A loss of faith

Poster seen at the 20 October TUC march.

A few weeks ago, after details were revealed about what really happened at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium in 1989, when 96 Liverpool football fans died, my mother was on the phone.

A St Helens lass herself, she’s no football fan as such, but has always held a soft spot for both Liverpool FC and the city itself.

For pretty much the same length of time, she’s been a staunch C/conservative and believer in the inherent rightness of the Establishment. But the revelations had left her shocked – perhaps more than I’ve ever known before.

“How could they?” she asked, of the police decision to blood-test every victim, including children, to see if they had alcohol in their bodies. “How could they?”

But if she was struggling to come to terms with the enormity of what had been revealed about Hillsborough, then what has been trickling out since the first public allegations about Jimmy Savile must be taking her breath away.

If you’re looking for names in connection with allegations of abuse in North Wales some years ago, you won’t find them here – partly for the obvious legal reasons, but also because, even if not true, such suggestions can particularly severely tarnish the innocent.

And the issue as a whole is (or should be) way beyond the tribalism of partisan politics.

But if it is true that senior government figures were involved in abuse, then it goes further than individual politicians themselves.

It would be difficult to believe that the security forces didn’t know – certainly those on protection duties. The same can be said of the police.

If, as is now clear, many in the mainstream media knew about Savile, did nobody know about any implicated politicians – particularly given that we are now rather more aware of the links between press barons and police and politicians?

The tendrils of corruption seem to spread a long way.

In truth, there was never a total lack of corruption in this country. That is a myth. Read Dickens. Look at Hogarth. It’s there.

But there has been a belief constructed that this was never the case. And perhaps that is part of the problem – that in so doing, abusers have been protected.

It also seems worth questioning whether the culture of the English (male) public school is also an issue.

Some years ago, Channel 4 screen a very lengthy and heavyweight documentary called Sex and the Holy City. One of the issues that it looked at was child abuse by priests.

The point was made that if (as happened) parents threw children into seminaries, having decided, for them, that they would become priests and, therefore, be celibate, it halted their natural “psycho-sexual” development.

This makes a deal of sense – and I do wonder whether the English public school system does something similar.

Take the example of Andrew ‘Plebgate’ Mitchell MP.

It seems that Mitchell, who attended Rugby School, was known as ‘Thrasher’, because of what a disciplinarian he was.

Now this is someone who was a child/adolescent, who had the authority to deal with discipline toward other children/adolescents in the school. That nickname suggests that the discipline was meted out in physical fashion.

What sensible adult hands responsibility for disciplining other children or adolescents to a child or adolescent?

Seriously?

It doesn’t seem irrational to suggest that that would be a situation that is absolutely tailor made for abuse and bullying.

But let’s move on.

Given the way in which the Savile case has been grasped by some on the right as a way of beating up the BBC (calls for it to be dismantled, the licence scrapped etc), David Cameron seemed strangely reluctant to announce any review of Auntie.

It was the correct decision, because it would be naïve to imagine that the abuse of children and young people was unique to one organisation. Indeed, a great deal of what has emerged makes it quite clear that this is not the case.

But calling such an inquiry would have made a lot of sense in terms of pleasing a core of supporters.

And now it has been announced that there will be an inquiry into the Waterhouse inquiry that investigated abuse in North Wales and reported in 2000.

That inquiry decided that alleged abusers could not be identified in public.

It seems suspiciously as though the Prime Minister has been made aware of just what could come out and is desperately engaged in an exercise of attempting to bail water out of a boat that’s shipping a great deal more.

None of what is trickling through should really be any massive surprise to people. The Leveson Inquiry has pretty efficiently shone light on the links between politicians, media tycoons and editors, and the police.

Which is why Leveson is so important.

Elements of the media – the Sun, specifically – were complicit in smearing the victims and survivors of the Hillsborough disaster. The police made up lies about what happened: Rupert Murdoch's paper spread them.

Many in the UK, like my parents, have existed in a cosy bubble of belief in the innate superiority and incorruptibility of these islands.

You could point at the likes of Italy and laugh. But corruption in the UK was, if not unheard of, but a very quiet cry.

My mother’s own faith in the Establishment is such that, back in 1990, she preferred, quiet openly, to believe a Daily Mail report of what happened on the night Islington Council met to set the poll tax to what I saw that night, as a platform steward at the rally outside the town hall.

To précis: there had been no trouble early on. The local police were doing a perfectly good job, refusing to react to the few hecklers at the front of the rally.

The trouble only started when the Met came around the corner on horseback and in full riot gear.

That, at least, is what I saw. I got out of the way quickly after that.

But my mother was convinced that I was so politicised (as opposed to herself) that I could not be trusted: in effect, I would lie to my parents for political effect.

So for the likes of her, what we are seeing now must be particularly shocking.

And it is not going to go away – or get any ‘better’ any time soon.

The North Wales case is being talked of widely. It seems that, at the time, there were rumours of people dying in odd circumstances or disappearing.

Where it will end is impossible to guess.

And there are other cases that are similarly linked to widespread, inter-agency corruption, and which are also refusing to conveniently just go away quietly.

The murder of Daniel Morgan is just one such case. For an introduction to that, here is the first in a series of excellent posts by lawyer David Allen Green.

The Justice for Daniel campaign can be found here.

It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that something is rotten in the state of Britain.

You watch it unfold with a mixture of fascination and horror. But the loss of faith for some will be not be easy.

We're all plebs and scumbags now

'Oooo, those plebs make my blood boil.'

‘In vino veritas’, goes the (very) old saying: or to translate from the Latin, ‘in wine there is truth’.

It’s been suggested that Andrew Mitchell MP, Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield and the government chief whip, had been imbibing himself before his recent spat with a policewoman at the gates of Downing Street.

After being told that he could not exit the street through the main gates, he launched into a stream of invective.

But if being a bit sweary and ranty were that not enough, Mitchell’s biggest mistake came in telling the police that it was “best you learn your fucking place” and then (although he continues to deny this – in other words, he’s saying the police are liars) that he called them “fucking plebs”.

‘In vino veritas’, perhaps?

Was this the mask down; the true feelings revealed?

Mitchell is hardly outside the government’s little coterie of public school boys, having himself been educated at Rugby, where he gained the nickname ‘Thrasher’ for his love of stern discipline.

Whether he did use ‘plebs’ or not, his other comments suggest a sense of his own superiority – and others’ inferiority.

The good old British class system is alive and kicking, it seems. Or if not kicking, at least swearing a bit.

Not that Mitchell is alone in being caught with the mask askew.

For at the weekend, on hearing that anti-hacking campaigners were lobbying the prime minister, Rupert Murdoch availabled himself of the opportunity afforded by Twitter to let his 340,000-plus followers know his thoughts on the matter:

“Told UK's Cameron receiving scumbag celebrities pushing for even more privacy laws. Trust the toffs! Transparency under attack. Bad.”

That’s quite some way from his declaration, when sitting in front of a committee of MPs in Parliament to examine the issue of hacking, that it was “the humblest day of my life”.

He tried to backpedal on Twitter, claiming he hadn’t meant it about people like Charlotte Church, but then poured further oil on the flames with another tweet, attempting to link the case of Jimmy Savile to that of hacking.

“Likes of Saville [sic] further protected if we don't fight Cameron, dodgy celebrities in UK. Could not happen in US.”

There’s a certain irony to this – Murdoch and his varied businesses make a very great deal of money out of these people he appears to view as “scumbags” and “dodgy”.

And it is, of course, so reassuring to realise that hacking and invasions of privacy for nothing other than salacious stories are really the sort of things that help uncover abusers.

In which case, it’s such a shame Murdoch’s minions didn’t actually use such methods to garner stories of an actual public interest.

It seems that some of the people in positions of power in this world don’t think much of either those they are either in power to help govern – or those who make them millions.

Not that this should come as any major shock. Look at the behaviour of the banks and big finance – they gambled and lost, and now it’s ordinary people who are paying the price. And do they show any sense of remorse? No.

They just keep paying themselves the same big bonuses and keep denying that continuing relevations of corruption and wrongdoing suggest that anything might actually need to be done.

Or of the supermarkets, which put the single issue of profit over the health, wellbeing and choice of their customers, the nation as a whole, the environment and their producers.

Or the big pharmaceutical industry, which does the same with patients the world over, as Ben Goldacre’s new book, Big Pharma, reveals in shocking detail.

It seems that, when our government tells us that "we're all in this together", what they really mean is that most of us are – but not them. Or their friends.

After all, is there a reason that they seem remarkably reluctant to tackle the issue of corporate tax evasion, while David Cameron himself can stand up and condemn an individual for using a scheme to avoid paying much tax.

Indeed, Murdoch's Times has been pursing the latter line with relish in recent weeks. But the former? Forget it.

So, hide away in despair? Or try to find ways to spread the word and grasp any chance to change things?

Can they even be changed?

Perhaps old Charlie Marx wasn’t so wrong in some of his analysis after all.

This isn’t just journalism – this is 'Daily Mail' journalism

Paul Dacre in defensive mode at Leveson.

It’s beginning to appear as though the story about Jimmy Savile has, as our cousins across the Pond might say, gone nuclear.

Revelation follows revelation. The numbers of those making allegations rise almost inexorably.

It is worth noting, at this juncture, that the response from some people, questioning why they had not come forward before, as though this means that their allegations are automatically false, does not hold up.

It is quite normal in cases of abuse for the victim/s not to be able to say anything until the abuser has died – in other words, when the psychological grip is suddenly broken.

But back to Savile. Allegations about his time at the BBC, about his visits to NHS hospitals and about his appointment, in 1988, as the head of a taskforce overseeing the high-security Broadmoor Hospital, after the health secretary had dismissed the hospital’s management board.

It has seen some quite extraordinary coverage in elements of the conventional media.

And social media continues to see journalists themselves wringing their hands one minute and, the next, insisting that, while there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that publications knew about Savile – and knew years ago – they couldn’t have done anything.

The whinging is reflected below.

'We had no resources.'

Well, except when you wanted to hire private detectives and employ the increasing trend for chequebook journalism, including making payments to police.

'Okay, so we had resources – but we didn’t have any witnesses.'

Yes. Well that's the sort of thing that real journalists go out and find. And the (regulated) ITV does not appear to have had such a problem in making its documentary about the deceased DJ and TV presenter, does it?

And as it happens, there were witnesses. According to this, in 1994, the Sunday Mirror had "credible and convincing" evidence from two women who claimed that they had been abused, but the paper's legal team warned against publication. At least the paper's then editor, Paul Connew, spread the word with some impact.

'There’d only be an inquiry if someone can say that Savile had a horse that he let the PM ride.'

Because, in case you haven’t realised it already, all those poor, poor journalists who have (along with police and other figures) been arrested as part of Operation Elevedon never did anything wrong (even if and when a jury decides otherwise), and corruption and criminal activities such as phone hacking aren’t really crimes when done by journalists in pursuit of a story, and …

You get the gist of the martyred indignation, one hopes.

So what sort of worthy stories do these put-upon parts of the fourth estate produce with the resources that they do have and do choose to use?

Oh yes. World-changing issues such as how Max Mosely likes a spot of consensual S&M. A story that the News of the World then had to invent lies about in order to present a spurious cover of public interest – as opposed to it simply publishing something to titillate the public.

Sex sells. And to some in our trade, anything goes: there is no privacy if you are in the public spotlight. You are fair game for a profit-making story about your private life even when there is no evidence of a crime or even a note of hypocrisy.

If you dare to suggest that such an approach is wrong, then you're a snob and an elitist.

Instead, such people – and, more to the point – the publishers and editors who are the ones who choose to follow such routes – decide to patronise people and dumb down the public discourse by feeding readers a diet of crass and salacious gossip and ‘scandal’, and anything that will send them into an orgy of knee jerkery, which sometimes goes as far as liberating an actual mob.

The Paulsgrove riots are a perfect illustration of exactly this. And it is not snobbery and it is not elitism to say so.

And whipping up hysteria or peddling the details of people's private lives isn’t ‘proper’ journalism either. It’s a sham.

The reality is that, just as with people in other walks of life, people on newspapers knew about Savile. And for whatever reason, editors and publishers chose not to follow up the stories.

Or, if the one case that has been mentioned is correct, when one title did, it was then dared by Savile himself to publish – and, he told them, in so doing, be responsible for all the monies he raised for Stoke Manderville drying up.

It is a simple fact that the culture in the UK has changed almost out of recognition in terms of child abuse and other forms of abuse and exploitation.

Well into the 1980s, the issues was simply brushed under the carpet – by all sections of society.

A friend, who grew up in London’s East End, once told me how, if there were any rumours of ‘kiddy fiddling’ in the community, a group of local men would go around to the accused’s house, give them a seeing to and ensure they would leave the area and never return.

Knowing about this was almost a rite of passage into manhood.

In the meantime, the problem was simply shifted somewhere else – much as happened with the church, when priests were known to be abusing children.

That that is no longer the case; that we take child abuse seriously and that we listen to children now, is cause for – well, if not celebration, then at least a feeling that things have changed for the better.

But it is bad history to attempt to impose the attitudes of today onto the past – even when, as here, that past is within the living memories of many.

To illustrate this better: were you to study the history of the Colosseum in Rome, you would need to put aside your own horror at what went on there and attempt to understand it in terms of the attitudes of ancient Rome at that time; to understand how it was considered to honour the gods, for instance.

That’s not about ‘excusing’ or ‘condoning’: it is about reading history properly.

Of course, when history is concertinaed, as it is here; when culture has changed so markedly in such a very short time, it is particularly difficult to employ such perspective.

The media could help. Good journalism could help.

Instead, we see a delight in jumping onto the blame bandwagon.

And in the case of some, it is an excuse to promote an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with the protection of children or any possible justice for the alleged victims.

In a quite extraordinary rant in Thursday’s paper, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre decided to use the Savile case to lay into two of his pet hates: the BBC and the Leveson inquiry into standards in the press.

Suffice it to say that Dacre would like Leveson to broaden the inquiry to look into the Savile affair (having previously said the remit was already too broad).

But let’s examine the issue a little further.

Dacre, as mentioned before, is hardly a paragon of virtue. He might enjoy exposing sex ‘cheats’, but judged by nothing more than his own standards, he is one himself, having been revealed to have had an affair.

His editorial meetings are infamously known as ‘the vagina monologues’ because of the language he uses. He has apparently turned something called ‘double cunting’ into an art form.

Bullying, perchance?

Martin Clarke is the Mail Online’s editor. But Dacre is not only the editor of the Daily Mail itself, he is also the editor-in-chief of the Mail group as a whole.

One could be forgiven for imagining that such a powerful man would, therefore, be able to exercise some control over all aspects of the group’s product.

Mail Online, however, sits so far from the moral posturing of Dacre that it’s really quite hard to grasp.

Let’s leave aside, for the sake of this discussion, the utterly irresponsible cult of cancer scare stories that the group feeds to its readership.

Let’s pass over the ignominious approach to women; to the promotion by the group as a whole – and the website in particular – of a culture of self-loathing, through a variety of means, from the constant photographs and derogatory comments on the weight, shape and clothing of women in the public eye, and even if, in middle age, they have cellulite, to the faddy diets that appear regularly in its pages.

Let’s concentrate, instead, on its obsession with under age girls.

Loath though I am to give the Mail any extra revenue through hits, if you visit its online site and, in the search box, type ‘all grown up’, it will produce at least 10 pages of results for this one phrase.

From the first two pages of search results:

“Classy Chloe: Teen actress Moretz, 14, looks all grown up as she steals the the [sic] show at Hugo premiere” gushed a header for Mike Larkin’s piece on 22 November 2011.

“All grown up! Chloe Moretz looks very ladylike and older than her 14 years as she attends Hugo screening” ran a further headline on 7 December 2011, in case you hadn't quite got the point the first time around.

“Pop star ‘boyfriend’ and a spicy new rock girl image: Dionne Bromfield is all grown up”, said the headline to a piece by Martin Howden on 17 August this year.

The story itself trilled: “Dionne Bromfield may only be 16-years-old, but she’s letting us know she’s not a little girl anymore.

“The goddaughter of Amy Winehouse wore a daring outfit …”

Gist got? Well, at least she’s legal. Just.

“From geek to chic: Modern Family’s little Ariel Winter is all grown up at Critic’s Circle Awards in Beverley Hills”, said the headline for a story by “Daily Mail Reporter” on 21 June 2011.

“She’s beloved as the brainy middle child of the Dunphy Family in ABC’s hit series Modern Family, but Ariel Winter was all grown up – and anything but geeky – at the Critics’ Choice Award in Beverly Hills today.

“The 13-year-old actress …”

To be fair, the Mail does not limit this obsession to girls.

“All grown up! Prince Jackson, 15, stands almost as tall as his bodyguard as he steps out in Los Angeles”, ran a headline for a story on 5 July 2012 about one of Michael Jackson’s children.

“Daily Mail Reporter” wrote that, since Jackson’s death in 2009, “his son, Prince, has seemingly grown overnight into a strapping young man”.

The day after Dacre’s broadside against the “cesspit” at the BBC and how Leveson should Do Something, came this:

“Growing up too fast? Paris Jackson steals the show with a very grown up look on the red carpet.”

Joel Cooper had written: “Looking much older than her 14-years, Paris Jackson stole the show when she arrived at a red carpet event on Thursday night in Beverly Hills”.

Again in the interests of absolute fairness, some of these ‘all grown up’ stories involve celebrities who are now in their thirties. And some of these stories are written by female journalists.

But ‘all grown up’, eh? No hint of Lolita in any of these, is there? Nothing of the Humbert Humbert, if lacking the consolation of Nabokov’s prose.

I am far, far from being a prude. In essence, I am a libertarian on matters sexual. Assuming consent and adulthood, then it is and should be nobody else’s business.

But there is something skin-crawlingly nasty about this Mail obsession – and even more so when considered in the light of Dacre and his rants about ‘morality’.

In that same editorial, he wrote: “The Mail utterly condemns phone hacking. But in truth much of it was practised to obtain celebrity tittle-tattle. Yes, utterly deplorable, but a footling matter, we would suggest, compared to the molestation and rape of 13-year-old girls.”

Or to something akin to the pimping of such girls for a drooling readership, perhaps?

And yes, readers and consumers of such media have a responsibility too. 

Dacre’s Mail decrys the sexualisation of young girls. Yet he fails to use his position of authority in the Mail group of newspapers to do anything to stop this same group doing precisely that.

When appearing before Lord Leveson, Mail Online editor Martin Clarke told the hearing that he reports, editorially, to editor-in-chief Dacre, and commercially, to Associated Newspapers’ managing editor, Kevin Beatty.

So unless he lied or the group's editorial chain of command this is meaningless, it is within Dacre’s capacity to change the editorial bent of the paper’s online edition.

Clarke, incidentally, also described the Daily Mail is an “ethical, decent” newspaper, run by good people. (Clarke’s full witness statement to Leveson is here. All Dacre’s witness statements and submissions can be found here).

But back to Savile.

Some of what is being said about how the news media could not do anything is particularly absurd, though, given that Savile’s own autobiography, published in 1974 and presumably written by him or ghosted from he said, includes the following:

“A high ranking lady police officer came in one night and showed me the picture of an attractive girl who had run away from a remand home. ‘Ah.’ says I all serious, ‘if she comes in I’ll bring her back tomorrow but I’ll keep her all night first as my reward.’ The law lady, new to the area, was nonplussed. Back at the station she asked ‘Is he serious?’

“It is God’s truth that the absconder came in that night. Taking her into the office I said, ‘Run now if you want but you can’t run for the rest of your life.’ She listened to the alternative and agreed that I hand her over if she could stay at the dance, come home with me, and that I would promise to see her when they let her out.

“At 11.30 the next morning she was willingly presented to an astounded lady of the law. The officer was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues, for it was well known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me.” (p56-7)

There are other revealing excerpts too. But it hardly requires much of an imagination to comprehend what Savile himself said or set down on paper.

To take it at face value is to see that the police are implicated. And it appears that nobody batted an eyelid. Nobody read it, was shocked and raised the matter with, say, the police or any other authorities – or if they did, nobody did anything.

Will Dacre also be demanding an inquiry into the publisher of the autobiography (if still extant)? What about the book’s editor, if still alive?

What about any journalist who read and reviewed it? Did the Mail itself review the book?

Eighteen years ago, a senior journalist at the Mail, who had previously been at the Telegraph, told me about Savile. It seems unlikely that nobody else at either of those titles didn’t know too.

In those days, I had no work resources to pursue the story – I didn’t even have basic expenses.

Those newspapers – and others – did.

Former Daily Express editor Brian Hitchen now claims he has known – for 45 years. But, of course, the libel laws and a cult of penning only uncritical celebrity stories stopped him doing anything.

There are many reasons that they may have chosen to do nothing: some have been touched on above.

Whatever the reasoning, the media knew – and it chose not to tackle the issue. It chose not to employ proper journalism to get to the bottom of the allegations and rumours. It chose to turn its back on witnesses.

In the last few days, I have tweeted to @MailOnline, pointing out that the paper knew – and chose to do nothing. Strangely, there has still been no response.

I haven’t done the same to the Telegraph, because there is not the hypocrisy element involved that is clearly part of what is happening at the Mail now.

Our culture, as I noted above, has changed hugely. It would be crass and pointless to go around blaming everyone for behaviour and attitudes that, in days of yore, were considered culturally acceptable – or at least not beyond the pale.

Yet it is the Mail that squeals the loudest – while at the same time showing a continued flagrant disregard for anything other than making a profit out of, amongst many other things, the sexualising of children.

Dacre should take heed of the proverb about people in glass houses before launching into tirades against the morals and ethics of others.