Bartholomew's Notes

From The Times:

An MP who received death threats after condemning the sexual abuse of girls by groups of British Pakistani men has been given increased security amid fears that hard-left and Muslim opponents are trying to force her from office.

…The strongest public attacks on Ms Champion, who campaigns for the victims of child sexual exploitation, have been made by a Rotherham-based racial justice charity, Just Yorkshire.

…In March Just Yorkshire published a report on Ms Champion that it said was commissioned by a “grassroots partnership” of activists and organisations.

…Co-authored by Nadeem Murtuja, the chairman and acting director of Just Yorkshire, it said that British Pakistanis felt “scapegoated, dehumanised and potentially criminalised” by their MP, who had “crossed a point of no return”. Its foreword accused her of “fanning the flames of racial hatred” and acting like a “neo-fascist murderer”.

The Times understands that the report led to death threats against Ms Champion. Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism unit increased her security risk level and she was advised to accept extra protection. The MP declined to comment.

The article – unsurprisingly – is by Andrew Norfolk, who won plaudits for his reporting on “grooming gangs” in Rochdale and Rotherham (like Maggie Oliver, he was depicted in the Three Girls Rochdale dramatisation), but whose more recent reporting of a fostering case in London involving a Muslim family became mired in controversy over sensationalism and distortions.

An accompanying Times editorial states that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which has provided funding to JUST Yorkshire, is “implicated” in what it calls “the saga in which the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, has received death threats”; in response to the main article, JUST Yorkshire has issued a statement along with links to

both our press release (published August 11, 2017) and Temperature Check report (published March 15, 2018) from which words have been taken and manipulated in creating this baseless and sensationalist front page Times story.

Champion wrote an article for the Sun last August under the headline “British Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls”. She later complained that the article had been “stripped of nuance” by editors, but she was forced to resign her shadow ministerial position (and to my knowledge, she has not explained in what ways exactly the editors distorted her article). Despite this semi-repudiation by its author, the article has often been cited as evidence of Champion’s willingness to speak out on a matter of public interest, and its critics as extremists who are weaponising false allegations of racism in order to suppress discussion of crimes against children.

The JUST Yorkshire report

The JUST Yorkshire report states that Champion, through her Sun aticle, “was sending out a message to the entire non-Muslim population of the country, whites especially, that our daughters are all at risk from males of ‘Pakistani heritage'”, although it concedes that its survey “does not provide evidence of any direct correlation between racist and Islamophobic attacks post the Champion article and media interviews and what Sarah Champion wrote and spoke in the media.” It does not dispute or criticise the findings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (the Jay Inquiry), and notes the inquiry’s findings that “people in state funded authority had turned a blind eye” to reports of abuse and that Asian girls were among the victims.

Having browsed the report, it seems to me that its call to frame what happened more in general terms of “predatory men” – with comparative references to Jimmy Savile and Harvey Weinstein – is not conducive to properly understanding the specifics of the “grooming gang” scandals, but there is nothing here that can be reasonably blamed for inspiring death threats. It is noteworthy that Norfolk feels the need to bolster his article by referring to “recent Tweets” by “the charity’s leader”, a “radical academic” named Waqas Tufail. Norfolk conveys the grave news that Tufail regards the royal family as epitomising “white privilege”, and that he

mocked the England football team during the World Cup, describing its three lions emblem as a colonial legacy that would more appropriately be of “three hedgehogs”.

The JUST Yorkshire report also contains a couple of references that are critical of the older Times reporting – a detail that gives Norfolk a personal reason for polemical coverage.

The Alleged Death Threats

There were previous media references to Champion receiving “death threats” soon after her Sun article’s publication, although details were scarce and there was no reference to any police investigation. And this seems to be the pattern once again: it is not clear why The Times merely “understands” that there have been new threats since March, or on what basis it believes that the JUST Yorkshire report is what “led” to them. There is also again no reference to any police investigation; one might speculate that details are being withheld so as not to alert a potential suspect, but that if that is the case then surely no article ought to have been published at all?

Champion also declined to provide any information in a follow-up article in the Guardian, although she provided more general quote which suggested she is vulnerable due to statistical probability:

Champion said she didn’t want to comment in detail on her case but said: “The real story is that at least nine women MPs have convictions against people planning to murder them (and one succeeded in Jo Cox’s case). Where is the outrage? Think how many have threats, I’m far from unique. Femicide accounts for two murders a week in the UK.”

“Where is the outrage?” is an odd complaint given that such cases receive widespread publicity and condemnation.

UPDATE: Extrapolating from the Times report, the narrative on social media is that Champion has been targeted for simply having “spoken out” about grooming gangs, or even for having “exposed” them, rather than because of criticism over how she framed the issue in her Sun op-ed.

Excursus

Champion’s “campaign[ing] for the victims of child sexual exploitation”, which Norfolk juxtaposes with “public attacks” by JUST Yorkshire as part of his monstering, includes the view that complainants should always be believed. This was shown in a Tweet of support she sent to Esther Baker, after Baker complained about sceptical Daily Mail coverage of her allegation against the former MP John Hemming of (satanic?) ritualistic sex abuse in woodlands decades ago.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

From the Independent, last week:

Elon Musk has apologised to the British cave diver he labelled “pedo guy”.

…Mr Musk… attacked Mr [Vern] Unsworth on his Twitter page, claimed it was suspect that Mr Unsworth lived in Thailand, labelled him “pedo guy” apparently without any grounds at all and suggested that the diver had invited the attack on himself.

…Mr Musk had initially doubled down on the tweets, despite intense criticism. “Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true,” he wrote to one user who questioned him over the posts.

As was widely reported, Musk lashed out after Unsworth contemptuously dismissed his suggestion that the group of trapped boys that Unsworth had rescued from a flooded cave could instead have been brought to safety via a mini-submarine designed by his company.

The offending Tweets have now been deleted – but there is no indication that Twitter took any interest in the controversy, despite reports in June that the platform was cracking down on abuse.

The implications of Twitter’s inaction are disturbing. “Pedo” is not a mere insult, like “bastard” or “wanker”; the term is always meant literally and substantively, to indicate an inappropriate and disturbing sexual interest that is synonymous with serious crimes against children. The word’s deployment is highly stigmatising, and someone so labelled is in danger of personal destruction and perhaps even of physical harm. It does not matter whether such an allegation is merely spat out as a casual jibe in a fit of petulance (as in this case), or is made as a serious proposition – it takes very little to stir up a mob, or to put a cloud over someone’s reputation.

Twitter could have sent a strong message that this kind of rhetoric is unacceptable, by suspending Musk for a period. Instead, it has colluded in the normalisation and trivialisation of false child sex abuse allegations.

Perhaps someone who is not a public figure would have been treated differently, but if so then we are in an even worse situation. If anything, a Twitter account with a blue tick verification symbol ought to be held to a higher standard – to instead give such users extra license to bully and abuse is dystopian.

UPDATE (2021): The following year, Unsworth later sued Musk, but lost:

Jury foreman Joshua Jones said the panel decided that Unsworth’s lawyers spent too much time trying to appeal to their emotions and not concentrating on the evidence.

“The failure probably happened because they didn’t focus on the tweets,” Jones said after the verdict was announced. “I think they tried to get our emotions involved in it. In a court of law you have to prove your case, which they did not prove.”

Musk’s defence was that “pedo” is simply an insult, and Unsworth’s attorney, L. Lin Wood, attempted to frame this as itself being a victory despite the outcome. Was Unsworth well served by his lawyer? Wood has since become notorious for expounding QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories and for claiming that Trump won the 2020 election.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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 FIELDING

MP 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 »

A Tweet from independent journalist Anna Brees, 11 July:

I have been told that 30 police whistleblowers are meeting in Manchester tomorrow and I’ve been told @itn will be there along with @thetimes Thankyou I have hope

Informal pieces to camera recorded during the “meeting” have been posted online by Brees and by a YouTube channel called Battletv, although for a gathering of “whistleblowers” details are oddly thin on the ground. Brees has highlighted the involvement of Jon Wedger and Maggie Oliver, while Battletv also refers to “Robert Green, Anthony Carlin amongst other heavy hitters”, as well as Gareth Slinn and Darren Cox. There is no sign of coverage from ITN or The Times.

As a Detective Constable with Greater Manchester Police, Oliver played a significant role in bringing the Rochdale “grooming gang” to justice, since when she has become something of a celebrity: she was portrayed by Lesley Sharp in last year’s Three Girls BBC dramatisation, and earlier this year she was a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. She resigned from the force in 2012, and last year she told the Daily Express that this had been because of bullying. It was stated that previously she “not spoken publicly about her bullying so as not to detract from the way in which the young victims were let down by the police.”

Wedger, meanwhile, claims that he was bullied out of the Metropolitan Police for uncovering paedophile rings; when he came forward in 2016 Oliver expressed support, and the two have since made joint appearances. A nuanced discussion of Wedger’s account can be found on the Hoaxtead Research website.

However, the Hoaxtead author also points out Wedger’s association with Bill Maloney, which of course takes us deep into the conspiracy milieu: Maloney has made numerous videos alleging VIP abuse, and in 2015 he gave a speech at a rally opposite Downing Street in which he accused David Cameron of being a “paedophile protector” and alleged that refurbishments at Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster were being undertaken to conceal evidence of ritualistic child abuse and murder by up to 76 MPs. Wedger has also come to include Satanic Ritual Abuse in his own claims, in discussion with Maloney about the notorious “RAINS list“, and in interviews with Lou Collins for David Icke’s website and with the alt-right “Red Pill Phil“.

Maloney was not apparently at the “whistleblowers’ meeting”, but the name of Robert Green (not an ex-officer) will be familiar as the continuing promoter of the Hollie Greig hoax and of SRA claims, while Anthony Carlin is a “common law” (similar to US “sovereign citizen”) theorist who was imprisoned for contempt of court after attempting to arrest a judge during civil litigation in which he was involved.

UPDATE: More here.

UPDATE 2: Brees has made a Tweet that strongly indicates that she supports the American “QAnon” conspiracy theory.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Milo Yiannopoulos sends a text message to Davis Richardson, a journalist with the US Observer:

I’m suing you and the Observer. 233,000 tweets today accused me of being responsible for 5 deaths. That’s on you and your headline.

I didn’t want to spend the $3m it would have taken to get Simon and Schuster to court but you best fucking believe I am coming for you and I take you to the cleaners for this. Your life is over.

Yiannopoulos has posted the message online, under the commentary “This motherfucker is CANCELLED”.

The Observer headline concerned a previous message that Yiannopoulos had sent the journalist:

Milo Yiannopoulos Encourages Vigilantes to Start ‘Gunning Journalists Down’

Milo Yiannopoulos has started issuing reporters threatening messages when asked to comment for stories.

“I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight,” the right-wing nationalist told Observer over text message, in response to a longer feature in development about an Upper East Side restaurant he is said to frequent.

When asked to elaborate on who specifically had upset him, Yiannopoulos explained that the statement was his “standard response to a request for comment.”

Richardson notes that Will Sommer at the Daily Beast had received the same response when he asked about Yiannopoulos’s decision to join UKIP (1). Yiannopoulos made a screenshot of the quote as it appeared in Sommers’s article, which he posted to Instagram next to the ambiguous comment “Where is the lie?” He then mocked the media for reporting his comments, in quotes published uncritically by the Kremlin-backed RT:

‘Fake news a new standard, media drunk on hatred’: Yiannopoulos explains ‘gun journos down’ prank

Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos told RT the threatening messages he sent to reporters asking for comment were a prank designed to “feed the media bait,” berating the media for “knowingly publishing” fake news.

…In an email to RT, Yiannopoulos confirmed his remark was facetious, saying that mainstream media outlets reporting it as a genuine call for violence “fell for it again.”

“Knowingly publishing false allegations and fake news is now standard operating procedure for journalists, who believe that no professional sin is too grave in the fight against conservatives,” Yiannopoulos wrote.

“But it isn’t working: thousands of readers contacted me yesterday to join in my amusement at how easy it is to feed the media bait,” the former Breitbart editor added.

“I used to think journalists were simply unintelligent. Now I realize they are demented, drunk on rage and hatred. And I’m loving it!” Yiannopoulos mocked.

However, Yiannopoulos is no longer “loving it”: the next day, as has been widely reported, a gunman killed five people at the offices of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland. The suspect is apparently someone with a long-standing grudge against the newspaper, and there is no reason to suppose that he was inspired by Yiannopoulos or had even heard or him. Nevertheless, there was speculation that the killer may have been influenced by vicious anti-press rhetoric, and the juxtaposition of Yiannopoulos’s malicious fantasy and a real-life massacre of journalists just days later has proven damaging.

Thus Yiannopoulos now wants to sue over a headline that he previously found amusing, using the argument that subsequent events after it was published have put him in a bad light. The headline’s claim that Yiannopoulos “encourages” vigilantes is perhaps a bit of an extrapolation, but his decision to screenshot one of the stories and to add an ambiguous comment next to it falls far short of “mak[ing] it clear that I wasn’t being serious”, as he now claims on Facebook:

I sent a troll about “vigilante death squads” as a *private* response to a few hostile journalists who were asking me for comment, basically as a way of saying, “Fuck off.” They then published it. Amazed they were pretending to take my joke as a “threat,” I reposted these stories on Instagram to mock them — and to make it clear that I wasn’t being serious.

As I noted previously when Yiannopoulos backtracked from comments about underage sex, a provocateur who feels the need to explain himself after the fact has already damaged their brand. Of course he “wasn’t being serious” – the category of “being serious” is probably an alien concept. But he was being malicious, and no-one could reasonably suppose that such a message to a journalist – sent in reply to a request for a quote – would not published.

Footnote

(1) Yiannopoulos recently joined UKIP alongside Alex Jones’s UK sidekick Paul Joseph Watson and “YouTube personalities” Carl Benjamin (aka “Sargon of Akkad”) and Mark Meechan (aka “Count Dankula” and “the Nazi pug guy”). They were welcomed in a short video made by UKIP’s Neil Hamilton, in which Hamilton raised a glass of wine while promising a future of “truly dank memes”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

From the Daily Mail:

A former MP has launched a scathing attack on ‘politically correct’ police after they ruled a woman who made false child sex allegations against him should not be prosecuted for perverting the course of justice.

John Hemming said their refusal to seek charges against his accuser Esther Baker undermined the criminal justice system and would encourage ‘other fantasists’ to make bogus paedophile claims.

He hit out after Staffordshire Police informed him via email that following a ‘review’ of his allegations, it had decided there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to proceed with the case and no further action would be taken.

Hemming spent more than a year under police investigation; his name was not reported in the media until he chose to speak out afterwards, although it was bandied about in the meantime – including by a speaker who made extravagant claims about “VIP abuse” to an angry crowd at an anti-abuse rally opposite Downing Street in 2015.

Baker alleges that she was subjected to ritualistic abuse in a woodland setting when she was a child: she claims that police officers stood guard, and that her abusers included someone who addressed as a “lord”. Some adults present were unknown to her, but she says that she remembered Hemming as having been one of them after she encountered him an event in Parliament in late 2014.

In due course, Staffordshire Police passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service, which declined to proceed to prosecution on the grounds that Baker’s identification of Hemming could be a case of mistaken identity. For Baker and her supporters on social media, this implies that Hemming escaped prosecution on a technicality; in contrast, the very fact that Staffordshire Police interviewed Hemming under caution and made a submission to the CPS supposedly indicates a strong case to answer, if not outright guilt.

However, while Baker is vocal on social media about her own allegations and those of others (in particular, she remains a strong supporter of Operation Midland’s “Nick” [UPDATE 2019: aka Carl Beech]), she has also said that there are details that she is currently unable to go into, for legal reasons. Thus she declines to explain how her claims might be substantiated, while citing the police referral to the CPS as evidence that such substantiation exists. The outcome of Hemming’s complaint is now taken to be a new confirmation of this.

A further complication is that Baker has also made other allegations that relate to other situations (such as underage sex with a former employer), so that when she writes of ongoing police investigations or her status in police eyes as a “victim” it is difficult to tell how these might relate to her sensational ritual abuse claims. There seems to be little desire for clarity: she recently suggested a previous post of mine amounted to “talking bollocks”, but no corrective has been forthcoming.

Hemming’s complaint was always a long-shot. In general, a police force will be resistant to re-assessing a complainant in whom it has already invested, because it is difficult to do so without admitting to having made mistakes. And in this case, Baker is protected by the same possibility of mistaken identity that led to her own complaint failing.

Presumably, Hemming would have presented police with a possible motive for Baker to have falsely, rather than just mistakenly, accused him: in particular, it seems that the allegation came shortly after Hemming had argued with an associate of hers. However, Baker says that police were provided with “full permission from me to access to any of my online communications in any form they wished to investigate”, and that “they have found exactly zero evidence and not even a suggestion that I or others have been involved in an attempt to pervert the course of justice”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 70 Comments »

At Zelo Street, my friend Tim Fenton receives an email announcement:

Event for Tommy Robinson, jailed British reporter, announced by D.C lobbyist and attorney, Jack Burkman

Official Robinson spokesman coming from London to join Burkman at press conference and fundraising event

Burkman also assembling lobbying coalition to obtain a US Congressional resolution demanding the British government release Robinson at once

WASHINGTON D.C. – Jack Burkman, prolific D.C.-based lawyer and lobbyist, has announced plans for an event benefitting the recently imprisoned Rbel Media reporter Tommy Robinson. A joint press conference with Robinson’s spokesperson Caolan Robertson will be followed by a cocktail fundraiser.

Burkman and Robertson believe this case is an example of poor freedom of speech laws and they hope holding an event will draw attention and support from fellow conservatives in America.

Robertson assists with making Robinson’s videos; it seems that they met through Rebel Media, and that the association continues despite Robertson having fallen out with Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant. The claim that Robertson is Robinson’s “official spokesperson”, though, is disputed, despite the former providing “updates” for Alex Jones; as Tim notes, a Twitter account apparently controlled by Robinson’s sometime PA Hel Gower has said that “The team don’t talk to Caolan and I regularly talk to the family as well as Tommy ringing me”.

Burkman, meanwhile, was profiled in Mother Jones last July; he had previously been attached to Seth Rich’s parents, but by that time they had parted company and Rich’s parents were increasingly critical of his “investigation”, which included a stunt in which he had re-enacted Rich’s killing. The Daily Beast later described Burkman as “notorious for running gags that do little more than insert him into random news cycles” – and further media attention came earlier this year, when a disgruntled co-investigator apparently shot and wounded him.

Burkman is flexible in his principles: in 2016 he organised a fundraiser for Donald Trump which then became an anti-Trump event after the Trump campaign disavowed him. This ability to reverse ferret may come in handy when he meets Robertson, who is openly gay; in 2014 Burkman created a lobby group called American Decency and “as a private citizen, proposed legislation to ban gay players” from American football.

However, given that tolerance for homosexuality is frequently cited by alt-right figures as evidence that the movement is not far-right, why would Robertson want to be holding a “fundraiser” with someone who has promoted homophobia?

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

A grave allegation reaches Avon and Somerset Police:

11,000 emails were stolen from journalist Isabel Oaksuott [sic], which we believe were obtained by Byline media , Chris Wylie and then passed to Carole Cadwalladr and the Guardian Media Group.

The claim was submitted via the force’s “Report a Crime Online” page, and a screenshot has been posted online by Andy Wigmore on behalf of the businessman Arron Banks; the emails pertain to Banks’s campaigning on behalf of Brexit, and they are of interest due to references to contact with Russian officials. The same Tweet from Wigmore also has a screenshot of the automated response Banks received:

This email is confirm your successful submission of a crime/incident report to Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

The reference number is 1462018/B/1069. Please note – this is not a crime reference number.

We recognise that being a victim of crime can be upsetting and you may feel that you require some support…

Wigmore’s commentary on this is that

…today @Arron_banks reported the theft of his 11,000 emails from @IsabelOakeshott to @ASPolice that have conveniently and illegally been passed onto various people in the anti Brexit media.

Reporting a crime online is a preliminary procedure that in itself requires very little effort or investment – Banks has not yet spoken to an officer, or given a proper formal statement, and he and Wigmore do not know if any investigation will proceed. If I were an officer dealing with this I would be sceptical as to the motives of the complainant: trumpeting the online submission in this way leaves an impression that the two men wish to involve the police primarily for dramatic effect and as an intimidatory tactic, rather than because they seriously expect to see a criminal investigation go forward leading to prosecution.

One question is why Isabel Oakeshott is not the complainant rather than Banks, since the complaint alleges that the emails were “stolen” from her. Banks says that it is because “Its my property that was stolen”, but there are two problems with this.

First, Banks still has the emails, so he has not been deprived of his property. We may in common parlance talk about someone “stealing ideas” or “stealing data”, but the crime of theft has not occurred. The Secret Barrister has referred Banks to Oxford v Moss on this point.

Second, Banks in effect gifted a copy of his emails to Oakeshott, to assist her in ghostwriting his book The Bad Boys of Brexit – some were provided on paper, while others were apparently sent via Dropbox. According to Oakeshott, “no conditions were put” on her use of the emails, and she says she that she has made further use of them in a forthcoming book about challenges faced by the British armed forces. It appears that she has done so without complaint from Banks, even though he did not provide them for this purpose and the context will be uncongenial to him. When you give away emails to a journalist without conditions, then it seems to me you have relinquished ownership and even any expectation of privacy.

Meanwhile, Oakeshott says that she was “hacked” at the end of March. In a Tweet, she has posted a screenshot of an email from Dropbox which says that her account was accessed from “a public IP address”; confusingly, she describes this as proof that her computer was hacked, although of course a hacked account does not imply a hacked computer. The screenshot does not indicate that files pertaining to Banks were sought out; she has redacted some of the email, but one folder that was “likely viewed or downloaded” related to “family photos”. Apparently Dropbox provided other “IP information”, but Oakeshott has not disclosed what this is.

Carole Cadwalladr has stated that she received the emails late last week, shortly after they were passed to Peter Jukes of Byline Media; Peter in turn says that “a third party” received the emails legitimately last November. A further difficulty is that Oakeshott has confirmed that the relevant material is among the documents that she received on paper, rather than electronically, and that she was storing in her attic. Both details mean that whatever happened with Oakeshott’s account in March is irrelevant: the documents were leaked months before, and they were never in her Dropbox anyway. Byline has stated that it is prepared to defend itself against allegations of involvement in hacking via a libel action.

It should also be noted that that Banks’s online submission closes off the possibility of anything untoward having happened earlier. Oddly, Wigmore has stated that “we… know who stole them”, but no-one is clearly named as the primary culprit in the online submission; instead, we have the ambiguous expression “obtained by Byline media , Chris Wylie”, which leaves open the question of how they were obtained and from whom. If Wigmore and Banks are confident they know who committed the alleged “theft”, why is the submission to police not more precise on this point?

UPDATE (16 June): Banks now says that he spoken with police (who obligingly came to his house rather than asking him to give a statement at the station), and that “They will be talking to the police force that @IsabelOakeshott reported the theft to”. As far as I am aware, this is the first confirmation that Oakeshott had made a complaint to police herself. Presumably this happened in early April.

UPDATE (2024): In March 2023, Banks put forward a different version of events: in response to a BBC headline “Isabel Oakeshott reveals why she leaked Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages” (provided to her by Hancock for his Covid memoir), he wrote “For dough and publicity”, adding “she stole all my emails and texts , and have [sic] them to the Guardian”. Is he accusing her here of collusion in the emails reaching the Observer (the Guardian‘s sister paper), or maybe of negligence for allowing it to happen? Or is he in muddle? Whatever the explanation, it usefully for Oakeshott undermines any impression that her leak of the Banks material was done for his benefit as a damage limitation exercise.

Note

The significance of the emails as regards the Brexit referendum result is a separate issue from the above discussion.

My concern here is primarily with the fact that a story Oakeshott says she thinks is “in the public interest” – and which the Sunday Times judged was important enough to be front-page news – had been hidden from view for months, and only came to light because of Carole Cadwalladr and Peter Jukes; and that the story’s subjects now appear to be attempting to discourage further investigation by involving the police.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

A blurb on the website of Biteback Publishing:

White Flag? An Examination of Britain’s Modern-Day Defence Capability

By Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott

…[D]efence spending is no longer a public priority. Politicians know that there are more votes in schools and hospitals, even while they are deploy our troops onto the streets after suicide bombings or, more recently,  a nerve agent attack. In what feels like peacetime, no wonder top brass have to justify big budgets.

Yet this country faces an array of new and escalating threats, while Brexit and Donald Trump raise difficult questions over the future of our most important alliances. Have we become dangerously complacent?

The blurb was posted on Ashcroft’s website in July last year, when it was announced as a “new project”; according to Biteback, it is due to be published in mid-September. (1)

The topic is interesting, but it is not immediately obvious that such a book would contain sensational revelations about Arron Banks’s dealings with Russia, based on emails provided by Banks to Oakeshott when she was employed to ghostwrite his book The Bad Boys of Brexit.

Yet this is what are are to infer from a statement made by Oakeshott yesterday, after the emails formed the formed the basis for two front-page splashes: an article by Carole Cadwalladr and Peter Jukes in the Observer, after a source provided them to Peter on Thursday, (2) and a group effort in the Sunday Times, after Oakeshott took her material to them as a spoiler a couple of days later. Both papers thus claimed an “exclusive” that covered similar ground.

By her own account, Oakeshott first realised the significance of the emails while researching White Flag?:

For more than a year the files I had been given gathered dust in my attic. It was not until I embarked on this investigation into the state of the British armed forces in 2017 – and public interest in Russian links with Brexit began mounting – that I decided to revisit the material.

Oakeshott says that she had missed this previously because although she had access “to about 11,000 emails” while writing Bad Boys of Brexit she “was not particularly looking for material about Russia at this point”:

I was very surprised by what I found, which conflicted with the public accounts of the relationship with the Russian embassy that Banks and [Andy] Wigmore had given.

The difficulty here is that these “public accounts” were written by Oakeshott herself. Surely the very point of giving her the emails was so that she could flesh out their account with details such as those that later “very surprised” her? On a post on her website, she refers to having read “correspondence with politicians, journalists, the BBC, and everyone else from Posh Spice to NASA”, and that this “hilarious reading” made it possible for her and Banks “to piece together what is effectively a contemporaneous account of the referendum” (H/T Jim AK) .

Having stumbled on this scoop sitting in her own attic, the next question is why she did not immediately write it up for a newspaper. She could perhaps have argued that it would have been unethical for her to use material provided to her by a ghostwriting client for some other purpose, but that would have been in conflict with her role as a journalist and she has anyway confirmed her intention to publish:

It was always my intention to publish this information. I believe it is in the national interest… I believe it was a grave mistake on [the part of Banks and Wigmore] to forge these links [with Russia].

There is no doubt that Oakeshott is a strong critic of Putin’s Russia, but if it is in “the national interest” to publish, what was the counter-balancing interest that necessitated such a long delay before doing so?

Producing the material for the first time in a book would certainly have provided a bonanza of free publicity for the volume, but the postponement seems disproportionate. Its relevance to a book about “Britain’s Modern-Day Defence Capability” is apparently as part of a discussion of “the Kremlin’s ‘hybrid warfare’ capabilities”, but in this context it’s difficult to see how it would be anything more than a brief illustrative anecdote (and it is not a theme mentioned in the book blurb).

This, together with the story’s “hot news” value (both as regards Banks and Brexit, and Banks and Trump), and the current electoral commission investigation into Banks’s donations, suggest to me that the decision to hold back was a strange one.

UPDATE (March 2023): In the wake of Oakeshott breaking her non-disclosure agreement with Matt Hancock after helping the hapless former Health Secretary write his memoir, Banks has now publicly criticised her over her use of his emails, although his recollection is garbled:

She stole all my emails and texts , and [g]ave them to the Guardian!

He’s apparently muddled the Guardian/Observer with the Sunday Times. But usefully for Oakeshott it undermines any impression that her leak of the Banks material was done for his benefit as a damage limitation exercise.

Footnotes

(1) Ashcroft is the majority owner of Biteback. He and Oakeshott previously wrote Call Me Dave, a biography of David Cameron that is remembered primarily for containing scurrilous gossip about a pig’s head.

(2) Oakeshott says that her “computer was hacked” at the end of March, and that this was how the material reached Peter. As evidence, she has posted an email from Dropbox confirming that her Dropbox account had been accessed from “a public IP address”, which of course does not have implications for her actual computer.

However, Peter says that “a third party” received the emails in November, and Banks’s associate Andy Wigmore has stated that “we… know who stole them”. This implies a leak from someone inside Banks’s camp, but although that means the hacking explanation is superfluous, Wigmore refers to “hacking and theft”.

There is some confusion has about how this relates to files in Oakeshott’s attic anyway. She says in the Sunday Times that “the majority of the messages were stored electronically, but some were delivered to me in paper files”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

From Ireland’s Village magazine:

In 2015, [Enoch] Powell was named in a Church of England review into historical child sex abuse concerning the 1980s. One of its spokespersons told the press that: “The name Enoch Powell was passed to Operation Fernbridge on the instruction of Bishop Paul Butler”. The information originally came from a cleric who has counselled child abuse victims in the 1980s. Last April Village gave Powell the benefit of the doubt insofar as these claims were concerned. In light of [Richard] Kerr’s account of his encounters with Powell – revealed here for the first time – that benefit must now be replaced with outright condemnation.

The “revelation” forms part of a longer article that supposedly links sex abuse in children’s homes in Northern Ireland with VIP paedophile conspiracies involving the British secret services. This was the context in which Powell was thus able to commit abuse in Northern Ireland with impunity, despite his status as a political pariah and many journalists, activists and other enemies highly motivated to look for discrediting scandals.

I discussed the allegation against Powell that was raised in 2015 here. Powell was not in fact named during a “Church of England review”; Butler contacted police after the Bishop of Monmouth, Dominic Walker, was asked to expand on an old quote that had appeared in 1991 book, when he was a vicar in Brighton. This old quote in turn related to claims about a VIP Satanic cult that were raised in court during the trial of a fraudster in the 1980s (1).

Meanwhile, I discussed Kerr here, in relation to the Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse in Northern Ireland. There is no doubt that Kerr is a damaged and vulnerable adult whose early years were blighted by sex abuse, but the inquiry found that his account contained inconsistencies and that he was actually in custody in Northern Ireland during a period in which he now claims to have been trafficked to London. The Village article, by one Joseph de Búrca, does not address or even acknowledge this problem. (2)

It is also difficult to understand why Powell’s alleged abuse of Kerr (“Powell began to beat him with a leather belt and buckle. The abuse involved a variety of other acts of degradation including oral sex and masturbation…”) is now being “revealed here for the first time”. In 2015, Kerr appeared on the UK’s Channel 4 News and Australia’s 60 Minutes programme on Channel 9. On 60 Minutes, Kerr identified the late Peter Hayman (a known paedophile who was likely the Deputy Director for MI5) as having been one of his abusers; according to Exaro News, he also referred to Lord Mountbatten, the former head of MI6 Sir Maurice Oldfield, Anthony Blunt, and the MPs Knox Cunningham, Nicholas Fairbairn and Cyril Smith. (3)

Kerr made some of these identifications after being shown photographs; it’s not clear to what extent this was a genuine test rather than theatre, but even if he were not shown a photo of Powell, one would still have expected Kerr to have mentioned his name long before now. Powell is probably the most famous person Kerr has now publicly named, looming larger in British collective memory today than even Lord Mountbatten.

In lieu of providing supporting evidence, the Village instead draws attention to Powell’s racism, and to details of a homosexual affair while he was at university. The article also quotes a letter Powell wrote at the age of 25, in which he admits (unconventionally, to his parents) to an “instinctive affection” for 17-year-old boys to whom he was teaching classics in Australia. Readers are also shown photos of Powell apparently appearing on a television chat show with Jimmy Savile and smiling alongside Ted Heath, who is also described as “another paedophile with a taste for young boys” (presumably the author’s odd take on the Operation Conifer fiasco).

Notes

1. At the time, Walker was associated with the Churches Exorcism Study Group, and he had a media profile as an Anglican authority on “occult” matters. I remember seeing him on TV from time to time.

2. Village magazine describes itself as “Ireland’s political and cultural magazine”. It was relaunched following bankruptcy by an Irish journalist named Michael Smith in 2009. It leans left, although a rival left-wing magazine called The Phoenix doesn’t think much of it.

3. This segment was not used by 60 Minutes, and it has been claimed that Exaro published the article against Kerr’s wishes. The Exaro website closed down in 2016; it has recently been revived as an online archive.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 22 Comments »