Child abuse, the BBC and the hierarchy of truths
Can you rearrange the following sentences into a well-known political narrative?
- It is wrong to haul young boys from their children’s home dormitory at night and brutally rape them.
- It is wrong to coerce, cajole or pressurise underage teenage girls – even apparently willing doting fans – into performing sexual acts.
- It is wrong to turn a blind eye to sexual abuse by a fellow BBC employee.
- It is wrong to make accusations of child abuse against a senior Tory politician without checking that the accuser has identified the right man.
- It is wrong to suppress allegations of sexual abuse by a tv presenter because that would scupper Christmas tribute programmes to the same man.
- It is wrong to fail to read The Guardian every morning and key an eye on Twitter when you are the head of a news organisation.
- It is wrong to allow someone to save face by saying they have resigned when you have actually told them they will be sacked if they don’t go quietly – and by offering them a pay-off equal to what they would have got had they been dismissed.
Ok. It was a trick question. This is not about narrative. We all know the Jimmy Savile/ top Tory paedophile (or not, as it turns out) story. But the Second Vatican Council, in very different circumstances, came up with the idea of the “hierarchy of truths” which applies here.
Statements or stances can be true without having equal validity or importance. One truth can conflict with another – or at any rate elbow others aside. Sociologists have another way of describing this: moral panic. That is what has gripped the chattering classes now over child abuse and the BBC in a political debate which has developed an irrational sense of proportion.
FollowWhat is really behind the implosion of Amnesty International?
For more of the past 50 years it has been regarded as the paragon of human rights organisations – a globally admired beacon of liberty and hope. But in recent times a note of discord crept into the public reputation of Amnesty International. Behind the scenes lurks a crisis that threatens its very existence.
Staff are striking in Amnesty offices across the globe and a vote of no confidence has been passed in its leadership. On the face of it the human rights organisation is being riven over a structural reorganisation and a couple of dozen redundancies among its 700 staff. But the real problem goes much deeper and has been characterised as a “struggle for the soul” of the human right movement.
There are disputes at the International and UK arms of the organisation, both of which are headquartered in London. Staff at Amnesty International UK (AIUK) have called for the resignation of its director, Kate Allen. Staff at Amnesty’s International Secretariat have issued a vote of no confidence in the ability of the wider movement’s Secretary General, Salil Shetty, and his senior leadership team to continue leading the organisation.
The increasingly bitter crisis comes as cuts of £2.5 million are being implemented at AIUK, despite a steady annual growth in income, and despite staff agreeing to a pay freeze. The dramatic cuts are being implemented so senior managers can switch large amounts of money to Amnesty’s International Secretariat in a plan to run down the London operation and build new “regional hubs” in Nairobi, Johannesburg, Bangkok and Hong Kong.
Amnesty management has responded by saying: “This statement by the union is not a fair or accurate representation of what has been a highly consultative and inclusive process of change”.
But a senior director, Susan Lee, who runs Amnesty’s programme in Latin America, has now resigned in protest at the way staff are being treated. Picketlines have formed outside Amnesty’s offices in Senegal, Paris, Uganda, Beirut, New York, Hong Kong and Johannesburg. One union official, Alan Scott of Unite has described Amnesty as “one of the most mendacious employers” he has known. “Amnesty International cannot be an effective or credible human rights organisation,” he said, “if it does not respect the rights of its workers”.
High on the complaints of the staff is the lack of agreement on redundancy terms. But the unhappiness at Amnesty is far wider and deeper than the issue of redundancy.
It points to a deep ideological rift. One side insists that Amnesty must physically position itself in solidarity with those whose causes it champions, and those are mostly in the poor world. The other alleges that diligent and effective human rights research is being sacrificed by marketing managers who want to “build the Amnesty brand” to recruit more members and raise more funds to do more broad-brush campaigning.
What voters really think of the elections for one police commissioner
“This is not America you know,” said the man impatiently, pushing past a slightly embarrassed-looking Roy Warren as he stood clutching his curriculum vitae leaflets. “I’m not voting. It’s ridiculous.”
Mr Warren is the only independent candidate standing in Greater Manchester in tomorrow’s elections to appoint a new police and crime commissioner. It is no easy task. As well as the party machines of the other candidates for the post – Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Ukip – he is up against not just voter apathy but voter hostility.
Turnout is predicted at a record low for any UK election when the polls open to appoint 41 of the new commissioners all across England and Wales. Standing by Mr Warren, as he lobbied keep-fit enthusiasts as they entered his local gym at Hale Country Club, you could see why.
The new commissioners are a Conservative flagship scheme to replace the nation’s old police authorities, which were made up of local dignitaries, councillors and magistrates. This most radical reform of the police service for 50 years was intended to make the police more directly accountable to the general public. The new commissioners will have the power to appoint and dismiss the local chief constable.
But the first half dozen voters Mr Warren stopped revealed the range of problems candidates – and in particular independent ones – have been facing.
Why I won’t be voting for a police commissioner
I am about to do something silly, in the estimation of the government’s Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, at any rate. I am not going to vote on Thursday in the elections for the nation’s first police and crime commissioners. When Ian Blair, the former head of Scotland Yard, suggested that voters boycott these unnecessary and counter-productive polls he was told by Mr. Grayling that his advice was “silly”. I disagree which is why, for the first time in my adult life, I will be spoiling my ballot paper.
Lord Blair, of course, could be dismissed as a man with a personal grievance. After all he was sacked as head off the Metropolitan Police by the man who was, in effect, the prototype elected police commissioner, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. But my objections are both principled and pragmatic.
Anyone who has spent any time in the United States is aware of the dangerous of politicising policing. I was in Huntsville Texas once when the local sheriff was running for re-election on a platform demanding the execution of an unpopular character on death row who — after the lethal injection was administered — turned out to be innocent. You can’t win them all, the old lawman no doubt stoically reflected.
Anyone who thinks we Brits wouldn’t go in for such gun-toting populism should look at the tv ads the government has been running to frighten the nation into voting. Yobs punch commuters. Fly-tippers scream abuse. A car wing mirror is kicked off. We live in a wild and dangerous place, the message screeched, and we need to do something about it. Crime has been down in recent years but the fear of crime will suffice.
There is all manner — if you will excuse the Dixon of Dock Green pun — of problems with a police force controlled by a politician who trades on fear to get re-elected. The crimes about which voters get most passionate are not necessarily those which are most damaging or dangerous. Domestic violence, sex trafficking and organised crime are not so visible as intimidating youths on street corners. Social scientists reveal that neighbourhoods where crime is highest are also those where people are least likely to turn out to vote. That will create subliminal pressure to concentrate policing in more middle class areas.
The new Archbishop must look to the nation as well as the Church
It is a matter of some irony that the Church, a body which sets out to tell the rest of us how to live more moral lives, sets such a poor example in its own affairs. The process for choosing a new Archbishop of Canterbury has been fairly shambolic, with its leaks and clandestine flurries of betting from individuals who are ever-ready to preach about respect, integrity and the evils of the love of money. Fairly high up the agenda of Justin Welby, if he is, as expected, translated today from the bishopric of Durham, ought to be ensuring a more dignified and transparent method of choosing his own successor.
He comes with some apt qualifications for the job. His 11 years as an oil executive gave him not just long experience of sophisticated financial products like derivatives but also of managing complex processes and organisations. He is a skilled diplomat and negotiator – qualities he deployed working on conflict resolution in world war zones as a canon and dean. He will need all those skills, and more, in his new job, coping with a bitterly divided church.
The new archbishop has been a strong advocate of women bishops but has been keen to find ways to protect the place of dissenting traditionalists. On gay marriage he has been more low-key. Though theologically conservative he has been an outspoken on social justice issues normally associated with the left. Despite his charismatic evangelical background he embraces much papal social teaching and is an enthusiast for Catholic styles of worship. As a result most Church factions welcome his appointment.
But that will not be enough when it comes to another key aspect of the job, speaking to the wider nation. To most of society gay marriage is a simple matter of equality. There is no theological circle to be squared. Friends say the new archbishop knows what he wants but doesn’t always take the most direct route there. Whatever techniques he chooses to deploy he needs to know that the British public will judge the Church here by criteria of compassion and plain justice.
The redemptive power of ‘Millions’
By one of those productive coincidences I saw the final performance of Nicholas Hytner’s shattering Timon of Athens last week and then, two days later, sat down with my grandson and read Frank Cottrell Boyce’s children’s novel Millions from cover-to-cover in a day. The overlap was instructive, most particularly against the background of a US presidential election which had none of the vibrant optimism of the Obama campaign in 2008 which took place before the global financial crisis deflated confidence as well as budgets. The common denominator in all this is money, and the effect it has on our psyche.
Timon of Athens was once described by Frank Kermode as the “poor relation” of Shakespeare’s major tragedies. On the page it reads like an abandoned draft, which is presumably why it is thought never to have been performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime, or indeed much since. By setting his 2012 National Theatre version in the City of London amidst the bling of boom and then the dust of bust Mr Hytner transformed what is usually deemed one of the Bard’s most obscure and difficult works into a parable for our times.
Timon begins like the Prodigal Son dispensing unearned largesse in a whirling world of City crooks, braying bankers, parasitic poets and air-kissing artists. He ends a down and out, pushing a supermarket trolley laden with jetsam, sleeping on cardboard boxes in the street and railing against humankind in general. His sudden death offers the blindness of tragedy rather than the dawning of redemption.
What is striking about his earlier spendthrift philanthropy is that he gives compulsively yet never seems satisfied. And he does it all on what turns out to be credit, underscoring Marx’s reading of the play as an allegory of the inherent contradictions of capitalism. Timon’s clear belief that money can buy friendship, rather than mere fawning, takes us into deeper psychological territory but it ends in a kind of embittered despair.
Frank Cottrell Boyce is more helpful and hopeful. Millions centres round two precocious brothers, Damian and Anthony, who discover a huge stash of banknotes thrown from a train by robbers only days before all stacks of sterling are burned to be replaced by the Euro. The cash comes crashing through the roof of a cardboard hermitage Damian – who is obsessed with saints – has built by the railway line after their mother died. “Have you met a Saint Maureen?” the eight-year-old repeatedly asks the various saintly visions who appear before him. His brother Anthony, aged 11, by contrast, is consumed by consumerism, cash, houses prices, estate agents and the money supply.
The bookies are so sure this man will be the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury that they have stopped taking bets
If – and it’s a big if, given the track record of the Church of England on these matters – the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury is to be Justin Welby most of the church, let alone the nation, will not know what to expect.
He is an Old Etonian but in the self-deprecating rather than posh entitlement mode. Before he was ordained he worked as an international oil executive for 11 years, some of it in civil war-torn Nigeria where oil companies are part of the problem rather than the solution. He returned there when he ran the reconciliation ministry at Coventry Cathedral, and later when he was Dean of Liverpool, to do mediation work which three times almost got him killed. He understands pain; his first child, Johanna, died in a car accident.
A man of quiet charisma he has the common touch, even now as Bishop of Durham. Though a conservative evangelical he talks human rather than Kingdom-of-God speak. Commentators have described him as “to the right” of the present Cantuar, though Rowan Williams, for all his liberal inclusive theology, has trodden a pretty conservative path in his attempt to maintain unity with fractious reactionary evangelicals.
And Justin Welby’s theology is not so conservative as some suppose. The title of his dissertation at theological college was “Can companies sin?” – a question far from the usual evangelical focus on personal morality. And his answer is Yes. Unexpectedly he is keen on Roman Catholic Social Teaching which is big on “structures of sin”. A member of the new parliamentary commission on the Libor-fixing scandal he has described the banks as “exponents of anarchy” who pursued “activity without purpose” before the 2008 financial crisis.
Expect him to talk tough on other matters too. He has castigated the present generation for inheriting the benefits of their grandparents’ faith and jettisoning its moral obligations. Society is using up the cultural capital of Christianity and not replacing it.
Those fractious conservatives may find him no pushover either. Only Nixon can go to China, the political proverb said. Perhaps only a conservative evangelical can square the circle on gay marriage and women bishops by reconciling those who think it a theological necessity with those who think it a theological impossibility. Hope is, after all, a cardinal Christian virtue.
What will be the Poppy controversy this time? In past years the season of remembrance has been marked by a variety of rows. Last time there was one over whether England’s footballers could wear shirts bearing the emblem in Europe. There have been protests from Islamic extremists at the Cenotaph. There have been complaints from the right about the Poppy as a fashion accessory and from the left about politically correct “Poppy fascism” which brands any public figure who declines to wear a Poppy as unpatriotic or proclaimers of a psychological treachery. It is tempting to wonder amid all this hoo-haa whether the Poppy has had its day.
This month the Queen will visit the Royal British Legion Poppy Factory in Richmond to mark the 90th anniversary of the founding of the place which makes around 36 million poppies each year. It was set up in 1922 to provide work for ex-servicemen disabled in the First World War, a generation of men whose survivors have now almost entirely gone peacefully to their graves. Most veterans of the Second World War have followed them.
A few years ago I spent some time with a group of them selling Poppies by a supermarket in a small English town. For them memory was an affirmation of their identity. Remembrance was an activity of sweet sadness in which the past and the present intermingled. “You don’t sell Poppies; people buy them,” one old soldier said to me. “Don’t shake the tin,” said another “it’s bad form”. Their memory is now becoming a second-hand affair and, you might suppose, will inexorably fade away.
New wars – in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan – have changed all that. With new wars have come new forms, like the charity Help for Heroes which was founded only five years ago but which last year raised £46m, almost a third of what the British Legion raises. In place of the Poppy it uses a range of fundraising techniques like its Big Battlefield Bike Ride, Heroes Ball and Twickenham rugby challenge matches. X Factor finalists recorded David Bowie’s Heroes to raise funds for it. And new times have brought new protests, with Poppies being burned in 2010 by a group called Muslims Against Crusades, and a similar group a year later threatening a “Hell for Heroes” protest.
But there is more to it than that. The historian Jay Winter suggests there are at least three stages in the process of remembrance. The first is the construction of a commemorative form, with a set of meanings that contemporaries readily understand. The second is the fixing of this ritual action in the calendar, so it becomes embedded in social identity. Then in the third stage, as the years pass, the ritual loses its original force so that it either fades away or is transformed into something different.
Obama the Mamba – and the lesser of evils
What if they had elected George Hussein Obama instead of his big brother Barack as president of the world’s most powerful nation four years ago? Twenty years in age, and nearly 8,000 miles in geography, separate the two men. They share the same father but have different mothers.
By the accident of birth Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii to his father’s second wife while George was born in Kenya in their father’s fourth marriage. The two sons have only met twice in their lives. One is President of the most powerful nation in the world; the other is dubbed by his neighbours president of one of the world’s most notorious slums, Huruma, in Nairobi. One is the apotheosis of the American dream, the other of the African nightmare.
When George Obama first came into public view in 2008 he was seen, to use his own words, as the “black sheep” of the family. His was a cautionary tale of how things could have gone wrong in his big brother’s life. Their absentee father played virtually no part in the upbringing of either son. Both had stable stepfathers, both did well at school, both experimented with drugs and joined gangs as teenagers. But Barack Obama was soon back on the straight and narrow, where George after his white aid worker stepfather vanished one day – went off the rails. He was thrown out of his smart boarding school, where he played rugby and was a star pupil, for smoking marijuana. He soon began hanging out in changaa dens, drinking spirits illicitly distilled from fermented maize spiked with methanol.
George became estranged from his despairing mother who moved to the United States leaving him behind. He lived rough on the streets of the fast and angry city for 10 years. He became a bad-ass gangster, a one-man crime wave, pick-pocketing and hijacking matatu taxis. He was known as Obama the Mamba – Swahili for crocodile – for his ruthless method of striking first. As one of Nairobi’s most notorious criminals, he indulged in the fantasy that he was a kind of Robin Hood, but in reality he was part of the city’s increasingly vicious circle of injustice.
The Jimmy Savile scandal exposes a flaw in BBC systems which must be addressed
George Entwistle was on a hiding to nothing when he appeared before a Commons select committee yesterday to answer questions on the BBC and how one of its top television stars, Jimmy Savile, had got away with sexually-abusing underage girls for decades. The new Director General of the BBC did not get off to a good start. He appeared under-informed, under-briefed and under-prepared in the face of hostile and aggressive questioning from MPs allowing them to criticise him for a “lamentable lack of knowledge” and “amazing lack of curiosity” in his failure to ask more questions when he was first told that a Newsnight investigation into Savile might scupper plans for BBC Christmas tributes to the late presenter.
But as the questioning proceeded the mild-mannered BBC boss began to be more persuasive. Partly this emerged by contrast to some bombastic grandstanding from the politicians. But partly it was because it became patently clear that Mr Entwistle was not the man to have become embroiled in any kind of cover-up at the BBC. He was firm in his view that the Newsnight investigation should have been allowed to continue to gather further evidence. And he was quietly incisive in removing the Newsnight editor, Peter Rippon, who axed the inquiry with a blog which was neither accurate nor honest, in Entwistle’s words.
The Director General also shrewdly analysed that he was being accused of two contradictory things – exerting undue influence on Newsnight and standing too far back from editorial decisions. What became clear was that he saw his job as overseeing a series of arms-length processes which would ensure editorial independence and allow him to act as the final court of appeal were those processes to fail. Mr Entwistle could have answered many of the questions by repeating that he had set up two separate inquiries which would provide the answers MPs demanded. This would have gone down very badly so he avoided that and took the blows as a result.
The BBC is a massive organisation and the procedures it has developed over the years clearly work well for the overwhelming majority of its output. But they clearly do not cope with cross-departmental emergencies like this. Neither of his two inquiries will address that, but Mr Entwistle needs to. The BBC needs systems to ensure that material from its journalistic inquiries, even if it cannot be published, should inform its wider policy. Newsnight may not have had the evidence demanding editorial standards require but the BBC knew enough to decide to axe the tributes to Savile. Mr Entwistle has been a prisoner of progress. He needs to find a way of breaking free of that when a crisis requires.
The questions the BBC’s new Director General must answer on the Savile scandal
Barely a month into the job the new Director General of the BBC, George Entwistle, finds himself in serious trouble over allegations that one of his flagship news outlets dropped an investigation into allegations of sex abuse by the late Jimmy Savile because the corporation was preparing a major Christmas tribute to the man who was once one of its most popular entertainers.
When the truth emerges it may be of confusion rather than conspiracy in the senior echelons of the BBC. But Mr Entwistle has a number of awkward questions to answer today when he appears before a House of Commons committee. The revelations in last night’s Panorama into the dropped Newsnight investigation has only added to them. So has the decision that Newsnight’s editor, Peter Rippon, “step aside” from his job after embarrassing admissions that his initial explanation for dropping the probe was inaccurate and incomplete.
But the most difficult questions concern the role of Mr Entwistle himself. Why, in his old job as head of television, did he go ahead with broadcasting the Savile tribute after being told that Newsnight were investigating him? What exactly was he told by the Head of News, Helen Boaden, last December? Why did he not ask for more detail about the nature of the investigation? The suggestion that he believed it was not his place to interfere in the work of another BBC department reveal questions about his judgement.
There are other questions. What did Helen Boaden, and her deputy, say to Mr Rippon when he discussed the investigation with them? Why did he so rapidly change his views of the story? Why, if he felt the evidence was insufficient, did he drop the investigation rather then instructing his journalists to search for further corroborative evidence? The BBC exists, above all, on the basis of the trust of its audience, it chairman Lord Patten has said recently. Answers to these questions are essential if trust is to be preserved.
Having said that, it is important that the public focus is not diverted into side-issues about how the Savile affair should have been best reported. After a preliminary analysis of 400 lines of inquiry, involving more than 200 potential victims, Scotland Yard has launched a formal investigation into allegations of crimes by living individuals suspected of being complicit or negligent in situations which allowed the former tv star to abuse children not just on BBC premises but in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Leeds General Infirmary, at Broadmoor and elsewhere within the National Health Service. That is where the iniquity of the Jimmy Savile case must be most closely scrutinised and lessons learned to ensure that the lax culture which permitted such abuse has been rooted out.
Jason Roberts has got it wrong on his Kick It Out racism campaign
This is not the kind of thing a white man should say. But Jason Roberts seems to have got it wrong on racism. The black footballer has called for a boycott of this weekend’s anti-racism Kick It Out protest. He feels it has not been vigorous enough in its response to abuse in the game.
He has a point, sort of. Kick it Out cannot impose punishments on clubs, fine players or do anything much more than voice anti-discrimination platitudes, Roberts insists. Several other black players, including the Wales goalkeeper, Jason Brown, agree.
Their indignation has been fuelled by the monkey chants directed against the England Under-21 full-back Danny Rose in Serbia on Tuesday – not to mention the decision of the European football authorities to fine the Italian club Lazio a paltry £32,500 for the racial abuse recently showered on Tottenham’s black players. The Serbs did the same thing to Jason Brown nine years ago and were fined a pathetic £16,000.
It’s easy to blame foreigners but it is inarguable that Serb football clubs shielded suspected war criminals like Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic or the mass murderer Arkan who actually ran one of Belgrade’s football teams. Serb clubs were, and are, neo-Nazi fronts which supplied paramilitary combatants for the ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s. They still hold up banners gloating about genocide in Srebrenica.
By contrast it is long years since football yobs hurled bananas at black players on the pitch here. The Liverpool player Luis Suarez was banned for eight matches for repeated racist needling last year. The former England captain John Terry has been dragged through courts and disciplinary procedures for an entire year for a racist jibe.
Jason Roberts says that Terry’s apology has come a year too late and that the FA’s four-match ban is too lenient. But Chris Hughton, the only black manager in the Premier League, replies: “Fortunately here in England we have done a lot of good work and have reaped the benefits from it.” David James, the black goalkeeper, capped 53 times for England, says “the organisations which have done so much good on the terraces” now “have an agenda to keep themselves in existence. I struggle with the racist issue in football because as a player I don’t see it. The game’s changed.”
