From the Daily Express, December 2017:
POLICE whistleblowers are calling for an independent body to be set up where officers can expose corruption without being bullied out of their jobs.
By JAMES FIELDINGMP Andrew Bridgen has written to the policing minister Nick Hurd asking him what support is currently available to officers who raise concerns over criminality within their force.
In the letter Mr Bridgen told him that those who “dare” to speak out are often “put under pressure to back down and keep quiet.”
…The letter added: “Any new body should act as an ombudsman and be a point of contact for serving officers who wish to come forward with information.
…Two former detective constables, John Wedger [sic – should be “Jon Wedger”] and Rochdale whistleblower Maggie Oliver told the Sunday Express how their lives were made unbearable once they reported police corruption to their senior officers.
Oddly, it seems that Bridgen’s enquiry was informal: it does not appear on the list of Bridgen’s “Written Questions and Answers” on the Parliamentary website, nor is it mentioned on Bridgen’s own website. I have been unable to find any report about Hurd’s response, if there was one.
I noted Wedger and Oliver just a few days ago; Oliver is a mainstream celebrity, based on her involvement in exposing the Rochdale “grooming gang” case, while Wedger claims that he was forced out of the Metropolitan Police after raising a concern that evidence about a paedophile ring had been covered up – more recently, his allegations have come to include claims about Satanic Ritual Abuse (as noted by Hoaxstead Research), and he appears to have introduced Oliver to a conspiracy-theory milieu that includes the likes of Robert Green.
James Fielding, the author of the above article, wrote about both Wedger and Oliver in November 2017 (here and here); previously, Oliver had said that she had resigned in 2012 over how the Rochdale case was being handled, but in Fielding’s piece she re-framed her experience as “bullying”, explaining that she had not spoken out until now “so as not to detract from the way in which the young victims were let down by the police.”
Bridgen is a backbench MP who frequently obliges journalists with rent-a-quotes on a range of topics (1), and given his intervention just a couple of weeks later it is very reasonable to suppose that he was brought in at Fielding’s request to generate an easy follow-up article that would give a sense of the November stories moving onward and upward. (2)
A couple of months later, in February 2018, Wedger undertook a canal walk from London to Manchester, to raise awareness of his “whistleblowing” cause and to raise money for a drug rehabilitation centre; according to his Justgiving crowdfunding blurb:
Support has also come from morally focused MPs who have faced resistance from their peers for supporting us, as well as victim and survivor support groups and members of the public. Well-wishers have included the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham; Cardinal Vincent Nichols; and the original and most famous police whistleblower, Frank SERPICO.
The canal walk was also reported by Fielding, this time for Mail Online, but the journalist focused on the detail that Wedger was being accompanied by Chris Lambrianou, a former East End gangster and associate of the Kray Twins who is now a Christian after having had a conversion experience in prison.
Manchester was also the location of the mysterious “police whistleblowers’ meeting” attended by Wedger and Oliver that I noted in my previous post; in a short video, Wedger said that the meeting was taking place somewhere in the north of England, but an associate then gave the game away by complaining that it had taken him an hour to get to the venue from Manchester Airport, when the journey should have taken just two minutes.
Several other short “to-camera” videos from the meeting were uploaded to YouTube, but for some reason some of these have now been removed. In one of them, Wedger complained about an unnamed individual who was causing “unlimited damage”; and just yesterday he used social media to announce his immediate withdrawal from campaigning, supposedly due to “threats”. This is despite having recently launched a line of merchandise, including t-shirts bearing an image of his face and the words “I Stand with Jon” (3).
From context, it is obvious that the person Wedger says is causing “unlimited damage” is the former pop-singer Brian Harvey. However, it is difficult to see how this can be substantiated: in a recent YouTube video, Harvey spoke respectfully of Wedger, but appealed to him to disassociate from Bill Maloney, a self-styled activist who has made extravagant allegations of sex abuse and murder against politicians. Wedger says that he has known Maloney for eight years.
Harvey at one time worked with Maloney, and he has video clips, apparently from late 2013, that show Maloney “coaching” an obviously vulnerable adult in a way that is disturbing and demeaning, and asking this same man to confirm whether he had been abused by various celebrities. Maloney’s list of names also included a private individual known to Harvey, and Harvey very reasonably believes that this name was included to manipulate him (4). There is also a clip in which Maloney tells Harvey and the vulnerable adult that his life is in danger, and warns them that theirs may be as well.
This brings us back to James Fielding. Harvey claims that Fielding travelled with him and Maloney to meet this man; he says that Fielding was not present when Maloney read his list of names to him, but that he conducted a separate interview that yielded a sensational headline about supposed abuse by an unnamed politician. This was during a period when posthumous allegations against Jimmy Savile and the ongoing farce of Operation Midland meant that any lurid “VIP abuse” allegation would be published uncritically, although details were often kept vague to skirt libel laws and evade proper scrutiny.
Was it through Maloney that Fielding came into contact to Wedger? And if so, what does this tell us about the interactions between rabble-rousing conspiracy activists, journalists seeking sensationalist scoops, and publicity-hungry politicians?
Notes
(1)
As I have previously noted, the media has faithfully conveyed Bridgen’s view that it is “totally inappropriate” for the National Trust to be promoting gay rights; that he has “no idea” why John Lewis is selling children’s clothes as gender neutral; that police have “more important things to investigate” than a car being accidentally splashed with water from a watering can; and that “people will be shocked” by the proportion of National Lottery grants that go to Scotland. Etc, etc.
(2)
Last October Bridgen received a pre-publication copy of Wiltshire Police’s underwhelming report into Edward Heath, for which he provided positive publicity before the rest of us could see it and judge for ourselves. In the same month, he spoke supportively of Wiltshire Chief Constable Mike Veale, when it announced that Veale was facing a disciplinary investigation on an unrelated matter. Fielding wrote this up for the Express in an article that carried the headline “Edward heath chief investigating constable victim of ‘ridiculous’ accusations” – the single quotes around “ridiculous” serving as cover for the obvious editorialising in such an announcement.
(3)
The items are for sale via a shopify website called “resistanceclothing”, apparently based in Thornton, Wirral. Alongside the “Jon Wedger Whistleblower collection”, the site sells “Clothing etc for patriots (rebels) with a cause whilst helping fund the patriots cause!” The items for sale mostly carry designs based on the Union Flag; there are also mugs advertising bacon, and a range of items promoting a Tommy Robinson supporter who goes by the name of “The Pissed Off Patriot”.
(4)
Harvey suffers from a bipolar disorder, and has in the past made something of a spectacle of himself (e.g. turning up outside Downing Street in 2014 and demanding to be seen by Davd Cameron). His broader narrative involving phone-hacking and police statements is difficult to follow, and some of his inferences are arguable. He also appears to remain invested in conspiracy theories. However, the Maloney material speaks for itself, and it’s a shame that journalists show no interest in it while running trivialising “weird news”-type articles about Harvey’s reduced circumstances and supposed mental state.
Harvey most recently gave his account in an interview with a London-based activist who goes by the name “Eddie Is OK” (var. Eddieisok, Eddie Isok). “Eddie Is OK” is a black Briton who, from his various videos, appears to be supportive of Tommy Robinson and of Anne Marie Waters’s For Britain party. He believes that immigration to Britain by Muslims is a conspiracy, and the blurb on one of his YouTube videos directs readers to a book by William T. Still entitled New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 51 Comments »
