelson prove his “Lizards” theory after all!
I think real ‘rings’ do exist and involve powerful people. I believe though that the likes of Gary Glitter & Jimmy Savile are cartoon whipping boys designed to whip up idiotic absurd hysteria amongst the idiots by the media, and that this is just what the law-makers in Parliament want.
Icke is clearly mad – mad not because of his theories, but because after everything he’s still quoting the likes of The Daily Mail & The Sun, still looking to the media that has ridiculed him to “address things” and that “they” have presented a giant ‘white elephant’ for him in the guise of Savile.
I find the idiots on his forum as disgusting and stupid as the arseholes you get on sites like ‘Digital Spy’.
not all those who post onto David Icke’s forum are stupid disgusting arseholes.. some use his forum and other not quite reputable sites as a way of publicising their story.. Kaz is one of them and her blog is definitely worth reading.. for 21 years she was silently trying to get some sort of life together.. then came the allegations against McAlpine and the now on-going Macur Inquiry. having been denied the opportunity to tell her story all those years ago, with the Waterhouse Report, she is now trying to make a stand for herself and others who were also ignored.. she is also trying to help put a stop to many of the perpetrators of the Bryn Alyn Communities (and others) from continuing to profit from their vile practices of then and now..
check out her blog – she is an intellegent young woman who wishes to be listened to and have her concerns investigated, not swept under the carpet, which by now resembles a blooming mountain in the making.. check her out, no it is not me….. brynalynvictims.blogspot.co.uk
@ she is an intellegent young woman @
Arithmetic tells me she is 37.
http://brynalynvictims.blogspot.co.uk/p/who-is-kaz.html
“Born in Birmingham Feb 13th 1975, we moved to Leeds by my 2nd birthday.
I first saw a psychologist when i was approx 4yr old, as i was hearing voices in my head, some of which were quite violent and threatening towards me.”
Jo,
And all the stuff about child sacrifice and the royal family (amoung others) being satanists…?
Clearly a lot of people use it to post lies and slander as well.
Jo,
You shouldn’t tar all with the same brush without giving them a chance first, no….
Jonathan Mason,
I think Pakistani men think all British women are prostitutes or just ‘easy’ regardless of age. I think men in places like Turkey do to, but perhaps that’s more to do with the impression they get from British holiday makers, lol…
P.s Given that Jimmy Savile is alleged to have wandered around Duncroft in track suit bottoms and a string vest and it was apparantly ‘inappropriate’ (what did the P.E teacher wear…?), can you sue for having to see women topless on the beach and round the pool on holiday as a kid…? Surely that must be ‘inappropriate’ too now…?
I am what could be termed as a ‘nobody’ but I have had contact with some ‘somebodies’ (who work in a field JS did) and who share the same sort of feeling we are expressing here. The problem they have is expressing any view contrary to that which is being pushed by the media may have terrible consequences for their future employment and also single them out for trawling. Even some of them who initially went along with the Savile BS realised quite quickly how this was a groundless witch hunt – something the failure of Yewtree to actually charge anyone has emphasised. Mike Smith may have been the only former BBC DJ to speak out against the DLT stitch-up by The Met, but not the only one to think it.
There has been a climate of been generated by Yewtree – especially after they ‘bit the hand that feeds’ and went for Max Clifford, previously King Of Bullshit. Anyone speaking out is targeted for a trawl (see also Jim Davidson) or is certainly in danger of making themselves ‘unbookable’.
Chris Barratt,
Their definitely in for a heavy slagging in the papers and on Twitter if they dare question it publicly.
The police would have probably been scared of being accused of a ‘cover up’ if they didn’t give the verdict they were told to give, the BBC probably feel that way aswell….
I agree that defining a paedophile as someone who might have messed about with teenage girls in the 70s is ridiculous, and doesn’t address the true nastiness of it, when it involves little children. We’re getting completely off-track thanks to Mark Williams-Thomas, who would be better employed going after REAL paedophiles and not dead celebrities who can’t fight back.
Mewsical,
And handing the matter straight over to the police, rather than trying to use it to further his television career first.
I don’t see the necessity for that at all….
Its time a few prominent police spokesmen, self styled ‘child protection experts’ and high end DPP personnel suffered some spurious allegations themselves really.
Well done, I’ve been following all your articles on this nonsense and am so incensed , that I am seriously considering starting a Justice for Jimmy campaign. Operation youtube more like – and where on earth are Jimmy’s friends ? I can count on one finger, the number of fair articles produced in the press since itv aired their award winning ‘scoop’ last October. Up and down the country each nhs trust begins it’s ‘robust’ investigations. In Leeds it’s been named ‘speakingoutleeds’ and like yewtree it’s trawling – for those who ‘knew or suspected inappropriate conduct by Jimmy Savile at Leeds General Infirmary or elsewhere in the nhs in Leeds’. Anyone up for a spot of campaigning…….?
Rabbitaway,
“Operation YouTube” – that’s what it should have been called…
How are you going to campaign for Jimmy Savile?
Thanks Luco – well now I haven’t quite decided how……but I’m serious – like any rational fair minded person I believe all abuse is wrong and must be always be challenged. It sticks in my craw how these people (the media) can destroy a persons name and inflict their propoganda on the rest of us night after night. Outrageous, that JS was hardly cold when those morons at ‘auntie’ were pulling their ‘investigation’ together – you’d have thought they could have tipped the wink to Scarborough council before they erected that £4000 headstone a month before sending it to landfill……!
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/
Thanks for this Moor – great piece about ‘giving victims a voice’ – too bad they (the police) only believed 214 of them there ‘voices’, they might have had to forgo their xmas hols and listen to the rest of the 600 plus !
Rabbitaway,
I noticed his headstone looks nowhere near as big in the pictures of his family standing next to it (it was about waist high), to how huge it appeared to look in the pictures in the papers and on the news after the Exposure programme was shown – like they were using the camera angles to try and make it look as big as possible to make people more likely to want it removed and to create more negative feeling towards him….
Aye it’s considerably smaller now ! The rags have to make the pics as big as possible to fill up their non news papers. As for his family etc (the ones who had a good word for him that is) imagine having to put up with this and not being able to speak up on his behalf for fear of retribution. The irony of it all – everyone gets a voice except the accused…….Good night
Jimmy was an eccentric, but while he was alive and bringing his own brand of whatever-it-was to the British public, there appears to be a consensus that he was above suspicion. Even Meirion Jones, in his deposition to the Pollard lawyers, says that he believes his aunt Margaret Jones – the headmistress of Duncroft – was just as taken in by Jimmy as were members of the Royal family. However, he also says that he saw Savile there maybe six times in a six year span that he was visiting. He also admits to a family squabble, and that he and his mother, Margaret Jones’ sister, have not communicated with each other for about seven years. When I last spoke to Margaret, she said she had a nephew who worked for the BBC, but that she had not seen him in some time. She also told me, without prompting, that Jimmy was an odd man.
According to Margaret Jones – in her second interview with the Sunday Mail (Russell Myers) – she says that Jimmy was annoying, and her mother (Meirion’s grandmother) was not a big fan – recoiling in horror when Savile tried to kiss her hand. Grandmother Jones lived at Duncroft, in her daughter’s separate residence. I’ll bet not much went on that she was not privy to. Margaret Jones was simply waiting for a good opportunity to get him gone, she says, but the girls liked him visiting and also liked the trips to the BBC, and I’m sure she appreciated whatever monies he was able to drum up.
One of the Duncroft accusers is connected to a BBC director/producer from the good old days of radio, which individual didn’t leave until 1975, as his show was still in production. He was also knighted (lifetime peerage like JS). This accuser wrote a letter to Margaret Jones in the late 70s, setting forth her appreciation for Duncroft’s role in her life. She also had/has a photo of herself with Mr. Savile, framed, in her home.
If only all those out there who were genuinely ‘abused’ and have genuinely suffered since, could believe that they can go to some ineptly named panels and tell all the FACTS about their dad, uncle, step dad, big brother or even mother or substitute mum’s sexual abuse, that would be marvellous. In those cases no corroboration or similar activity elsewhere is required by publicity seeking institutions trawling around the media. The big problem is the public’s appetite for this kind of news, especially connected to celebrities. I watched PART of a programme last night about Fred West and his wife. Broadcast between 8pm and 9pm last night. The causative reason, so it seemed, was incest within both their childhoods. There was also violence and brutality in both their lives when young. They met when Fred West had already murdered and done a country burial. The rest is history. The real scandal is, that, as soon as those family histories of abuse were known, some process to deal with family abuse being reported, very very privately, was not put in place. This could also have been used for these later cases of historic abuse too. Instead of that we get the disgusting trawling/publicity/ andwrecking of maybe innocent lives, years after the possible event.
It remains a fact that Karin Ward’s mother is supposedly still alive and according to Karin’s story, her mother did far more harm to her than any celebrity ever did. So far as we can tell, the weapon of mass distraction known as MWT has no interest whatsoever in the woman.
Presumably that is because she is not a media or entertainment star and has no money to sue for–which tells you a lot about what this is really all about. Is the stepfather dead? I presume so.
Another reason for not pursuing her could be that… no I just had a moment of crimethink. I think I need to be reprogrammed.
Jonathan Mason,
That’s the reason that first came to my mind – there’d be no money in pursuing Karin’s mother.
But I also think Karin Ward is a grown woman, when she went to the police to report Gary Glitter and Freddie Starr she could have reported her mother aswell if she’d chosen too.
Although she apparently said it was Mark Williams Thomas who advised her to go to the police about Gary Glitter and Freddie Starr, she’s and adult so it’s really up to her to report it if she wants too. Though i’m betting she hasn’t…
I can’t see the Freddie Starr or Gary Glitter accusations going to court anyway…
In the Pollard paperwork, one of the lawyers says that Gary Glitter is a non-starter, for want of a better word, because he was already on the sex offender registry.
Mewsical,
Re: “Gary Glitter”
Have they managed to find the alleged ‘victim’ yet though…?
@ Have they managed to find the alleged ‘victim’ yet though…? @
I would have thought it would be easy. I’ve gained the impression here at the Raccoon Arms that there were not very many girls of 13 sent to Duncroft, so the list should be quite short.
There were no girls of 13 at Duncroft. Full stop. The list will be nil.
Anna Raccoon,
Well, if she couldn’t even remember the age she’d have been at time she would have visited that show why would we expect her to remember the age of a girl she can’t remember the name of…?
Did you mean the bit where they say they don’t have to worry about libelling Gadd because he’s already known to be “guilty”?
Moor Larkin,
Guilty of other offences, but they had no proof he was guilty of that one.
Having read that particular part of her story and seen her 2 tv interviews – personally, i’m surprised so many people believe her…
@ Guilty of other offences, but they had no proof he was guilty of that one. @
Libel is not concerned with guilt really, it’s about “reputation”. I used the wrong word.
There was a fuss about porn and paedophiles at Broadmoor quite a few years ago. The hospital/jail assisted an inmate to sue the Daily Mirror over naming him in their various allegations. The ‘patient’ eventually won the case, but only received 1p damages because it was said that as a Broadmoor inmate he had no “reputation” to lose.
I suppose it was drinks all round afterwards for the guy’s'n’gals at the Bar however……
Moor Larkin,
Ah, so is there no law about speculating publicly or making false allegations against a man to the public if he has previously been convicted of a similar offence/offenses…?
Well, presumably you could sue, but as the monetary damages would be reliant on the perceived reputational damages it wouldn’t be a sound economic decision to take ? I don’t really know – like I always say, I’m no lawyer……
Libel is known to be a rich man’s game – always has been, but I can see why historically ‘rich’ people were prepared to pay for the protection it gave them. I think it was Oscar Wilde pursuing a libel case that got him into trouble in the first place, so it’s always been a double-edged sword of the lady with the blindfold.
Moor Larkin,
Yeah I see, what’s the point in going to all the expense of taking someone to court if you’ll probably be lucky to be awarded 1p in damages…
Your point about Oscar Wilde is a good one, people have tried to suggest the reason Jimmy Savile was never ‘exposed’ in his life time was because he usually sued for libel when dodgy things were printed about him, but if he won these cases, surely that means he had been believed over the newspaper’s etc…? Had he been obviously guilty of what the papers had tried to suggest would he not be running the risk of being caught out like Oscar Wilde was…?
@ Jimmy Savile was never ‘exposed’ in his life time was because he usually sued for libel when dodgy things were printed about him, but if he won these cases @
I’m not sure any of his cases ever reached court. The only Libel case I’ve seen that got that far was one in 1989 where he won a case when the ‘papers said he was letting Broadmoor patients get out on his say-so. I suspect that what are darkly referred to as “libel cases” are where he had solicitors prepare papers, and then a retraction/settlement was made. That seemed to happen when the Sun (I think) tried to implicate him in Haut de la Garenne. There are one or two other cases I’m aware of, of less import.
As we saw with the Messham debacle, damages get paid without a libel case getting anywhere near a M’lud.
Moor Larkin,
Re: “I’m not sure any of his cases ever reached court”
Oh yeah, I see that he apparently told the police in 2009 that he had sued 5 newspapers in the past and they had all settled but goes on to tell them that if this does not disappear “you ladies will finish up at the Old Bailey because we will be wanting you there as witnesses. But nobody ever seems to want to go that far.”
I think reading that we are supposed to think “oh, the horrible man”, but I was glad to read of him standing up for himself actually, given everything that has been said and written about him in the papers since October, most of which seems like nonsense….
Not as far as I know.
I can think of one 13 y.o. but she was a bit of an exception. Otherwise, they liked to get you at 14 and keep control of you until you were 17, whether you were under their roof for the entire 3 years, at Norman Lodge or living at home. I was officially ‘released’ in Aug. 65, and went into remand/classifying/Duncroft starting July 62. I arrived at Duncroft October 62. I then went home for Christmas, like a regular boarding school. If the parents were willing, Duncroft did try and let you visit your home fairly frequently. Of course, there were some very flaky parent, absentee parents, and parents that Duncroft would not encourage anyone to spend time with.
According to Ms Jones, you couldn’t go before 14 in our time, because school leaving age was 14 then, and we had to be in full time education until then – Duncroft in 1963 wasn’t able to provide full time education – though it is possible that someone who would have been 14 before the next school term was due to start might have been admitted…..they would have to be very, very new to the school, a matter of weeks and unlikely to be on a privileged trip to the BBC!
I think school leaving age changed around 1965, so that would explain the renewed efforts to provide more education round that time.
Whether someone could have been 13 in 1973/Savile era would depend on how much education was available then and exactly the school leaving age. i.e when school leaving age became 16 – either Duncroft was able to provide full time education or you couldn’t go until you were 16!
I also didn’t realise until my last conversation with her, that we were actually released under licence – until we were 21, even though they might have appeared to have dropped the reins at 18 – even she couldn’t explain why that was, but assume it was to do with the fact that you were not fully adult until 21; for instance couldn’t get married without parental approval before 21, I suppose Duncroft would have been in loco parentis for some purposes – getting married, operation, something like that, for those of us who had no contact with parents.
That doesn’t seem to have been the case with me. I was released in August 65. End of story. No more Duncroft, no more PO. Free as a bird. I was living in Los Angeles when I was 21. But then, I did have contact with my parent(s) the entire time, though my Dad kept his distance as usual he did in fact stay in touch with Miss Jones and the rest of the crew during my stay there, which I didn’t know until I got my records. I passed all my exams in early 63, so I was just lollygagging around from 15 to 16, after which I was mostly at home in 64, working and so on.
The 13 y.o. was someone you might have encountered as well, because she was there when I left. She was a special case, couldn’t be left with her parents, and certainly was not educable in the normal course of events. One difference in the 60s was that only girls who qualified got the continued education. The rest did not. In the 70s, they actually had an education wing built, along with Miss Jones’ separate house. The one and only time that Savile stayed overnight, he was bunged into a room in the education wing, which had no access to the school and dorms.
Agreed, I certainly never heard from them past 18 – that’s why it surprised me that technically they retained control until 21. Can’t say I ever heard of anyone being recalled like that, which is why I assume that it was really not for recall, but because we might need them up to age 21 for permission for marriage as I said.
@ Moor – yes, that was the statement pretty much, regarding Mr. Gadd. I need to finish Vol. 2 and get on to the appendices.
Just confirming I’ve been officially ‘trawled’ now, at work. Asked to contact a certain investigation team should I be a victim or have any information, blah, blah.
Kindly queue in an orderly fashion….
I was on a forum a while back and an ex-BBC employee (concurrent with Savile) said that he had responded to something like this at the BBC and he had sent a missive saying that nothing like what was being alleged struck any chords of memory/likelihood with him. I have yet to see any report suggesting this kind of nay-saying other than indirectly, such as the the Pollard report mentioning 60 old-Duncroftians had been approached, and only ten had responded and there even seemed confusion over that.
@Moor Larkin
Its a shame there aren’t more people still willing to volunteer the information that everything was just fine in their own experience, thank you very much, but you do get the feeling that folks think theres no longer any point.
I found a hand written list relating to a licence file in the papers I got from Barnados. I was No.81 and you, Anna were 82, followed by Betty R!
Good god!
Right, that’s it, I’m sending for my records…..Anita should be about 85 then, she showed up pretty soon after I arrived. Christ were we amazed to see each other – you couldn’t make it up!
You should send for your records, especially as a lot of it is – at least mine – somewhat fictional! Also, be prepared to use a magnifying glass to read some of the daily entries! I am still puzzled by a letter that they held back, supposedly from a boy I knew back then. I am in touch with this “boy” these days, and he says he never wrote to me, and then I contacted the “girl” who allegedly gave him my whereabouts, and she says that she never gave my address as she had no idea where I was. There’s lots of that sort of thing, including phantom social workers.
i was in Duncroft 1965 – 1966. nothing untoward happened whilst i was there – nothing that i know of.. we all chatted about everything and anything so would have known if “bad” things were going on.. during the summer of 1965 i and another young woman (un-named but now know who you are) attended a summer camp run by Prof Bell from Cambridge. the place we stayed was a field just outside the village of Brancaster.. i was fortunate enough to be asked to go again the next year – which i did.. i did know that we were out on license until 21, Jonesie told me, so did Hettie at the hostel..
Don’t know how the numbering on the licence file worked – Glenys G and Jeanette G should have been before you but no mention and in letter I received recalling me it said both of them were to be recalled as was Lisa C but none of them were actually recalled when I was.
Mewsical did you not get all the letters that were withheld with the papers from Barnados? I got a bundle including some from my mother and indeed one from a girl who shared the tent with me at Prof Bell’s summer camp in 1964 – 4 of us went that year.
@ Ellen – yes, I did. Looking at all this through the spyglass of time, not a lot of it makes sense to me. Some of it does, and I remember the events, some of it was very interesting background information, and some of it was outright not true at all. I have a very good memory – sort of known for it – for example, in 1964 a girl stole my leather jacket from the railway station in my home town (I’d left it lying on a bench and got on the train without it). I saw her later with the coat at another railway station in a neighboring town (one of those you couldn’t make it up situations), challenged her about it, the police from the railway station got involved, and the girl was later prosecuted and I believe sentenced to some time away – seemed a bit harsh to me at the time, it was only a coat after all. If she’d just handed it to me, we could have avoided the whole thing. In the Duncroft records, it indicates that it was me who was prosecuted for stealing a coat, and more detail on this thing that never happened at least as recounted. WTF?? There are other incidents which are completely twisted to make me look bad. Some are just completely fabricated.
I find all this Icke business beyond ridiculous. I couldn’t believe that my old friend Kris Kristofferson was being accused of being a giant lizard, for example. There are no giant lizards, there is no ring of highly-placed pedophiles, and everyone who thinks so needs to get the hell over it.
Mewsical,
I noticed that Lord McAlpine is still being labeled a ‘paedophile’, among other things, on some of those sites, lol
Were these the sort of sites that Philip Schofield was browsing to get the information he showed David Cameron on This Morning….?
While waiting to make a statement in regard to the abuse I suffered in Halifax and Wrexham, this
is the disheartening treatment I have received from Operation Yewtree. Will point out, Op Pallail
have been great so far, and have tried to help sort this out for me, although they are hampered
by the fact Op Yewtree are in control of my case, for the moment.
As a survivor of Bryn Alyn Community, the trauma’s inflicted upon my mind whilst in Wrexham only served to broaden my existing untreated mental health issues. My last diagnosis, less than 6 months ago, was Manic Depressive Schizophrenic with Multiple Personalities Disorders. I went undiagnosed and untreated for approximately 27 years.
When the child abuse investigations were re-opened last year, I thought…. finally, my chance to have my say, maybe find a little peace along the way. So I came forward, and laid out the basic facts of my case to the authorities.
It was decided that my case fell under both Operation Yewtree (Jimmy Savile and Others) and Operation Pallail (2nd attempt at the Waterhouse mess).
Firstly, I was told that my Interview with Yewtree would be sometime this year, and Pallail would probably do their interview some time next year.
This was because Yewtree didn’t need to know I had left Bryn Alyn with a newborn baby, despite the fact that Calderdale Social Services were in charge of my case, they held the Care Order in place, and once every 6 weeks they would pay travel and board for my mum to visit.
more at http://brynalynvictims.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/fighting-to-be-heard.html
Kaz, you are posting and reposting this or lengthier versions of this all over the internet. I can’t find any reference to Operation Pallail anywhere. As this has nothing whatsoever to do with Jimmy Savile and Others, not sure what you are trying to accomplish here.
Operation Yewtree the one tasked with the investigation into Jimmy Savile and others.
Anyone that was in an English children’s home is being lumped together with the victims of these so-called stars, whether the abuser was a “star” or a “nobody”. So yes, Operation Yewtree is entirely relevant to the thread.
Operation Pallial is the one looking at North Wales children’s homes only.
@ Kaz – so what you’re saying is that Op Yewtree is acting on your behalf even though you have not authorized them to do so? So far, btw, there do not appear to be any proven victims of Jimmy Savile, just a lot of people accusing him and The Others of things that cannot be proven. If this whoop-de-do is taking away attention from real victims of real people, not celebrities, then I agree with you. However, once again, I can’t find any reference to this other operation, just a lot of posts by you. Do you have any links to who they are and what they’re doing?
Here you go Mewsical!
http://www.soca.gov.uk/news/495-operation-pallial-soca-supports-investigation-into-recent-allegations-of-historic-abuse
Thank you Kaz – adding another strand into why this Yewtree/Savile business is almighty con, something we were unaware of. In addition to the immorality we already know about, they appear to be interlinking Yewtree in with other “real” investigations on the crumby grounds thank JS or “others” may have driven past somewhere related to the places under investigation, and making Yewtree the primary investigation over the real one in order to try and justify the cost and publicity. Far from “giving victims a voice” this appears to shoving real victims of real abuse to a side whilst the Yewtree witch-hunt is stage-managed.
This astonishing conspiracy just gets worse!
No wonder Op Pallial gets little or no attention – no celebrities attached and no MWT priming the pump. He should get involved in this sort of situation as well as his celebrity witch-hunts. Then he might be doing something actually useful.
Really – now what was the point in that program ? I think even JS would clap with one hand if it resulted in a reduction in real abuse. I doubt any of these hacks, program makers or civil servants who formulate social policy give a toss about the vulnerable. It (exposure) was a story – a scoop that apparently the world and his uncle (but not auntie) knew about but did not have the bottle to release. Fortunately, Mr Savile managed to take quite a few quid off the scum whilst he was alive.
Yes, I wonder how interested MWT and Meirion Jones would have been in the Duncroft angle if the women had revealed that Mr. Rowe, the gardener/handyman, was molesting them back in the 70s. He wasn’t of course, but you get the point, I hope!
Blimee – now those two kinda go together Operation Pale Ale and Youtube. No disrespect anyone !
only pointing out that one cannot tar all with the same brush…
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