Fuck me, I'm going to go and buy a fucking dog, there's serious money to be made out of gullible detectives.
The Penguin
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Letting off steam. You don't have to like it or agree with it, it is written for my benefit and no one else's. Feel free to add comments if you choose. There will be no moderation. If you choose to post personal attacks, I may well leave them there, so that the bile can fester in the sunshine of my approval, as I regard it from the vantage point of the moral highground.
6 comments:
Oh this is just the tip of the iceberg Penguin - e-mail me for more if you want it!
It's a very dirty iceberg
Re-opening a conspiracy theory
If one nasty kiddy fiddler was convicted I consider the money better spent than in Iraq and Afghanistan!
The snag was, that when accusations began to be picked up in 2006, the old habits kicked in and the States - notably certain senators - did their best to keep a lid on it, citing 'reputation' as if that matters a toss compared to justice.
Instead of properly investigating and sorting out historic abuse from the sometimes rather different childcare standards of the times, the States did their damndest to do deals, such as getting a social worker to sign a gagging order when he had been the first to go public with just how untennable some of the practices were.
Then one Senator, Stuart Syvret, picked up the cases. By our standards he's a bit of a lefty and greenie, but by Jersey standards he counts as a dangerous commie. He was also very critical of so many of the States decisions - and with good reason. Things like the Waterfront development were deeply contentious.
Syvret became a lightning rod for the historic abuse claims, refusing to keep quiet about them, with victims coming to him with horror stories going back years. He may perhaps have become overwhelmed with the stories and unable to sort out which ones were fact-based and which ones were fantasy-based, but that is unusually difficult on Jersey for particular reason.
The Channel Islands were occupied during the war and, as with Austria, the experience goes deep. Peoples' safety depended on their ability to keep secrets, and besides, after the war, not everyone came out looking too good. That too was a secret. So if your neighbour does something you disapprove of, how easy or difficult is it to go to the police, knowing that one's own war record might be brought up?
So on the one hand the idea of children being abused for years in underground caverns is absurd , but on the other hand, if it was going to happen anywhere, a place riddled with handy caverns and a culture of secrecy was the place to do it. Ted Heath, as has been observed, brought Morning Cloud down there a few times. Well, that could be innocent sailing, but then again, Heath was a bastard.
The Jersey senators also scored magnificent own-goals doing things such as disconnecting Stuart Syvret's microphone, throwing him out of a chamber he was elected to an entitled to sit in, mocking the genuine public grief of certain victims, and finally arresting him on some charges. It didn't discredit Syvret - it made it look as if he had very good reason for yelling at an oligarchy determined to shut him up.
It may not be the lurid depth of child abuse which was feared, but it is a case of political cover-ups where the senators put their public face before the need for honesty, with the result that their reputation stinks even worse than it would have, had they sought the truth in the first place.
It was only over the summer that the local paper was bitterly complaining and blaming Syvret for having damaged Jersey's image. In fact, the fall-off in the tourist trade is more to do with the general recession than him, but they made themselves look stupid by blaming him and constantly appearing to imply that if you have been abused in Jersey childrens' homes, you should keep quiet about it for the sake of somebody else's business.
Re-read the Mail story carefully - somebody is trying to spin it.
Stuart Syvret's side of the story.
Caution. Syvret is a bit gobby and dramatical. He's also capable of getting the wrong end of the stick, going off half-cocked, and he can, like many greenies, be a sanctimonious pain in the buttocks.
That doesn't mean all his vaporings can be dismissed. There is a core of reliable testimony and the States tried to suppress it rather than face it.
Thanks for the links, interesting read.
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