Interesting conundrum that The Sun had no rules about payments to public officials because it knew they were illegal yet Rebekah Brooks is happy to pay out tens of thousands to people without asking who was receiving the money.
Day 65:
The Sun under Rebekah Brooks’s editorship had no written rules controlling the payment of money to public officials, she told the phone hacking inquiry today.
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Tried to email your MP? Waiting for a reply from their office? Before you blame our public servants for being lazy, it may just be that their tools of the trade are on the blink.
As I report on the Exaro News website Parliament’s computer system is getting and all singing, dancing upgrade so MPs can get super access to the internet.
Only the subcontractors installing it have made one big mistake – they have programmed the system to get LESS access to the internet. The result: furious MPs, bad tempered office staff as the system regularly crashes and can’t cope.
How do we know this? Well the mother of all democracies has not made the usual public announcement.. Instead it has used its private email; system to tell its 7500 users that they have got it wrong and issued a private apology.
Details of the email from Joan Miller, director of the parliamentary IT service, are on the Exaro website.
She wrote:“The problems may have shown themselves in freezing or slowing down of your web browsing, video via the web, slower delivery of e-mails sent outside Parliament, use of [Microsoft] Office 365 and other internet-dependent systems.
“I know that this has been very frustrating and inconvenient for those affected. I therefore wanted to write to you to apologise for the ongoing problems and for any difficulties caused, and to tell you about what we have been doing to fix the problem.”
She admits:“We therefore commissioned work to upgrade and expand our links out of the estate to the internet. Unfortunately, in January, one of our suppliers involved in this upgrade inadvertently introduced an error into the supporting software. This had the opposite effect of that intended, that is, it reduced the capacity of the access to the internet.”
Officially Parliament says it is OK. A spokesman said: ” “The company that provides this fully managed service made an error, which it has rectified at its own cost. This caused some disruption to parliamentary services.”
“We are working with the supplier to ensure that the services remain resilient in the future.”
But today one of my sources says it is as bad as ever. More cover ups?
Since the publication on Exaro and on my blog the story has been taken up by Hugh Muir in the Guardian diary -with a typical wry commentary
Clifford Hindley: Home Office civil servant with an academic obsession with boy love. Pic courtesy: Daily Mail
I am putting up on this blog a link to an extraordinary analysis by Ian Pace, a music lecturer from City University on the academic work of the late Clifford Hindley, the man exposed by Exaro News and the Sunday People this weekend. Currently under investigation by Mark Sedwill, the permanent secretary,for possibly authorising taxpayers’ money to support the Paedophile Information Exchange, his findings are damning.
He concludes: “This far from exhaustive account of Hindley’s writings in retirement should leave no doubt as to what a central role pederasty played in much of his thought. Beneath a scholarly and deeply learned exterior, steeped in antiquity, lies an obsessiveness and distorted morality which is not so different to that to be found in the more obviously explicit writings to be found in Magpie and other paedophile publications.
“I do not believe we should censor Hindley’s work, by any means, nor that it is without worth. But if the allegations about his having facilitated government financial support for one of the most insidious of all paedophile organisations – members of which have been linked to child pornography and abuse rings and international networks, ritual exploitation of those in children’s homes, and a whole host of cases of sexual predation upon very young boys in other institutions – are proved correct, as looks likely, then Hindley’s scholarly legacy should be afforded a good deal more critical treatment than has hitherto been the case.
“And above all, in no sense should Hindley’s work be seen as representative of wider gay-focused studies and scholarship. There is no more intrinsic link between same-sex desire and paedophilia as there is for opposite-sex desire; both remain minority inclinations belonging to those in desperate need of help before they do untold damage. It is to Hindley’s discredit that he attempted to dissolve such distinctions, and legitimise paedophilia as the most natural representation of same-sex desire, in exactly the manner in which paedophile groups appropriated the language and rhetoric of gay rights to suit their own twisted ends.”
His blog is long and scholarly and also discloses that prior to joining the Home Office he was in India and after leaving he contributed to a legal review to lower the age of consent to 16.
For those who want to find out how a very intelligent and scholarly man educated at the best universities in the country used his academic abilities to twist and justify his obsessive interest in young boys this is a must read.
A former top civil servant who later went on to write academic articles on the love between men and boys in ancient Greece and in Benjamin’s Britten’s operas is at the centre of a Home Office inquiry into whether he sanctioned taxpayers’ cash to fund the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Clifford Hindley, who died some five years ago, was head of the Home Office’s Voluntary Services Unit from at least 1979 until 1983, which is now under investigation after a former civil servant has alleged there may have been a ” cover up ” over a grant re-application from PIE.
Reports in Exaro News and The People reveal today that the Home Office inquiry under permanent secretary. Mark Sedwill is examining recollections from the whistleblower that when he raised questions about why the Home Office should fund such an organisation Mr Hindley brushed this aside and asked him to hand over the paperwork. This happened around 1979 and 1980.
This has raised the question – as the whistleblower thinks it was a re-application -whether the Callaghan Labour and Thatcher Conservative governments actually funded PIE just at the time when the National Council for Civil Liberties was also supporting the organisation, Such a decision would be far worse than the present row going on between the Daily Mail and Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, over her role at NCCL. It would mean that taxpayer’s cash has been given to fund paedophiles.
The whistleblower originally contacted Tom Watson MP who passed him on to the Home Office.
Last night Tom Watson said: “It’s a remarkable state of affairs and the Home Secretary must make sure a report is presented as soon as possible.
“If the allegations are true, it shows how insidious an organisation PIE was that they could even convince the Home Office to give them taxpayers’ money.”
Investigations by Exaro revealed that Mr Hindley, an assistant secretary in Whitehall, holds degrees in classics and philosophy from Oxford University and a degree in theology from Cambridge.
Exaro has also found articles and book contributions written by Clifford Hindley after he retired for academic and music magazines – all entirely on same sex relationships between men and boys.
His contribution to the Cambridge Companion on the composer Benjamin Britten is entirely on emphasising the love relationships between boys and men in his operas – a view that is challenged by other experts on Britten. as too extreme.
He has also written articles on the Greek historian and pupil of Socrates, Xenophon, again entirely on love between men and youths – either in the army or in society.
Ian Pace, a lecturer in music at City University, where he is head of performance, and a researcher said: “It is very hard to deny that there are pederastic themes in some of Britten’s operas, most obviously The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice (mirroring such themes in the original literary works of Henry James and Thomas Mann respectively); and arguably also in Peter Grimes and Let’s Make an Opera (The Little Sweep).
“Some of Hindley’s writings on Britten certainly show a strong interest in such pederastic elements.”
An example is his description of the relationship between the ghost Quint and the boy Miles in the Turn of the Screw.
Hindley writes: “‘Quint is not a monster but one who opens fascinating new opportunities to the imaginative boy. Also fundamental is the fact that their relationship is one of homosexual love. It is presented as an emotional and mutually responsive relationship, in which the physical element is barely hinted at. It is nevertheless a bond of the kind rejected by conventional society’.”
The Home Office were not giving anything away about the inquiry – though it sounds as though documents – particularly from the Thatcher era – appear to be missing on anything to do with PIE.
At the moment a search is on to find out whether a dead man files will disclose a highly damaging fact that the vile organisation the Paedophile Information Exchange was actually funded by the government.
Rebekah Brooks: Turning Down MPs expenses story ” pretty high error of judgement”, while Cabinet minister Charles Clarke responsible for another leak, she claims Scotland Yard told her!
Day 60:
Stories for which the Sun paid a civil servant thousands of pounds could have come from a variety of legitimate sources rather than a public official, the paper’s former editor Rebekah Brooks said today.
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This is an important blog and worth following. If you are either concerned or interested in the issues surrounding the treatment of child abuse survivors it provides a valuable insight. I cannot reveal the identity of the person who is behind it for legal reasons but I can assure anyone following my blog that the person knows what he is talking about.
The Police clearly have a difficult job in investigating allegations of historical abuse.
These people are specialists in this area, and spend much of their time wading through the filth of our society. Their focus is on apprehending criminals, but they are human beings, and generally trying to make the world a better place. The time spent working in this area is limited, mainly due to the huge personal impact on them. Spare a thought for the officers who pursue allegations, aware that there is insufficient support for victims, but who do their utmost to make the best of a bad situation. Like a tanker, they leave a huge wake, and they know this but try to control this as best they can.
The Police do not have access to proper support for victims – and they know this! They understand that this is a force-wide issue, and people within…
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A4e: Improving People’s lives -obviously not for lone parents in this case
Remarkably unreported this month (outside one Daily Mail report) is that four of private work provider A4e’s staff who ripped off the taxpayer and lone parents have pleaded guilty to 30 acts of fraud and forgery.
I am indebted to FE Week for a report from Reading Crown Court that saw the four admit their crimes and now face sentencing later. It reports:
“Ex-A4e recruiters Julie Grimes, Aditi Singh, Bindiya Dholiwar and Dean Lloyd, pleaded guilty to more than 30 charges of forgery and fraud when they appeared at Reading Crown Court on Monday, February 3.
The case followed a police investigation into financial rewards claimed for helping the unemployed into work through the European Social Fund ‘Aspire to Inspire’ Lone Parent mentoring programme, which ended in July 2011.
It is alleged that they forged documentation to support fraudulent claims for rewards for work with learners who had not found work or did not exist over a period of four years until February last year.
Grimes, 51, of Staines, admitted nine charges of forgery and Lloyd, 37, of Milton Keynes, admitted 13 offences of forgery.
Dholiwar, 27, of Slough, admitted seven counts of forgery while Singh, 30, of Slough, admitted two counts of forgery and one of fraud. No date was set for set for sentencing.
The magazine reports that the trial of eight other ex-A4e defendants, who pleaded not guilty to all charges at Reading Crown Court, including conspiracy to cheat, is expected to start on October 6.
A further defendant, Nikki Foster, aged 30, of Reading, recruiter, was not at court on Monday. She was due to appear later this month.
The magazine also carries a statement from the chief executive of A4e who appears to be remarkably complacent that everything is OK in the rest of the company.
Andrew Dutton, A4e chief executive, said: “I am deeply disappointed that a small number of people who formerly worked for A4e on the Aspire to Inspire contract in the Thames Valley up to 2011 clearly let down the people they were supposed to help, and in turn the taxpayer, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and A4e.
“A4e co-operated fully with the police enquiry, after our own internal investigation first brought these incidents to light.
“Since these events took place, we have augmented our controls and processes to seek to ensure that nothing like this could ever happen again…..
He goes on: “I would also like to say thank you to our 3,000 loyal, hard-working and principled staff who each day deliver public services to the highest standards that help to improve the lives of thousands of the most vulnerable in our society.
“I am intensely proud of what they do and deeply sorry that the allegations have for so long cast a shadow over their good work.”
There is a little bit of amnesia here. I seem to remember a certain Commons Public Accounts Committee report in 2012 following hearings from whistleblowers who worked for A4e among others.
Margaret Hodge MP, Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts, is reported as saying at the time “Where the Government chooses to use private companies to deliver public services it is essential that proper arrangements are in place to prevent and detect fraud and malpractice. In this instance, the DWP’s arrangements for overseeing and inspecting its contractors were so weak that vital evidence on potential fraud and improper practice was not picked up. The Department failed, for example, to obtain from A4e damning internal audit reports produced in 2009 which pointed to instances of potential fraud and malpractice across the country.” …
“If it had not been for whistleblowers, a range of systemic issues would not have been identified. The Department might have identified these issues if it had asked the right questions of providers. The recent investigation into A4e looked at particular allegations of fraud but not at the more fundamental question of whether the company was a ‘fit and proper’ contractor.”
Need I say more! I won’t in respect of the eight other A4e employees so they get a fair trial.
People queuing outside Jobcentre Plus. Pic courtesy: The Guardian
For the last year an extraordinary war has been going on between the Department of Work and Pensions and some of Britain’s tweeters and bloggers.
The battle has been over the centuries old right to free speech, to send up self-seeking bureaucrats and insult and satirize government ministers and the heads of private companies profiting from public services. This example is very modern, the battleground is Twitter rather than over some pamphlet.
The row began over a year ago when the Department of Work and Pensions used Twitter’s complaint procedure to lodge a trademark complaint against @UKJCP, a satirical account attacking Jobcentre Plus.
The application came from one Jon Woodcock, calling himself brand and information manager – his actual title is senior public information publishing manager – objecting to the site using the Jobcentre Plus trademark.
What was extraordinary was his reasoning. I quote from the document :
“The @UKJCP account has been set up with deliberate and malicious intent to devalue and criticise the work of Jobcentre Plus. In addition, there are a number of rude and potentially libelous tweets aimed at UK government, elected politicians and the heads of large private sector organisations who are committed to working with government on reducing unemployment.”
Not surprisingly Twitter quite rightly rejected such a request.
But the ministry came back – this time I am told using a discreet phone call – specifically objecting to what are called PTs – parody tweets – which were frankly taking the Mickey out of Jobcentre Plus – but where quite clearly linked to information that showed it couldn’t possibly have come from them. Some were true. One was a link to an article showing Jobcentre Plus backed sending claimants to work at strip clubs and for porn film companies – providing they didn’t participate- which I ‘m afraid is correct.
There has been storm of protest from bloggers and tweeters who used Twitter’s appeal process to overturn the decision. The account was restored on February 8 after ten days.
An official spokesperson from the DWP Press Office told me :
“The changes we’re making to the welfare system to ensure that work pays are important to many people, and we work hard to make sure claimants have access to correct factual information.
“We alerted twitter to an account that was falsely sending out tweets claiming to have been published by our official account. It’s for twitter to decide what action is appropriate – we have not asked for any account to be taken down or suspended.”
An official spokesperson for @UKJCP told me:”I am sure @DWPgovuk has no basis to complain about anyone who does a Parody of a Parody Tweet …Some of what was tweeted by me after 9/1/14 was focused on letting followers know what DWP and Jobcentre rights they have. I take the view that the DWP inspired suspension of @UKJCP was not only to censor Freedom of Expression and criticism of the Government but an attempt to suppress the sharing of rights based information.”
What is interesting is that I have been told that NO minister – not even Iain Duncan Smith – asked for Jobcentre Plus to close down this Twitter account,. The idea that ministers, MPs, and anyone running a big private business should be immune from rude comments or libelous views seems to have been taken by managers at Jobcentre Plus’s HQ in Sheffield
Sorry DWP there is a very long tradition in this country from John Wilkes and Liberty to Hogarth,Steve Bell and comedians like Mark Thomas, to poke fun and be rude and tear the governing classes apart. David Cameron is regularly portrayed by Steve Bell as a condom ( he doesn’t like it and has complained to no avail to The Guardian).
If Mps and big bosses don’t like it they should take out a writ and sue. But they know that under the coalition the cost of a writ has risen to £1600 and legal fees are phenomenal. And they know claimants aren’t worth suing because they could never recover their money. That’s why they would love the government to resort to censorship, particularly if they haven’t even asked them to do it.
Offered a dodgy deal in Dubai ? Given an expensive Rolex as a present? Pressurised to give a backhander to get your visa stamped? Taken out to a very expensive meal?
All these dilemmas might well face business people working to secure a contract abroad – or even now possibly in a few cases in the UK.
Bribery and corruption according to the Institute of Business Ethics is the top ethical concern now for 80 per cent of major FTSE companies who might well be worried their staff could be tempted by an offer they can’t refuse.
Interestingly company action seems to have been boosted by the implementation of the Bribery Act in 2012 which makes it an offence for a commercial company to allow their employees to bribe other people on their behalf.
Companies are expected to have procedures in place and The Institute of Business Ethics neat solution is a free App which can be put on any business phone – offering instant advice on what to do when you are put in a difficult position.
The App offers sane advice on how to handle the situation – including a sensible warning to pay up if you are threatened with violence- and report the incident later. Life in a foreign country is too precious to risk for the sake of a few pounds.
Details of the app and the toolkit on the Institute of Business Ethics website.
IBE’s Director, Philippa Foster Back CBE OBE, says “Any one, at any level, in any organisation, can be offered a bribe. The SayNo Toolkit supports staff by giving them clear and easily accessible guidance about what can or cannot be accepted. Not only will the App provide an adequate procedure to combat bribery, it could also help to minimise the risks of corruption taking place.”
Two criticisms can be made.about the effectiveness of the new app. What happens if the firm itself – through either its legal or human resources department – turns a blind eye to what is happening.
The toolkit does not suggest going elsewhere or reporting it say to Public Concern at Work a charity which also can handle such issues and can help businesses manage such problems. The second is that it is not clear whether an individual employee could order one of these free apps if his or her firm does not go along with the scheme – which means people miss out on a valuable guide.
However the Institute of Business Ethics, a non profit making company, should be congratulated for a clever idea that might just help cut down bribery and corruption before it starts.
Vince on the prowl: pic courtesy BBC
That’s why the rather bizarre reconciliation between Nick Clegg and Ed Balls is particularly interesting. For whatever the parties are saying publicly, everyone knows the Liberal Democrats will be talking to Labour as well as the Tories.And they will start worrying who is going to get what in any new coalition.
In a story on Exaro News earlier I illustrated this – from information obtained from two independent Westminster sources – one in the Labour Party and another in the Liberal Democrats – about the real reason why Ed Balls and Nick Clegg – who until now both publicly say they loathe each other – are kissing and making up.
The answer is a premeditated power grab from Vince Cable, the current business secretary, to get the chancellor’s job from a somewhat unpopular Ed Balls. It appears according to both sources that the last thing Nick Clegg wants even if he were to remain deputy PM.
According to the Liberal Democrat source ” Vain Vince ” – once shadow chancellor for the Lib Dems – fancies the post but such a move would be anathema to both Clegg and Balls. Cable. The main reason is Cable’s tendency to keep things to himself . As the Lib Dem put it :
“It is no coincidence that Vince Cable and Gordon Brown were both young members of the Labour party in Scotland at the same time. They were very similar in keeping things to themselves,” said the source.
The insider recalled Clegg’s irritation with Cable as shadow chancellor. Clegg would complain to colleagues that he had to wait until Cable went on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to find out what the party’s economic policy was on a particular issue.
While Balls interest would be to get Clegg on side fuelled by the fact that his leader, Ed Miliband is warming towards Nick Clegg after they regularly met socially at last year’s Olympics.
The ability of politicians to scheme like rats in a sack is one of the more unenviable sides of Westminster politics. Getting the electorate to trust politicians is one thing. The fact that they don’t trust each other – especially among people in their own party – is quite another.
Westminster Confidential 