Monday, April 29, 2013
BBC STILL persisting with the Welsh childen's homes nonsense
Having screwed up totally TWICE ALREADY (most recently falsely accusing Lord McAlpine) in persisting with bogus kids' homes 'paedophile' rings when there is either no truth whatsoever or just a kernel of it, the BBC has yet again today run with this 'story'. The only basis there has ever been to the whole saga is just the one member of staff: no other staff members, and nobody on the 'outside'; famous or otherwise. All the rest is non-proven, non-provable and very likely complete fabrication.
This (below) is an exposé of the BBC on the saga up to 1999, from the website of the late Richard Webster -- the brilliant author of Why Freud Was Wrong and of exposés of bogus 'false memory', 'satanic' and child sex abuse scandals: an article he wrote for The New Statesman which appeared on 19 February 1999.
What the BBC did not tell us
ON MONDAY 25 January 1999, immediately after Newsnight, BBC2 broadcast a documentary, A Place of Safety, about sexual and physical abuse in children's homes in North Wales. Many who saw it found it one of the most harrowing programmes about abuse they had ever watched.
As the North Wales Tribunal, the longest and most costly public inquiry in British legal history, gets nearer to publishing its report, the BBC had lined up a succession of witnesses who were prepared to speak about the years and years of child abuse they said they had experienced. All of them were adults. Almost all of them were men. With one exception they spoke full-face to the camera and allowed their names to appear on screen. They spoke of beatings and of bullying by the staff who were employed to care for them, of habitual sexual assaults and of cruelty and neglect on a scale that, ten years ago, would have been beyond belief.
As the programme went on, it became clear why North Wales has now become almost a synonym for abuse. Sir William Utting, chairman of the National Institute of Social Work, said on the programme: 'I think this is one of the names that will continue to resonate through childcare over the coming decades because it establishes a kind of benchmark for the combination of things that can go wrong in residential childcare . . . It will be the name that's used to terrify future generations of childcare workers.'
This is now the received view of North Wales, held alike by journalists, social workers and politicians. But there is a problem with the story of North Wales. It is a problem that the BBC programme illustrated repeatedly and disturbingly.
The first witness to appear on the programme was Brian Roberts. He had been sent to Bryn Estyn, the home said to have been at the centre of a web of abuse, in 1970 when it was still an approved school. Standing in front of the buildings he said: 'It was just like something out of a horror movie, the beatings, the abuse, the sexual abuse. It was disgusting.' As atmospheric music played and the camera cut to a shot of crows perching on nearby tree-tops, Roberts went on to say that a man (whom he did not name) had taken him into the gym and attempted to bugger him.
What the BBC did not tell us was that Brian Roberts only made his allegation of sexual abuse after watching a television programme about Bryn Estyn in 1997. This programme, which dealt with the setting up of the North Wales Tribunal, had mentioned the conviction of Peter Howarth, the deputy head of Bryn Estyn, for sexually abusing adolescents in his care. (It did not mention that Howarth, now dead, always protested his innocence, or that some of his former colleagues still believe he was wrongly convicted.)
Roberts immediately contacted the tribunal and told them that he, too, had been sexually abused by Howarth. He then made a formal statement to this effect. At this stage it was pointed out to him that Howarth had not begun working at the school until November 1973, three years after he had left. Far from being sexually abused by Howarth, Roberts had never met him.
The next witnesses to appear on the programme were Keith and Tony Gregory. Tony described a regime where physical abuse was commonplace. He said: 'You'd let it happen to you. You'd let the staff punch you in the face, or in the stomach, or throw things at you.' He went on to make even more serious claims, including that he had seen Peter Howarth sexually abusing one of the residents.
What the BBC did not tell us was that Tony Gregory had also given evidence to the North Wales Tribunal. One of the allegations he had made concerned a Mr Clutton who, he said, had thrown a leather football at his face so hard that it had almost broken his nose. During cross-examination it was pointed out that, although there had been a Mr Clutton on the staff of Bryn Estyn, he had left in 1974, three years before Tony Gregory had arrived.
The next witness to appear on the programme was Steven Messham. He said that on one occasion, when he had been in the sick-bay with blood pouring from his mouth, he had been buggered by Howarth as he lay in bed. He said that on another occasion he was asked to take a hamper of food to Howarth's flat, where he was buggered by Howarth over the kitchen table.
What the BBC did not tell us was that Messham claims he was sexually abused by no less than 49 different people. He also says he has been physically abused by 26 people. In 1994 the Crown Prosecution Service declined to bring his allegations against Howarth to court. None of his allegations has ever resulted in a conviction. In 1995 one of his most serious sexual allegations was rejected by a jury after barristers argued that it was a transparent fabrication.
The next witness was Andrew Teague. Teague said he had been beaten and sexually abused by one unnamed member of staff and that he had also been sexually abused by Howarth.
What the BBC did not tell us was that, although Teague had at one point agreed to appear as a witness at the North Wales Tribunal, he changed his mind at the last moment. The tribunal declined to use its powers to subpoena him. Counsel to the tribunal, however, did read out a statement which Teague had made to the North Wales police in 1992. In this statement he made allegations of physical abuse but clearly said: 'I never experienced any sort of sexual abuse by the staff.' His main allegation was of serious and repeated physical abuse by a care worker, Fred Rutter. It was later pointed out to the tribunal that Teague was at Bryn Estyn between 1977 and 1978. Rutter, however, did not start working there until 1982.
The next witness to appear was Andrew Treanor. He said that he had been abused at Ty'r Felin in Gwynedd, when a member of the care staff had punched him in the face.
What the BBC did not tell us was that in 1992 the North Wales police took a statement about a similar incident from a young woman who had been in care with Treanor. In her statement she recalled that Treanor had been arguing with a member of staff: 'Following the argument Treanor came to join us by the steps to the loft. He had a bruise on his face from an earlier incident . . . We were talking about it and Andrew decided to start hitting himself on his face by this bruise to cause a more serious injury. He then said he would make a false allegation against the ex-army member of staff to get him dismissed. We all agreed to go along with his story, although we all knew Andrew had not been assaulted at all.'
The next witness did not appear under his real name, and was filmed in shadow. He told of how, some ten years ago, he had been sexually abused by Stephen Norris, the officer in charge of Cartrefle children's home. His testimony was detailed and convincing. There is a wealth of evidence to indicate that the sexual abuse he described (and which he complained of at the time) did indeed happen. Norris, who had previously worked at Bryn Estyn, subsequently pleaded guilty to offences against boys in his care and has served two prison sentences.
Partly because of Norris's conviction there can be no question at all that some sexual abuse and some physical abuse did take place in care homes in North Wales during the 1970s and 1980s. But equally, after all the evidence which has now emerged, there should be no doubt that a substantial number of false allegations have also been made. If the selection of witnesses who appeared on A Place of Safety is in any way representative, then the programme itself would seem to indicate that the proportion of false allegations may be startlingly high.
By far the most disturbing feature of the programme, however, was that the journalists who worked on it failed utterly to discharge the most basic duty of all journalists - the duty to investigate.
The real question raised by the programme is not whether every detail of the complaints made in it was true or false. It is whether the witnesses it featured should have been relied on by responsible journalists. At least five of the first seven witnesses who appeared had in the past made serious allegations of abuse that were demonstrably false. In some cases they had tried to uphold their allegations even when the details of their complaints had been shown to be impossible. Brian Roberts, for example, after having learnt that he could not have been abused by Peter Howarth, said that he had mistaken the identity of the staff member involved. The trouble, he said, was that 'we never knew the staff directly by their names, it was either Sir or Miss'. According to those who knew Bryn Estyn at the time, Roberts' account of an institution whose staff had no names bears no relationship to reality.
In most cases the amount of research needed to uncover the unreliability of the witnesses who appeared on A Place of Safety was minimal. In the cases of Roberts, Gregory and Teague, for example, all the BBC needed to do was consult the relevant portions of the transcript of the North Wales Tribunal. Yet even this piece of elementary journalistic research, which would have taken hours rather than days, appears to have been too much for them. The result was a programme that undoubtedly shocked many who saw it but which is actually far more shocking as an example of the low level to which some television journalism has fallen.
The low standards of this BBC programme are all the more worrying in view of the planned publication, later this year, of the report of the North Wales Tribunal. This report was referred to in the programme. Steven Messham, the man who claims he has been abused by more than 70 different people (and who also frequently appears on Channel 4 News), spoke of the promise made by Gerard Elias QC that the tribunal would 'leave no stone unturned in its search for the truth'. Messham went on to suggest that this was not so because the tribunal had failed to give proper consideration to the idea that a paedophile ring had organised a network of abuse in North Wales care homes.
What the BBC did not tell us was that other observers have criticised the tribunal from a quite different point of view. In particular they point out that, although considerable doubt surrounds the conviction of Peter Howarth, the tribunal has explicitly declined to consider this question. The tribunal says that it is bound by the doctrine of res judicata, which prevents it from investigating matters that have already been brought before the courts. This may well have been a legally correct decision. But the effect of the ruling is to prevent Howarth's barristers from challenging the soundness of his conviction.
In other words, one stone must remain unturned. And since the stone in question is nothing less than the foundation stone on which the entire North Wales story has been built, there are those who hold the view that the tribunal has not been able to conduct a proper inquiry at all.
The North Wales Tribunal has cost the taxpayer an estimated £15 million, but if this expenditure is unprecedented, so too is the difficulty of the task it faces. No amount of money can buy access to the truth and we must hope that the tribunal will not end by wholly or partly endorsing a received view of the story of North Wales that is fundamentally false.
But in view of the doubts that surround the story of North Wales - doubts that A Place of Safety, by its choice of witnesses, inadvertently illustrated - it is extremely important that the report, when it eventually appears, is thoroughly examined. For that to happen it is essential that the report is scrutinised by journalists who have themselves researched the story in depth, and whose appetite for sex, sensation and scurrility does not overpower their capacity to judge between what is true and what is false.
On this front, the only reassuring news to have emerged since the broadcast of A Place of Safety is that the tribunal report is now unlikely to appear until the summer. This gives journalists both in the BBC and in other media throughout Britain at least three more months to research the story thoroughly themselves. If we are to judge by the quality of journalism apparent in the BBC's A Place of Safety, they will need all this time and more.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
The Insanity Continued: Charging Max Clifford
With now the ludicrous charging of Max Clifford, we see an even more ultimate insanity of 'guilt by association' -- if only there was any guilt to associate with: the likelihood (as I've explained several times in detail) being no guilt by Savile much beyond being rather a lot of a lad). A police/media witch-hunt trawl was always going to lead to the chief celebrity publicist attracting bogus accusations in the wake of all of the multiple bogus allegations against all sorts of celebrities -- most recently, of all people Rolf Harris.
In the usual pattern, even the most recent supposed indecent assault by Max Clifford was nearly three decades ago, allowing the accuser to hide behind the complete impossibility of any evidence gathering. The police case rests entirely on the supposed cross-corroboration of seven complainants when a multiplicity of bogus complainants is exactly what would be expected from a police/media celebrity trawl. It's surprising that there are ony seven. The police have no excuse for not understanding this standard dynamic.
The police are intent on repeating the fantastic miscarriage of justice that occurred recently in Portgual, following a very similar police/media celebrity trawl re supposed child sex abuse. Here a plethora of complaints about the leader of the main centre-Left political party and the nation's most famous TV personality led to them both being imprisoned, only to be released four years later when it was finally admitted that there was zero evidence against anyone – just the cross-corroboration of equally fictitious allegations.
This witch-hunt hysteria is what happens when totalitarianism runs riot. What we are witnessing are literally show trials as a result of the ubiquity of the new religion of PC-fascism, which is the endgame of political-Left pique at our collective refusal to 'rise up' in their predicted 'revolution' of supposed 'liberation'.
It is revenge against 'the workers' that the government-media-education uber-class – the supposed intelligentsia (ha!) – stereotype as men (white, heterosexual males – and boys as well as men).
The more extreme and farcical this unprecedented massive political fraud becomes, the louder will be the enormous crash when inevitably it comes. In the meantime, we should mercilessly take the piss out of all of the fools who make up the 'political class' for their monumental gullibility and rank bad faith.
How much further has the idiocy of 'Yewtree' left to run? Arresting Steven Hawking? Charging Cliff Richard? Are they going to further trawl re dead people? How about long-dead folk? Winston Churchill? Lloyd George? Oliver Cromwell?
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Rolf Harris: Stephen Hawking and Cliff Richard must be next in the witch-hunt that is Yewtree
Following the arrest of Rolf Harris, Operation Yewtree officers are set to arrest Stephen Hawking and Cliff Richard. It is also understood that Orville, David Attenborough, and Sooty have been separately interviewed under caution.
Police sources indicate that the music recording, Jake the Peg, was a clear admission by Mr Harris that he was in possession of fully arousable male genitals; and it was this which weighed heavily against him when the police/media trawl brought about yet another accusation against a celebrity; all of which police say they are duty-bound to fully investigate no matter how tenuous.
There is a formal denial tonight that Yewtree investigators had interviewed Esther Rantzen on suspicion of indirect sexual harassment in storing photographs of individuals in their late 20s taken some 40 years ago and flashing her teeth at 'em. This follows rumours of a new Home Office working definition of childhood as extending to age 35, and a revival of the former notion of indecency of exposed ankles.
Cressida Dick, the Met's assistant commissioner for specialist operations, commented: "Don't be so fucking stupid. Do you think we're just taking the piss?"
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Thatcher was a typical woman leader: untypical of women
Margaret Thatcher was not typical of women. They don't say! Of course, as a leader, how could she be typical of women? Women typically of all things do not want to join men in climbing a male dominance-hierarchy; even if this is just to ape men in climbing a corporate (or other organisational) male-styled greasy pole. They do not do so for the obvious reason that there is nothing in it for them. Rank in a hierarchy confers status on men, which is mate-value in male terms -- what makes men attractive to women. There is no such thing as female mate-value in status terms. Female attractiveness is fertility – youth and 'beauty'. Female sociality is not dominance-hierarchy but personal-network – an extension from family/friends in a linear chain of association. So a woman who feels driven to be 'top dog' beyond following a keen interest with a great conscientiousness, understandably is questioned.
As for the 'queen bee' pulling up the ladder behind her: yes, and it's also other women pulling the ladder down. Plenty of survey research shows a deep antipathy of women to women bosses. Through female sociality being personal-networking, then female in-grouping psychology correspondingly is very different from the all-inclusive nature of the male equivalent. It includes those belonging to the woman boss' chain of the personal-network but excludes others – most of those within the work-group. These women 'underlings' are bound to feel resentment towards a woman boss who nepotistically excludes them. They may well view the woman boss as playing an 'unfair' double sexual game of not just displaying fertility but also aping men (in climbing the amorphous version of male dominance-hierarchy that is the corporate ladder) so as to cross paths with high-status men.
Female leaders throughout history, just like Margaret Thatcher, have been uncompromising, war-mongering, and non-empathetic. Why was anyone surprised? As pointed out by the author of the book, 'Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology' (Irene Claremont de Castillejo): a woman leader combines the worst of both sexes in her un-caring ruthlessness, displaying the ultimate nepotistic self-interested nature of the mother with children.
I live in Sheffield, the capital of the UK steel industry – still today, with its high-spec world-beating facilities. Back in the early 1980s it was the first target of Margaret Thatcher's confrontation with union power. At that time, every job in British Steel was subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of £100 per week – similar to the median weekly wage back then. Clearly unsustainable as a mass 'clog iron' producer for an over-supplied world market, the UK steel industry was (as was all too apparent from the ancient restrictive practices) grossly over-manned. But as with Thatcher's way of dealing with the similarly nationalised and union-hobbled coal industry, instead of a rational rationalisation to retain a necessary strategic large rump, the policy was to eliminate all but a tiny portion that could survive de-nationalisation.
The former finance director of Sheffield Forgemasters, my uncle, Alan Moxon, would tell you in forceful terms that a necessarily capital-intensive industry like steel requires levels of investment that private capital is always unwilling to gamble. Government partnership is crucial, whether or not it's in the form of full-blown nationalisation. So while it's true that Thatcher was right to take on the far too powerful union vested interest, the way she went about it destroyed vital principal parts of the UK's manufacturing base; the dire consequences of which we continue to suffer. Principled action can be noble, but it can also lead to a blindness to proper concerns of strategic value, let alone tactical advantage; with the result of missed opportunities to constructively compromise.
The great myth of the Thatcher era is that the reversal of state power was to save money, but public spending actually increased during Margaret Thatcher's premiership. So a balanced assessment of Margaret Thatcher hardly can be reverential. Perhaps the destruction of an essential section of our manufacturing future along with the 'rust-bucket' manufacturing past would have been justifiable if it had put us on the path of a truly financially sustainable future, but it did not.
No thanks, then, are due to female leadership. And if anyone is in doubt about this, just take a look at the most prominent women politicians in the Labour and Conservative parties: respectively Harriet Harman and Theresa May. Just imagine either of those horror-stories as prime minister.
Monday, April 01, 2013
David Miliband's April Fool's joke: he resigned over fascism
So David Miliband has resigned because he does not want to associate with 'fascist' views.
Well, that's the most honest thing he's ever said about the Labour Party!
OK, he actually said that about the football club at which he is – now was – a director. The point is that he much more pointedly dissociated himself from fascist views when he quit the Labour Party, which is avowedly PC-fascist along with the rest of the political class (and not least most or even the great majority of Conservative Party MPs) – the government-media-education uber-class as a whole.
Wasn't he really making a coded attack on his former political party?! After all, he's not going to be anywhere near Sunderland from now on, relocating as he is to New York; so he hardy needed an excuse to forgo the dosh Sunderland FC could ill afford for his over-paid 'services'.
'Political Correctness' has had a long evolution – see all of the scholarship (including my own: the scene-setting first section in my science journal review paper of the misrepresentation of domestic violence) – being the great backlash by the intelligentsia against the mass of ordinary people: punishment for not responding to the prescription and prediction of the intelligentsia's political-Left (Marxist) mindset.
In a nutshell, because we didn't all 'rise up' in revolution, this caused what psychologists term 'cognitive dissonance' in the minds of all those with a political-Left mindset, given that this is in direct conflict with reality. It's human nature not to blame your own gullibility for swallowing obvious baloney, and instead to find a fall guy. The fall guy here is collectively all those who were supposed to benefit from Marxist revolution: 'the workers'. [Note this is not any kind of conspiracy but simply the coalescing of individual attitudes emanating from shared normal psychology that was the subject to usual 'groupthink'.]
The workers stereotypically are – and in the past overwhelmingly were – male, white and heterosexual. By a truly ridiculous inversion, neo-Marxism (cultural Marxism; identity or critical studies) deemed 'the workers' as unworthy, and in their place was put a new 'oppressed' class comprising all those who were non-male, non-white and non-heterosexual – women, ethnic minorities and gays/lesbians/trans-sexuals.
Correspondingly, in place of the 'boss' class as the main ogre, they deemed the major villains of the peace 'the workers' as the new 'oppressor' class. This inversion likewise is basic human nature. The friend who is seen to become a turncoat is hated more than the erstwhile enemy. Meanwhile, the state, which had hitherto been regarded as the supposed boss's lackey also did a spectacular somersault in political-Left imagination. Being now stuffed full of all those who recoiled from being in the proper, commercial workplace and 'capitalism', the state was magicked into the imagined main agent of social change.
PC has nothing whatsoever to do with being considerate to minorities as claimed, being in fact the very opposite of egalitarian. It wilfully mis-identifies the actually disadvantaged group – lower-status males – and pretends they are instead somehow the main source of what creates disadvantage. Meanwhile those who are actually the most privileged in any and every society – women – are deemed their 'victims'.
Truly the most absurd and nastiest political fraud in all history, PC over the past 20 years or more has taken hold of every institution here in the UK, across Europe and in the USA. [Indeed, it began in earnest in the USA, albeit that the main root was in central Europe -- the Frankfurt School (of Marxism) circa 1930.] It has become hegemonic across the whole of the 'Western' world'.
Anyone who is at all interested in truth and justice has a clear duty to shame the hell out of all the numpties who believe in PC malicious baloney.
