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How much evidence is there of long term high level UK paedophile ring?

Am a bit surprised that anyone who saw the footage of Janner shown on TV last night (he was being helped across the street) seriously doubts that he has Alzheimer's.I agree with Wilf that the incredible thing is that the police are only now,when it is too late,getting a case together a quarter of a century after the Beck case led them to bring him in for questioning.
 
The obvious point about the currie quote is she only sees it as a political threat, no obvious concern about children being raped. But the even more bizarre one is that in leaving it in her diaries she doesn't even care that people know that. Maybe her and Esther 'everybody knew about Jimmy' Rantzen - the founder of Childline - should do one of those laugh a minute tours together, like George Best and Rodney March did.
 
Damage limitation

Lord Janner child abuse allegations were not passed to me, former DPP says

A former director of public prosecutions has criticised Crown Prosecution Service officials for failing to present him with new evidence in 2007 of the Labour peer Lord Janner’s alleged abuse of children.

Lord Macdonald QC said that instead of passing on allegations of serious sexual offences against Janner, local CPS officials in Leicestershire dropped the pursuit of charges without consulting headquarters in London.

His comments shed more light on how Janner escaped prosecution for eight years, following a third police inquiry into claims that he abused a number of young boys.
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Wilf said:
The obvious point about the currie quote is she only sees it as a political threat, no obvious concern about children being raped. But the even more bizarre one is that in leaving it in her diaries she doesn't even care that people know that. Maybe her and Esther 'everybody knew about Jimmy' Rantzen - the founder of Childline - should do one of those laugh a minute tours together, like George Best and Rodney March did.
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Her position is somewhat more nuanced and/or slippery than that, for example these related quotes. I can't access the full article but the start is enough for now.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/Politics/article1153409.ece

EDWINA CURRIE, the former Conservative minister, has claimed that a leading Tory MP during Margaret Thatcher’s era had sex with underage boys — and senior party members had covered up for him.

Currie, 66, said this weekend she had heard that Sir Peter Morrison, Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary and deputy chairman of the party, had sex with 16-year-old boys when the age of consent was 21.

“Was he doing anything illegal? Almost certainly. Would it be illegal today? Hard to tell now the age of consent is down to 16,” she said.

Morrison had been in charge of Thatcher’s disastrous leadership campaign team in 1990 when she lost power. He died aged 51 in 1995.

Currie said Morrison had been protected by a “culture of sniggering, of giggling and of nudge-nudge, wink-wink”
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Elsewhere it is reported that in an interview with a social work magazine in 1989, she said that many house of commons colleagues didn't believe child abuse was real, they thought that it was made up by social workers.

It is certainly possible with these attitudes, and with other observations, to see how a mix of factors such as historic laws on homosexuality and age of consent, gentleman club atmosphere, public school attitudes, the size of the political closet, the games and the gossip politicians and journalists were used to indulging in, along with in some cases simple naivety or straightforward rank-closing all contributed to the hideous environment that could enable such abuse.

Some of those factors are gone or greatly diminished or offset now. Others are not, or have evolved in complex ways. If abuse continues at high levels today, it is either much less blatant or at least a different sort of blatant. All the same we've still seen fairly recent examples of MPs closing ranks, but I still suspect the equation has changed somewhat. Even offenders who enjoy the risk-taking aspect tend to take calculated risks, and I would struggle to claim that the risk calculations now are the same as they were 20+ years ago for so many reasons.
 
Can only the defamed person take action in a personal libel and if so is Janner open season now for allegations if he is unfit mentally to stand trial ?
 
Dan U said:
Didn't realise Jay Rayner was an actual journalist before being a food critic and occasional urban75 poster

http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...greville-janner-25-years-ago?CMP=share_btn_tw

Awkward reading for Vaz amongst others
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Indeed.

Of all the things about this sorry tale I'm getting increasingly angry about the statement from Janner's family (via his solicitor)...
Lord Janner is a man of great integrity and high repute with a long and unblemished record of public service.

He is entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.
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Safe in the knowledge that he has been protected from the course of justice they feel comfortable calling those alleging abuse liars. Fuckers.
 
Well they would say that wouldn't they. The ultimate reward from the system, placed above the law. All social status intact, big pension etc. etc.

Sickening, especially for the poor victims.
 
As an aside to the point Rayner makes about Keith Vaz he may not have been 'party to' the rumours but he would have been more aware of them than most given his position as a celebrated Leicester lawyer.
 
Never any shortage of ex-journalists and ex-policemen to speak up when the market conditions are right for them to sell their stories.

I've read Rayner's piece twice - is there a single fact beyond his involvement which wasn't previously in the public domain, or a single 'point' which hasn't been made elsewhere in the last week ? I can't see one. Well unless you count the nonsensical implication that he played a more significant role in getting the allegations about Janner into print than any of the other journalists who covered the Beck trial (and who also didn't follow the allegations up after Janner had denied them in Parliament and made a visible point of employing high-powered lawyers).

Rayner says he will explain 'what went wrong', but doesn't, and hovers around an explanation as to why the story wasn't followed up. But, rather than clearly state the obvious (and less marketable) truth that even if journalists had believed there was something to follow up, there was no obvious financial or career advantage to doing so, and potentially some legal and financial risk, we are instead favoured with a piece of distraction about something different, how Janner's political friends rallied round him.

That was it. The story was dead. The Independent on Sunday was not a paper to be cowed by pressure from above, but it was simpler than that. Clearly Janner was set up. I don’t even recall being taken off the story. It was just never spoken of again.
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Translation into plain English: the story wasn't believed. But that wasn't because various notables rallied around Janner. It was because journalists didn't believe Beck or the defence witness who testified that Janner had abused him.

I don't see the action of 24 year old Rayner filing the story and moving on as being especially open to criticism. His activities today are a different matter. The spectacle of 48 year old Rayner exploiting his anodyne recollections, both for money and for some brand building on twitter would be repulsive enough, but he manages to out-do himself by employing the same distraction. Suddenly the story isn't about Janner's alleged abuse it's about Keith Vaz. Don't get me wrong - I defer to no-one in my loathing of Vaz. But the story isn't about him any more than it's about Jay Rayner.
 
Duncan2 said:
Am a bit surprised that anyone who saw the footage of Janner shown on TV last night (he was being helped across the street) seriously doubts that he has Alzheimer's.I agree with Wilf that the incredible thing is that the police are only now,when it is too late,getting a case together a quarter of a century after the Beck case led them to bring him in for questioning.
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Agree that there should be outrage over the failure to bring him to book in the past. Though I am finding appalling senior police officers and the Home Secretary attacking the decision not to charge this time, the idea of courts trying people who don't have a clue what's going on is a disturbing one.
 
I guess Rayner would say that the story is,in part,about Vaz in view of his castigation of the Home Office's incompetence with regard to the current child abuse inquiry.
 
Duncan2 said:
I guess Rayner would say that the story is,in part,about Vaz in view of his castigation of the Home Office's incompetence with regard to the current child abuse inquiry.
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He says exactly that in paragraph 11. And if he'd just made the point that would be fair enough. However he leads up to it with the references to Vaz in paragraphs 6 and 10, including the old trick of saying Vaz "clearly hadn’t been party to the rumours circulating in his home town" and thus danging the possibility of exactly the opposite. That whole strand of his story is clearly structured around making a point about Vaz. Which he does far more clearly than any point he makes about Janner or about 'what went wrong'.
 
must admit i thought Rayner did make it reasonably clear what in his view 'went wrong' the first time there was a missed opportunity to arraign Janner in 1992.Janner had done such valuable work in pursuing perpetrators of war crimes that his powerful colleagues Vaz and others simply refused to consider the possibility that Beck's allegations could contain even a grain of truth.They were eventually to endorse him in the H of C.Rayner himself, perhaps naively and ,certainly ,wrongly assumed that the evidence against Janner,such as it was, would be presented in Court at some stage and anyway the sub judice rule meant he had to sit on what he knew for years.Much later Beck was found very Guilty and with five life sentences to serve out no one in their right mind was going to publicise as fact anything further he might have to say about the great and and the good.
 
Duncan2 said:
must admit i thought Rayner did make it reasonably clear what in his view 'went wrong' the first time there was a missed opportunity to arraign Janner in 1992.Janner had done such valuable work in pursuing perpetrators of war crimes that his powerful colleagues Vaz and others simply refused to consider the possibility that Beck's allegations could contain even a grain of truth.They were eventually to endorse him in the H of C.Rayner himself, perhaps naively and ,certainly ,wrongly assumed that the evidence against Janner,such as it was, would be presented in Court at some stage and anyway the sub judice rule meant he had to sit on what he knew for years.Much later Beck was found very Guilty and with five life sentences to serve out no one in their right mind was going to publicise as fact anything further he might have to say about the great and and the good.
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mmm, well there are one or two minor problems with Rayners account. Rayner is referring to a pre-trial hearing. Before the trial started in September 1991 the CPS issued 'guidance to editors' on behalf of the Attorney General warning them about prejudicing the trial, and the trial judge initially imposed reporting restrictions. Various newspapers and the Press Association challenged these restrictions and on the 8th day of the trial they were lifted by the Court of Appeal.

During the trial the allegations against Janner were aired in court. Beck gave evidence about them as did a defence witness. And they were fully reported (indeed the attempt to impose reporting restrictions may have had a small 'Streisand effect'). Here for example (courtesy of the Spotlight on Abuse site) is the report in the Guardian about the testimony of the defence witness :
g911911.jpg

Lots of other cuttings at that site and four pages of transcribed press reports at Ian Pace's blog starting here.

Rayner twice mentions the fact that rumours about Janner were circulating in Leicester "for some years". Indeed he appears to imply - without stating as much - that he knew about these at the time of the Beck trial, and that they were credible enough to take notice of. Which rather begs the question that if this was true why did both he and the the rest of the press lose interest in the story.
I don’t even recall being taken off the story. It was just never spoken of again.
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Rayner's answer - that Janner had denied the allegations and fellow MPs had denounced them, doesn't address this at all. The press had successfully challenged an attempt to stop them reporting the allegations. Yet I don't recall seeing anything that suggests the press made any significant effort to investigate them.

The reason, I believe, is that they treated them the same way they had treated allegations made during a trial in 1986 that Willie Whitelaw (then Leader of the House of Commons) was also leader of the 'Sons of Lucifer', a satanic cult. They did not believe them. Neither Rayner, nor the journalists who actually covered the trial, were obliged to sit on anything because of sub-judice rules. Like a lot of Janner's parliamentary colleagues, they did not find them credible and so didn't look into them. Why they didn't find them credible in 1991 is interesting but it's scarcely the real issue in the Janner affair.

The real issue is why, given what evidence was available, as the CPS now acknowledges, he was not charged in 1991 or 2007, and why Police did not pursue an investigation in 2002.

In the scale of the things contributing to how this happened, the role of one self-important windbag in Parliament defending a colleague by making what even then looked like foolish suggestions to reform the Contempt of Court Act, has about as much significance as what another self-important windbag did at the time as a freelance journalist. It was background noise to the real failings then and it is even more annoying background noise now.
 
gosub said:
the idea of courts trying people who don't have a clue what's going on is a disturbing one.
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In which case why could he then walk back into the Lords and exercise his judgement voting, to provide a theoretical majority of 1 to pass some important bill?
 
Wilf said:
In which case why could he then walk back into the Lords and exercise his judgement voting, to provide a theoretical majority of 1 to pass some important bill?
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shouldn't be able to. A leave of absence was an odd thing to go for, as you don't come back from dementia (unless you are Ernest Saunder's) and now, when they publicly strip him of his seat (how can they they not). yet more disgrace.
 
Wilf said:
In which case why could he then walk back into the Lords and exercise his judgement voting, to provide a theoretical majority of 1 to pass some important bill?
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Janner was diagnosed in 2009 and only stopped voting in November 2013. I never took any of the suggestions of high level cover ups seriously, I just don't think politicos are any good at keeping secrets. However, the more I read about this case the more it stinks of it. He's had multiple investigations over the years, the Director of the CPS seems to have overruled her own experts advice and see announce not proceeding during a General Election when it's going to get buried.

I don't know if he's guilty or not, or how far his illness has progressed; the fact he doesn't want to give up his Lords seats suggests not that far.
 
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