Wednesday, March 23, 2016 

Operation Midland: a modern morality tale.

Operation Midland has been closed down.  Announced on Monday, happily for the Metropolitan police while attention was on Westminster and before the events in Brussels, it had been in the offing for quite some time.  After around 15 months of investigations into claims of sadistic abuse perpetrated by figures from the very top of the defence, intelligence, political and entertainment establishments, at its conclusion there was not enough evidence to so much as submit a file to the Crown Prosecution Service for their consideration.  It had already been announced that Lord Bramall, the former chief of the defence staff, had been cleared of any involvement.  Monday saw Harvey Proctor, the only other accused still alive, told that he also would not face charges.

Even at this point, it's difficult to properly get your head round how the Met could have gone about investigating the allegations of a single man with such a level of seeming incompetence.  Operation Midland has been a disaster rivalled only by the anti-terrorist operations in the aftermath of 7/7, or the corresponding failure to properly investigate phone hacking at the News of the World at the first opportunity.  Some of the mistakes were made with the best of intentions, or at least that's what we have to conclude.  Otherwise, the Met looks even more headspinningly credulous.

As the Met belatedly recognised, it was a huge mistake for Kenny McDonald to describe the allegations made to his team by the man known only as "Nick" as "credible and true".  McDonald we were later told did not accept they were true; his aim in describing them as such was to reassure any other witnesses they would also be believed.  His team believed that as with Jimmy Savile, and others since convicted of historic sex offences, the publicity would encourage other witnesses to come forward and help corroborate Nick's story.  Only two witnesses did, and they came to the police through the same proxy as Nick, via Exaro News.  One of those witnesses was decided not to be credible midway through last year.

With no other witnesses to back up Nick's highly distressing account of abuse by VIPs, it was almost as if the police didn't properly know what to do, having already described their witness as telling the truth.  Their approach, knowing they didn't have even the beginnings of the evidence needed to arrest anyone, was to carry out searches of the homes of the accused still alive, and in the case of Leon Brittan, the recently deceased.  The raids on the homes of Lord Bramall and Harvey Proctor were accompanied by leaks to Exaro News, making their names public when the police were unable to.  The relationship between Exaro and Operation Midland was far too cosy from the very start, almost as if it was Exaro rather than Nick in control of events.  It was to Exaro that Nick first went, who then provided access to Nick to the BBC and the newspapers, most notably the Mirror group.  When the police came calling, Exaro at the least accompanied Nick; other reports have suggested they sat in on the interviews.

Nick's account itself should have set alarm bells ringing.  Not just that some of the details given by Nick of his abuse are highly reminiscent of the accounts provided by those who have claimed to be the victims of Satanic ritual abuse, with Nick claiming he was tortured on Remembrance Sunday, his abusers pinning a poppy to his chest repeatedly, but that those named and the locations where the abuse was meant to have taken place have been circulating online for years.  As the Times belatedly reported, the defunct magazine Scallywag claimed over 20 years ago that abuse by senior politicians had taken place at Dolphin Square; those articles have provided the backbone to conspiracy theories ever since.  Nick's account of his abuse developed over time: he first went to Wiltshire police in 2012, informing them only of the predation by his deceased stepfather.  The following year he spoke to a documentary team, alleging that he had been abused by groups of men that on a number of occasions included Jimmy Savile.  Come 2014, his story had expanded further to include Ted Heath, the former heads of MI5 and MI6, Lord Janner and Peter Hayman, as well as the murder of three boys.  As the Needle Blog has pointed out, his story seems a conglomeration of online conspiracy theories, the Scallywag articles and the varying allegations made against Savile and Janner, with added details that only he can explain.

By the time Harvey Proctor gave his extraordinary press conference in August of last year, detailing in full what he was being accused of by Nick, it was already apparent the investigation was falling apart.  Having at first given massive publicity to the allegations, if we're being extremely charitable believing McDonald when he pronounced them "credible and true", the coverage swung in the exact opposite direction.  The Mail and the Sun went after Tom Watson, more because of his new position of power as deputy Labour leader than anything else, before turning on commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe, again more out of rage at the investigations the Met has undertaken into the press than real digust at the treatment of Bramall and Brittan.  Despite reports in the Mail and Telegraph that had began to cast further doubt on the police and Nick, it was BBC's Panorama, somewhat making amends for the corporation's role in first publicising Nick's claims, that piece by piece cast doubt on the police investigation and asked why it was they apparently hadn't done some very basic fact-checking.  The police's response was to demand it not be shown, while Exaro resorted to smears directed at Panorama's reporter Daniel Foggo.

The Met, as Matthew Scott writes, still seems to believe it has done little wrong.  They will not apologise for investigating "serious allegations of non-recent abuse", as though anyone is asking them to.  If anyone is asking for apologies rather than lessons to be learned, it's for the way Operation Midland went about its investigation, or arguably, didn't.  Hogan-Howe's attempt to regain the initiative, saying that perhaps the police should not automatically believe witness testimony given to them of abuse completely missed the point: everyone wants allegations of sexual abuse to be investigated, and properly.  Victims must have confidence they will be believed.  Public trust can also be damaged however when someone's testimony is declared to be true before it has even began to be investigated, not least when that testimony it subsequently becomes clear was, as even Exaro News's editor said, "very hard to believe".  As with so much else, a balance has to be struck: until recently it was often felt police forces failed to take sexual offences as seriously as other crimes.  The public interest is not served by a tilt too far in the other direction, where the reputation of individuals can be destroyed in a moment, never to recover, thanks to leaks to the media.

More than anything, the police and Nick have done a disservice to other victims of abuse, especially those who have been the victims of people in positions of authority.  Nick himself may not be a liar or a fantasist so much as so severely damaged by what he went through as child that he no longer knows the truth of what happened to him.  We don't know how he was treated for the problems arising from his abuse, or by whom.  The Met cannot say the same.

Nor though is it just the Met or Nick.  The media, Exaro especially, has played a dangerous game, having no real care for those entrusting them with so much, thinking only of the remuneration available, or possible political advantage.  Politicians played a similar role.  So too we have seen how social media has become an echo chamber rather than an arena for debate, where dissenting views are ignored and opinions reinforced rather than challenged.  We're left depending on the Goddard inquiry for the answers, which from the preliminaries looks as though it might turn into a 5-year long saga of successive witnesses detailing accounts of abuse.  The omens could hardly be worse.

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3/23/2016 11:33:00 pm | |

Wednesday, October 14, 2015 

If Tom Watson should apologise, then so must plenty of others.

Tom Watson is a self-publicising tool, never happier than when he is at the very centre of attention.  Until that is he resigns in a huff, as he has done more than once previously.

The above could easily have been written before he had so much as voiced any sort of opinion on child sexual abuse.  More than anyone else Watson coat-tailed on the work of Nick Davies on phone hacking, and he did very well out of it.  Taking on Rupert Murdoch and News International was as righteous a cause as any, even if the motivation behind doing so was party political, having seen what the Sun did to Gordon Brown.  He also though has a habit of making an arse of himself, as he did when questioning James Murdoch, referring to him as a "mafia boss".  It took effort to make Murdoch junior look human, but Watson almost managed it, undermining at the same time his otherwise forensic attempts to get at the truth.

Having established himself as this crusader for the underdog, it's not surprising that he became the go to man for anyone who felt their problems had been ignored, their cause shat upon, their battle with the state and/or anyone else covered up.  Nor is it surprising that thanks to this new status and what must also be damn hard work, his efforts in encouraging victims of abuse to come forward have resulted in three convictions, and that's only so far.

You do then have to wonder if, more than anything, Watson's real failure is one of spreading himself too thinly, difficult as that is to imagine.  His doors have been so open that it reached the point where he either couldn't keep up, or he was so overwhelmed that he wasn't able to differentiate between all the accounts he kept on being given.  He might well have taken extra pleasure in how the claims he first raised at prime minister's questions of a Westminster paedophile ring mainly involved Conservative MPs of the Thatcher era, but he was also involved in the campaign to get the (Labour) Lord Janner to at least face a trial of the facts.

Watson is after all very far from the only person to have reported the claims of abuse victims as though they were incontrovertible.  Watson's main accuser since last week's Panorama, the Mail, has done a very abrupt about turn from revelling in the allegations being made to now declaring them without any hesitation a "witch-hunt".  The home secretary, Theresa May, apparently in reference to the claims being made by the likes of "Nick", said that "only the tip of the iceberg" of the extent of abuse had thus far come to light.  A very different attitude to the one of the prime minister, who on Monday invited Watson to "examine his conscience".  Simon Danczuk, who if anything has been even more vocal than Watson about cover-ups and was at the forefront of demanding that anyone with the slightest link to Leon Brittan be excluded from the overarching inquiry, now claims that he always felt Chris Fay, one of the key links between the actual accusers and the allegations about the Elm Guest House, was "wholly unbelievable and some sort of fantasist".  At the same time as Watson was penning his "close to evil" piece on Brittan, Danczuk was exclaiming on how he feared Brittan's death would mean an end to any answers on the whereabouts of the Dickens dossier.

The response to last Tuesday's Panorama has shown in microcosm everything wrong with the media, social media, the police and politics in their current state.  To start with, it should not take a taxpayer funded broadcaster to point out the gaping flaws in a police investigation so well resourced and funded.  Daniel Foggo's hour-long report was not sensational; it was even-handed, and did not reach conclusions.  They were left for the viewer to draw.  For the Metropolitan police to do their hardest to try and stop the programme from being shown, as they did, and to essentially criticise the BBC for doing their job for them was quite incredible.  The message from both the police (and Exaro News for that matter) was that only they were capable of investigating these cases, and for anyone else to do so would only confuse and potentially damage the chances of justice being done.

Second, where has the rest of the media been in all this?  They've known just as well as the BBC of the questions over "Nick's" credibility, and it's only been as the much-advertised Panorama approached that the likes of the Mail and Telegraph started to raise doubts also.  It's almost as though it needed one respected outlet to break the silence before anyone else would.  We know these are not new allegations; Chris Fay has been bandying his supposed list from the Elm Guest House around since the late 80s.  Nick's claim of a friend he could not so much as recall the second name of being run down by his abusers, fairly easy to check out, was left for the BBC to do.  Any fear of undermining the police investigation surely had to be measured against how in 9 months no one has been arrested despite the police declaring Nick's allegations to be "credible and true", and yet lives and reputations have been turned upside down regardless.

The fact is there has been much for some to gain from the misery of others.  I don't doubt Tom Watson started down this path with the very best of intentions; for him to use it as a reason for why he should be deputy Labour leader, as he did, and to respond to the demands for an apology by in turn asking for an apology for the previously ignored victims, as though he has been and still is their spokesman, is distasteful in the extreme.  It can be argued that by writing to the director of public prosecutions asking for a review of the decision not to charge Lord Brittan over rape allegations was overstepping the mark; presumably then the outrage that met the decision not to charge Lord Janner, from MPs and media alike, which resulted in the review that led to the upcoming trial of the facts should be judged similarly.  It's also now open season on Exaro News, which has managed to stay afloat almost solely through its claiming of exclusivity on those making the most lurid claims of abuse.  How very different from when the press and the BBC also worked through them to further publicise the allegations.

Panorama's case was that the police had gone from one extreme, from being too eager to dismiss and disbelieve, to being all too credulous, uncaring of the effect the raids, leaks and appeals for witnesses were having on those unable to clear their name.  Exactly the same could be said of the media, and indeed many on social media, all too willing to believe the worst and then claim the moral high ground.  Yes, the exposing of Savile has led to many being believed who previously weren't, of convictions of abusers thanks to other victims coming forward thanks to the publicity.  At the same time, others have been accused wrongly or acquitted in precisely the same fashion.  There is no easy balance.  For the Tories and the Mail to now attack Watson in such a hyperbolic way, partially in an effort to get Corbyn through his deputy, partially out of revenge for Watson's role in the Leveson inquiry and partially because they can, only lowers proceedings even further.  That Simon Danczuk and John Mann have been all but ignored despite playing a similar role speaks for itself.

The danger has always been that by focusing on the sensationalist, the lurid, which is subsequently disproved, you don't help survivors of abuse, you run the risk of once again returning to a situation where they are routinely belittled and ignored.  Esther Baker's allegations might also turn out to be unsubstantiated, but the Liberal Democrat MP would not have been able to dismiss them in the way he has today had it not been for the mistakes of so many.  It certainly isn't just Tom Watson who should be examining his conscience.

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10/14/2015 01:30:00 pm | |

Wednesday, September 23, 2015 

The collapse of trust: Operation Midland and Exaro News.

As is becoming ever clearer, a substantial number of people in this country and across the American-speaking world in general have reached the point where they don't believe a single thing the old authority figures say.  They actively dislike traditional politicians, they don't believe the newspapers, they turn their noses up at mainstream broadcasters, and so on.  There are a number of reasons for this, the major one being that some politicians and some newspapers have got away with telling lies and half-truths for a very long time.  While the same can't necessarily be said of the BBC, what it most certainly can be accused of is status quo bias: while if anything it helped with the rise of UKIP thanks to the televisual quality of bar room Nige, its sniffier attitude towards Scottish independence and more recently Jeremy Corbyn has been noticeable.

Quite why this is happening now, and why it is happening to both left and right, whether it be with UKIP, Corbyn, Trump or Podemos is difficult to pin down precisely.  What is apparent is that it has its roots both in the economic crash, and in the transformation in the way we consume information: the collapse in faith in politicians who insisted they had all the answers, that there was no alternative, combined with the rise of social media where those very alternative voices have been able to cut through where they couldn't previously.  The same forces are behind very contrasting movements: on the right, where the belief is that an unaccountable liberal elite has been forcing its values onto the majority, resulting in a resurgence in patriotism and nationalism; and on the left, where what are seen as the failed compromises of the past are being rejected in favour of those who will at least fight for what they believe in.

This is obviously to simplify massively, not least as there is also a third constituency.  This consists of individuals who aren't necessarily politically inclined one way or the other, but who are convinced they have been and are being lied to by everyone.  Again, this group is also well catered for, increasingly by ever more professional outlets.  That they are often backed and funded by authoritarian states doesn't seem to matter; Press TV and RT's ability to offer an alternative is enough by itself.

Then you have the likes of Exaro News, where the clash between the establishment and those professing to be against it looks to be coming to a head.  Funded by Jerome Booth and headed by Mark Watts, formerly of Press TV, with ex-Guardian reporters David Hencke and David Pallister also on the staff, the agency is at the very centre of the intensifying row over the Met's Operation Midland.  Approaching a year after the investigation was launched into claims made by a witness known only as Nick, no arrests have been made and evidence to back up the allegations of murder and organised child abuse by a Westminster paedophile ring remains elusive.

Following continued criticism of the decision by Midland's lead officer Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald to call a press conference following interviews with Nick, at which he told the media that the account related was both "credible and true", the Met on Monday released a lengthy statement defending the investigation up to now.  While accepting that the use of the words "credible and true" suggested they were pre-empting the outcome of the investigation, they insist they were doing nothing of the sort.  Would everyone rather have a return to the mistakes of the past, the statement all but asks, where "the first instinct of investigators appeared to be to disbelieve those making the allegations"?

Obviously not, but the resort to a false dichotomy is unhelpful to say the least.  The difficulty for the police once a statement such as McDonald's is made, which does seem to be almost unprecedented, regardless of how they now want to present it, is that it gives the impression of then looking for evidence to confirm their initial belief was the correct one, rather than "investigating without fear or favour, in a thorough, professional and impartial fashion" as they claim to have done.  The Met further doesn't help its cause when the rest of the statement is essentially a complaint about how the media other than Exaro has been operating, asking them to consider the vulnerability of those making the allegations, and all but calling out James Hanning of the Independent for putting Nick's real name to Harvey Proctor amid a list to see if it produced any response.

Adding insult to injury, the statement goes on to insist that the Met "does not name or confirm names of those arrested or interviewed".  What the Met has been doing however is informing either Nick or Exaro when it has carried out raids of those accused, as Exaro was first with the news of the interviewing of Proctor and the initial raid of his home.  Proctor has not been as much as arrested, it should be remembered, nor was Lord Bramall, who as the Mail reported on Saturday also saw his home searched by a number of officers.  Equally apparent as evidenced by a previous report in the Mail and by pieces elsewhere since is that officers, either on Operation Midland itself or within the Met, are split on whether or not there is any truth to Nick's claims. 

A somewhat corroborating account, given by another witness who first went to Exaro News, has since been dismissed.  The Sunday Telegraph reported that while "Darren" was abused by a foster carer, his claims of being abused by a paedophile ring led by Peter Righton were not backed up by the available evidence, and that he had a history of making unsubstantiated allegations.  Exaro claimed at the start of September that Darren had himself withdrawn cooperation from Sussex police after they had referred his son to social services, which does not seem to be an entirely truthful account.  Despite describing the reports as "smears", Exaro in a number of tweets made no attempt to dispute the Telegraph account, beyond insisting that it has not sat in on interviews between the police and witnesses.  Exaro staff have apparently attended preliminary meetings between the police and witnesses, however.

Exaro's approach has been criticised from the outset.  As the Mail's report on Saturday makes clear, Exaro has not made any mention of previous accounts of the abuse Nick suffered which he shared online, none of which made reference to the allegations against VIPs he subsequently made to them.  Exaro has also as Richard Bartholomew notes not featured the most lurid parts of Nick's testimony, that it was Ted Heath who prevented Proctor from castrating him with a penknife, and also that he was abused by soldiers who humiliated him further by pinning a poppy to his bare chest.  This could be perfectly innocent: they may not have wanted to go into such detail, despite reporting in the case of Darren that a boy with Down's syndrome was tied between two cars which then reversed away from each other or it may have been that Nick only informed the police of these specific aspects of the abuse.  It could also be that Exaro felt these parts of his account to be so incredible as to cast doubt on the whole.

This isn't to pretend there aren't problems with the reports by both the Mail and Sunday Telegraph.  While not naming Nick, the former article gives more than enough detail from which anyone who really wanted to could identify him.  Doing so is completely irresponsible, and only makes it all the easier for supporters of Exaro and Nick to dismiss the rest of the story.  It also attempts to make it into an issue for both Labour and about political correctness, as the Mail is so often insistent on doing.  While there are criticisms that can be directed at Tom Watson and other Labour MPs Simon Danczuk and John Mann, Watson has had zero input on the actual police handling and investigation of Nick's allegations.  Nor does he seem to have influenced the investigation into Darren's claims, despite having according to the Telegraph been copied into some of the emails between Darren and the police.

Exaro's response to the criticism so far has been to either not engage, cry smear, in the case of Darren to blame Sussex police while at the same time when it comes to Nick repeating ad nauseum how the Met believes his allegations to "be credible", or to list what it claims its reporting as a whole has achieved.  If as seems increasingly likely the Met does slowly wind down Operation Midland, Exaro might be able in the same way to move on with little in the way of fanfare from its all but ownership of the establishment paedophile claims.  Nothing was proved, nothing was disproved, and so the claims will go on.  Those who want to believe always will.  The question is whether the numbers of "believers" is increasing, or whether they're simply more visible than before.  And if the likes of Exaro fail to satisfy them, will there be another new media organisation along to take its place?

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9/23/2015 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, August 26, 2015 

Another post in the making myself even less popular series.

Earlier in the month you might just recall we had days of coverage on the varying allegations made against Ted Heath.  Every police force in the country seemed to be launching investigations into claims made against the deceased former prime minister, to the point where it was decided Wiltshire police, the force whose superintendent had decided to make an appeal to other potential victims to come forward from outside what was Heath's home, would supervise the other inquiries.

It does strike as just slightly odd then that mere weeks later a genuinely extraordinary press conference by Harvey Proctor, during which he outlined in full the allegations of both child sexual abuse and murder, made not just against him but other senior members of the establishment, has slipped down the news agenda quite so quickly.  Only the Mail and Independent lead with it on their front pages, and beyond the interviews Proctor gave, little in the way of further analysis of the claims being made about a Westminster/establishment paedophile ring has been forthcoming.  One has to wonder if whether this might either be as a result of a request from the Metropolitan police, who yesterday were declining to comment on Proctor's media blitz, or if others have taken the same tact as the Guardian, declining to name the other figures identified out of a misplaced sense of not further spreading unproven allegations.

Some of it can undoubtedly be put down to the extravagant, hyperbolic way in which Proctor put his message across.  Either he should be arrested, charged and prosecuted immediately, or his accuser, known only as "Nick", should be charged with wasting police time, while the officer in charge of Operation Midland, Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald, should either resign, be sacked or demoted to traffic duties.  Oh, and both should be medically examined to ensure they are of sound mind.

Proctor has done himself no favours with such personal attacks.  He does though have absolutely every right to be as angry and bewildered as he is.  When someone makes allegations as lurid and as serious as the ones that Nick has, not just against Harvey Proctor but, to reel off the list Proctor was provided with, Ted Heath, Leon Brittan, Lord Janner, Lord Bramall, the heads at the time of both MI5 and MI6, General Sir Hugh Beach, a man called Ray Beech, as well as to be asked as to whether he knew or had any association with Jimmy Savile, Leslie Goddard or Peter Hayman, the expectation has to be that they will be investigated thoroughly, properly, and without favour or prejudice.  Instead, one of McDonald's first actions following the interviews with Nick was to hold a press conference at which he said that he believed the allegations made to be not just credible, but "true".  Nick has since appeared on television a number of times to relate his story, albeit with any details beyond that he was abused by establishment figures and also witnessed the murder of three other boys almost entirely shorn from the interviews.

Now that we know precisely whom Nick is accusing, it does, as Proctor said, seem "so farfetched as to be unbelievable".  As Evan Davis nearly summarised on Newsnight last night, either the very worst fears of an establishment abuse ring and cover-up are true, or this is the biggest witch-hunt since the Satanic abuse panic of the late 80s/early 90s, with some of the same individuals involved.  The police strategy appears on the surface at least to have been to give publicity to Nick's allegations in the hope that other witnesses will come forward to corroborate them.  If anyone has, it would seem their accounts haven't matched, leaving the Met with little evidence other than Nick's statements.  This would explain why despite searching Proctor's home and twice interviewing him under caution, he has not been arrested.

Instead, the police have allowed the drip, drip of the claims against various figures, not just Proctor and Heath, to continue for the best part of 9 months.  In the vanguard has been Exaro News, the online agency that has come to specialise in investigating cases of historic child abuse, with a journalist from Exaro apparently sitting in on the interviews between the police and Nick.  Exaro also had the scoop on just when Proctor was to be raided and interviewed, whether as a result of the police telling Nick and Nick informing Exaro, or being told directly.

Nick's testimony, regardless of the figures he says were involved in his abuse, is clearly compelling.  Without other witnesses however, or when most of those named are either dead or advanced in age, it's left the police with almost nowhere to go.  When you've already declared the account given by the witness to be true, a word that Exaro notably have been leaving out of their defences of Nick, saying only that he is regarded as credible, to then not act against Proctor other than to leave him to be judged in the court of public opinion is deeply troubling.  Proctor's claims of a homosexual witch-hunt may be over done, at least when it comes to the police, but that these allegations have been made repeatedly and principally against gay men does raise concern.

As does so much about the way these cases have been reported and consumed.  I don't know whether Nick's account is true, nor do I know if as Proctor protests, he is innocent.  You might well have thought that Proctor's downfall in 1987 over rent boys, albeit ones that would now be above the age of consent, would have led to these even more sensational claims coming to the fore sooner, for instance.  

Nonetheless, the more serious and the higher allegations of wrongdoing go, the rule normally is the more evidence is needed in order to convince.  Neither the police or media have come close to providing anything other than innuendo or a single, necessarily anonymous source to back up the claims being made.  The so close to almost be inseparable involvement of a media organisation with both the witness and the investigating state body also raises alarm bells.  For the same media organisations that have had no problem with repeatedly publicising allegations against senior figures without naming them or detailing exactly what they have been accused of to suddenly blanch when the principal accused sets out in unflinching detail the rapes, the stabbings, the running over of a 12-year-old, a list of exactly who is being accused, it smacks of them thinking that their readers will conclude they've been strung along for months once they're given the whole picture, rather than as Exaro laughably claims, about "avoiding contaminating the evidence pool".

This still doesn't explain why so many have been convinced from the moment Nick's allegations were first made public that they were true.  Exaro yesterday retweeted someone who asked them to send their regards as Nick was a source of "hope".  If that's out of the sense that survivors of abuse will be believed, fine.  If however it's because many want Nick's account to be true because it will prove accurate the worst fears or rather prejudices many have long had for politicians, especially Conservative ones, as it's difficult not to detect, that's something quite different.  Barth's Notes puts it down to a form of anti-establishment millennialism, but to me it reminds of Nick Davies' mea culpa over the murder of Hilda Murrell, an anti-nuclear campaigner whose death became a cause celebre in the 80s.  

Then it was the shadow of the secret state combined with the viciousness of the Thatcher era.  Now it's the spectre of the failure to expose Jimmy Savile while he was alive, combined with the general contempt for politicians and the belief that exposing the figures of the past will do for their successors today.  Others call for the abused to always be listened to regardless of how outlandish their claims may seem, ignoring how if it turns out that Nick's story is false or doesn't lead to prosecutions the damage likely to be done to public faith in similar exposes will be considerable.  Like what Proctor did or not, his actions are a more than understandable response to the mistakes and questionable decisions of both Exaro and the Metropolitan police. 

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8/26/2015 11:09:00 pm | |

Friday, August 07, 2015 

Britain, August 2015 part 2.

EXCLUSIVE TO THE SPECTATOR

JONATHAN KING: ALL THOSE OTHER MEN WHO CLEARLY WEREN'T GAY AS THEY WOULDN'T SLEEP WITH ME

LIBERACE: I TINKLED ON HIS IVORIES, BUT HE TOLD ME TO FUCK OFF WHEN I GRABBED HIS KNOB

ROCK HUDSON: I RAN ROUND HIS RUGGED GOOD LOOKS, BUT STILL COULDN'T GET IN HIS PANTS

TOM DRIBERG: I BEGGED HIM TO TAKE ME BACK TO HIS CONSTITUENCY AND PREPARE FOR MY PROTUBERANCE, BUT THEN HE THREATENED TO NAIL MY HEAD TO THE FLOOR

OSCAR WILDE: TO BE REJECTED ONCE MAY BE REGARDED AS MISFORTUNE, TWICE SEEMS LIKE CARELESSNESS

NO WONDER I HAD TO LOOK ELSEWHERE, HUH?  THANKS INCIDENTALLY FRASER FOR LETTING ME MAKE CLEAR JUST HOW NOT INNOCENT I AM AND DRAGGING TED HEATH INTO IT IN THE BARGAIN

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8/07/2015 03:43:00 pm | |

Thursday, August 06, 2015 

Britain, August 2015.

EXARO NEWS EXCLUSIVE

JIMMY SAVILE'S UNCLE'S NEPHEW'S BROTHER'S COUSIN'S DOG'S MOTHER'S GERBIL WAS SHOVED UP SIR TED HEATH'S ANUS, SAYS MAN WHO REFUSED TO COMMENT

"THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING OF OUR EXPOSURE OF JUST HOW SHOCKINGLY LOW JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS HAVE FALLEN IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA AGE," COMMENTS EXARO NEWS EDITOR HARRY HAMSTER
 
In other news: 
Did Cilla Black fall over and have a stroke to distract attention from Westminster paedophile scandal?
Total nutjob Noel Edmonds warns of the dangers of "electro smog", what a loon, eh?
Blogger goes totally off the deep end into victim blaming, concern trolling and general prat-arsing in futile attempt to prove something

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8/06/2015 08:52:00 pm | |

Wednesday, August 05, 2015 

A post bound to make me even more unpopular.

There are often times when someone beats you to the punch on a particular post.  Far rarer in my experience is when Dan Hodges, of all people, both beats you to it and even more amazingly, is right.

Let's be clear about this then.  If the same allegations that have been made against Edward Heath, given all the more publicity by the police, practically begging anyone to invent their own story of misery at the hands not just of the faceless establishment, but at a man that reached its very zenith, had been made against a living prime minister they would have been dismissed out of hand, and rightly so.  John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, raping a 12-year-old, getting a case against a brothel keeper dismissed by mere virtue of their name being mentioned in connection, being involved in a previous over-hyped abuse scandal on the island of Jersey?  Pull the other one, everyone would say.  The police also would have looked at the allegations, quickly realised they were nonsense, and not publicised them for that very reason.  Major might have sprayed salmonella all over Edwina Currie (or rather, did), Blair could possibly have banged Carole Caplin and Wendi Deng, and Brown might have, err, committed self-abuse somewhere he shouldn't have in Westminster, but anything more than that?  Cobblers.

Heath wasn't an ordinary, regular, normal prime minister though, oh no.  Sailor Heath.  Grocer Heath.  Unmarried Heath.  Weirdo Heath, basically.  At the time most assumed he was closeted, a possibly self-hating gay man at a time when to be openly gay and a politician, let alone prime minister, couldn't be countenanced.  Ironically, Westminster itself was far more liberal in such matters.  Good old Tom Driberg was tolerated after all, Churchill quipping that he gave sodomy a bad name.  Indeed, it's most odd that Driberg's name hasn't been so much as mentioned in all of the allegations about establishment paedophiles, especially considering his penchant for men on the very cusp of the age of consent, and I mean what the age of consent is now rather than the 21 it was when homosexuality was first legalised.

The general consensus now, or at least was, that Heath was asexual, which makes him even odder in our eyes.  Not interested in sex at all?  Who could possibly believe that in our age, when sex and gender we're told are not binary but multifaceted, when transitioning is celebrated, at least if you're famous already?  It just doesn't sound, or feel right.  Far easier to imagine Bachelor Heath as suppressing his real sexual desires, or rather not.

What surprises me, and surprised me from the outset of this panic, as that is certainly what it's become, is that otherwise sensible, cynical, inquiring minds appear to have been taken in by allegations that have come from highly suspect or confused, unreliable sources.  Oh, but the Heath story about the brothel, that's not from a survivor of abuse who is mistaken as a result of the damage and trauma they received and went through, or just a random loon, that's from a former inspector of Wiltshire police.  Only, as it's now turned out, the keeper of the brothel denies making any such claim in a bid to evade prosecution.  It raises the question of just what precisely Wiltshire police did investigate for those months before they passed it on to the IPCC.  Did they so much as approach Myra Forde, or was the account of someone convicted of perverting the course of justice, despite supposedly making the allegation, thought unnecessary?

History seems to be repeating, except this has gone well beyond farce.  Geoffrey Dickens at least had a legitimate target in the Paedophile Information Exchange, and his exposure of Peter Hayman was backed up by facts.  Our latter day Dickens', our Danczuks, our Watsons, our Manns, they don't even have that.  Simon Danczuk is repeatedly credited with exposing Cyril Smith, as though Private Eye and the Rochdale Alternative Paper didn't all those years ago, only they weren't listened to.  Tom Watson piggybacked off Nick Davies' work on phone hacking, and being right once does not make you right all the time.  John Mann meanwhile doesn't even have those feeble credentials; he's the archetypal loudmouth rent-a-gob MP, saying whatever he thinks will get him in the Daily Mail.

None of the three had any involvement with the Lord Janner case, beyond demanding that Alison Saunders resign for making the unpopular but reasonable decision that Janner's dementia meant it was not in the public interest to prosecute.  As it is, expect even the trial of the facts to not take place, as Saunders clearly thought it wouldn't, again due to perfectly reasonable legal challenges from Janner based on his condition.  All these investigations launched, all these operations, all these allegations, and what so far has been found in way of evidence other than against Janner, considering it was there about Smith if only anyone had bothered to look?  Very little, to precisely nothing.  The police believe the account of a man we know only as "Nick" about what went on at Dolphin Square, including murders, and yet they can't find any bodies, they don't have full names, they don't have exact locations, they have very little other than a couple of decades' worth of speculation, innuendo and rumour, since filtered through the internet conspiracy machine to the point where it's almost become accepted fact.

Ever since the Met and NSPCC mutually decided in the aftermath of the Savile revelations that accounts given to the police about historic child sexual abuse, so long as those accused are dead and so can't contest the claims, should be regarded as "not unproven allegations", or as you and I would call them, facts, the slow descent into the completely ludicrous has been all but inevitable.  Almost all the claims about Savile's wider access to NHS hospitals and state properties were unsubstantiated or couldn't be proved, not that you would have known that from the media coverage.  The reviews that have been conducted, like the Wanless and Whittam review, with the pair not altering their conclusions based on the new documents that were found afterwards, suggest there wasn't a cover-up.  Their comment on a newly found letter from 1986 between the head of MI5 and the Cabinet Secretary discussing a Conservative MP alleged to have "a penchant for small boys", something the MP denied, that it just reinforced their finding that crimes against children were given far less serious consideration than they would be now, doesn't go anywhere near far enough for those convinced there's no smoke without fire.

And to be fair to them, the MI5 archives remain relatively untapped.  If there's going to be evidence that child abusers within the establishment were known about and were tolerated, as to expose them would be more embarrassing to the government of the day than a genuine security concern, it's most likely in there.  Which was all the more reason why the overarching inquiry into child abuse should have been allowed to get under way as soon as possible, rather than twice delayed while Danczuk and others demanded that Theresa May find someone without any "establishment" links whatsoever.  Presuming the Goddard inquiry does get such access, it will still be years before any conclusions are reached.  Goddard herself said she expects the inquiry to take five years; if she goes down the same Maxwellisation route taken by the Chilcot inquiry, as was discussed at length in the Slicker column in the last Private Eye, you can probably double that time frame.

This isn't of course to argue that allegations of historic child abuse should not be investigated.  They should be.  What should not be happening however is that they are either treated as fact regardless of the level of implausibility involved, or that the reputations of the dead should be besmirched before anything approaching evidence has been turned up.  In the space of a few days Ted Heath has been slandered in a way that would be unconscionable and unthinkable were he still alive, only for the claims to almost immediately be called into question.  Any lessons that should have been learned from the cases of either Lord McAlpine or Chris Jefferies to name but two have been thrown out the window or ignored on the basis of Heath not being around to defend himself.  Moreover, just as with Jefferies and McAlpine, the reporting has been driven just as much by demand, by the echo chamber of social media, so many apparently wanting to believe the absolute worst about people who look weird, are weird, or were politicians and so deserve it.

Last night, meanwhile, the BBC ran a report on the head of Greater Manchester police saying tracing missing teenagers, many of whom abscond from care homes, was becoming "unsustainable".  Considering the potential for such missing youngsters to be drawn into child sexual exploitation, it seems perverse that more attention and money is lavished on chasing what might well turn out to be phantoms than protecting those who could become victims today.

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8/05/2015 10:48:00 pm | |

Wednesday, October 22, 2014 

So damn easy to cave in.

Pressure is once again growing on ministers over their latest choice of candidate to lead the inquiry into historic child sexual abuse.

It had been thought all sides would unite around the appointment of the Witchsmeller Pursuivant, known for his long record in uncovering paedophiles, including in cases where there was no record of the guilty so much as having contact with a child.  "He's completely unbiased," said a ministerial source.  "Every single person he has accused has been found guilty, as proved by their failure to pass ordeal by water.  You can't get more unbiased than that."

Campaigners have since discovered however that Mr Pursuivant is a 10th cousin, thrice removed of Lord Brittan, bringing his objectivity into question.  The Witchsmeller denies ever meeting Lord Brittan, but admits he cannot guarantee having never been within 10 miles of the former Conservative home secretary, the latest stipulation asked for by MPs and lawyers.

Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, was scathing of the choice of Mr Pursuivant.  "How many more times does this government intend to choose establishment figures who are unable to prove they are sufficiently removed from Lord Brittan?  That he can't account for every single one of his movements over the course of the past 45 years simply isn't acceptable.  I don't know what world these people inhabit but where I come from you know if you're within 10 miles of a lizard in human skin.  You can smell them for a start."

Asked who he would like to chair the inquiry, Danczuk had the answer.  "There is only one man for the job.  I realise Geoffrey Dickens has been dead for 19 years, but that doesn't mean he can't be channelled by a medium, one suitably removed from Leon Brittan, obviously.  His spirit would also be able to answer questions over the contents of his dossier as no one else could.  The fact he was vehemently opposed to the occult poses a problem, I'll admit, but it shouldn't be insurmountable.  I'm sure he'll understand."

Should Pursuivant be forced to stand down, he will join Lady Butler-Sloss, Fiona Woolf, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, Will.i.am, Jeremy Irons, Sara Payne and Chris Hansen, all of whom have been appointed only to then resign.

 In other news:
Ched Evans speaks - "It wasn't rape, just a light sexual assault, and I apologise for my infidelity"
Meghan Trainor withdraws All About That Bass from sale, apologises for pretending to be African-American
Man kills everything

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10/22/2014 10:28:00 pm | |

Monday, July 07, 2014 

Celebrity betrayal and a revived frenzy.

Last century promised so much.  Now all our heroes are dead or corrupt.

As a sprog, one of my favourite, if not absolute favourite TV programmes was Rolf's Cartoon Time, later Rolf's Cartoon Club after he shifted to ITV.  I even joined the club, as there was one attached to the show (really?), and could well still have somewhere the paraphernalia sent every so many months.  In truth Harris wasn't a great artist, and while I detest the snobbery that greeted his commission to paint the Queen, there were obviously dozens, hundreds, thousands of others far more deserving of being given the publicity of doing so.  Rolf's amateurishness was however part of the point: just as with Neil Buchanan and Tony Hart to name but two other presenters, their enthusiasm was meant to inspire kids to be creative themselves, to nurture the belief they could think out and do something as impressive (at least to a child) as one of Art Attack's on a grand scale collages.

Reading the latest outburst of being wise after the guilty verdict comment, just as there would have been an outburst of why was he even prosecuted comment had he been found innocent, it's hard not to agree with Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times and be thoroughly dispirited at the uniform reaction.  Rolf Harris didn't betray me, as so many others are convinced he did them just by existing and not admitting he was in private a different, sad and extremely flawed man.  The only people he betrayed are those whom put personal trust in him and those whose innocence he stole.  As an adult he's never meant anything to me; all I have is those childhood memories of a much simpler time.  I bear him no ill, and feel sorry for him, just as I also feel desperately sorry for his victims.  Rather than the sentence being too lenient, I thought it too harsh, lack of guilt or regret notwithstanding.  Some of the reporting on his supposed child porn stash has also been extremely dubious, with it being most likely he sought out images of young looking but over the age of 18 women.

As Lawson wrote, there really doesn't seem to be any room for grey when it comes to celebrities in this hellish second decade of the 2000s.  They are either at the very peak of their powers or in crisis; they are either globe trotting behemoths or once again piling on the pounds; they are either heroes, or they are villains.  We, or at least most seem to find it intolerable for anything of someone convicted of offences against children to continue to exist, or at least be consumed in public.  It's not just lobbing plaques down the memory hole or the refusal to host sales of artwork, it's the rubbing out of a person's existence in substitute for not being able to do so literally.  Everyone else's brand must be protected.

You can also forget about rehabilitation: look at Chris Langham, acquitted on charges of sexual assault but found guilty of possession of child pornography.  A great comic actor bedevilled by alcoholism and himself abused as a child, he's barely worked since (he appears alongside Leslie Grantham in The Factory, Grantham's conviction for murder not having affected his career as much as his later "sex scandal" did).  A fitting punishment?  Only with death is there the opportunity for release: those stations that had rarely if ever played Michael Jackson's music after his trials suddenly found it was again permissible to fill the airwaves with his oeuvre.  Once gone from our midst we can start to put things in context, despising Wagner's rabid anti-Semitism while adoring his operas, concerned about Lewis Carroll's fascination with young girls while still enthralled by his Alice.

Nor do we learn anything from past events.  Was it only 18 months ago we had the McAlpine fiasco, Philip Schofield brandishing a list of names dug up via Google at David Cameron, demanding they be investigated?  Can it only be last February when Operation Yewtree was being criticised after the initial prosecutions had all failed?  Now with some of the press in full cry we have Theresa May announcing a Hillsborough-type inquiry into the potential covering up of child abuse across almost every sector, whether it be government, churches, or broadcasters.  This has been principally sparked by the sudden rediscovery of how Geoffrey Dickens, a Conservative MP, had presented the then home secretary Leon Brittan with a "dossier" on child abuse by establishment figures, which may or may not be connected with the investigation into the Elm Guest House, a brothel frequented by among others, Cyril Smith.

That 114 papers connected with Dickens' dossier have either gone missing or been destroyed simply has to mean this is a cover-up, or will be seen as such.  So insists Simon Danczuk, billed by some as having "exposed" Cyril Smith, ignoring the Rochdale Alternative Paper and Private Eye, just as they were ignored when they printed the original allegations against Smith.  It couldn't possibly be the whole thing was mostly if not entirely bollocks, Dickens being perhaps the original rent-a-gob MP, mates with Mary Whitehouse, hitting one target and then never able to repeat the trick.  Towards the end of the 80s, along with a distinct minority of social workers, Dickens was convinced children were being ritually and Satanically abused, that great witch-hunt where witches really were sought and none discovered, families broken apart in an attempt to prove one of the great recent myths and panics.

If there is a case for an over-arching inquiry, it's to put all the allegations that have surfaced or resurfaced since Jimmy Savile's abuse came to light to both the test and to get them out in the open.  One aspect barely covered has been what the security services were up to or knew about the likes of Savile, apparently unconcerned as they were at his forming relationships with the royals and Margaret Thatcher.  Were they too taken in, or not bothered by his predilections?  Did they perhaps have some sort of involvement with Cyril Smith, as has been hinted at, hence why he wasn't brought down after RAP and Private Eye first printed the claims about him?  While suggestions of a massive cover-up aren't completely unbelievable, especially when you consider what the likes of say Tom Driberg got away with through having friends in high places, it does stretch credulity to the limit.  It seems all too similar to the wild conspiracy theories that have floated around the internet for years; moreover, if the likes of Private Eye had thought there was something to Dickens' dossier, they certainly would have ran with it.  Before Newsnight took Steve Messham at his word over Lord McAlpine, the magazine was also burned by his understandable failures of memory.

Such an inquiry must not though be a place for allegations to be looked at but not seriously investigated, then reported as being proof of the depravity of those accused.  As Anna Raccoon has been painstakingly pointing out (I must stress I wonder about her motives and think the number of allegations against Savile means he definitely was an abuser, albeit not on the scale as has been suggested) by actually reading the NHS report into Savile's access to the estate, not a lot of them stand up to scrutiny.  Faded memories are one thing, giving credence to dubious in the extreme claims something else entirely.  The appointment of the head of the NSPCC to lead a separate inquiry into last year's government search for files, an organisation that has made some of the most hyperbolic claims about Savile, therefore raises concerns.  It all smacks of the government acting because there have been days of tabloid front pages rather than because it truly believes there's something in the claims.  Also helpful is the main inquiry's report will be published in the next parliament rather than this one.

There's another subtext here.  Focusing on the establishment, the politicians, the BBC, it all shifts the glare away from the rest of the media.  The conviction of Harris at almost the exact same time as that of Andy Coulson and the rest of the phone hacking gang helped superbly in distracting attention from the former tabloid editor, while few have wondered just why it is our supposedly free press never managed to catch any of these abusers, focusing instead on the small timers.  The silence on Max Clifford was understandable, as they were so hand in glove with one another; on Harris it's more difficult to think why it is nothing was found out before now.  Harris wasn't influential, and didn't court those in high places to the extent of a Savile.  He also admitted to suffering from depression, failing to be there for his daughter, to having a darker side.  Nothing came of it.   

Watching the "debate" on Newsnight just now, I felt like throwing myself out the window, the sound and fury adding to the impression pitchforks are being sharpened over something that failed to get attention three decades ago for the reason there wasn't anything there to begin with.

And what did become of us? A borrowed intellect and a stolen pose.

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7/07/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, October 13, 2011 

The pornography of terror.

It's proving to be a busy three months for the good people down in Soho Square. No sooner had the BBFC rejected Tom Six's magnum opus the Human Centipede II, a decision which last week they reversed after the director offered to truncate his work, removing scenes of sandpaper masturbation and barbed-wire rape, than they're banning a slightly more serious work, Adam Rehmeier's The Bunny Game.

The two films, although both in the horror genre, could hardly be more different, despite it seems sharing the same black and white aesthetic. The Human Centipede is pure fantasy, albeit it "torture-porn" indebted fantasy; The Bunny Game is startlingly grounded in reality, to the point where the film's star and co-writer Rodleen Getsic, according to the makers, genuinely endured the treatment her character receives from the truck driver who abducts her, everything you see apparently being real. Agreeing to be branded with a hot iron for your art is not the only disconcerting apparent detail: Getsic according to some reviews has experienced abuse herself in the past, something alluded to in this piece she links to from her Twitter account.

If the making of the film was in some way meant to act as both therapy and catharsis, then it poses further uncomfortable questions for both censor and viewer: the BBFC, concerned as ever with the potential for harm, for once quite reasonably worries that "the lack of explanation of the events depicted, and the stylistic treatment, may encourage some viewers to enjoy and share in the man’s callousness and the pleasure he takes in the woman’s pain and humiliation". For the viewer, there's the knowledge that if this is part of an attempt by Getsic to turn her very real past pain into a performance while also emphasising the fact that suffering ends and life goes on, then by watching are you playing a role in something which very few therapists would advise? Are those attracted to such material complicit in deriving entertainment from the very real acts of violence committed by murderers and abductors?

Without having seen the film, it's difficult to be able to say for certain just how brutal the violence is, and whether it genuinely does break new ground in the horror endurance stakes. Unlike the also recently banned Grotesque, which fitted into the Japanese mini-genre of pseudo-snuff horror associated with the Guinea Pig series of films, it instead appears to bear a resemblance to the final act of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where the character Sally endures almost a full half hour of terrorisation at the hands of her captors, before finally escaping and experiencing the euphoria of freedom. TCM was one of the few films that the BBFC's former director James Ferman felt could not be released in any form, with the organisation's student case study revealing he described it as "the pornography of terror". What it doesn't make clear is that Ferman overruled all those under him at the organisation who felt it could be released, with the unsurprising result being that almost as soon as he retired the film was passed 18 uncut.

It's this fear of the "pornography of terror" which it seems has returned to claim a new victim. Even considering the fact that The Bunny Game is far more graphic than TCM ever was, one thing that is absurd for the board to complain about is that there's no apparent explanation for the violence depicted in the film. The idea that violence, abduction and murder can always be given such an explanation is to ignore the fact that on some occasions there is no real reason; it's simply because the perpetrator can. They may well derive and sexual and sadistic pleasure from their crimes, but that is to only partially understand why. If the film's whole raison d'etre is to portray the grim reality of what some victims have gone through, then it appears the BBFC would rather that such accounts are toned down before they can be accepted as fiction. Indeed, in passing TCM the BBFC noted that

any possible harm that might arise in terms of the effect upon a modern audience would be more than sufficiently countered by the unrealistic, even absurd, nature of the action itself.

The implication appears to be that film-makers at the extreme end of horror can't win either way. Go for too much realism and you'll be banned, while you'll also find your work cut if you cast aside reality and stitch together multiple people from mouth to anus and put abrasive materials into the mix. That adults should be able to decide for themselves what they personally can stomach and experience seems as distant an ideal as it has ever been.

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10/13/2011 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, June 08, 2011 

The censoring of a centipede.


It's most likely a indication of my slow, all but unnoticeable declining interest in "extreme" cinema that I haven't seen the original Human Centipede. Like a good few films in recent years, the hype surrounding it was that it could well be the sickest ever made. Unlike those other, mostly flaccid entries in what became known derisively as the "torture porn" genre, it wasn't an unoriginal retread, remake or homage to either a 70s exploitation piece or an 80s slasher flick. No, here was something resembling an idea, even if it was being pulled off in the confines of a traditional mad scientist/maniac plot: you can after all only be brutalised or killed in so many ways. What's more frightening than being slowly hacked to pieces by an unknown assailant? It's surely not just being deprived of the ability of any means of escape on your own, but also being forced to share the experience with others, and when I say forced I mean literally. However ridiculous and scientifically ludicrous the idea is of three people being able to survive surgically joined together at, to put it in the nicest possible way, bottom to mouth, it's a concept so horrible to the average person that it just about works. For anyone else, well, there's got to be comedy lurking in there somewhere.

Opinions differ as to just how well director Tom Six pulled off his undeniably affecting conceit, with Peter Bradshaw in the Graun, notoriously difficult to please, giving it three stars, while Roger Ebert decided it was beyond his own star system of ranking. Kim Newman, the veteran horror journalist, declared it was odd and unforgettable but never quite as outrageous as it threatened to be. Indeed, discounting the gross-out inevitability of the lead person in the centipede failing to control his bowels, there was relatively little graphic footage in the film of the necessary surgery to construct the human insect, nor much once it had been created. Everything else was left to the over-active imagination. The BBFC, that august body tasked with the always onerous duty of deciding just what we can and can't see was similarly unmoved and passed it 18 uncut. There is however a clue to just how seriously they took the nastiness Six had put to celluloid, contained in their extended classification information:

The Board has taken legal advice which indicates that THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is not in breach of the Obscene Publications Act 1959 or any other relevant legislation. In terms of harm, the scenario is so far fetched and bizarre that there is no plausible risk of emulation.

This is in contrast to the two most recent new submissions which the board has cut, the remake of I Spit on Your Grave and A Serbian Film, neither of which it seems they sought legal advice over before issuing a certificate.

The reason for rejecting The Human Centipede II (Now it's personal, err, sorry, I mean Full Sequence) then is not that anyone is likely to emulate what's portrayed, even though that's exactly what the entire plot is based around, for Six's concept this time is that someone has been so taken with his original that they put it into actual practice. This breaking of the fourth wall, or attempt at post-modernism ala Scream, call it what you will, is what it seems has really upset the BBFC. Sure, they've dressed it up as they always do in terms of sexual violence, about the only thing they still do cut non-sex works for containing, on always questionable subjective grounds, and make much of how the Full Sequence "presents graphic images of sexual violence, forced defecation, and mutilation", unlike the original, yet you can't help but feel that it's because Six has specifically shown someone doing just that which they said was so "far fetched and bizarre".

David Cox has pretty much hit the nail on the head in his piece for the Graun. The BBFC complains that since the principal focus of the film "is the sexual arousal of the central character at both the idea and the spectacle of the total degradation, humiliation, mutilation, torture, and murder of his naked victims" that cutting any one section will still fail to make the whole acceptable. This is rather odd, as it passes hundreds of works each year that while not necessarily arousing the characters in the film are clearly aimed at stimulating the sections of certain individuals that other parts can't reach. What is it about this fictional character that makes what he inflicts unclassifiable, when numerous serial killer films on the market are just as unflinching in depicting their crimes, like Henry or Man Bites Dog? Key it seems is this passage:

There is a strong focus throughout on the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence and a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure.

A link between sexual arousal and sexual violence? You don't say? Is it really so awful that this be shown, even in what is an exploitation film? As for a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure, it seems that this is still too transgressive, too beyond the pale for the BBFC to even contemplate that it exists. It's certainly not clear from the BBFC's justification just how truly graphic the lead character's sexual arousal is shown as: we're told that he masturbates with sandpaper wrapped around his penis, although not whether this is implied or actively shown. The same is the case with the scene in which he apparently rapes the woman at the back of the "centipede", this time with barbed wire around his member, excited at seeing his walking, living shit eating machine in "action" as it were. If any of this sounds just slightly silly, going beyond even what some of the good people over at Bmezine have done to themselves then congratulations, you are just a little more mature and well-balanced it seems than the BBFC.

The problem the BBFC have is that so much of what they object to presented in this context they've passed in highly similar or distantly related genre pictures. Many horror films present the victims of their protagonists as "objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience"; what are the Friday the 13th pictures and many other knock-off slashers than exercises in showing how creative the writers can be at killing their teenage fodder off? Those characters exist solely as one-dimensional beings, so unappealing and impossible to empathise with that the audience actively looks forward to seeing them getting chopped up. Sit someone down in front of Salo who knows nothing about the film whatsoever, and would they understand at the end that it's meant to be a vicious allegory of life under fascism replete with Pasolini's despair at modern society, or would they just remember the naked children being served up a meal of their own faecal matter as the degradation they're subjected to intensifies? As for rape, is there a scene more visceral, more agonising and extended than the ordeal which Alex undergoes for nine long minutes in Irreversible?

And so, inevitably, the board is left with relying on the Obscene Publications Act, that outdated and increasingly laughable piece of legislation. The United States has the Miller test, where three separate distinct clauses have to be satisfied before any work can be defined as obscene; we rely on a jury deciding simply if a film is liable to "deprave or corrupt". During the 1980s in the aftermath of the video nasties panic perfectly respectable men and women were brought before the beak for owning, distributing or selling copies of such films as Evil Dead, Last House on the Left and Zombie Creeping Flesh, with juries deciding that such tapes could indeed do just that. Almost all of those banned at the time have now either been passed completely uncut or with piecemeal edits: the most heavily truncated while still given a certificate is House on the Edge of the Park, shorn of an astonishing 11 minutes 43 seconds for its 18. Clearly when motivated enough the BBFC can slash a film into something they deem acceptable. Notably, one of the most notorious nasties, Cannibal Holocaust, has recently been passed with only 15 seconds of cuts, with just the on screen killing of a muskrat removed as required under animal welfare legislation.

Bounty Films and Eureka!, the distributors of Full Sequence plan to appeal the BBFC's decision, taking the film before the Video Appeals Committee, another collection of the great and good. They could well have a chance: Rockstar Games successfully appealed the decision of the BBFC to reject Manhunt 2. If not though, the BBFC instead of merely deciding that the film could be successfully prosecuted as obscene ought to put their case before an actual court: let a jury decide whether it really is likely to "deprave and corrupt", harm, or even slightly desensitise a significant majority of those that encounter it. What could they possible have to lose?

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6/08/2011 11:59:00 pm | |

Monday, June 06, 2011 

Everyone else's problem.

If you thought New Labour were bad when it came to the seemingly endless policy reviews they ordered, many of them helmed by people of the moment, almost all briefly made famous by lifestyle television programmes, then the coalition has gone one better. Previous reviews on the state of childhood by Dr Tanya Byron and Dr Linda Papadopoulos have now given way to the Big One. For such an important and definitive report on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood, a truly big beast was sought. As none could be found, Sarah Teather chose Reg Bailey, head of the Mothers' Union charity instead.

Yes, if you too are scratching your head at the apparent cognitive dissonance involved in a man being the chief executive of a charity calling itself Mothers' Union, then much soon becomes clear. For Mothers' Union is nothing if not forthcoming in its actual aims, as made clear on their website:

In 81 countries, our members share one heartfelt vision - to bring about a world where God's love is shown through loving, respectful and flourishing relationships. This is not a vague hope, but a goal we actively pursue through prayer, programmes, policy work and community relationships. By supporting marriage and family life, especially through times of adversity, we tackle the most urgent needs challenging relationships and communities.

Yes, they're a Christian charity. For those who think that perhaps God has very little to do with either loving relationships or indeed, childhood sexualisation, all such complaints should be taken up with Teather and friends, although one suspects that this might be a case where Iain Duncan Smith had some influence.

Bailey at least admits that he has no special qualifications for helming such a review, other than being a parent and grandparent himself, as well as the head of a charity (he notably doesn't state its religious ethos, and the word Christian doesn't appear once in the entire document) that supports families in 83 countries. In fairness to Bailey, his introduction to the review (PDF) which follows covers its bases well: he has harsh words for the "prurient approach that has sometimes characterised the wide media coverage of these issues" and he more than once emphasises the fundamental responsibility of parents themselves to control the environment in which their children grow up in. This is a review ordered by a Conservative-dominated government, after all.

The problem that the review barely touches, if puts its finger on at all, is that for all the calls that have been made for children to be children, adults need to try to come to terms with how they project their own worries about the world they're living in onto their offspring. The report informs us that 9 out of 10 parents surveyed agreed that children were under pressure to grow up too quickly, yet it doesn't seem that the finding prompted the researchers to do the obvious thing and ask children themselves whether they felt they were under pressure to do so. The answer might well have been illuminating. For while adults fret, mainly due to how quite a considerable number yearn after their own carefree years as a child, and wish they could return to it, children on the other hand either don't think in such terms, or instead wish that they were older and so have more freedoms. I cannot at any point during my childhood recall feeling that I was not being allowed to act my age, at least within reason, or that outside influences or pressures were bearing down on me; it's only now that I look back and contemplate how quickly time passes that I regret not making more of it while I had it. I suspect this is the emotion that especially drives parents, who after all are in effect seeing little facsimilies of themselves growing up before their very eyes, into wanting them to remain in that state for as long as is possible.

As the report then can't put it as brutally as advising parents to try as hard as they can not to fuck up their children with their own neuroses in the finest Philip Larkin fashion, while still advocating proper boundaries and limits on material from whatever sources they consume, it instead either beats around the bush or puts the onus on the retailers, broadcasters and media. To be sure, they have more than their fair share of responsibility, and it is difficult to argue with the conclusion that we are living in "an increasingly sexual and sexualised culture", yet it's hardly the case that there isn't any getting away from it. Rather than it being the children pressurising the adults into giving them what they want, it seems more to be about adults demanding things that either already exist or which they can't seemingly be bothered to put in place themselves. Take the very opening of the report, where Bailey sets out the "simple" views of a child:

“I don’t know why grown-ups find it so difficult, it’s really very simple. There should be another button on the remote control like the red button so that if you see something that isn’t right on television then you can press it to tell them you don’t like it. And if more than a thousand people press it then the programme is automatically cut off”.

So said the enthusiastic 10-year-old at a research presentation from a group of children to the Review team. “It’s really very simple.”

It is indeed very simple, or at least it seems so to this simpleton. There doesn't need to be an additional button which takes the equivalent role of Caesar at the Coliseum, you already have either the "off" button or the change the channel button, neither of which it seems see much usage. Television executives, believe it or not, make decisions based on the ratings the programmes they commissioned receive. If you don't like what you're watching, switch it off or turn it over.

This it seems is simply no longer good enough. Instead, and mainly prompted by the X Factor final where two of the least sexy performances in living memory took place in front of millions, images which the Daily Mail made its hypocritical best out of, broadcasters must "involve parents on an ongoing basis in testing the standards by which family viewing on television is assessed", as if they weren't already enough compliance procedures in place. It's still difficult to understand why there was such synthetic outrage generated by the X Factor final, especially when old Top of the Pops routines by the likes of Pans People and friends could be almost as risqué nearly 40 years ago, but then all broadcasters had to face was Mary Whitehouse and her clique. Now we have Mumsnet, which doesn't just want to interfere with factual and entertainment programming, it also wants to decide what is and isn't permissible in a soap opera, for goodness sake.

Other recommendations just seem to be the kind of gestures which these reports have long settled for making in lieu of, in this case, doing something far more counter-productive and potentially inhibiting on adults making a free choice. Hence "modesty boards" are recommended for lads' mags in newsagents, which have been in freefall circulation wise for some time, despite the effect they may still have on teenage girls' perception of what boys expect, while the proposed introduction of age ratings for music videos seems to miss the point entirely. They can conceivably be too explicit for younger children, yet the older teens will have long since moved on from their wares. Bailey recommends that the "internet industry must act decisively to develop and introduce effective parental controls", but there's only so much that NetNanny type software can block; most kids will exchange material now over social-networking sites. Parental monitoring is always going to remain key, and putting the onus on others will continue to be a cop-out.

The contradictions then are manifold. Nine out of ten parents worry about children growing up too fast when asked, yet they don't really think about it, or consider concerns about sexualisation and commercialisation too much when they aren't confronted with it, as it should be. Bailey wonders why "so many parents seem to lack confidence in their ability to help their children navigate this commercial and sexualised world", but why should he be so surprised by that when not a single one of the recommendations he makes urges parents to take action themselves? Instead of empowering them to take control or even to help them overcome what are certainly in some cases irrational fears, it remains everyone else's problem.

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6/06/2011 11:11:00 pm | |

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