Banned VIP child sex abuse memoirs: Supreme Court orders expedited hearing

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There has been yet another important development in the extraordinary saga of a British court granting an injunction which banned a famous performing artist publishing his memoirs in which  he disclosed he was sexually abused as a child.

The excellent Inforrm blog reveals that the artist has won his case to appeal and the Supreme Court has granted an expedited hearing so it can be heard next month rather than waiting until the spring.

Inforrm reports : “The hearing of the appeal is listed in the week commencing 19 January 2015.

“As we reported last month, on 6 November 2014 the artist applied to the Supreme Court for permission to appeal against an order of Court of Appeal dated 9 October 2014 ([2014] EWCA Civ 1277) granting an interim injunction to restrain the publication of a book which deals with his art form and his recovery from the sexual abuse he suffered in his childhood and his consequential mental illness.   The full application to the Supreme Court can be read here [pdf].

The application for permission to appeal was supported by a written intervention made by free speech NGOs, English PEN, Article 19 and Index on Censorship.

On 9 December 2014, Lady Hale, Lord Carnwath and Lord Toulson granted the artist permission to appeal against the Court of Appeal’s decision and ordered an expedited hearing of the appeal.

We had a post in which Dan Tench expressed “shock and disbelief” at the Court of Appeal decision.  A number of prominent UK writers, including Sir Tom Stoppard and William Boyd, signed a letter from English PEN protesting at the banning of the book.”

The full application to the Supreme Court is well worth reading as it shows the author wants to share his experiences of his abuse, the mental trauma he suffered and how he was driven to self harm but was later in life able to come to terms with what happened to him. It also reveals how his love  of music helped him overcome the trauma.

The ban was granted after his ex-wife sought it to prevent his son, who lives abroad, and suffers from a number of medical conditions, from ever reading it. But it used obscure case law which the artist says amounted to a severe curtailment of freedom of expression, hence widespread support from famous writers to get this overturned.

NHS: Investigation into historic unexpected deaths of elderly patients at Gosport War Memorial Hospital

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Entrance to Gosport War Memorial Hospital Picture credit:BBC

Entrance to Gosport War Memorial Hospital Picture credit:BBC

Today I have been appointed to serve on an independent panel to review all the documentary evidence into historic unexpected deaths of elderly patients at Gosport War Memorial Hospital in Hampshire.

The panel will be chaired by Bishop James Jones, the former Bishop of Liverpool,  who chaired the Hillsborough Inquiry into the deaths of  Liverpool football fans.

The inquiry will try to obtain all the facts behind the deaths of patients at this hospital stretching back for a large number of years.

The aim is to address the concerns of families who lost loved ones and are very unhappy about the way they were treated by the authorities.

While the investigation is under way for the next three years I have been asked to keep a vow of silence about its findings until they are made public.

This is because my prime duty is to the families who believe they have been seriously let down and I intend to devote my energies as an investigative journalist to get as near to the truth as possible.

So you will find nothing on this blog about the investigation. Any journalist hoping for leaks on information this inquiry is uncovering is also going to be very disappointed. There will be an official website outlining the scope and nature of the investigation and who sits on the panel. The link is    gosportpanel.independent.gov.uk

But the only people who should know the findings in advance will be the families themselves.

Distorted and Massaged: How the dole claimant figures show a divided nation

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George Osborne at the Despatch Box in Parliament pic credit: video snatch from www.csmonitor

George Osborne at the Despatch Box in Parliament
pic credit: video snatch from http://www.csmonitor

George Osborne’s great claims that the UK is on the road to jobs recovery has already been attacked for producing a mass of new low paid jobs, zero rated contracts and a boom in part-time working.

A closer analysis recently provided by the House of Commons library breaking down unemployment by constituency reveals a rather different disturbing and divided picture. And it officially shows the current claimant count is being massaged by Iain Duncan Smith, the works and pensions secretary, to underestimate the number of dole claimants on benefit.

As I report in Tribune magazine the figures reveal huge differences in the claimant rate between constituencies with up to 25 times more people on the dole in the worst parliamentary seats than the best. It shows that the “recovery” is by no means universal despite the creation of hundreds of thousands of low-paid jobs.

The worst place in the United Kingdom is undoubtedly the Foyle constituency of Mark Durkan, the SDLP MP. Here there are more than 6,600 on benefit representing 13.2 per cent of the population.

The recovery has by passed Foyle – with a drop of just over 5 per cent in claimants in the last year – compared to an average drop of 30 per cent in the UK and more than 45 per cent in Epsom and Ewell, the Surrey seat of Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary.

The best place in the UK is still fuelled by the Scottish oil boom – the West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine constituency of Liberal Democrat MP, Sir Robert Smith – with just 0.4 per cent on benefit – 221 people claiming benefit with only 30 unemployed for more than a year.

Other unemployment blackspots are Birmingham, Ladywood and Hodge Hill, all over 11 per cent and falling at a lower rate – some 20 per cent -than the national average.  There is a similar picture in Belfast North and West;Bradford East and West, Middlesbrough and Birmingham, Perry Barr.

But there are areas where unemployment claims have disappeared. Among those with benefit claims of 0.7 per cent and less are Stratford-on-Avon, Henley-on-Thames, Mid Sussex, North Dorset, Kenilworth and Southam and North East Hampshire.

But there is also a disturbing picture that has gone unnoticed because of the debacle by works and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, in launching universal credit. At  the moment it covers about 0.3 per cent of the population.

The Commons library  reveals that currently statistics are not being collected from people on universal credit to find out whether they are in work or unemployed when they claim the benefit.

As it says : “Some new jobseekers are claiming Universal Credit rather than Jobseeker’s Allowance since the commencement of the Universal Credit pathfinder on 29 April 2013. These jobseekers are not included in the claimant count. ”

“…As a result, the claimant count will understate the total number of jobseekers in the constituencies affected.
ONS (Office for National Statistics) intends to include jobseeker Universal Credit claims within the claimant count statistics “as soon as possible”.”

However the ONS website says :  “No timetable is currently available as to when this will occur.”

This affects claimants at 40 jobcentres. The worst example is the Oldham West and Royton seat of Labour MP Michael Meacher where 1240 people are on universal credit.

The number of JSA claimants in his constituency is 1530, down  51 per cent over the last year but if the figures do not include those on universal credit instead – they are bound to be an underestimate of the real number of claimants on the dole.

A similar situation exists in  Wigan, the seat of Lisa Nandy, where 1020 people are claiming Universal Credit and is recording a 46 per cent drop in the number of people claiming  JSA over a year.

Now it would be remarkable if Wigan and Oldham could post  bigger cuts in dole claimants than Epsom and Ewell in Surrey. It is obviously not true.

So I think Mr Osborne better be very careful if he starts talking up the big drop among the unemployed in the North before the next general election based on these massaged statistics. If he does he will be telling the electorate at best only a partial truth and at worst lying through his teeth.

Why Theresa May was right to ignore David Aaronovitch over child sex abuse in North Wales

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Times columnist David Aaronovitch. Pic credit :Flickr

Times columnist David Aaronovitch. Pic credit :Flickr

Two years ago when Theresa May announced she was re-opening the police investigation into the North Wales child abuse scandal  Times columnist David Aaronovitch penned a highly controversial column warning that the nation was in danger of mounting a modern witch hunt over alleged paedophilia. Indeed his post was entitled Beware a modern Salem over child abuse.

He  pointed out that both the  original John Jillings report and the ” exhaustive inquiry ” by retired judge Sir Ronald Waterhouse Lost in Care had found no evidence of a paedophile ring and therefore  there was no need for any fresh inquiries.

I remember disagreeing with him on the BBC Radio Four’s Today programme over his findings after reading the report. He was right about  Waterhouse’s findings but failed to notice that the findings somewhat jarred with the detailed evidence contained in the same report.

He also firmly disagreed with the line taken by one survivor’s solicitor, Steve Messham, that Waterhouse had too limited a remit to inquire properly into the idea of an abuse network.

Fast forward to this week and Operation Pallial, the National Crime Agency run investigation set up by Theresa May, has achieved its first scalp,John Allen. He was sent to prison for life and given he is 73 will probably die there.

Nor was this minor stuff – he was convicted of 33 extra charges – that somehow had been missed in an earlier police investigation. The full background is outlined here in the Liverpool Daily Post. And he is not the only one to face new allegations which will be heard in future trials. To be accurate the latest Pallial statistics say 13 more people are facing trial, there are over 100 new suspects and over 200 survivors coming forward.

Now if David Aaronovitch had won the argument Mr Allen would be a free man and would have got away with all this and died peacefully at home. A  lot of survivors claims would never have been proven and left to fester on no doubt ” lurid and preposterous” ( as Aaronvitch would have it) sites on the internet.

Of course Mr Allen, who had already been found guilty of previous offences, claimed in his defence he wasn’t gay, was not sexually attracted to children and had suffered a “miscarriage of justice ” when he was convicted in  the first place. His accusers were making it up to get compensation money, his defence lawyers said. The jury did not buy this.

I raise this because some of the commentariat and the Establishment believe the latest allegations of a Westminster paedophile ring and alleged murders of some of the victims is another fantasy and leading to a new witch hunt. While the investigation is in no way as advanced as Pallial – Pallial shows it needs following through.

Theresa May in setting up Pallial  and an overarching child sex abuse inquiry obviously does believe that further investigations are needed to find out  what really happened decades ago. She is in on record that this could be ” the tip of an iceberg”. David Cameron believes this is ” stuff of conspiracy theories ” and David Aaronovitch reflects this view in his own column and tweets.

I am backing Theresa May on this one.

European Union seeks ” the right to be forgotten” web ruling to apply world wide

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An important development over the battle of the ” right to be forgotten ” is highlighted in a report on the influential Inforrm blog.

The row centres round the European Court of Justice’s decision to allow people to get search engines to  remove references to them in their past even if all the facts are true.

The decision arose after a Spanish worker wanted information deleted from searches showing he was connected to a property auction to pay off social security debts in 1997.

The court decided that his privacy was infringed by people being able search out such information and the decision immediately led to 41,000 people, including a paedophile and a former MP, asking search engines to do the same for them.

However as nearly all the major search engines are American, Google, the biggest search engine, decided to only remove it from its EU sites and people could  still search the same information by logging on to an American site.

Now an EU working party wants this banned. It has ruled as Inforrm reports:

limiting de-listing to EU domains on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains cannot be considered a sufficient means to satisfactorily guarantee the rights of data subjects according to the ruling. In practice, this means that in any case de-listing should also be effective on all relevant domains, including .com”.

In other words, the Working Party has confirmed that …the attempt of Google to exempt its search engine at Google.com from the “delisting procedures”is misconceived.

To add to this the EU working party has said there will no requirement to tell the person who provided the information that this has happened – so bloggers and media groups will just suddenly discover that the article has disappeared in any searches – worse than just going behind a pay wall.

The groups does give data protection controllers much needed guidance on whether such listings should disappear – including information on whether the person is a public figure or a criminal. And it does not appear to extend to companies either.

However I am afraid I have little sympathy with any removal if the facts are true. I still see this as an attempt by people to cover up their past. It might be right if the information is a pack of lies but there are other ways to deal with this. It seems to me another restriction on freedom of information.

News: Plebgate Libel Cases, Judge finds that Andrew Mitchell did call police officers “plebs”

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This is an extraordinary case over a 15 second altercation at the gates of Downing Street tells you everything you might want to know about the attitudes today of some of the rich and powerful towards ordinary people doing their job. But it should never have reached this level with millions of pounds spent on court fees, jobs lost, reputations and careers ruined and people dragged through the judicial system. A simple apology might have sufficed in the first place.

INFORRM's avatarInforrm's Blog

The Sun Andrew MitchellIn a judgment delivered in slightly over an hour this afternoon Mr Justice Mitting held that Andrew Mitchell MP did tell PC Toby Rowland that police officers were “fucking plebs”.

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Child sexual abuse: Thank you survivors and Zac Goldsmith

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Today I got  praised by Zac Goldsmith MP for the work  Exaro and I have been doing on investigating child sex abuse and helping to press for an overarching inquiry into the issue.

But I could not have done this without the help from survivors,contacts  and MPs who have passed vital information allowing me to investigate this scandal in the first place.

Also this is a team effort.  Exaro colleagues like Mark Conrad have uncovered amazing  leads and Mark Watts, editor of Exaro, has fearlessly put this whole investigation together.

There is much more to be done, much more to be exposed, but it is great to get some recognition from MPs like Zac.

I can assure everybody that Zac Goldsmith,Tom Watson and Simon Danczuk are very concerned to get to the real truth behind such a disturbing scandal that has remained hidden for decades. No one is going to be silenced very easily.

Child Sex Abuse: Will the police finally catch the perpetrators ?

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The extraordinary revelations at the weekend by my Exaro colleague Mark Conrad and the Sunday People should finally dispel fears that the police have no intention of investigating the VIP paedophiles and now possible murderers in the Westminster paedophile scandal.

I could tell until this weekend  many in the mainstream media  were sceptical ( and some still are) that such horrendous acts involving MPs could ever have taken place in the 1970s and 1980s without the Westminster lobby knowing. Some, including one of my long-standing former colleagues on the Guardian, emphatically told me no MP could possibly be involved in the murder of a young boy.I’ll spare his blushes until there is an arrest.

However the disclosure at the weekend  that two former police detectives are now corroborating that they had heard about a murders and were aware of a paedophile ring in Westminster but couldn’t investigate.

As the Exaro article says :A source close to the investigation said that the two former police officers alleged: “There was a significant paedophile group in Parliament who were untouchable to the police.”

They provided new information on Sir Cyril Smith, the former Liberal MP, and Sir Jimmy Savile, the BBC star, who were exposed as paedophiles after their deaths. They have also provided potentially important information on former MPs and living perpetrators of child sex abuse.”

The key thing about the police coming forward is that the story by the brave survivor called ” Nick” has now a possible chance of being collaborated by other sources. This will be essential if they are to be prosecutions.

Also in the same week I learnt that in Durham where 900 people have come forward alleging sexual and physical abuse at the now closed Medomsley young offenders institution arrests are likely before Christmas and Operation Pallial in North Wales is also expected to lead to more arrests shortly. Even the home secretary, Theresa May, has indicated that she believes  it is only ” the tip of the iceberg” so far..

Altogether the chances of this far too long running historic scandal being dead and buried again are becoming much slimmer. The police now have to throw everything at it to get at the truth.

Anti Austerity: Time for the Job Creators Allowance

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Muhammad_Yunus_-_World_Economic_Forum_Annual_Meeting_2012 (1)This month a radical thinker passed through Westminster and presented an idea that politicians tackling Britain’s economic crisis should sit up and take notice.

Nobel Peace prizewinner Muhammad Yunus was addressing a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference on growth and development en route from Bangla Desh to Mexico City. The conference attracted people from as far apart as Somalia and Paraguay and Haiti and Timor-Leste.

Yunus is the man who created an anti-bank bank called the Grameen Bank in Bangla Desh which broke every rule of traditional banking. As he put it : ” I went and talked to the banks and did precisely the opposite of everything they told me.”

His bank was only interested in lending money to the poorest in Bangla Desh – those with nothing so they could start tiny micro businesses. His ideas have now been taken up in developed economies notable the United States in New York and elsewhere.

He has been criticised however by people who say it  is still exploitative and has not worked, The idea has been hijacked by others as this review suggests.

But his bank is extraordinary. he employs no lawyers, has no detailed contracts, and lends to people with no collatoral and yet 99 per cent of the small loans are repaid. Bad news for Price Waterhouse and City lawyers as well as banks.

I was particularly struck by one phrase he tells the unemployed in Bangla Desh to say. ” I am not a job seeker. I am a job creator. I want to start at the top not be exploited at the bottom.”

Now it occurs to me that this might have a lot of resonance to Britain post the crash. Capitalism and bankers are brilliant at helping the haves have even more so they can exploit the have-nots, What about turning the idea on its head and help the have-nots for once.

Britain is rapidly becoming a more unequal society in wealth and jobs. Constituencies near to me like Hemel Hempstead face a job feast this Christmas with Amazon and Royal Mail competing against each other to fill vacancies. Constituencies like Birmingham, Ladywood and Foyle in Northern Ireland face a job famine  with over 11 per cent still out of work.

It also strikes me that among the wasted talent on the dole they must be people capable of learning skills, particularly in the  child or personal caring professions, but can’t get going because they haven’t basic qualifications or access to a few hundred readies to get started. This is why Jobcentre plus in pushing them into low paid work, zero hour contracts, to become the new exploited of companies funded by wealthy private equity groups.

Now if a politician decided that instead he was going to find a way to connect with the dispossessed by setting up a bank only interested in funding them to create their own job – this might have more resonance in the real world than in the current Metropolitan elite.

Traditionally this idea sits with Labour – the party created by trade unions, that believes in social credit organisations rather than Wonga and backs the ideals of the Co-operative movement. But it could equally apply to the Greens and some strands in other parties

What better way to reconnect to the working class than allow him and her to get cash to buy equipment so they can earn some money, even get  a second-hand white van. A veritable Job Creator Allowance.

What about the money for this?  Why not use the huge fines on corrupt banks to kick start the scheme rather than as sticking plaster for the NHS (Labour) or tax cuts (Tory)? What is a more delicious idea than taking money from bloated, arrogant money manipulators and giving it to the very people they wouldn’t give house room?

How would it work? I don’t know but I now know a man who does. He is called Muhammed Yunus. Someone should call him up and put the idea in their party manifesto. He did speak after all in the Attlee Room,  named after one of Britain’s greatest reforming Prime Ministers.

The Westminster Paedophile ring: Now a murder inquiry

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Over the weekend the inquiry into a Westminster paedophile ring took a dramatic turn with Met Police officially saying it had seconded  murder detectives to the investigation.

On Sunday the People newspaper and Exaro News disclosed the inquiry was related to the horrific  revelations from a  survivor called Nick (not his real name). It involved three murders including one boy being run over, another being strangled at a party where sadistic child sexual abuse seemed to be the norm. It also suggests that other premises in Central London as well as Dolphin Square were used as venues.

Some of the more sceptical MPs and commentators, some of whom are also incidentally  are opposed to an overarching child sexual abuse inquiry, have  expressed near disbelief that this could have happened anywhere near Westminster in the 1980s.

To those doubters I would say this has been a meticulous detailed investigation – by my colleague Mark Conrad – who in a related piece on Exaro News gives the background to the events.

It has taken months to uncover and has involved building up the confidence of the brave survivor who decided himself to report it to the police after years of being told never to repeat what happened.

As he said himself : “The MP was particularly nasty, even among the group of people who sexually abused me and others. I still find it difficult to talk about these incidents after all these years.”

Some of the scepticism is based on the fact that there may have been rumours of wild parties in Westminster at the time – and that people might have been smeared by Westminster gossip.  The fact that nothing was proved at the time does not mean it did not happen.

I am reminded by the  “cash for questions” investigation which I revealed on the Guardian in the mid 1990s. That actually referred to events happening a decade previously right under the nose of the Westminster lobby. And they were proved to be true.

These  allegations will now be investigated by the Met Police who will have to decide, along with the Crown Prosecution Service, whether there is enough evidence to prosecute.

In the meantime it is becoming very clear that this historic child sex abuse scandal is not going away. More revelations in London and other parts of the country will make sure it won’t.