Bartholomew's Notes

From the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), 5 June:

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has withdrawn its direction that former Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse face gross misconduct proceedings after a large volume of relevant material was recently disclosed to the IOPC by the Metropolitan Police.

…The allegations centred around comments made to the media in March 2016, concerning his beliefs about the honesty of two witnesses to Operation Midland – a Met investigation into allegations of non-recent sexual abuse – and remarks he is alleged to have subsequently made to former High Court Judge Sir Richard Henriques who had been commissioned to carry out an independent review of the handling of Operation Midland in August 2016.

…There is no evidence within the recently disclosed material that there was any inappropriate motivation in Mr Rodhouse’s comments to the media or which supports that he made those remarks during Sir Richard’s review.

There was, however, substantial evidence to indicate the comments made to the media were the result of collaboration between senior Met officers and staff and that there had been appropriate considerations, including a desire not to discourage victims of historic sex offences coming forward…

It was announced that Rodhouse would face an investigation in 2023. Operation Midland was infamously triggered by Carl Beech, a man whose extravagant tales of VIP child sex abuse and murder were declared to be “credible and true” before any of his claims had been examined and despite obvious similarities with “Satanic panic” ritual abuse tropes from the 1980s. Beech is now in prison, both for perverting the course of justice and for possessing indecent images of children. Two other individuals, “Witness A” and “Witness B”, latched onto Beech’s allegations, but so far they have not been made accountable for false statements made to the police.

The implication of the IOPC statement is that the “recently disclosed material” is exculpatory for Rodhouse, but it remains unclear how exactly. The case against him was set out long before its discovery, and so the fact that it contains “no evidence” against him is neither here nor there. Neither would we expect it to have any evidential bearing as to what Rodhouse might have said privately to Sir Richard Henriques.

Further, although details of “collaboration between senior Met officers and staff” may reveal something of Rodhouse’s decision making, it is not clear why it therefore absolves him of responsibility. The statement seems to be saying that “collaboration” means that responsibility was so diffuse that no-one can be blamed. The public may take the opposite view, that the case against Rodhouse has been dropped to keep the lid on a wider scandal.

The IOPC decision has been criticised by Lady Brittan, who is Leon Brittan’s widow, and by Harvey Proctor, who has issued a statement that includes the following:

…The IOPC has upheld my complaints. They acknowledge Rodhouse misled the public about Operation Midland – but now claim he was not alone. Instead of naming those responsible and holding them to account, they have dropped the case entirely. Because the misconduct was collective, no individual will be held responsible. What sort of justice is that?

For Mr Rodhouse to claim he acted with “honesty, integrity and care” in Operation Midland is as grotesque as it is offensive.

Sir Richard Henriques found over 40 failings in the Met’s investigation -an investigation Mr Rodhouse led. Innocent men, including myself, had our reputations shredded, homes raided, and lives wrecked based on obvious falsehoods. Mr Rodhouse authorised those raids. He was warned about the unreliability of Carl Beech, now convicted as a paedophile and fraudster, yet he pressed on. That is not integrity – it is dereliction…

I will be writing to Sir Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to demand a meeting and an explanation. I will also ask the IOPC to justify how it can claim to uphold complaints while simultaneously refusing to act on them…

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

From the Daily Telegraph:

Concern about mass migration is a “terrorist ideology” that requires intervention by the Government’s anti-radicalisation Prevent programme, according to official documents.

An online training course hosted on the Government’s website for Prevent lists “cultural nationalism” as a belief that could lead to an individual being referred to the deradicalisation scheme.

This encompasses a conviction that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups”, staff taking the course are told.

…Prevent’s official “refresher awareness” course, hosted on gov.uk, states that “cultural nationalism” is one of the most common “sub-categories of extreme Right-wing terrorist ideologies”, alongside white supremacism and white/ethno-nationalism.

One might expect the url link there to click through to the primary source, but it instead bizarrely takes readers to an irrelevant opinion pice by Daniel Hannan from last year complaining about Labour in general terms.

Also oddly, the article fails to explain where the three “sub-categories” have come from. The impression is that Prevent has come up with the terms itself, and that they perhaps reflect a new government directive. Readers are not told that the terminology described instead reflects usages adopted in May 2019 by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), MI5 and Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP).

The reason for this omission, I suspect, is that the article is primarily a vehicle for promoting Toby Young:

Lord Young, the general secretary of the Free Speech Union (FSU), has written to Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, urging her to reconsider the classification urgently.

…He said: “While not defined in law, nor subject to statutory constraint, the definition in the training course expands the scope of suspicion to include individuals whose views are entirely lawful but politically controversial.

It is reasonable to suppose that Toby Young (sorry, “Lord Young of Acton”) came to the Telegraph with the story and the “gotcha” screenshot from the Prevent course, and the grateful hack then set about rounding up pundit quotes rather than digging into the actual background.

I previously noted Toby Young’s own “lawful but politically controversial” views here.

Background

A 2022 report from the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament that has the missing background:

The following are MI5 and CTP’s definition and categorisation of ideologies that potential terrorists might adopt: as with Islamist terrorism there is no suggestion that all those who hold these views or subscribe to these ideologies have terrorist intent – this categorisation process is used as a means of assessing those who might be potential terrorists:

• ‘Cultural Nationalism’ is a belief that ‘Western Culture’ is under threat from mass migration into Europe and from a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups. The ideology tends to focus on the rejection of cultural practices such as the wearing of the burqa or the perceived rise of the use of sharia law. In the UK this has been closely associated with anti-Islam groups.

• ‘White Nationalism’ is a belief that mass migration from the ‘non-white’ world, and demographic change, poses an existential threat to the ‘White Race’ and ‘Western Culture’. Advocates for some sort of ‘White’ homeland, either through partition of already existing countries, or by the (if necessary forced) repatriation of ethnic minorities. Much of this rhetoric is present in the ‘Identitarian’ movement.

• ‘White Supremacism’ is a belief that the ‘White Race’ has certain inalienable physical and mental characteristics that makes it superior (with some variation) to other races. Often associated with conspiracy theories that explain the decline in ‘white’ political and social status over the last hundred years. This can also encapsulate a belief in the spiritual superiority of the ‘White Race’, often describing racial differences in quasi-religious terms (such as the ‘Aryan soul’).

A 2019 article in the Guardian has further details:

Counter-terror officers said the rightwing terrorists are being inspired by three distinct sets of ideology, all of which have associated individuals and groups.

Cultural nationalism and the far-right is anti-Islam, anti-immigration and anti-government. Groups that display this ideology include, but are not limited to, the Football Lads Alliance and the English Defence League. The ideals of cultural nationalism inspired in part the actions of Darren Osborne, the terrorist who drove a van into worshippers outside Finsbury Park mosque, killing 51-year-old Makram Ali.

The ideology escalates to white nationalism and identitarianism… Finally, the ideology heightens further to white supremacism and the extreme far right.

The Prevent “refresher awareness” course expresses the three sub-categories more concisely, as provided by a Telegraph screenshot:

Extreme right-wing

We define extreme right-wing terrorism as the active or vocal support of ideologies that advocate discrimination or violence against minority groups. The 3 most common sub categories of extreme right-wing terrorist ideologies and their narratives are:

• Cultural nationalism: ‘Western culture’ is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups.

• White/ethno-nationalism: Mass migration from the ‘non-white world’ and demographic change poses an existential threat to the ‘white race’ and ‘Western culture’.

• White supremacism: The ‘white race is biologically, culturally and spiritually superior to all other races. An alternative form of government, ranging from fascist regimes to ethno-tribalism, should replace Western parliamentary democracy.

UPDATE: This October 2023 article by Karam Bales at Byline Times about Prevent noted the following:

Specific “extreme right-wing ideologies” listed as potential terrorist ideologies are Cultural Nationalism, White/Ethno Nationalism and White Supremicism, while left-wing ideologies are described as falling into “Two broad ideologies: socialism and communism. Each is united by a set of grievance narratives which underline their cause.”

It’s this inconsistency between the demarcation of specific extreme right-wing ideologies compared to a much broader approach to left-wing ideologies as a whole which has led to accusations of the politicisation of Prevent.

In other words, right-wingers were happy enough with the three far-right categories when balanced against “socialism”. The phrasing on the course page on this point has since been changed:

While extreme right-wing and Islamist terrorist ideologies contribute to thelargest part of the terrorist threat to the UK, left-wing, anarchist and single-issue ideologies and narratives can also cause a person to be radicalised into terrorism.

Bales also has a thread about the Telegraph story here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Speaking from his back garden, Laurence Fox discourses on the colours of the progress pride flag, in ways you would expect:

Baby pink, baby blue, that’s the child mutilation cult. White is Minor-Attracted People, that’s paedophiles…

He then proceeds to burn the flag.

Fox’s source on the flag’s supposed colour symbolism is likely to be a 2023 video in which a black American named Maj Toure made a comparable claim:

blue stands for attraction to infant boys… pink stands for attraction to minor girls… and then white stands for attraction to virgin children.

As he speaks, a caption on the screen brings up another flag with a wide white stripe in middle – this is the supposed “MAPs Pride Flag”, which was uploaded to Tumblr in 2018 along with the explanation that white represents “our innocence and unwillingness to offend”. However, as explained on Snopes, the person who made the upload subsequently changed their tagline to “Y’all need a therapist, not a community”, indicating that whole idea was literally a “false flag” intended to draw in paedophiles in order to then rebuke them.

The colours referenced by Fox in the progress pride flag are more sensibly interpreted as incorporations of the 1999 transgender flag created by Monica Helms. According to Helms, speaking to Atlanta magazine in 2020:

In the 1990s, Mike Page, the person who created the bisexual Pride flag, encouraged me to make a flag for the trans community. One day, I woke up with the idea for the colors—the traditional color, light blue, for boys, pink for girls, and a single white stripe for those who are transitioning, gender neutral, or intersex. I took it to protests, marches, funerals, transgender days of remembrance.

In the flag as shown by Toure, the white area forms a triangle to the far left; in the version burnt by Fox the white is a stripe and the triange to the left is yellow and contains a purple circle. This represents the incorporation of Morgan Carpenter’s 2013 intersex flag. It might be argued that this means that the white stripe is redundant, and conspiracists will say that it must therefore have some other meaning. However, Helms distinguishes between “intersex” and two other categories, which can be seen as being continued to be represented.

Traditionally, conspiracists have claimed to discern secret Satanic messaging within logos or instances of artistic expression that they disliked; the idea of secret paedophile messaging is a secularised variation of the same phenomenon.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

The Telegraph whips up a new controversy about the Attorney General:

Lord Hermer is facing fresh calls to quit after personally signing off on the prosecution of Lucy Connolly.

Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to stirring up racial hatred in the wake of the Southport killings last year.

…Lord Hermer, the Government’s chief lawyer, approved the 42-year-old’s prosecution despite having the constitutional power to prevent it, his office confirmed.

While Connolly’s sentence was decided independently from the Attorney General’s office, his involvement in the controversial case has raised fresh questions over his political judgment.

However, buried much further down in the article is some extra context that makes a mockery of this “fresh questions” framing:

Connolly was jailed for inciting racial hatred, which is an offence under the Public Order Act (1986).

That offence, along with 60 others, requires that the Attorney General give their consent to any prosecutions. (1)

In other words, the Telegraph‘s supposed revelation is nothing more than publicly available general information about how the legal system works.

Further:

It is rare for the Attorney General to refuse to give consent because, by the time it reaches their office, the Crown Prosecution Service will have itself determined that a successful prosecution is likely, it is understood.

It would be particularly surprising for the Attorney General to overrule the CPS in a case associated with widespread public disorder and violence. However, the initial paragraphs – inevitably – have been widely interpreted to mean that Connolly was prosecuted because Hermer took a special interest in her case, or even that by not blocking the prosecution he acted improperly. Thus Allison Pearson denounces the Jewish Hermer as a “globalist”, while GB News ideologue Patrick Christys implies that the story indicates that Keir Starmer was involved.

The Telegraph article also rounds up some quotes – indeed, it is likely that the story was contrived primarily as a vehicle to publicise criticisms from the likes of Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage. It is worth noting that the statements sourced from Kemi Badenoch and Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philip focus on Connolly’s sentencing; Badenoch claims that “our Attorney General is content to keep people like Lucy Connolly behind bars”, while Philp states that the “sentence seems unduly harsh”. It is alarming if senior political figures think that the Attorney General has a role in sentencing, or the power to reduce sentences.

A useful primer on the Connolly case has been provided by Matthew Scott at BarristerBlogger. His observations on Twitter/X about her sentencing appeal outcome are also worth reading. One wonders why none of the individuals quoted in the Telegraph story refer to her failed appeal; could it be that the story was prepared some time ago, and has been dusted off in order to bandwagon on a different controversy involving Hermer?

Note

1. The passage continues: “The requirement was designed to act as a safeguard to prevent the criminal justice system unreasonably clamping down on free speech, The Telegraph understands”. One wonders why the paper preferred this mysteriously sourced explanation over the CPS website, which refers to ensuring “a consistent approach”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »