The Joy of Six 1286

"Liberal democracy depends upon a sense of shared citizenship, a relatively stable society and an inclusive economy without too great a gap between rich and poor." William Wallace puts his finger on an important truth: economic inequality is a barrier to liberal politics.

Robert Saunderson on what the Conservatives must do if they are to recover from July's rout: "The party must resist three fantasies that have loomed too large since the election: that defeat was less severe than at first believed; that its failures in office were the fault of traitors or non-believers; and that there are easy solutions to the dilemmas that now confront it."

Meg Gain listened to Sayeeda Warsi speak about the tendency to a growing acceptance of racism and Islamophobia at the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival.

"Seeking to silence him once and for all, Jersey’s government also slapped Syvret with a superinjunction in 2012 – an action undertaken via a secret court proceeding, which took place without his knowledge, and forbade him from speaking about the four individuals he had named." Stuart Syvret describes how he was forced out of Jersey for doing his job as a senator.

"In one of the Rolling Stones’ most crucial songs, Sympathy for the Devil, it’s not Keith Richards’ guitar that defines the melody or propels the piece. It’s a series of stark piano chords, struck by a studio musician, that give the piece its earth-shaking power." Jim Farber on the genius of the pianist Nicky Hopkins.

Shane McCorristine asks why ghosts wear clothes or white sheets instead of appearing in the nude.

Lenny Harper interviewed on the Jersey child abuse scandal and other crimes

Here is the YouTube blurb for this impressive interview:

Lenny Harper was an outstanding detective who came to police the island of Jersey bringing his experience of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the Gorbals, Soho and many other extremely tough postings.  

He describes himself as a 'gutter' or 'sewer' cop, ready to deal with the worst of society.  Although he was not told at the time, this was why he was selected by his chief, Graham Power, to head operations in Jersey.  He found the elite society of Jersey to be at least as much of a sewer as anywhere he had been before.

Lenny found himself in an extraordinary but sometimes hilarious situation, trying to police serious crimes of corruption, gun crime and systemic child abuse, while the ruling elite of Jersey tried to sabotage his every effort and thwart his attempts to bring justice to the island.

The BBC Storyville documentary on the case, Dark Secrets of a Trillion Dollar Island, is still on iPlayer.

Dark Secrets of a Trillion Dollar Island: Garenne

Embed from Getty Images

This evening BBC4 is showing Dark Secrets of a Trillion Dollar Island: Garenne in its documentary series Storyville.

The film was made by Camilla Hall, who wrote about its genesis in the Financial Times:

As I dug back into Jersey, I wanted to know what the hell had happened at Haut de la Garenne. A covert police investigation had begun in 2006, going public in late 2007.

The tabloid reporters alongside me had reported on mass graves and a “house of horrors” but the whole story disappeared after the Mail on Sunday reported that what had been referred to as a fragment of child’s skull was just a piece of wood or coconut.

Why did the media stop caring when it turned out to be a sexual abuse story rather than murder? Why did children have to die for us to care? What was normal about any of this? There were so many unanswered questions that I couldn’t comprehend but they all pointed back to Jersey, this tiny island that was at the same time a huge financial powerhouse.

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"Like most wars, this one will end inconclusively with a narrow margin on a low turnout and the losers promising to keep fighting once they have regrouped and rearmed." Vince Cable takes a humorous look at referendum campaign.

Martin Hancox on the insanity of the badger cull.

A proposed new law would make it harder to criticise the ruling regime on Jersey. Voice for Children has the details.

"Reiner ends his memory with an envious observation: 'The word fuck is a perfectly good word now.' 'I never minded Richard Pryor saying it,' says Van Dyke, 'but so many comedians use it constantly instead of good material. That’s when it gets offensive.'" Katherine Brodsky interviews Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner, who are both past 90 but still crackling with ideas.

"If you’d have said that to us 50 years ago, that’d we’d be doing this still, we would have not believed it. That was the time Lennon said that he didn’t expect to be still doing it when he was 30!" Midlands What's On interviews Rod Argent from the Zombies.

Can you name the six London Underground stations named after pubs? Londonist can.

Lenny Harper gives evidence to the Jersey Care inquiry

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Lenny Harper, formally a senior police office on the island, has been giving evidence to the inquiry into the care system in Jersey.

BBC News has a report of his evidence. On the policing of Jersey he said:

Lenny Harper, who was appointed deputy chief officer of the force in 2003, told the inquiry there were approaching a dozen suspects who had been arrested and files were presented to the Law Officers Department but they were not charged by the attorney general. 

He said the police took possession of computers senior members of the IT Department "had bought on the police budgets with pornographic films on the computers and no charges were ever brought against them". 

He told the inquiry he could also remember at least four cases in which officers who had been suspended by the States of Jersey Police (SOJP) were reinstated by the States of Jersey.

And on child abuse on the island he

gave evidence about "a culture emerging in Jersey of systematic child abuse" which was "far worse" than a single paedophile ring. 

He said: "Children were in effect being loaned out to people taken on yachting trips" and there were allegations of abuse taking place outside of territorial waters which were not dealt with properly by the police.

Jersey is "heading towards bankruptcy"

View image | gettyimages.com

Oliver Bullough writes in the Guardian today:

Jersey looks rich – but it is heading towards bankruptcy. 

In April, officials announced that the budget would be short £125m a year by 2019. “What went wrong?” asked the Jersey Evening Post. And that was just the start of it. By June, the annual deficit – now known on the island as the “black hole” – had been revised upwards to £145m, more than £1 in every five that the government spends. 

“The black hole is so big,” according to Connect, a Jersey business magazine, that “filling it will take the equivalent of shutting down every school in the island, laying off every teacher, letting the parks turn into overgrown jungles and having our roads literally fall apart.” 

That is quite a hole, and the question is, how can Jersey fill it? The solutions are not pretty: voluntary redundancies, compulsory redundancies, new taxes, fewer public services. 

Jersey bet its future on finance, allowing its other industries to shrivel, in the belief that it could live well in perpetuity from moving other people’s money around. If that belief was false, then does its fate await another island off the coast of France – one that has also pledged its future to finance? 

In short, is Jersey’s worrying present Britain’s bleak future?

It is also worth quoting a Telegraph article by Gordon Rayner that appeared during the abortive investigation of child abuse on the island:

One more disturbing question presents itself in the light of the child abuse scandal: just why, on a such a small and supposedly idyllic island, did so many hundreds of children end up in care homes? 

The answer lies in another little-publicised fact about Jersey - its unexpectedly high level of poverty, which brings with it the sort of social problems that lead to children being taken into care. 

Although Jersey, with its £250 billion financial industry, has the second-highest gross domestic product per capita in Europe, the island's wealth is largely held by the privileged few. Some 13,000 people - more than one in seven - live in social rental properties, Jersey's equivalent of council houses, and half of all households suffer from one or more of the internationally recognised measures for relative poverty. 

The crumbling 1960s council estates of St Helier are testament to the years of neglect. Rusting cars rot on rubbish-strewn drives, windows have bedsheets for curtains and the paint is peeling off walls and doorframes. "This place is run by the finance industry for the finance industry," says one resident. "Anyone else just doesn't count."

And if the finance industry fails, what will become of the islanders then?

Wally Herbert on the background to abuse in children's homes

Wally Herbert, a former president of the Association of Directors of Social Services, has written a guest post for Cathy Fox's blog on the institutional and political background to the abuse of children in public care:

We should be careful not to sully the good name of every employee in residential children’s services during that period. Some community home staff worked with considerable skill and dedication. There were successes as well as failures. But good quality care was sometimes achieved at a heavy price in terms of stress to staff. 

In larger homes it was relatively easy for staff to conceal abusive behaviour from the officer in charge. Shift systems complicated communications and children were generally disbelieved. Officers in charge tended to respond to allegations of abuse informally. It was not in their interests to acknowledge maltreatment. 

During visits to a family group home a casual visitor was likely to see at firsthand how staff and children related to one another in unguarded moments. It was much more difficult to ascertain this in a CHE where, because everything was on a larger scale, there were seldom opportunities to discern the quality of relationships. Visitors placed greater reliance on the word of staff. 

This was true also for governors of homes who mostly took their responsibilities seriously, spending many hours on visits. But they almost invariably saw children in groups and were escorted by staff so had limited opportunities for casual exchanges with children.

You may also be interested in my 2008 post Why were so many children in care on Jersey?

Six of the Best 465

Mark Pack says the party's federal executive has submitted a mess to conference on one member, one vote. He wants your help to sort it out.

"Somehow or other, the next government is going to have to find us a more effective, more innovative form of government, handing powers out widely to cities and counties, as part of a wider settlement that is far more important than the development of an English parliament at Westminster (another kind of centralisation, it seems to me)." David Boyle on the United Kingdom after the Scottish referendum.

"In 2013, Jersey quietly rose to the top spot of the global rankings of offshore tax shelters, as measured by the Global Financial Centres Index, edging out the Cayman Islands, Monaco, Gibraltar, the British Virgin Islands and Cyprus. Yet because it is so small and tends to shirk publicity, many have never heard of it." Leah McGrath Goodman takes us inside the world's top offshore tax shelter.

Museworth remembers 1989, when Mstislav Rostropovich played Bach among the rubble of the Berlin Wall.

"By the time Caruana won his fifth straight game to open the tournament, destroying Nakamura while playing with black, the commentators were struggling to situate this performance in historical context." Seth Stevenson reports on the Sinquefield Cup, one of the most remarkable chess tournaments ever held.

Flashbak lists the greatest songs ever banned by the BBC.

Lenny Harper on how Jersey is governed

Christopher Hitchens once described Ian Smith's Rhodesia as "Surrey with the lunatic fringe on top". You could say much the same about Jersey - a tax haven where people can be imprisoned for whistleblowing.

And if you don't believe me, listen to Lenny Harper. He is not a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist but a hard-bitten cop who served in Belfast, South London and Glasgow before he tangled with the Jersey authorities.

The Coalition, in the shape of Tom McNally, has had the chance to do something about Jersey but has declined to take it.

This video came to me via The People's Voice and Voice for Children.

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"The deeply shocking reality is that over one-third of MPs, half of senior doctors and over two-thirds of High Court judges come from private school backgrounds despite these schools educating less than 10% of the population." Jack Smith considers the aftermath to John Major's intervention on social mobility for the Tory Reform Group's Egremont blog.

"The dangers of such an unholy alliance between the highly customized advertising excesses of modern capitalism and the data-gathering excesses of the modern surveillance state are obvious: Internet companies are licensed to collect and analyze as much information as possible precisely because the state may one day ask them for it." On Boston Review Evgeny Morozov writes on the authorities' online spying.

Sam Mézec looks at political radicalism on Jersey in the 1950s.

Municipal Dreams explains how Liverpool Tories came to build the first council housing in Europe.

"Thankfully I haven’t had his frustration at not getting the right parts and feeling under appreciated, or the fact that he initially felt he was taking a backward step by doing something for children in Doctor Who." David Bradley discusses his acting career and playing William Hartnell with York Mix.

Joe Moran offers a lecture on the lecture.

John Hemming puts down EDM on Stuart Syvret case

John Hemming, the Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, has put down an early day motion on the imprisonment of Stuart Syvret.

You can read early day motion 685 on the Parliament website and you might like to encourage your MP to sign it.

An interview with Stuart Syvret

Earlier this evening I blogged about the imprisonment of Stuart Syvret on Jersey.

This interview, which appeared on his blog three weeks ago, gives the background to the case.

Jersey blogger Stuart Syvret jailed for three months

This story appeared on the Guardian website yesterday evening, though it did not make this morning's printed edition:

Jersey's former health minister has been sentenced to three months in prison after refusing to take down articles on his blog making serious allegations against a number of people on the island. 

Stuart Syvret, described by one judge as "a thorn in the side of the [Jersey] establishment", did not attend the court hearing in the royal court in St Helier on Monday but was arrested at his home after locking himself in his flat. 

According to John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP, Syvret has been unfairly prosecuted for revealing information in the public interest, including evidence that a nurse on the island may have killed some of his patients. 

Hemming accuses the Jersey judiciary of behaving oppressively by misusing the Data Protection Act in order to silence its critics.

John Hemming gave more information on the prosecution (or persecution) of Stuart Syvret in the Commons in November 2009. Those remarks, of course, enjoyed parliamentary privilege.

Later. Listen an interview Stuart Syvret gave three weeks ago.

Secret Jersey court case

Four prominent Jersey citizens have sued the blogger and former senator Stuart Syvret because they want to have posts removed from his blog.

They are not suing him for libel, as you might expect, but under data protection legislation.

Their legal action is being funded by the Jersey government.

And the trial took place in secret.

That's justice, Jersey style.

Thanks to voiceforchildren.

John Hemming on preventing child abuse scandals

An interview from last night's Channel 4 News.

Craig Murray on Haute de la Garenne

Craig Murray wrote on his blog last year:

I receive, constantly, emails from people wishing me to take up various cases on my blog and furnishing information. 95% of the time I do not publish because I am not able to investigate fully (there is just one of me) and I do not know the source: the exclusives on this blog come mostly from my access to well-placed sources I have known for years through my past diplomatic career, and trust. 

A notable proportion of the cases brought to me by those I do not know involve alleged paedophile rings. I was sent information about Haut de la Garenne for years, which named a string of senior people alleged to take advantage of organised paedophilia in the care home. Among the judges, politicians and aristocracy, there was indeed the name of Jimmy Savile. 

I have to admit it was not just that I could not prove any of it, I was actively sceptical about what seemed a random list of names of the famous. We now know for certain that Savile visited the place several times. The whole Haut De La Garenne investigation always seemed to obscure more than it revealed; I do hope it is now re-opened, and taken away from the local Jersey police.

It is also worth watching the video included in this post...

John Hemming and Leah McGrath Goodman

The Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley meets the American journalist who was banned from Britain, apparently because she wanted to investigate the murkier aspects of Jersey life.

Jersey: Blood, Sweat and Fears

In 2008 I blogged:

I still remember an article in the first ever issue of the New Statesman that I ever bought - it must have been in 1977 or even 1976. 

It was headed "John Bull's Other Islands" and dealt with the cliquey and undemocratic nature of local politics in the Channel Islands.

These videos of a television documentary from 1993 - featuring a young Stuart Syvret - are not that old, but they do confirm that concern about the governance of the Channel Islands goes back a long way.

John Hemming accuses Jersey authorities of complacency over child abuse allegations

From The Big Issue in the North:

An MP has accused the government of “complacency” over child abuse allegations on Jersey. 

Birmingham Yardley MP John Hemming backs Jersey Parliament members Shona and Trevor Pitman, who want the government to “ensure good governance by investigating evidence of the breakdown of law within the island’s justice system”. 

The Jersey child abuse scandal first surfaced in 2007 when social worker Simon Bellwood was sacked after complaining that children as young as 11 were routinely locked up for 24 hours in solitary confinement at the Greenfields secure unit. International attention followed when the ensuing wider police investigation moved into Haut de la Garenne, a children’s home from 1900 to 1986.

The article ends: "Lord McNally did not respond to a request for comment."

Six of the Best 328

"The Justice and Security Bill was, is and will always remain a bad Bill. No amount of amendment will make it anything other than a full assault on fair trials in this country. It must be defeated, and we are watching Liberal Democrat parliamentarians, including Mike Thornton, to see they do everything they can to defeat it at every opportunity." Jo Shaw keeps up the fight against secret courts.

Simon Jenkins, rightly, defends Michael Gove's plan to reintroduce narrative to school history.

A Song of Liberty leaves the Liberal Democrats, making an interesting observation on the way: "Here’s a theory I’ve been working on: political parties are cults. They should be clubs for the like-minded, but instead become repulsive repositories that make the people inside more similar, not less, and farther away from the general public, not closer. They encourage closed minds, adoration of party leaders, disbelief of crimes committed, putting the good of the cult above the good of other people – in this case the country!"

Chris "Stumbling and Mumbling" Dillow makes the case against negative interest rates for Investors Chronicle.

Vice interviews Leah McGrath Goodman, the investigative journalist the British and Jersey authorities tried to ban from the island.

"May 1861, and the newly created state of Italy was in turmoil. The country remained a loose coalition of territories. Rome had been declared as the capital a few months before, but not everyone was playing ball. In particular, Pope Pius IX remained strongly opposed to Italian nationalism. A French garrison was stationed in Rome, protecting the Pope and impeding the new government from taking its seat. The situation was tense. No one knew which way the wind would blow." One solution proposed was that the Pope should move his court to London. Read more on Londonist.