Bartholomew's Notes

From disgraced former MP Andrew Bridgen, in interview with William Coleshill of “GB Resistance”:

I passed details of people who are engaged in child trafficking into the UK. Names, names of all those. Nobody wants to act about it. It’s big, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds… They’re flying them in to small airports that haven’t got fences round them. Lots of them in the UK. I gave the government the names of the  people, and the name of the company they’re laundering the money through, where the children are being taken to have their photographs taken. They thought they were going to go to school. These were for selling them to paedophiles. Nothing. It’s gone to MI5, it’s gone to the National Crime Agency, no-one will act. And when you see the names, you see why. They are known names. I’m told that they use them in the sex trade for about three years and then they’re worn out and then they organ harvest them.

This is par for the course from Bridgen, who has a history of making extravagant claims that are never backed up with evidence or even plausible details. Back in January 2023, for instance, he asserted that “people who’ve recently left security services around the world” had told him that they had been warned in September 2019 that Covid was going happen, and they should avoid the vaccine – that one was reported in The Times, although there was less media interest when two months later he followed up with social media posts in which he claimed to have been “informed that the US DoD were responsible for both the virus and the vaccines” and that “many politicians and officials” would be facing criminal proceedings “by the end of the month”.

Just before losing his seat in the July 2024 general election (which he has attributed to the result being “rigged” rather than the fact that he ran as a discredited independent rather than as the official Conservative Party candidate, as previously) he claimed that “intelligence sources” had told him that NATO would be waging war in eastern Europe within “days or weeks”; his assertion was amplified by US nepo-baby politician Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who cited it as evidence that “The White House seems to be on autopilot heading for a hot war with Russia”.

Bridgen’s interview with Coleshill has also now received an American boost – this time from Alex Jones, who currently remains at the helm at InfoWars despite the Sandy Hook defamation judgment. The interview clip had been circulating since the summer (passed around social media by the likes of David Atherton), but a recent re-upload by Jones with added commentary has brought in more than 20 million extra views so far.

It seems likely that renewed interest in the clip owes something to Elon Musk’s recent campaign of vilification against British Labour Party politicians. Musk’s intervention was welcomed by the Conservative Party, but Kemi Bedenoch’s strategic deployment of the grooming-gang “cover-up” smear (even adding a wrecking “reasoned amendment” to the second reading of the Children’s Welbeing Bill so that she could afterwards say that Labour had voted against a national inquiry) was always going to unleash new waves of conspiracising. However, given that Jones has also claimed from “British sources” that young girls were murdered in the presence of former Conservative PM Edward Heath (inevitably, procured for him by Jimmy Savile), this perhaps isn’t something they can keep control over.

UPDATE: The Bridgen interview clip has also now been promoted by Dan Wootton (uploaded via a “VIP paedophile” conspiracist, whose Twitter/X username is shown at one point), who complains that there was “total silence” from the media about it. Wootton also cites a number of old media reports about Labour councillors and workers being convicted for child sex-related offences as evidence that the media covers up such crimes and that Labour is “a party of paedophiles”, and he alleges that this explains the lack of a national inquiry.

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From the Independent:

Nigel Farage has launched a defence of Elon Musk’s incendiary social media attacks on Keir Starmer, claiming that “free speech is back” under the Tesla tycoon’s ownership of X (Twitter).

The Reform UK leader said that “tough things get said” in public life after Mr Musk described safeguarding minister Jess Phillips as a “rape genocide apologist” who should be in jail.

Farage’s deputy Richard Tice adopted the same line on LBC, framing Musk’s accusation in terms of free speech and “the right to offend”, and accusing the interviewer of being “more worried about a bit of language than exposing the facts of what happened” as regards historic grooming gang cases.

As has been widely reported, Musk’s attack on Phillips came in the wake of news that she had previously written to the chief executive of Oldham Council to convey the government position that a local inquiry into grooming gangs would have more legitimacy than a national one. Her letter was apparently sent at the end of October, and was published online as page 203 of a “public reports pack” for an Oldham Council meeting for 18 December here. (1)

GB News reported her response under the headline “Labour REJECTS Oldham’s call for Government inquiry into grooming gangs scandal” on 1 January; the channel’s Twitter/X post was then amplified by Liz Truss, with the added commentary

This is @jessphillips, the same Home Office Minister who excused masked Islamist thugs.

Her title “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls” is a perversion of the English language.

It’s clear whose side she is on.

One of Musk’s initial comments that Phillips ought to be in prison was posted in response to that, while his “rape apologist” accusation was a reaction to a post by a user calling himself “Lord Talbot”. (2)

In fact, Phillips’s letter was consistent with the position of that of the previous government, and as such is quite explicable without resorting to the allegation that she supports sex criminals of any kind.

The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, saw scope for a different line of attack, as expressed in the headline “Labour blocks grooming gang inquiry into Starmer’s conduct as CPS head”. This morphing of the proposed inquiry’s purpose extrapolates from a comment by shadow home secretary Chris Philp, that “the conduct of the Crown Prosecution Service, including during the time when Keir Starmer was the director of public prosecutions, would be one of the things that this inquiry should certainly be looking at”. The article was complemented by second piece, headlined “How Starmer was forced to admit CPS let down child victims of grooming gangs”, which raked over comments by Starmer reported by Andrew Norfolk at The Times in 2012.

The Telegraph also followed up with a piece titled “Starmer ‘guilty as anyone I know’, says grooming gang whistleblower”, which refers to an off-the-cuff Twitter/X post by Maggie Oliver. Her post also formed the basis for a Daily Mail front-page splash. However, Telegraph includes a fuller quote, including the folllowing:

Those leading these ‘enquiries’ have always wanted to cover up the truth, to hide it. And I’d say it’s become even worse in recent months with those who dare to speak out finding themselves in prison within a couple of days… when victims wait 6/7/8 years for a trial! Corrupt and just wrong.

One can see why the Mail left that bit out, and why the Telegraph fails to unpack its significance as an extraordinary attack on the integrity of Alexis Jay and the work of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham. Oliver’s moral authority as a “whistleblower” tends to put her above criticism, but there is reason to be sceptical of her judgement here and on other matters (for instance, her one-time association with Jon Wedger, and more recently her endorsement of Covid-vaccine misinformation spreader Aseem Malhotra).

The GB News article about Phillips’ letter to Oldham council happened to coincide with the viral circulation on Twitter/X of a screenshot of sentencing remarks from the Oxford grooming sex case in 2013, which describe in grim detail sadistic sex abuse inflicted on a girl under the age of 13.

Notes

1. UPDATE: Background to to the request from Oldam council is provided by Joshi Herrmann at The Mill here. Herrmann notes the role of a local activist named Raja Miah, who turned to the subject after the local council drew attention to “major failings” in two schools he had run. Miah has accused an “assurance review” covering Oldham of being a cover-up, and suggested that politicians may have been personally involved in sex offences. He also claims to have a dossier, but when asked to produce it set unreasonable conditions. However:

The 2024 local election was coming into view and after Miah’s campaigning had helped to unseat three council leaders already, some councillors were panicking. Many insiders saw no merit in the calls for another inquiry but felt the pressure was becoming unbearable. Officers who worked for the council were getting threats – one says she was told via email by one of Miah’s followers that she was a child rape apologist and wasn’t fit to have kids…

…When [Labour leader Arooj] Shah’s party lost control of the council last year, she needed the support of some of the independents to get things done. And that support came with a price: backing the call for a new public inquiry. It was that request to the government, made last year, that was rejected recently by the safeguarding minister Phillips, setting off the current controversy.

2. Truss’s reference to “masked Islamist thugs” alludes to an incident in August, when Sky News abandoned a live report from Birmingham about local Muslims forming a protective ring around a mosque over rumours that it would be targeted following the Southport killings. As reported by the Telegraph:

In a clip shared online, a man sped up on a motorbike behind the Sky News presenter Becky Johnson…

The man shouted “yo, free Palestine, f— the EDL” before three others approached the camera, prompting Sky News to cut away and send security to the reporter.

Tice cited the clip as evidence of “two-tier policing”, prompting Phillips to reply that “These people came to this location because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them”. Phillips was accused of “excusing masked thugs”, and she subsequently admitted that she had made a mistake. The rumours about “racists coming to attack” derived from a far-right target list of 39 locations that had been posted online anonymously [UPDATE: the creator of the list has been identified as one Andrew McIntyre, a far-right activist who has been sentenced to seven and half years for encouraging violent disorder]

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