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The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has withdrawn its direction that former Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Rodhouse face gross misconduct proceedings after a large volume of relevant material was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

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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From BBC News:

A comedian who joked about the Liverpool parade crash has had an upcoming show cancelled following a social media backlash.

Andrew Lawrence said he would “drive through crowds of people” to get out of the city, in a post that has prompted more than 7,000 responses on X.

At least 65 people were injured in Monday’s incident, and Caddies in Southend has cancelled Lawrence’s upcoming gig, saying it did not “condone or support” the comment.

The 37-year-old responded he was disappointed the venue had “lost their courage after being bombarded with abuse and threats of violence from online trolls”.

A comedian saying something socially transgressive for a laugh is hardly a new phenomenon, but as a form of clowning it can fall flat: back in 2004 Billy Connelly was heckled after reportedly saying at a gig that he wished that jihadists who were threatening to execute the British hostage Ken Bigley in Baghdad should “get on with it” – the incident was reported in the Sun under the headline “The Sick Yin”.

The difference, though, was that nobody seriously thought that Connelly actually meant it; and although his quip caused offence and perhaps also distress, he wasn’t commenting about Bigley personally. Lawrence, in contrast, took direct aim at the affected community with an expression of contempt; and given his association with the populist right  – in 2014 he was praised by Nigel Farage after denouncing what he called the “moronic, liberal back-slapping” of comedians who make it onto the BBC – it is reasonable to interpret his post not as transgressive clowning for its own sake but as an instance of ideologically driven performative callousness. It is worth noting that he did not post his joke until after it had been confirmed by the police that the suspect was a “white British man” (an annoucement to which Lawrence objected), meaning that the incident could not be weaponised by the movement.

Adding to the impression is his bullish follow-up statement, in which he referred to the incident as a “clown show of Scouse retards”. This ugly term “retard”, either as a noun or in its adjectival form, has recently become something of a populist-right shibboleth; last month, Joe Rogan declared in conversation with Douglas Murray that “the word retarded is back and it’s one of the great culture victories”.

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From the website of Merseyside Police, Monday night, after a car had ploughed into a crowd during Liverpool’s Premier League victory parade:

We would ask people not to speculate on the circumstances surrounding tonight’s incident on Water Street in Liverpool city centre.

We can confirm the man arrested is a 53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area.

Extensive enquiries are ongoing to establish the circumstances leading up to the collision.

“White British” here departs from the long-standing police practice of announcing only a suspect’s age and sex following an arrest: further details, including their name and perhaps also a photo, are ordinarily released only if and when a positive charging decision is made, and even then only if the suspect is an adult. (1)

This unusual decision to racialise an arrest announcement can be interpreted as a pragmatic concession to the reality that the British public can no longer be expected to wait for authoritative information to emerge following due process, or not to riot if the suspected perpetrator of a public outrage is thought to be from an ethnic minority. It can be seen as something of a slow-boiled victory for those who used disinformation to whip up public anger after after last year’s Southport killings: thus Nigel Farage  – who gave spurious validation to the false claim that the killer had been under monitoring by the security services – has declared that the police have “got it right this time”.

Other agitators, however, instead complain that the decision demonstrates the bias and bad faith of police forces, who will highlight the ethnicity of a white suspect but not otherwise. A useful round-up collected by The Bear comes with pertinent commentary:

They accused the police of “protecting the narrative” and essentially moved from demanding answers to demanding silence the moment those answers didn’t fit the script… The point of this all is that the far-right agitators don’t want transparency, they want control – control of the story, the outrage, the emotional temperature of the nation. And when reality refuses to cooperate, they rewrite the script.

Note

1. This does not mean that an adult suspect cannot be named by the media, based on their own sources or observations: in 2017, for instance, Darren Osborne was named by “family and neighbours” as the suspected Finsbury Park mosque attacker ahead of charging, and this was widely reported without controversy. However, accusatory headlines implying guilt based on an arrest have led to led to payouts, and civil privacy law now means that a media outlet may be sued if it reveals without a public interest defence that someone is the subject of a police investigation. Of course, police forces may also release extra identifying information about a suspect if it is someone whom they want to arrest but whose whereabouts are unknown.

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A new “free speech outrage” front-page splash from the Sunday Telegraph:

Retired police officer arrested over ‘thought crime’ tweet

Pensioner held after Palestinian march post on social media, with ‘Brexity’ books in his home scrutinised

A retired special constable was arrested and detained over a social media post warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain, The Telegraph can reveal.

Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham in Kent, was handcuffed at his home by six officers from Kent Police – the force he had served for a decade – after challenging a supporter of pro-Palestinian marches on X.

As expected, the headline and lead-in have provoked much condemnatory comment on social media, although, also as usual, there has been little attention to detail.  What is not made clear until some way into the article is that the “social media post warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain” was misinterpreted by police as being itself an antisemitic threat.

Here’s what happened. At the end of October 2023, Home Secretary Suella Braverman expressed the view that marches in London against Israel’s actions in Gaza were “hate marches“. Nicholas Wilson – aka “Mr Ethical”, and known on Twitter/X for his campaigning against HSBC – fired a post in Braverman’s direction in response:

Dear @SuellaBraverman – as someone who was on one of the “hate marches”, if you call me an antisemite I will sue you. (1)

Foulkes replied with the following proposition (since deleted):

One step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals…

This was an allusion to an incident on the same day in Dagestan, when a mob shouting antisemitic slogans rampaged through a local airport. However, it seems that Inspector Knacker thought that Foulkes’ intended meaning was “I’m one step away from…”. As he now tells the Telegraph:

In hindsight, he said, the tweet would have been clearer had it begun with the words: “What next? You are…”

But he said that even without the extra wording, it should have been clear to anyone reading it in context that his post was a warning about where anti-Semitic hate could lead.

In other words, he was not arrested for “warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain”; rather, it was for botching a supposed “warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain” in such a way that the police got the wrong end of the stick and acted against a perceived antisemitic threat. The “thought crime” framing thus collapses, and given that Foulkes’ extrapolation seems to have been made in support of Braverman’s call for a crackdown on protests (“We get our laws under review, and if there is a need to change the law … I will not hesitate to act”) the free-speech pose is less than convincing.

However, as with other recent cases where media framing has been misleading, the full context does not get the police off the hook: Foulkes was issued with a caution which has since been rescinded following a legal challenge, so clearly they got it wrong. According to the paper:

On Nov 1, without Mr Foulkes’s knowledge, the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command referred his post to Kent Police, citing “concerns around online content”… The X post had not been reported by the public, and why a specialist Met unit – usually focused on terrorism and extremism – flagged such an innocuous tweet remains unclear.

“Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command” here means “Met Intelligence”, known as MO2 and part of Met Operations. Were Kent Police in awe of a specialist Met unit, or under pressure to get a result? And what does it say about police methodology that the context and Foulkes’ explanation were disregarded in the push to build a case and issue a caution?

Note

1. Wilson posts as @nw_nicholas, although a screenshot published by the Telegraph which also appears in a derivative Mail write-up unaccountably has doctored his handle to @nw_nicols. He has complained about it. Might this odd change have something to do with the Telegraph‘s commercial interests as regards HSBC?

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From Mail Online:

Christian protesters have gathered outside a school which recently scrapped Easter celebrations in order to ‘respect diverse religious beliefs’.

The faithful gathered outside Norwood Primary School in Eastleigh, Hampshire with banners reading ‘Headteacher Stephanie Mander wants to cancel Easter – let’s cancel her!’ after the announcement.

…The group of Christian protesters from the Living Word Church, based in Fareham, Hampshire, held England flags with the words ‘Jesus: the way the truth the life’ and ‘Jesus is kin’ [sic – should be “Jesus is King”] printed on them outside the school.

Reverend Chris Wickland said the protest was against the school cancelling the Easter service and what he called the exclusion of Christianity in schools.

Nick Tenconi, the leader of UKIP, attended the Christians’ protest as a member of the Disciples of Christ…

The Mail write-up, like a live blog published by the Southern Daily Echo, downplays the protest’s personalised and literally demonising attacks on the headteacher, expressed by posters produced by the Disciples of Christ in which her face was disfigured with Satanic horns or by the word “JUDAS” superimposed across her forehead (see below).

The protest went ahead despite the school responding to complaints about its decision. As described by BBC News:

The school has said the changes were made in consultation with parents and that Easter would still be celebrated at the school with various activities and events.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the school said: “To be clear, we are marking Easter in school and as with other religious festivals, children continue to learn about and celebrate Easter both educationally in our RE lessons and in our assemblies across the whole half term.”

They said the school, which has no religious affiliations, had decided not to visit the local church and instead celebrate the holiday “where all children are able to take part and benefit”.

“Changes were made in consultation with our parent forum, and we have received many positive messages regarding these,” the spokesperson added.

The Mail Online refers to the Disciples of Christ as “a protestant denomination popular in the United States”, but this is obviously confused: the phrase “Disciples of Christ” is fairly generic as a Christian formulation, and there is no connection with the American group. The UK Disciples of Christ first appeared in London last year, and Tenconi’s invariable presence indicates an overlap with UKIP. The phrase “Jesus is King” is also associated with the group, and one of their banners with the same slogan appeared on-stage at a Tommy Robinson rally last summer (the variant “Christ is King” has also become a regular chant at such rallies). Wickland attended one such pro-Robinson rally in London last autumn.

Wickland wore black clerical garb and a white clerical collar at the protest, but although in some contexts he describes himself as “Rev. Chris Wickland”, in others his preferred ministerial title is “Pastor Chris Wickland”. He has provided his backstory in a video available on YouTube – by his own account, he was formerly an occultist and Rosicrucian (“the worst kind of Freemasonry”) and had numerous encounters with the demonic. However, after converting to Christianity he was recognised by other Christians as a “prophet to the nations” in the “end times”, and he claims to have received visions of disasters that have then come to pass (in particular, he cites an eruption of Mount Merapi in Indonesia). As well as heading a network of two churches, he is a senior pastor at the Gravesend-based LCBN UK television network.

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In the Radio Times, Stephen Graham talks about writing the much-discussed Netflix television drama Adolescence:

“Where it came from, for me,” explains Graham, who co-created and wrote Adolescence with Jack Thorne (The Virtues, Toxic Town), “is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why?

“Then there was another young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. And there was this thing up North, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her. I just thought, what’s going on? What is this that’s happening?”

Graham here alludes to the killing of Ava White by the unnamed “Boy A” in Liverpool in 2022, and to the killing of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu in Croydon in 2023. In both cases, an altercation with a girl in a public place escalated to the girl being murdered by a boy. The Brianna Ghey case involved a different dynamic, in which a boy and a girl in a Leopold and Loeb-type relationship pre-planned the murder of a transgirl as a way to satisfy sadistic impulses. Clearly, Graham was speaking very generally about some high-profile cases of youth knife crime in which the victim was not targeted as a boy (in GQ, Graham makes a distinction with “gang-on-gang violence”, although that shouldn’t be assumed as the context when the victim of a gang member is a teenage boy).

Graham’s reference to south London got picked up by Surrey Live, which published the headline “Netflix’s Adolescence inspired by true story of Croydon girl’s horrific murder”. This overstated Graham’s comment, giving the false impression that Adolescence was an adaptation of the Sentamu case. Bad actors on social media seized their chance: Sentamu was black, yet the killer in Adolescence is white. Was the drama therefore not an attempt to obscure black crime while vilifying the white working-class? (1) The false complaint that the show “race swapped the actual killer” was amplified in particular by Ian Miles Cheong, even though his assertion was made incoherent by his reference to “real life cases” in the plural (2).

Cheong also complained that the protagonist was portrayed as having been “radicalized online by the red pill movement”. Graham’s co-author Jack Thorne has discussed this in an article published in the Guardian:

At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn’t a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: “I think you should look into ‘incel’ culture.”

I expected to be confronted by anger and aggression; what I didn’t expect was to quickly grasp the attraction of the so-called “manosphere”. I knew almost immediately that if I was an isolated kid, I would find answers as to why I felt a bit lost. One of the central ideas – that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men – would have made adolescent me sit up and, frankly, nod. The path then becomes: what do you do to upset that equation? How do you manipulate and harm in order to reset a female-dominated world that works against you? If you believe one part of the logic, the other half becomes conducive.

This, then, provides the context for the drama, rather than the specifics of the three cases cited by Graham.

Although not mentioned in Thorne’s article, the drama includes a passing reference to Andrew Tate, who has complained in a statement to Newsweek about being linked to the story. Some online comments about Tate were gathered by GB News under the headline “Andrew Tate fans flood Netflix Adolescence with backlash as they claim influencer is victim of ‘woke agenda'”; however, their round-up ignores aspects of this “backlash” aimed at Thorne in particular personally. On Newsnight, he noted that some online posters are falsely claiming that he is Jewish, or making comments about this appearance – it is claimed that he objects to masculinity due to being slightly built (something that can hardly be said of Stephen Graham).

Notes

1. Both authors of the drama are from working-class backgrounds. Graham refers to class in his Radio Times interview:

“I wanted him to be a kid from a working-class background whose parents were hard-working. You know, his mum wasn’t an alcoholic, his dad wasn’t violent, and he hadn’t been molested by his uncle. I didn’t want there to be a reason we can go, ‘Oh, well, we blame it on this.’ I think we’re all accountable in some way. We just wanted to throw it out there, ask the question why, and see where it lands. And if it can create debate within living rooms with people watching it with their families, our objective is completed.”

2. Cheong refers to “the Southport murderer” as one such case, even though the authors haven’t mentioned Southport or Axel Rudakubana anywhere (as far as I know). However, the parents of one of the children who survived being stabbed multiple times by Rudakubana recently referred to the drama in a statement that was read out in the House of Commons by Paul Foster MP:

“…We must support parents, caregivers and schools better, not only in how they identify and support young people who may be at risk to themselves or others—we can all agree that these pathways need overhauls, and the Southport inquiry will serve this purpose—but, before that, working with all children, establishing the fundamentals of healthy relationships, friendships, and girls and boys being equal.

Our young people must be exposed to counter-messaging from what they may be consuming online, or at home. The work required is vast and complex but the long-term reduction in knife crime will only be seen if we go back to the start and raise our children better.

In the context of violence towards women and girls, current topics are important. Netflix’s show ‘Adolescence’ has opened a conversation about our children’s exposure to harmful messaging and themes about women and girls. We are grateful for the coverage happening this week, which is further highlighting the terrifying impact of Andrew Tate and others on vulnerable young boys.”

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(Updated post after more sources became available)

From the New York Post:

New York Post columnist Douglas Murray won a libel claim Tuesday over an article that falsely accused him of “supporting violent racist attacks” during anti-immigration protests in the UK last year.

Murray — a conservative author, journalist and commentator — clinched the victory against the Guardian Media Group over an Aug. 11, 2024 column by Kenan Malik in The Observer which mistakenly attributed Murray’s comments from months prior to the widespread unrest surrounding immigration in the UK last summer, Murray announced on X Tuesday.

In Malik’s piece, he used Murray’s interview with former Deputy Australian Prime Minister John Anderson about Israel and Islam — from six months earlier — claiming that Murray made the comments about migrants during the UK’s protests that erupted after the stabbing of three young girls.

Similar coverage of the outcome has appeared in the Spectator and the Jewish Chronicle. However, none of the reports explain why Malik’s mistake occurred, despite a detail on this point appearing in the joint statement that was read out in court as part of the settlement. According to Murray’s legal representative:

8. On 6 August 2024, in the immediate aftermath of the riots, an edited version of the interview was, for a short period, uploaded on Mr Anderson’s website and YouTube, which gave the misleading impression that Mr Murray was encouraging the riots.

This video has been removed, and Anderson has also deleted a post on Twitter/X that referred to it. However, it can still be accessed via the Internet Archive. Titled ” ‘They’ve Lost Control Of The Streets’ | Douglas Murray on Illegal Immigration’, it begins with Murray in full flow:

But clearly they’ve lost control of the streets. Now, is it time to send in the army? At some point probably yes, but if the Army will not be sent in then the public will have to go in and the public will have to sort this out themselves and it’ll be very very brutal. it’ll be very brutal.

I don’t want them to live here. I don’t want them here. They came under false pretenses, many of them came illegally and continue to come illegally and we don’t want them here and I’m perfectly willing to say that because it needs to be said…

Although presented as a seamless discourse, these two statements are disparate extracts taken from the full version, which was uploaded as “Israel, Immigration & Islam | Douglas Murray” on 8 November 2023 and which can still be seen here. In the full version, the “But clearly…” statement is at 01:00:19, whereas “I don’t want them to live here” was from earlier, at 00:24:28. Later on in the short video Murray says

…They have defaced and defiled all of our holy places and I think I know that the British soul is awakening and stirring with rage at what these people are doing.

In the full video from 2023, this is at 01:00:45.

The editing of the short video meant that the original context was missing. By “lost control of the streets”, Murray was actually referring to the police allowing “Muslim groups, Palestinian groups, pro-Hamas groups” to hold marches; his comment about the “rage” of the “British soul” refers to his prediction that the protestors “will again defile the Cenotaph and the statues of our dead and our war leaders” during a planned protest on Saturday 11 November 2023 (1).

So why did Anderson upload his “edited version” when he did? After a week during which rioters had been attacking mosques and hotels hosting migrants, he apparently thought it would be a good idea to promote Murray referring to “loss of control of the streets” and to the British soul “awakening and stirring with rage”. Did he think it was pertinent to the situation? If Murray is angry with Anderson’s “misleading impression” he’s not saying so publicly, despite crowing about winning what he calls a “major libel claim” over the Guardian Media Group.

Malik’s error was corrected and acknowledged when his article went online, as was noted by Murray on Twitter/X at the time:

Dear @kenanmalik . I see your own newspaper had to correct your column because of your sloppiness. They had to correct that the interview you refer to was from last October, not recent weeks. What you all failed to realize was that I was referring to Hamas leaders in Britain. Sloppy and bigoted of you as usual.

However, despite the importance attached to a context of “Hamas leaders” here, this particular complaint does not not appear in the joint statement. Here’s the context from the full video:

[00:24:17] We have thousands, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who have no love at all for the UK but yet live here. I don’t want them to live here. I don’t want them here… [00:25:33] We stripped citizenship from Isis members… we need to start doing the same thing with Hamas we have Hamas leaders in the UK, Hamas members in the UK.

The “probably hundreds of thousands of people” that he doesn’t want here is plainly a larger set than “Hamas leaders”.

A a couple of week after Malik’s column was published, Murray wrote a piece for the Spectator in which he complained about the police investigation into Bernie Spofforth (discussed by me here). He contrasted this with lack of police interest in Nick Lowles, who had amplified a false rumour that a rioter had committed an acid attack on a Muslim woman, but also made a passing reference to Malik:

Yet so far as I know Mr Lowles has not had his collar felt, perhaps because he enjoys the government’s favour, as well as backing from prominent left-wing philanthropists such as Trevor Chinn. Kenan Malik of the Observer similarly passed around misleading reports in print and online this week, but also seems strangely immune from the law.

Murray does not clarify what “misleading reports” he means, but readers familar with his history with Malik would have interpreted this to be a reference to Malik’s column. However, the supposed comparability with Spofforth is strained, and the inclusion seems shoehorned in.

UPDATE: As part of his crowing over the libel settlement, Murray expressed the view that “I should have noted that the Guardian group (which had to apologise and retract their falsehoods in court this morning) left X last year because of alleged ‘disinformation’ on this platform”. This caught the attention of Elon Musk, who amplified the post while adding his own view that “The Guardian is pure propaganda”. This in turn was then amplified by Murray. I would not doubt Murray’s claim that he suffered “considerable distress” from Malik’s mistake, or that felt the need to take legal action as a matter of deterrence as well as compensation. However, his insistence on taking the matter to court (once again, with the help of Mark Lewis) rather than accepting the correction as an adequate remedy also served narrative-building purposes.

Note

1. In the event, the Cenotaph was not targeted; 11 November for the protest was chosen because it was a Saturday afternoon rather than because of the symbolism of the date.

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