We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Suspect in custody after shots fired at White House correspondents’ dinner, reports the BBC:
Gunshots were fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington DC on Saturday night. The suspect was arrested. An officer was shot at close range, but his bullet-proof vest saved him.
Here’s a recap of what happened:
The annual event was held at the Washington Hilton hotel, with Trump attending for the first time as president
First Lady Melania Trump, Vice-President JD Vance and hundreds journalists, media personalities and government officials were also there
A suspected gunman ran into the hotel foyer, trying to get past security officers and metal detectors, at about 00:45 GMT
Loud bangs were heard, prompting security service personnel to immediately escort the president and other officials from the venue
Hundreds of guests stayed behind for about an hour before the ballroom was cleared
Trump shared images and a video of the suspect on social media
Cole Tomas Allen, 31, is reportedly the suspect
Allen is expected to be charged on Monday with several offences, including using a firearm during a crime of violence
Trump told reporters afterwards, “I can’t imagine many professions that are more dangerous” when reflecting on several shooting attempts over the past three years
Update: As usual, everyone is rushing to find out the suspect’s politics. So far he’s weakly linked to the Democrats – a $25 donation to Kamala Harris and the fact that he’s a teacher. I do not, in fact, blame the entire Left for one man trying to assassinate Donald Trump. But I come damn close to blaming the entire “liberal” media for the unseemly haste to look up the would-be killer’s political donations. The haste is actually quite rational given the propensity of both old and new media to highlight or hide a suspect’s background depending on political convenience. These media double standards go back a long time. Here’s a Samizdata post from 2011: Two contrasting articles by Michael Tomasky on spree killers. Here are two quotes from different articles by Mr Tomasky:
Quote No.1 from this article: In the US, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time:
… You don’t have to believe that alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is a card-carrying Tea Party member (he evidently is not) to see some kind of connection between that violent rhetoric and what happened in Arizona on Saturday.
Quote No.2 from this article: American, for better or worse:
We should assume until it’s proven otherwise that Hasan was an American and a loyal one, who just snapped, as Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds and political persuasions do.
I will start by saying that there is no doubt whatsoever that Jeffrey Epstein carried out multiple sex offences against children. He was justly convicted in 2019, and should have been brought to justice earlier than he was.
But I was disturbed by one aspect of the way this story about Epstein that appears on the BBC website was reported: Epstein housed abuse victims in London flats, BBC reveals
Sex-criminal financier Jeffrey Epstein housed women who say he abused them in several London flats in the years after UK police decided not to investigate him, the BBC can reveal.
We found evidence of four flats, rented in the affluent borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in receipts, emails and bank records contained within the Epstein files. Six of the women housed in them have since come forward as victims of Epstein’s abuse.
Many of them – from Russia, eastern Europe and elsewhere – were brought to the UK after the Metropolitan Police decided not to investigate Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 allegation that she had been a victim of international trafficking to London.
The Met said it followed “reasonable lines of inquiry” at the time, interviewing Giuffre on multiple occasions following her complaint and co-operating with US investigators.
Some of the women housed in the London flats were coerced by Epstein to recruit others into his sex trafficking scheme, as well as regularly transported to Paris by Eurostar to visit him, according to emails in the files.
The BBC searched through millions of pages of records gathered by the US Department of Justice in its investigation of the disgraced financier, and released as part of the Epstein files, in order to piece together the most detailed picture yet of his operation in the UK.
It shows how the operation grew more extensive than was previously known – with more victims, established infrastructure such as housing, and frequent transportation of women across borders – right up to Epstein’s death, despite warnings to UK police.
We are not publishing any details about the young women to protect their anonymity as the victims of sexual abuse.
Our investigation found British police had other opportunities to open an inquiry into the disgraced financier’s activities in the UK, in addition to Giuffre’s complaint that she had been trafficked and forced to have sex with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in 2001. Mountbatten-Windsor has always denied any wrongdoing.
Just a few months before his arrest on charges of trafficking children for sex, and his death in jail awaiting trial, our investigation found that Epstein was messaging a young Russian woman on Skype who was living in one of the London flats he paid for.
He sent her an image which is not included in the files but which seems to have been a picture of himself. The woman jokingly asked who the good-looking man in the picture was.
Epstein said it was her landlord – but said that unlike most landlords, he pays rather than collecting the rent.
The woman later went on to ask Epstein for money to pay for her English classes in London and to help buy cutlery and furniture for the apartment. She also asked for visa advice for another Russian woman who was due to come and stay.
The 2019 exchange reveals how Epstein remained in touch with the women he housed in London right up until his arrest and death in jail, and how involved he was in the detail of their lives.
In contrast to the photos released in the Epstein files, which are often decades old, we found the women housed by him in London pictured in Instagram posts, on Russian social media and in high-end fashion shoots.
The exterior of the flat mentioned in the Skype chat is pictured in one of these photographs. In the background a doorbell with the name of the building is visible, which enabled us to find the tenancy agreement in the Epstein files.
A shipment of gifts recorded in the files led us to another apartment. Details of yet another, rented in 2018 and 2019, were buried in a 10,000-page credit card bill. It also recorded the daily living expenses of the woman staying there, who had her own card on Epstein’s account with a $2,000 (£1,477) monthly allowance.
The thing that disturbed me about the BBC’s reporting was the uncritical way in which these adult women were described as “victims” and the way that their claim to have been coerced was reported as absolute fact.
Why should that disturb me? Not because I think that Epstein was incapable of such a crime: we know he was a twice-convicted sexual predator. I also know that sexual coercion can be combined with lavish gifts and a luxurious prison. And I utterly reject the barbaric belief that sexual coercion “does not count” if the victim had previously agreed to sex, including sex that was paid for. Allegations of this type of crime must be taken seriously. As I have said many times, “taken seriously” means “carefully investigated”, not “automatically believed”.
A pity my first reaction upon reading this story was to laugh.
Related posts:
Believe or disbelieve individuals, not whole groups – about Neil Gaiman.
The feminist movement denies rape victims justice
If you don’t care whether a rape really happened, you don’t care about rape
“Why taxes are to blame for Britain’s fly-tipping problem” is the title of an article in today’s Telegraph by Patrick Galbraith, Environment Correspondent, and Emma Taggart, Economics Reporter, both of whom have earned their job titles. The standfirst is the title of this post. “Levy aimed at discouraging people from [X] is having the opposite effect” ought to win a National Recycling Award for ease of re-use. There’s a line that won’t be sent to landfill any time soon.
I quote:
The scale of the problem has become a national scandal, with observers focusing on how to stop fly-tippers, and questions being raised over the efficiency of regulators amid efforts to clean up the mess.
Yet there has been relatively little examination of the causes of the problem. One of the major drivers is that Britain has the highest rate of landfill tax in Europe.
Every time someone hires a skip or asks a builder to tear out a kitchen, the quote for the disposal of the rubbish comes with an added tax of £130.75 per tonne.
According to Mr Rayner, fly-tipping at the level we see it in rural England is “100pc an unintended consequence of the tax”.
The levy was first mooted by Ken Clarke, the former chancellor, in the autumn Budget of 1994 at just £7 per tonne.
At the time, Clarke said that the tax fulfilled “twin objectives of raising money and protecting the environment”. It was Britain’s first tax with an environmental purpose and was introduced with the promise that it would raise “several hundred million pounds a year”.
From 2007 to 2014, the tax rose by £8 a tonne each year in order to meet EU landfill diversion targets. Under Labour, the tax has risen significantly, climbing from £103.70 per tonne in 2024 to £130.75 in April 2026, a 26pc increase in just two years.
It is now far above equivalent taxes on the Continent. In France, the levy is €65 (£56) per tonne, while in Portugal it is €30. Even Denmark’s landfill tax is less expensive than ours.
At face value, the tax makes sense. It discourages people from mindlessly throwing things away and is meant to encourage recycling.
Unfortunately few people ever look past the mask of “face value”.
Sam Dumitriu, the head of policy at Britain Remade, a think-tank that campaigns for economic growth, notes that we currently have a system where taxes effectively incentivise people to fly-tip, but the authorities are scandalously useless at bringing those doing the tipping to justice.
“We have the worst of both worlds in that we have probably the biggest payoff in Europe for committing this crime, but we have pretty poor enforcement,” he says.
The results can be seen in the picture the Telegraph used to illustrate the article:
Up to 20,000 tonnes of waste was dumped beside the River Cherwell in 2025. Credit: Jacob King/PA Wire
Added later: it’s easy to get the scale of that photograph wrong and think the foliage at the sides is merely a pair of hedges between which someone has dumped a truckful of waste. Those are not bushes. They are full grown trees. A better impression of the amount of rubbish there is given by this drone footage published by the Guardian, which shows the rubbish heap and cars running up and down the A34 beside it, all in the same shot. Fly-tipping on this scale did not used to happen in the UK.
“Comedians tell ministers lack of funding is no laughing matter”, says the BBC headline writer. Do not judge him too harshly; hanging would suffice. The article continues,
Comedian Tom Walker, who portrays the fictional journalist Jonathan Pie, said the government needs to recognise comedy “as an important cultural thing from grassroots to sitcoms on the BBC”.
Walker suggested changing how stand-up comedians and others in the industry are viewed, explaining: “Essentially every stand-up comedian is a small business, they are an entrepreneur and that should be rewarded and acknowledged.”
“Should be rewarded”, that’ll get a laugh from the actual entrepreneurs. According to the Cambridge dictionary, an entrepreneur is “a person who attempts to make a profit by starting a company or by operating alone in the business world, esp. when it involves taking risks”. Get it? They take the risk, they get the profit if it works out, and they take the loss if it does not. By definition, no one who has a guaranteed income from the state is an entrepreneur.
Ro Dodgson said comedy is “often based on risk” and clubs and promoters who are struggling financially are less able to take a chance on new acts.
The comedian said if the government agreed funding to clubs “as almost a form of insurance” to keep trying new acts and supporting emerging talent “then we’d have an industry that can sustain itself”.
By definition, no industry that has a guaranteed subsidy from the state sustains itself.
The Wikipedia entry for apophasis, the rhetorical technique of raising an issue while claiming not to mention it, says,
As a rhetorical device, apophasis can serve several purposes. For example, It can be employed to raise an ad hominem or otherwise controversial attack while disclaiming responsibility for it, as in, “I refuse to discuss the rumor that my opponent is a drunk.” This can make it a favored tactic in politics.
Apophasis can be used passive-aggressively, as in, “I forgive you for your jealousy, so I won’t even mention what a betrayal it was.”
From an article by Oliver Wright in yesterday’s Times called “Louis Mosley: Our critics are putting ideology over patient safety”:
It was, by any standards, a very personal attack.
“No-one should be judged by who their parents or grandparents are,” Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader pronounced at a recent campaign event — before proceeding to do just that.
“But this is a man who is the grandson of Oswald Mosley and still insists on wearing a black shirt every single time he is on TV.” The subject of Polanski’s vitriol was Louis Mosley who, by dint of genealogy, is the grandson of the 1930s British fascist leader.
I do not wish to divert attention from the many legitimate concerns about the use of Palantir’s data-gathering software – originally developed for police and military use – during the Covid pandemic and in other civilian contexts, so I won’t even mention what a hypocritical rabble-rouser Zack Polanski is.
“The toughest job facing the new head of Ofcom: tackling the blatantly partisan GB News”, writes Polly Toynbee in the Guardian.
She writes,
Labour feels more sure-footed. A stronger sense of its own identity flows from standing up to Donald Trump, his war and his insults. MPs are less often looking over their shoulders at the right and its media.
Here comes one test. Selecting a new chair of the media regulator Ofcom is in its final phase: which of two reported frontrunners is appointed will reveal the government’s frame of mind. Ofcom has been moribund, weak to the point of invisibility. One key area is the regulation of online harms, as the government seeks to toughen up on the safety of children and the sanity of the nation, against a libertarian right that defends aggressive notions of free speech, and permits fact-free dangers, such as vaccine and climate denial. Kemi Badenoch is a free-speecher who argued for the weakening of the Online Safety Act in 2022 by removing the ban on “legal but harmful” material for adults, claiming it was “legislating for hurt feelings”. Keir Starmer is strengthening the law by banning addictive algorithms.
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Try to imagine the revolt on the right if Labour sanctioned an upstart broadcaster with, say, George Galloway as its main nightly presenter (he’d be as good at it as Nigel Farage), a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes. Beyond that scenario, it’s hard to devise a leftist channel as aggressively poisonous as GB News, which pours out Farage, Matt Goodwin, Lee Anderson, Darren Grimes, Martin Daubney and Richard Tice, and is frequently accused of breaking rules about accuracy and impartiality.
Toynbee is right to say that George Galloway could find an audience, but wrong to present the scenario of him being employed by a mainstream outlet as unthinkable. Alongside his work for Iran’s Press TV and Russia Today, Galloway hosted shows for talkSPORT and talkRADIO for several years. But we don’t have to imagine “a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes”, we can see it in Ms Toynbee’s own newspaper, which has been financed by the Scott Trust since 1936. That’s fine by me. I don’t object to “a string of leftists and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes” if it is paid for by a benefactor or by other leftists who like their tropes. I start objecting to a string of leftists and a news agenda focused on far left tropes when I am forced to pay for it via my television licence.
“Never mind leading the free world, if Donald Trump were your ageing father, when would you take away his car keys?”, asks Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian.
She writes,
Imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that the 61% of Americans (according to Reuters-Ipsos) who think their president has become more erratic with age and the 56% who don’t think he has the mental sharpness now to deal with challenges (according to recent polling for the Washington Post) were not wrong. Suppose that, much as they did with an octogenarian Joe Biden, millions of Americans had sensed something through their TV screens that genuinely did affect their president’s capacity to send thousands of young soldiers to their potential deaths in the Middle East, whether or not that something amounted to a clinical diagnosis.
Imagine they were right to suspect that the lives of countless people around the world rested in the hands of someone whose judgment might not be entirely up to this – including the 45 million estimated to be at risk of acute hunger if farmers can’t get enough fertiliser, a crucial byproduct of a now badly disrupted Gulf gas industry, to grow food. What would it take, hypothetically, for the system to challenge an elected president’s will?
It’s strange that this has become a subject seemingly too delicate to discuss in public, given what is at stake.
It is not strange at all. I think that Ms Hinsliff knows perfectly well why the delicate “cannot discuss” Trump’s possible senility. Her own delicacy in introducing the elephant to polite company demonstrates that. “Suppose that, much as they did with an octogenarian Joe Biden, millions of Americans had sensed something through their TV screens”. Yeah, suppose the sensing-through-the-TV screens had happened before. Suppose your newspaper – suppose your entire media establishment – had frantically squashed the ballooning obvious until it burst like an exploding colostomy bag. Imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that Americans had concluded that either Vice President Kamala Harris was complicit in covering up her boss’s senility or that she was too stupid to notice it. Imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that them voting for Donald Trump in preference to her was a rational decision.
You can’t imagine it; that’s your problem. The cloud of smoke you made to hide Biden’s senility has blinded you.
“Governments controlling prices? It has long been unthinkable – but may now be inevitable” is the headline of an article by Andy Beckett in the Guardian.
He writes,
Politicians are not supposed to meddle with prices. Even though much of politics is about whether voters can afford things – especially in an era of recurring inflationary shocks – ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union’s planned economy four decades ago, the orthodoxy across much of the world has been that only markets should decide what things cost.
As the hugely influential Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek argued, in a complex modern society, information is too dispersed among potential sellers and buyers of goods or services for government to make informed and correct decisions about the prices of those goods. Hence, his disciples say, the inefficiency of state-run economies, from post-colonial Africa to the eastern bloc.
Yet as the 21st century has gone on, and market economies have proved ever less able to provide essentials such as energy and housing at an affordable cost – while also generating their own huge inefficiencies, such as soaring salaries for failing executives, and privatised utilities that don’t provide a functional service – so interest in the state regulating and even setting prices has started to grow again. Sudden bursts of inflation from wars, the pandemic and agriculture’s disruption by the climate crisis have prompted governments to make economic interventions that would until recently have been considered hopelessly old-fashioned, unnatural and even immoral. Even the Tories, one of the most stubbornly pro-market parties in the world, introduced the energy price cap, having previously called this Labour policy “Marxist”.
Hey, at least he’s heard of Hayek, and he is not wrong to say that the Tories introducing the energy price cap was a betrayal of their previous beliefs. Same goes for Michael Gove’s abolition of “no fault” evictions. I had thought better of Gove. I note that neither of these anti-free market moves did much to help the Conservatives at the subsequent election. Yet Mr Beckett is also right to say when left wing governments introduce price controls and rent freezes they are almost always immensely popular. It is not really a paradox. Human beings are good at spotting opportunism and hypocrisy on the part of other humans, but they are proverbially bad at weighing short term pleasure against long term harm.
The BBC reports,
UN votes to recognise enslavement of Africans as ‘gravest crime against humanity’
The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”, a move advocates hope will pave the way for healing and justice.
They’ll never get reparations. But this move might end up paving the way for healing and justice – by being annoying enough to finally kill off the MOPE Olympics and the self-destructive mindset that mopery promotes.
“‘They singled out non-white, foreign-born workers’: the restaurants raided by Britain’s version of ICE”
As you probably guessed, it’s a Guardian article. I must admit that I am not that shocked that immigration enforcement officers singled out non-white foreign-born workers. But then I read this…
After 37 gruelling minutes, having failed to find any wrongdoing, the Ice officers left the premises. To top it all off, Moitra Sarkar says, the Home Office vans left the restaurant car park without paying – non-customers are usually charged £2.
The horror.
Now, as a libertarian, I am well aware of how often “the process is the punishment”. Here are several pages of Samizdata posts containing that phrase. There is no doubt that having cops or similar barging into the premises can lose a restaurant money. And it is an unpleasant experience for customers and employees alike. And I teetered on the edge of supporting open borders for years. And some very bad things can happen in 37 minutes.
But in this case, they didn’t. The enforcement officers came in, asked some questions, and went away 37 minutes later. Had they not singled out those workers obviously most likely to be illegal immigrants for questioning, they would have taken longer and caused more disruption. As it was, they evidently spent no more than a few minutes per employee. Judging from the facts if not the tone of the article, in this case British ICE (our version stands for Immigration Compliance and Enforcement and I genuinely wonder if its officers hate the fact that it has the same initials as the US version or if they secretly think it’s cool) did its job with commendable speed.
Not paying the £2 parking charge was bad, though. Someone start a GoFundMe.
A BBC story with that title warmed my heart.
A group of villagers who fought to overturn a council’s crackdown on second home-ownership say they are “proud” of their “David and Goliath moment”.
About 18 months ago, the council of Gwynedd, in north-west Wales, made what it called a “proactive step” to limit the number of second homes in the area.
Gwynedd Council, which reasonably enough calls itself by its Welsh name Cyngor Gwynedd since it is in a Welsh-speaking area, is currently under the control of Plaid Cymru.
It hoped that by introducing legislation requiring homeowners in the county to seek planning permission before turning a residential property into a second home, it would help local people who were being priced out of the market.
But some residents of Abersoch, a village on the Llŷn Peninsula which sees about 30,000 visitors during peak summer months, said the knock-on effects from the legislation – known as Article 4 – had been tough.
They described tradespeople needing to look for work further afield and long-time visitors feeling unwelcome.
The People of Gwynedd Against Article 4 campaign group took legal action against the council, Cyngor Gwynedd, and in November 2025 Article 4 was quashed.
Good for the campaigners. The BBC article later quotes two solicitors who brought the case on behalf of “People of Gwynedd Against Article 4”:
Laura Alliss, 38, who lives in Abersoch, said she initially threw away a council notice about Article 4 before she said she realised it affected everyone in Gwynedd.
“I just threw it in the bin because it just said it only affected you if you were a second homeowner, which we weren’t,” she said.
Enlli Angharad Williams, 29, who grew up in Abersoch, realised Article 4 “really impacted” her ability to re-mortgage when coupled with an existing Section 106, external restriction.
The two solicitors helped get a judicial review commissioned after £105,000 was raised by a fundraising group.
Enlli said her friends and family were initially “quite angry” after she put her name down as a claimant against the policy, until they came to understand its impact.
Enlli described it as a stressful time, saying she was “ecstatic” at the decision to scrap the policy, adding: “I’m proud of the community, actually.
“I think it’s shown how much community there is left here.
“We can’t live without the tourism here.”
There cannot be that many Welsh solicitors called “Enlli Angharad Williams” (for those familiar with the IPA, her first name is said /ˈɛnɬi/) so I am pretty sure that the Enlli Angharad Williams who appears on the “Meet the team” page for a Welsh law firm (and volunteers for the Abersoch lifeboat) is the same person as the lady just quoted. The page says that “Enlli is a fluent Welsh speaker and is happy to discuss matters in the medium of Welsh”. I’m glad to see Welsh speakers push back against the ill-considered tendency of Plaid Cymru to curtail property rights whenever they can. What Plaid Cymru think they are doing is enabling young adults who grew up in Welsh-speaking households to afford to be able to buy houses in their local area, hence keeping it Welsh-speaking, rather than being priced out by the English-speaking people who buy second homes there. But nothing drives young families out of an area faster than a lack of jobs. There are parts of Liverpool – one of them ironically called “Kensington” like the swanky London borough – that were so depressed that in 2013 Liverpool city council was selling houses there for £1. Sure, that is at the extreme end of the spectrum, but there are plenty of places in the UK now, both rural and urban, where houses sell for prices that wouldn’t buy you a broom cupboard in London, and wouldn’t buy you much in Gwynedd either. Why? Because the jobs are elsewhere. And after a few years of that, the people are elsewhere too.
I missed this story when it came out a few days ago. It is still relevant. It will be relevant so long as the patterns of human behaviour observed in the Salem Witch Trials last, which is likely to be a long time.
“The Met was duped by fantasist Carl Beech. A decade later, the real victims are still suffering”
Here is an excerpt:
Ten years ago this month, Harvey Proctor, the former Conservative MP, received a letter from the Metropolitan Police informing him that he would not be facing charges of multiple child rape and murder.
Following an 18-month investigation, which had cost more than £3m, the country’s leading police force had concluded there was, after all, not enough evidence to prove that he had been part of a VIP paedophile ring that had spent years torturing, abusing and killing children.
There was not enough evidence, of course, because the entire thing had been made up by a fantasist called Carl Beech, who was, in fact, a paedophile himself.
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The police investigation – which became known as Operation Midland – began in earnest in November 2014, when Beech, an NHS manager, went to police, claiming to have been abused for almost a decade by a powerful cabal of politicians, establishment and military figures.
He had already met with Tom Watson, the Labour MP, who enthusiastically encouraged him to take his allegations to Scotland Yard and then, without any due diligence, made a speech in the Commons warning of a “powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No 10”.
The list of those Beech – or Nick, the pseudonym he was given – accused read like a Who’s Who of the 1980s establishment.
He named Edward Heath, the former prime minister; Lord Brittan, the former home secretary; Lord Janner, the former Labour grandee; Harvey Proctor, the former Tory backbencher; Field Marshal Lord Bramall, the former head of the Army; General Hugh Beach; Field Marshal Roland Gibbs, the former Chief of the General Staff; Maurice Oldfield, the former head of MI6; Michael Hanley, the former head of MI5; and Major Raymond Beech, his own stepfather. He also threw Jimmy Savile’s name into the mix, perhaps to add a semblance of credibility (Savile’s crimes had become known in late 2012).
The list of people “Nick” claimed had abused him was a great deal longer than that. The Times journalist David Aaronovitch wrote an article (which I cannot now find to link to) before “Nick’s” true identity had been revealed that dared to question Beech’s tale on logistical grounds. I say “dared to” because at that time the witch-hunt was at its height and the comments filled up with people who said that for Aaronovitch to quibble about the likelihood of so many of the most scrutinised men in the country (including Edward Heath who as a former Prime Minister was given round-the-clock police protection) being able to slip away for murder parties quite that often must mean that Aaronovitch was in on the conspiracy too.
The Telegraph article continues,
In December 2014, in line with a new national policy that demanded the police must start from a position of believing all victims, Scotland Yard held a press briefing at which it declared Beech’s claims to be “credible and true”. Seasoned crime journalists present, including me, were somewhat surprised to hear detectives declaring allegations to be “true” at the outset of an investigation.
Sir Richard believes that this was a fatal mistake from the police. “For senior officers to stand outside New Scotland Yard and say Carl Beech was credible and true before they had even spoken to him or read his interviews really was outrageous.”
The senior officer who stood outside New Scotland Yard and said that Carl Beech’s accusations were “credible and true” was Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald. It was no mere slip of the tongue. Here is a BBC video from 2014 of him repeating it. I once thought that the presumption of innocence was drilled into every police officer.
What happened to Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald? He and the other officers who led Operation Midland to disaster were allowed to retire early on full pensions.
What happened to Tom Watson, the Labour MP who used Parliamentary Privilege to amplify Beech’s accusations in Parliament? Sir Keir Starmer sent him to the House of Lords. He should now be addressed as “The Right Honourable the Baron Watson of Wyre Forest”.
What happened to Harvey Proctor, the former Tory MP falsely accused of multiple rapes and murders of children? He lost his job and his home and says he will never feel safe again.
What happened to Field Marshall Lord Bramall and Leon Brittan? They did not live to see their names cleared. Their last days were darkened by the knowledge that millions of people believed they had raped and murdered children, because the police said the accusations were true.
What happened to “Nick” a.k.a. Carl Beech? He was released from jail early having served less than seven years of his 18 year sentence.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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