Tim Tate

RE-LOCATION, RE-LOCATION … AND CHANNEL 4

In 1988 I pitched an investigative film about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy to one of the BBC’s most senior editors.   I had been given access to evidence – then mostly still kept under lock and key inside Los Angeles Police Department HQ – which showed that the man convicted of the murder, Sirhan Sirhan,  did not kill RFK.

The BBC editor pronounced this to be “a page one story”. But before he commissioned the documentary, he had one concern: how, he asked, could I make a film in Los Angeles when I was based in Yorkshire ? Surely only those with offices in London could tackle such a serious investigative task ?

It struck me then – as now – as a bizarre presumption. World In Action – the best investigative current affairs series – emanated from Granada Television (location: Manchester). Yorkshire Television (location: Leeds) produced the best documentary films in its First Tuesday strand.

But since the BBC editor was evidently sincere in his belief, I took the idea to Channel 4 instead. It was then rather less metro-centric in outlook and the resulting film was broadcast, as part of the much-missed Secret History series, in 1992. It did rather well.

Fast-forward 30 years and Channel 4 is engaged in a fierce fight with the Government over plans for the forcible re-location of its HQ from London to a provincial city. C4 now makes largely the same claim as the idiot BBC editor: being based in London is a television imperative.

The Channel’s resistance has some influential supporters. Peter Preston, formerly editor of The Guardian, used his column in today’s Observer to pour scorn on the idea of prising C4 out of its ostentatious Horseferry Road HQ.

“C4, with nearly £1bn in revenue last year, needs presence and easy access to an ad [advertising] industry that hangs tight to its metropolitan base. Another [argument against moving] is the extra slog of having to get independent from Exeter or Southampton to travel to Birmingham, Leeds or wherever the government decides to send it.”

Preston is apparently blithely unaware that neither Exeter nor Southampton are overburdened with production companies – and therefore the likelihood of anyone having to make a round-Britain trek to pitch ideas converges on zero. Nor does Preston seem to have grasped that whereas it once commissioned purely on the merit of an idea – regardless of the city in which the producer worked – Channel 4 today has sweetheart deals with vast ‘mega-indies’ to churn out swathes of homogenized rubbish. And where are these factory-producers based ? London, of course.

Channel 4’s problems go much deeper than its geographical location. I detailed many of these in my submission to the government’s consultation enquiry into the Channel’s future. I published that on this blog in June, but make no apology for reproducing it again.

But basing at least one of our (notional) Public Service Broadcasters outside London is vital to re-establishing the diversity of voices, opinions and experiences on British television. ITV used to fulfill that function – and for four decades performed it extremely well. Now it, too, is almost entirely run from, by and for the capital – and its output is indistinguishable from the rest of the London-centric production business.

Channel 4 is the epitome of that metropolitan outlook. Its only unique selling point is a self-assumed ‘too cool for school’ attitude. High time, then, that its overpaid, overweening and unadventurous executives were forced out of their lair and back into the real world where producers from Yorkshire can make serious and important films – even in Los Angeles.

My 1992 Channel 4 documentary – The Robert Kennedy Assassination – is viewable on the Films page of this website.  My new book, re-investigating the story with former CNN-journalist Brad Johnson, will be published next year – the 50^th anniversary of RFK’s murder.

Posted on July 16, 2017 by Tim Tate

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE CHANNEL 4 ?

So, farewell then, Jay Hunt. Channel 4’s “Chief Creative Officer” has announced her resignation after six years at the (notionally) Public Service Broadcaster. She is unlikely to be missed, except by a fairly small number of production companies which have benefitted from her tenure.

Coincidentally, the future of the Channel is once again under official scrutiny. After toying with the – very bad – idea of privatisation, the Department for Culture Media and Sport has opened a public consultation on whether Channel 4 should be forced to move out of London to an as yet un-named location.

In the context of this week’s general election, the question of Channel 4’s geographical base may seem like small beer. The DCMS consultation ends in July, by which time Britain will have a new government that – whatever its political colour – is likely to reveal very different priorities to Theresa May’s somewhat opaque administration.

But the problem of Channel 4 – and it IS a problem – is both urgent and fundamental to the crumbling failure of this country’s democracy. Because it, and all British Public Service Broadcasting has abandoned its obligation to educate and inform the public: these broadcasters have, instead, concentrated on cynical, audience-grabbing entertainment (which happens to make many of those involved a tidy sum of money).

As a result, the population – the vast mass of people who will vote on Thursday (or who will not bother to do so) – is at best under-informed about the issues on which the election will be decided.

I worked in public service broadcasting for 32 years, making serious films for all channels.  I therefore feel well enough qualified – and sufficiently angry at the erosion of this vital element of our democracy – to have made a detailed submission to the DCMS consultation[1].

I have little confidence that my submission will be received sympathetically: it dissects how successive governments relaxed regulation to allow once-serious broadcasters to degenerate into purveyors of lazy, lowest common denominator television pabulum. But it also puts forward a blueprint for a radical re-invigoration of Public Service Broadcasting. For that reason I am posting the submission below.

Jay Hunt’s resignation could – given a government determined to return to real public service broadcasting – be A Good Thing.   She was not, of course, the whole of the problem with Channel 4: she was merely the most recent of its bosses who pushed it ever further along the path of shoddy entertainment (collecting, on the way, a £139,000 performance bonus in 2015 in addition to her £612,000 salary).

Whoever replaces her can either continue down that road, or can return to commissioning serious public service programmes.   But unless the DCMS and the industry regulator, Ofcom, understand that moving the Channel outside London will not – on its own – re-invigorate British television, the likelihood is that Channel 4 will carry on broadcasting the same shameful democracy-rotting candy floss that had characterised Ms. Hunt’s time at Horseferry Road.

[1] It may – or may not – be an indication of how serious DCMS is about this consultation that it initially managed to publish a non-working e-mail address for submissions.

Posted on June 6, 2017 by Tim Tate

TRUMPING NORTH KOREA

Yesterday afternoon (Washington DC time), President Donald Trump took to Twitter to articulate (in so far as that is possible) his latest stab at foreign policy.

“North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.”

Having already dispatched an aircraft carrier strike group to the seas around the Korean peninsula, Trump followed up his tweet by giving an interview with Fox Business Network.

“We are sending an armada. Very powerful. We have submarines. Very powerful. Far more powerful than the aircraft carrier. That I can tell you.”

Trump’s bellicose threats ratcheted up tensions in the single most dangerous potential flashpoint on the planet.  In North-east Asia five of the world’s biggest military-spending nations – America, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea – face each other across the South China sea.  The region is ground zero of a largely US-driven an arms race which has been spiralling out of control for almost a decade.

Given the unique seriousness of this global threat, you might assume that western attitudes to North Korea – more formally known as the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) – are based on profound and empirical knowledge. Unfortunately, the opposite is often true.   North Korea has become a lazy journalistic – and political – shorthand for despotic cruelty and eye-watering craziness. Remarkably, as we shall see, many of those those pumping out these crude stereotypes have never been to what they insist on calling “the hermit kingdom”.

There are four main sources for the information – in the loosest meaning of the word – about North Korea relayed by newspapers and television.

The first is its own state news service, KNCA.

The second is South Korea, and in particular the Seoul government’s National Intelligence Service.

Reports by respectable human rights organisations provide the third, supplemented by often-sensational stories from those who have either escaped or defected.

And the fourth source of information is the output of “expert” think-tanks – mostly based in the US.

The problem is that three and a half of those four “sources” are grossly and routinely unreliable: often the “news” they provide is completely false.

On the other side of the 38^th parallel, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service has been responsible for equally outlandish claims. In June 2015, for example, it “reported” that Kim Jong-un had disposed of one of his senior advisors, General Hyon Yong-chol, by shooting him with an anti-aircraft gun. This story was quickly published around the world as evidence of the bestial cruelty of Kim’s regime.  Rather less well-publicised was the NIS’ subsequent correction: that Hyon might not have been killed at all, let alone blown to pieces by heavy artillery.

(This sorry tale followed a familiarly dishonourable pattern of South Korean claims about the North. In August 2013, Kim was alleged to have had his pop-singer girlfriend, Hyon Song-wol, publicly executed with a machine gun for making pornography – a lie that ran round the world before the truth got its boots on.  Curiously few journalists subsequently reported Ms. Hyon’s live appearance on state television a year after her supposed execution.)

There is no doubt that North Korea is a repressive, single-party state with a sorry record of human rights abuses. Reports by Amnesty International,  Human Rights Watch and the UN have all clearly documented the plight of political prisoners and the existence “re-education camps” for dissidents.

Unfortunately, these solid, serious investigations can be overshadowed by what amounts to an metaphorical arms race in exaggerated claims – ever more grotesque allegations of torture, mass starvation and cannibalism – by defectors seeking to grab the attention of sensation-hungry western media. In January 2015, Shin Dong-hyuk, a (self-identified) survivor of North Korea’s prison camps , admitted that some parts of the shocking story told in his widely-promoted book, “Escape from Camp 14” were “inaccurate”.

What makes these over-sold exaggerations most worrying is that they find their way into the thinking and output of ostensibly-reliable western experts and think tanks.   In October 2010 I had personal experience of the reality of their attitudes and expertise.

I was asked to be part of a panel at the London Frontline Club. The subject under discussion was Kim Jong-un, who had just emerged as the man most likely to take over from his father, Kim Jong-il. (He did so just over a year later).    The reason for my presence was a documentary I had recently made inside North Korea. (“Dirty Little Secrets”: Al Jazeera, March 2010 – viewable on the films page of this website).

My fellow panelists were an academic North Korea expert, a UK-based South Korean human rights worker, the American director of a major think-tank, and a BBC World Service editor.   I was somewhat surprised to discover only I and the BBC journalist had been to North Korea. I was rather more astonished by all the other panelists’ bluntly-stated hostility to visiting the country and doing their own investigations.[1]

The academic, Aidan Foster-Carter –Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Leeds University and Mark Fitzpatrick, from the International Institute for Strategic Studies angrily denounced the suggestion that this was necessary, while on behalf of the BBC, Charles Scanlon (who said his total experience of North Korea amounted to half a day spent at Panmunjon, the border village tourist site) pronounced that it was often unhelpful actually to visit the countries on which he reported.

By contrast to my colleagues that night, I made no claim to be an expert.   I could – and can – only report my experience of making a documentary inside the DPRK. But that experience could – and possibly should – have been instructive[2]

That hour-long film investigated North Korea’s long-standing allegations that during the Korean War United States forces had used biological weapons, spreading anthrax, typhus and bubonic plague.   It took me four years of patient requests to gain filming permission from Pyongyang.   And, as the documentary made clear, we were dependent on the regime for transport (we traveled all over North Korea), on the ground translation and the choice of interviewees, including eye-witnesses to the alleged germ warfare. We had no way of independently verifying the identity of these elderly men; but the callouses and dirt deeply ground into their hands did appear to support their claims to be ordinary farmers rather than political bureaucrats.[3]

One of the other interviewees we were required to film – an official state historian – was, however, even more intriguing.   There was little doubt that his statements had been rehearsed with, and  cleared by, the regime’s leaders. When I asked him what it would take to repair the relationship between Pyongyang and Washington, he said slowly and firmly that if the United States was prepared to admit having used biological weapons then North Korea could begin serious discussions.

At the time there was no official dialogue between the two countries, nor any effective mechanism for this to happen. In the previous decade, both had used US-based North Koreans as a back channel.   It seemed to me (and to my senior colleagues back at Al Jazeera) that the historian’s statement amounted to an attempt by Pyongyang to send a message to the new Obama administration.   I duly tried to pass it on to the State Department.

Two things evidently prevented State from listening. The first was the fact that the Korean War has never official ended (there was a truce, but no armistice in 1953) and as a result both sides continue to view each other as enemies. The second was that Obama had not then turned his attention – nor that of his State Department – to the Korean peninsula.

Fast forward to January 2017. The outgoing President had taken the time to consider Korea: he left the new and completely inexperienced occupant of the Oval Office an urgent warning. North Korea, Obama advised Trump, was the most important national security problem facing America.

President Trump is not a man given to in-depth reading, and has repeatedly denigrated his predecessor. This makes it unlikely that he will heed Obama’s warning – much less put in the detailed forensic study required to sift fiction from fact about North Korea.

The real danger is that his ignorance, short-attention span and need for perceived “success” will lead him to rely on bullet-point versions of the already-shoddy sensationalism of lazy journalism and soi-disant experts.   Truth, as ever with Trump, will be a casualty.     But if he baits North Korea – or, more likely is baited by it – into military action,  the most unstable and geo-politically dangerous place on earth is likely to be engulfed by a terrible, possibly nuclear, war.

[1] This is a viewpoint repeatedly depressingly often by people who ought to know better. In the introduction to his book, The Korean War, Max Hastings, one of Britain’s most celebrated newspaper editors and authors, was not ashamed to boast that he “made a decision from the outset to make no approaches to Pyongyang” because it would be impossible to get any worthwhile insights from “a society in which the private possession of a bicycle is considered a threat to national security”. One insight he might have obtained, had he ventured into North Korea, is the enormous number of bicycles ridden by its citizens.

[2] I hold no brief for North Korea. I deplore its human rights record. But it is an uncomfortable fact that the western nations who hold Pyongyang’s feet to the flames routinely turn a blind eye to exactly the same – though vastly larger – abuses by China.  Double-standards are deeply unedifying, especially when shouted from the moral high ground.

[3] Subsequent filming in the US – including with an elderly US Air Force veteran – seemed to support the North Korean claims

Posted on April 12, 2017November 4, 2021 by Tim Tate

PIE AND THE INDEPENDENT CHILD ABUSE INQUIRY

The activities and membership of the Paedophile Information Exchange may be investigated by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse within the coming year.

But such an investigation will be held within the framework of IICSA’s examination of “allegations of child sexual abuse linked to Westminster”.

On Wednesday, I e-mailed IICSA, asking whether it planned to follow up my evidence concerning the failure of the Metropolitan Police and Home Office to investigate or monitor PIE members (see blog post below for this submission). Today, the Inquiry’s legal team today sent the following e-mail.

“Any issues related to the Paedophile Information Exchange are likely to fall within the ambit of the Inquiry’s investigation into allegations of child sexual abuse and exploitation involving people of public prominence associated with Westminster.

“As explained in the Inquiry’s internal review report, the Inquiry expects to invite applications for core participant status in relation to the Westminster investigation during the third quarter of 2017. A preliminary hearing will be held following that at which an update in relation to the investigation is likely to be provided. As the investigation is ongoing it would not be appropriate, at this stage, to provide further information about matters that are, or are not, being considered as part of that investigation.”

This apparent in principle undertaking to investigate PIE – the first such commitment by IICSA, as far as I’m aware – is very good news.   As my evidence to the Inquiry showed, several men who were on PIE’s 1984 membership list held by the Metropolitan Police were convicted of a succession of child sex offences years later.   The Met’s senior management must be asked to explain why it failed to protect their victims during the intervening years by doing nothing with the PIE list.

But IICSA’s decision to frame its PIE enquiries within the alleged Westminster and VIP paedophile investigations is distinctly odd. There is very little evidence that any MPs or famous people were members of PIE: certainly, there are none shown on the 1984 membership list I obtained and which I passed on to IICSA.

There is, by contrast, strong prime facie evidence which raises questions about the conduct of at least two government departments – the Home Office and the Attorney General’s office (detailed in my submission to IICSA).

Will IICSA investigate these ? I hope so.   The report of its internal review, carried out after Prof. Alexis Jay took over as Chair, and published in December last year, contains this statement about its existing enquiries into “allegations of child sexual abuse linked to Westminster”:

“We have requested and obtained documents and statements from political parties, individuals and the Home Office. We have inspected documents held by the Cabinet Office and the security and intelligence agencies.”

For now IICSA is maintaining a not unreasonable secrecy over its exact plans. We must wait until the autumn to see the scope of the proposed PIE investigations. Until then, two small, cautious cheers, and a guarded welcome for the Inquiry’s very important commitment to examine PIE, its members and its actions.

Posted on February 3, 2017February 13, 2017 by Tim Tate

Mark Frost, 70, one of Britain’s most prolific child  rapists today pleaded guilty to 45 historic sex offences against young boys in the UK and Thailand.

His case raises serious questions about the failures of the police and Home Office in dealing with the Paedophile Information Exchange in the 1980s.

Frost, previously known as Andrew Tracey and a former teacher and Scout movement volunteer, was first convicted in 1992 for possession of child pornography. Further convictions followed in 1993 and in 1998: in the second case he was sentenced to 12 months in prison for indecently assaulting a young boy. In 2002 he moved to Guernsey, where he was investigated for paedophilic offences, but left the island before he could be charged. He then travelled freely in Europe and the Far East. In Thailand he sexually abused boys aged between 7 and 13, recording the offences on video.

 But the Metropolitan Police knew that Frost/Tracey was a paedophile at least eight years before his first conviction.   Andrew Tracey’s name and address appeared on the Paedophile Information Exchange membership list held at New Scotland Yard in 1984. His membership number was 268.

I obtained a copy of this list in October 2015.   I wrote then (blog post dated October 29, 2015 – scroll back to find it) that an analysis of the names on it showed that several had been convicted some years later of serious offences involving children. It appeared the police and the Home Office had failed to appreciate the threat these men posed. Mark Frost, aka: Andrew Tracey, is merely the latest example of this.

In July last year I submitted a detailed dossier of evidence to the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse. It highlighted the cases of a number of PIE members who – despite being on the list held by the Metropolitan Police – had been left free to commit child sexual offences in the UK and abroad for many years. I urged IICSA to include the Met’s failure – and the Home Office’s remarkably relaxed approach to PIE – in its investigations. I attached the PIE list to my submission. (See blog post dated August 5, 2016).

Other than an acknowledgment of receipt, I have heard nothing from IICSA.

Today, Ogheneruona Iguyovwe, from the Crown Prosecution Service described Frost/Tracey’s crimes as “one of the most serious cases that I have dealt with as a prosecutor and one of the most serious cases of child sexual abuse”.

The IICSA should no longer ignore the evidence of repeated – but desperately belated – prosecutions like Frost/Tracey’s. Members of the Paedophile Information Exchange posed a threat to children: the failure of the Metropolitan Police and Home Office to accept this in the early 1980s led directly to the subsequent abuse of large numbers of young children in Britain and overseas.

IICSA must now publicly commit to investigating this historic failure.  In case it has mislaid my original evidence, I am re-posting it here.

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Tim Tate

JUSTICE FORGOTTEN – 70 YEARS ON FROM NUREMBURG

On October 1, 1946 The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg handed down its last verdicts against the 24 surviving leaders of the Nazi state.

The Nuremberg Tribunals were a unique and ground-breaking attempt to create a system of international justice: a court in which those who committed war crimes , crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace could be tried by proper legal standards.

Seventy years later the successor to that brave attempt – The International Criminal Court – is struggling. Today, South Africa, one of the 124 nations which have signed up to be bound by the court, became the latest country to announce that it was pulling out. The announcement – and the reasons for it – are a depressing indictment of the failure to learn the lessons of Nuremburg. And that indictment stretches far beyond Pretoria.

The framers of Nuremberg – America, Russia, France and the United Kingdom – agreed (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) that the end of World War Two should not be marked by traditional victors’ justice. In place of a wall and a firing squad, the men who had ruled the Third Reich were to be afforded the legal due process that the Nazi state had denied so many of its victims.

They were provided – free of charge – with lawyers to represent them, given access to the prosecution’s evidence and allowed to defend themselves as they saw fit. Three of them were acquitted by the court.

Nuremberg was a temporary tribunal. But its creators envisaged the future establishment of a permanent court which would enforce (albeit retrospectively, as all courts do) the most important international laws: those prohibiting war crimes, crimes of aggression and crimes against the peace of the world.

It took another 57 years for this to happen. The Cold War was responsible for some of this delay. But much of it was caused by opposition from countries which should have known better. Seven nations voted against the Treaty which established the court: five – China, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Qatar – had the sort of oppressive or dictatorial governments which made their hostility predictable. The other two were Israel and the United States: democracies both.

The International Criminal Court began work in 2003. Since then it has opened 10 investigations, indicted 39 people and issued arrest warrants for 31.

It is one of those defendants – Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir – who has caused South Africa to announce its withdrawal.   Not because there is no evidence to justify al-Bashir’s appearance at the Hague – there is a miserable abundance of evidence to support the court’s indictment of him for genocide and war crimes – but because South Africa is putting good relations with its continental neighbours above the principle of justice.

Why – aside from the anniversary – does this matter now ? What relevance does this have to anyone on the bus or tube home tonight ?

Sadly, South Africa’s tawdry decision is part of a wider international retreat from justice. And Britain and its closest ally, the United States, are at the heart of this. America first.

Successive US governments have refused to ratify the Treaty which established the International Criminal Court. Their argument has been that American soldiers, fulfilling their country’s call to be a de-facto world police force should only face trial for any misdemeanours in American court rooms.

US soldiers have repeatedly committed many of the same crimes which brought Nazi leaders to the gallows. But they are rarely brought to justice. And if the United States, the sole surviving military superpower, won’t join the Court it’s hardly surprising that other countries are beginning to desert it.

Britain’s position is a little different. In theory, at least, Her Majesty’s government remains committed to the idea that those who perpetrate the worst crimes in international law should be brought to justice. But on October 4, Prime Minister Theresa May fundamentally undermined this principle. She announced that her government plans to immunize British soldiers against the provisions of another international law – the European Convention on Human Rights. This, she announced, would suspend human rights laws on the battlefield and prevent victims of military crimes from suing soldiers.

“What we’ve seen is human rights legislation being used to generate all these vexatious claims and troops finding themselves in some difficultly in worrying and concerned about the future as a result of that.   We need to stop this industry of vexatious claims which has grown up, with lawyers appearing to chase around to see anybody who will bring about a claim about our troops.”

Brigadier Telford Taylor was one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg. Twenty-five years later he published a slim book in which he outlined clearly America’s retreat from the legal principles which underpinned the Tribunal and the way this had enabled its military to commit crimes against humanity in Vietnam.

That book – Nuremburg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy – should be at the top of the reading list for South Africa’s President Zuma. But on the 70^th anniversary of Nuremburg, it is also an moral indictment of the United States government – and of Mrs. May’s grubby little proposal.

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Tim Tate

KNAVES OR FOOLS ? THE HOME OFFICE AND IICSA

The Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse is under sustained attack.

It is under attack from outside – by MPs and (in particular) the press; and from the inside, by a steady stream of anonymous leaks emanating apparently from some of its senior staff.

There is a pattern to these attacks, and – followed closely – it points to a fundamental problem at the heart of the Inquiry. That problem is the Home Office.

On September 5, the former Inquiry chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, sent a nine-page letter to the Home Affairs Committee. In it she attempted to explain the issues which led her to resign from her post. I am posting it below.

Little or no attention has been paid to that letter: instead, the focus has been on allegations, leaked by someone from within the Inquiry leaked to The Times, that Goddard made racist comments and was abusive to Inquiry staff.  No actual evidence has been adduced of this alleged misconduct – merely the fact that the Inquiry secretary John O’Brien had reported them to the Home Office – and Goddard has vehemently denied the allegations, calling them “falsities”, “malicious” and part of “a vicious campaign”.

True or not, they have – once again, led to calls for the Inquiry to be closed down.

The Home Office is central to this fiasco.   Ostensibly, it has no involvement in the Inquiry, other than being the department responsible for paying for it. As Home Secretary Amber Rudd told the House of Commons yesterday:

“It is an independent body, established under the Inquiries Act 2005. The Home Office is the sponsor Department, and I am responsible for the terms of reference, appointing the chair and panel members, and providing funding … The appointment of staff and the day-to-day running are matters for the chair.”

The reality is somewhat different. More than 30 members of the Inquiry secretariat are Home Office staff. John O’Brien, the Inquiry secretary whose passing on of unsourced allegations about Goddard was leaked to the Times, is the Home Office’s “Director of Safeguarding”.    His “SCS2” staff grade has an annual salary of up to £162,500.

Why does this matter ?   Is it not both reasonable and sensible for the Home Office to second its staff to an Inquiry under its financial control ?

There are two reasons why the answer has to be ‘no’.

The first is that the Home Office is itself the subject of serious allegations involving organised paedophilia and child sexual abuse.   In August I posted on this blog the written evidence I submitted to IICSA which detailed the failures of the Home Office and the police to act on very clear evidence of paedophile activity in the 1980s and 1990s. At least part of that activity – an office of the Paedophile Information Exchange – was on Home Office premises.

I am re-posting below my IICSA submission. It sets out evidence which shows that the Home Office has serious questions to answer about its actions, its policy decisions, its record-keeping and its alleged funding relationship to PIE.  All of these should fall squarely within the Inquiry’s remit, and should clearly disqualify the Home Office from playing any part in the Inquiry’s operation.

Goddard herself set out the second reason.  Her letter to the Home Affairs Committee highlighted the problem which Home Office involvement has caused IICSA. She wrote:

“The administrative arrangements made by the Home Office as the inquiry’s sponsor meant that in the recruitment of staff priority was given to civil servants and any non-civil service staff had to become civil servants unless they were employed on contract through the Solicitor to the Inquiry. In practical terms this meant that the skills and qualifications of many recruits did not fit the tasks which they were called upon to perform, as none of the secretariat or senior management team had previous experience of running an inquiry of this nature.

Therefore they did not fully understand or appreciate its organisational and operational needs. Their approach has been bureaucratic and the Inquiry’s progress has been impeded by a lack of adequate systems and personnel, leading to critical delays.   I felt as Chair handicapped by not being given a free hand to recruit staff of the type that I judged to be essential.”

Since that letter, the Home Office has done nothing to address this fundamental flaw. Goddard, however, has been subjected to an unpleasant campaign of character assassination. She, rather than the department which appointed and then allegedly obstructed her, has been portrayed as the problem. She has also been criticised for not publicly explaining her abrupt departure from the Inquiry (notwithstanding her detailed letter to the Home Affairs Committee). But is she contractually allowed to do so ?

Goddard’s resignation was formally enacted in a severance agreement. Much press outrage has been expended on the pay off this allegedly gave her.   Severance agreements – particularly of this size and pubic importance – usually come with a non-disclosure, or “gagging” clause which prevents either party from speaking publicly about it.    Yesterday I asked the Home Office whether it had negotiated the severance agreement, and if so whether this included a non-disclosure clause. Its spokesperson, Richard Mellor, referred me to IICSA.

“This question is one for IICSA. I’m told it will be able to answer”.

The IICSA, however, refuses to answer either of those questions. Its chief spokesperson, Debbie Kirby, said:

“As with any organisation, all HR issues are confidential and therefore it would be inappropriate to comment. This should not be taken as confirmation or denial of any questions, simply that all employees have a right to expect confidentiality in relation to all HR matters.”

Ms. Kirby’s LinkedIn profile shows that amongst her previous posts were stints at the National Crime Agency (proprietor: the Home Office) and the Ministry of Justice.  I asked her how the simple question of which organisation – IICSA or the Home Office – negotiated Goddard’s severance deal could possibly be construed as an encroachment on anyone’s confidentiality. She refused to explain or expand on her previous statement.

Is this incompetence or something less benign ?   Is it wilful obstruction, or does it form part of the pattern of Home Office mismanagement which has blighted the Inquiry ?   Either way, Goddard’s letter spelled out the problems caused by the failure of Kirby’s department to operate effectively.

“Another difficulty is that the huge amount of hard work the Inquiry has been putting in over its first 16 months has not been sufficiently visible or communicated widely enough. During my tenure the communications capacity of the Inquiry was never adequate for the formidable and important function of interacting with the public and I suggest that capacity in that regard needs to be radically strengthened for the future.”

Evidently that lesson has not been learned. Until it is – and above all until the Home Office removes itself from any involvement – the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse will lurch from crisis to crisis.

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Tim Tate

JOURNALISM ISN’T DEAD, BUT IT’S NOT FEELING WELL

There is a sickness eating away at the slowly-rotting cadaver of British journalism. It’s not the recent malaise of tabloid phone hacking nor the older plague of cheque-book journalism. It is the creeping disease of ‘Columnism’.

Most of what were once called broadsheet newspapers (forget the tabloids) now fill their middle pages with the scribblings of famous, or semi-famous columnists, who – so the theory goes – enlighten the rest of us with their profound insights and deep thinking.

Two problems here:

• They don’t. What they deliver is all too often a recitation of their own prejudices. Which are published without the benefit of fact checking or even basic research.

• Their output is considered serious journalism – and thus both enters and influences public opinion. (There’s no other reason for their columns to exist.) But THEY ARE NOT JOURNALISTS (upper-case shouty emphasis deliberately added).

The winner of today’s prize for egregious, opinionated and utterly ill-informed nonsense is Dominic Lawson, son of the Thatcherite chancellor, brother of ‘celebrity chef’ Nigella.  His (habitually fact-free) Sunday Times column – positioned next to the paper’s own editorial comment – castigates investigations into allegations of child sexual abuse by celebrities[1].

This is neither a surprise nor a problem: Lawson has previously made clear his opposition to the investigation of historic CSA allegations. And he’s perfectly entitled to his opinion.

Unfortunately, he supports his argument with a reference to the “so-called Satanic abuse cases of Cleveland and Orkney”. And for good measure he claims that children making disclosures in Cleveland “were actually manipulated by professionals with a doctrinal attachment to lurid and fashionable theories”.

These are statements of alleged fact. And both are utterly false.

There were absolutely no claims of satanic abuse in the 1987 Cleveland child abuse crisis.  None. And the official inquiry report (Butler-Sloss, 1988) contained nothing to support his entirely false allegation of professionals “manipulating” children into disclosures. (For the record: not merely was there absolutely no evidence of this, but many of the affected children were pre-verbal and so could not have been manipulated into making false allegations.)

I have e-mailed Mr. Lawson and the Sunday Times to point out these mistakes. When – if – either replies, I’ll post the responses here. However, readers are advised that breath-holding is contra-indicated in such cases.

In the meantime, perhaps someone could suggest a new collective term for “columnists” (along the line of a flock of sheep).   An Ignorance, perhaps ?

[1] “In this rush to believe abuse claims we destroy both justice and lives”. (Article behind paywall)

Posted on September 11, 2016September 11, 2016 by Tim Tate

HELPING WITH INQUIRIES …

“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”.

The Importance of Being Earnest: Oscar Wilde

Last weekend I submitted detailed written evidence to the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). The Inquiry was set up in July 2014 by then Home Secretary, Theresa May, to examine alleged failings by government departments, police forces, churches and other relevant organisations in the protection of children from sexual abuse.

The 37 pages of evidence which I submitted detailed my personal knowledge of historic failures by the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office to assign sufficient importance (and thus resources) to information concerning known British paedophiles.

It also raised serious questions about the integrity of the Home Office’s commitment to a full and open understanding of the historic (and, indeed, current) problems of organised paedophilia and the allied trade in child pornography. It concluded with a series of suggestions for the Inquiry to follow-up.

Last night the Chair of the IICSA, Dame Lowell Goddard QC, resigned. She is the third Inquiry head to leave the post in the two years of its existence.

To adapt Lady Bracknell’s withering remark: ‘To lose one Chair may be regarded as misfortune; to lose a second smacks of incompetence. To lose a third – in the absence of any evidence to the contrary – suggests that there remains a serious problem in the government department responsible for the Inquiry’ . That department is the Home Office.

Because of this – and because it is unclear how (or whether) Lowell Goddard’s resignation will affect the IICSA’s progress – I am publishing below the evidence I submitted last weekend[1].

It is a long read. It names names and asks serious questions. I can only hope that whoever takes over from Lowell Goddard follows up the evidence and the questions I put forward.

[1] Only two pieces of information have been redacted. One is the website where my 1987 documentary film on child pornography may be viewed: the reason for this redaction are the (post 1987) laws on data protection. The second is the name of an investigator assigned by the Home Office examine allegations concerning its relationship with PIE. The version of my submission sent to the IICSA was unredacted and contains this information.

Posted on August 5, 2016 by Tim Tate

A PETARD HOISTED

Appropriately, given the persistent grumbling of this blog, I have been (correctly) taken to task for my own inaccuracy.

The reference to Exaro shareholder “Tom Pendry” in the previous post (“Exeunt Exaro”) was, as Mr Pendry has pointed out, wrong: his name is actually Tim Pendry.

My apologies to Mr Pendry and to readers.    A petard of my own making, on which I have been hoisted fair and square

Posted on July 23, 2016 by Tim Tate