The Other Prince and the Other Paedophile
They do keep the strangest company, the brothers Battenberg. Andy, his piggie face like thunder, is vainly trying to con us into believing that his lengthy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein
..........................................................................................
Succession of Home Secretaries endanger the public
Back when mr ishmael was in the Criminal Justice trade, the Probation Service was still required, under the Probation of Offenders Act 1907 to "advise, assist, befriend offenders" the rationale being that an offender needed good advice to remedy those deficiencies of home, school and society that had led to him (usually him) getting into trouble, needed some assistance to find a job and a home, and really needed a friend. That was a Probation Service that had evolved from the Police Court Missionaries, staffed by men and women with vocations.
(mr ishmael's drafts: 28/02/15)
His
Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of
Wales, Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter,
Extra Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle,
Grand Master and Principal Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable
Order of the Bath, Member of the Order of Merit, Knight of the Order of
Australia, Companion of the Queen's Service Order, Member of Her
Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, Aide-de-Camp, Earl of Chester,
Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew,
Lord of the Isles, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland; friend,
confidante and admirer of the late Sir James Savile, disc jockey,
charity worker, serial child sexual offender and necrophiliac.
Sir James Wilson Vincent "Jimmy" Savile
OBE, KCSG.
Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of
Saint Gregory the Great; LLD from Leeds University; Fellow of the Royal
College of Radiologists; Cross of Merit of the Order pro merito
Meletensi; green beret from HM Royal Marines; PhD from the University
of Bedfordshire
His Royal Highness The Prince Andrew Albert Christian Edward, Duke
of York, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killyleagh, Knight Companion of the
Most Noble Order of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal
Victorian Order, Canadian Forces Decoration, Aide de Camp to Her Majesty.
His Royal Highness has innumerable medals, honours, colonelcies and
admiralcies, most of them bestowed upon him by his mother, Queen Brenda.
His Royal Highness is friend, confidante and associate of notorious and
hugely wealthy child sexual offender, Mr Jeffrey Epstein, maintaining
their close relationship before, during and after Mr Epstein's
imprisonment on child sexual abuse charges.
They do keep the strangest company, the brothers Battenberg. Andy, his piggie face like thunder, is vainly trying to con us into believing that his lengthy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein
is
not only entirely innocent but actually quite noble whilst his big
brother, JugEars, the wifebeater, manages to evade any scrutiny about
his lengthy, personal relationship with the late Sir James Savile.
His
Royal Highness, Brian, his ponce fag courtiers will pronounce, as
though it were true, gives a great deal of his time to charity and
meets, therefore, many individuals from all walks of life; he simply
cannot be expected to investigate the backgrounds of all of them, shut
up, therefore, don't be impertinent, remember your place and go away.
..........................................................................................
Succession of Home Secretaries endanger the public
Back when mr ishmael was in the Criminal Justice trade, the Probation Service was still required, under the Probation of Offenders Act 1907 to "advise, assist, befriend offenders" the rationale being that an offender needed good advice to remedy those deficiencies of home, school and society that had led to him (usually him) getting into trouble, needed some assistance to find a job and a home, and really needed a friend. That was a Probation Service that had evolved from the Police Court Missionaries, staffed by men and women with vocations.
Then along came mass
unemployment, the collapse of the family, a massive increase in drink and drug dependence, the rise of an acquisitive
society bursting with consumer goods for the few not the many and an
ever-widening gap between those with survival tickets and the rest.
The level of civil unrest was alarming. And so criminal justice policy
was moved away from rehabilitation towards containment, instead of addressing the structural causations of crime. And along came
Michael Howard, Conservative Home Secretary who famously proclaimed, in 1993 that “Prison Works!” and built more prisons.
Michael was followed by a succession of Home Secretaries, all happily using the Probation Service as a vote-generating football. Here's the infamous roll-call - their party political persuasion is included, but it doesn't really matter:
Jack Straw, Labour, 1997 to 2001
David Blunkett, Labour, 2001 to 2004,
Charles Clarke, Labour, 2004 to 2006
John Reid, Labour, 2006 to 2007,
Jacquie Smith, Labour, 2007 to 2009,
Alan Johnson, Labour, 2009 to 2010,
Theresa May, Conservative, 2010 to 2016
Amber Rudd, Conservative, 2016 to 2018,
Savid Javid, Conservative, 2018 to 2019,
Priti Patel, Conservative, 2019 to present.
Eleven Home Secretaries in 26 years, the longest tenure being that of Theresa May, the shortest only a year. But - brilliant people, quickly master the brief and do as they are told. During these 26 years, the Probation Service was abolished and the inception of its successor agency, the National Offender Management Service changed the pattern of correctional services delivery in England and Wales. In turn, it then became Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.
The Offender Management Bill, introduced in Parliament late in 2006, was intended to enable probation areas to become trusts as part of wider government policy to open up the provision of correctional services to greater competition from the voluntary, community, and private sectors. The privatisation of probation services continues to produce “troubling” results. The Chief Inspector of Probation disclosed that probation supervision for one in four low-risk offenders in Gwent is no more than a phone call every six weeks. HM Inspectorate of Probation maintains half of cases have no proper assessment of risk of harm - so describing an offender as low-risk is more of a guess than an assessment. Most risk assessment tools rely heavily on the concept that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour - but as most offences go undetected, the past behaviour of an offender consists of those few offences that are on his record. Junior officers working for Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) sometimes manage over 200 cases each; though at most, 60 can be managed safely.
The probation service in London is understaffed and many probation officers are inexperienced. Probationers are seen too infrequently and some are overlooked. A proper risk assessment is not done in the majority of cases.The Justice Select Committee said the 'Transforming Rehabilitation' programme had brought the probation system into a "mess", staff morale was at an "all-time low" and newly released prisoners got "wholly inadequate" support. The committee said that splitting the service between a national body and 21 rehabilitation companies lead to a two-tier system, reducing voluntary sector involvement. MPs said the companies' efforts to reduce re-offending is "disappointing" and some staff are not trained to deal with cases they are assigned.
Against this shambolic background, Joseph McCann received a fixed term sentence for committing an offence of burglary and was released automatically at the half-way point. He was then seen by probation officers 10 times in the two months following his release in February. That's once a week, short of taking the chap home with his very own probation officer, that's probably as intense as the Probation Service does. The last probation appointment was in April,only days before he carried out the first rape in a series of offences over 15 days against 11 women and children, aged between 11 and 71 in London and the North West; for which he received 33 life sentences with a minimum term of 30 years in December 2019. He was found guilty of 37 charges relating to those victims, including eight rapes, false imprisonment and kidnap.
Chief Inspector of Probation Justin Russell carried out an independent review of the case, published on 30th June 2020. Mr Russell said there were ‘major failings’ in the way the case was handled, adding: ‘McCann was managed by an unstable team, lacking experienced and skilled practitioners. They suffered from poor management oversight, high workloads, poor performance and high staff turnover.’
McCann – who had a long history of “serious offending” and breaching court orders – saw 10 staff over 11 years, with three different probation officers responsible for his case in the months leading up to his prison release in February 2019.
“There were signs that he posed an increasing risk to the public. There was evidence of his potential for sexual offending,” Mr Russell said. Crucial information, recorded on different systems by various authorities, was “lost” in handovers between staff. In 2013 prison officers identified that McCann – “with the collusion of his family – was attempting to find a ‘young girl’ for his release”. But this “key intelligence” was not passed to probation staff, meaning they did “not have a clear picture” of who they were dealing with and were making decisions based on “inadequate” assessments, Mr Russell said.
McCann’s ability to manipulate staff was “underestimated” and the level of threat he posed to the public was downgraded “too soon” after his prison release, the report added.
An internal Ministry of Justice review published in March revealed a catalogue of errors in the case after McCann’s sentencing judge described him as a classic psychopath.
Details of police intelligence from 2003, which said McCann and a relative had been involved in the abuse and sexual exploitation of young teenage girls, was discussed at a meeting attended by the offender manager responsible for his case between 2010 and 2013.
One member of probation staff was demoted over the case.
Among 13 recommendations made to prison and probation services, Mr Russell said staff need better access to all relevant records, including historical case files, urged jails to share information, better scrutiny of recall decisions and more beds at bail hostels where offenders leaving prison are monitored by probation, which is where McCann should have been housed after release instead of with relatives.
The Ministry of Justice said McCann’s crimes were “horrendous” and it had already apologised to victims for the “unacceptable failings”, adding: “We have greatly improved information sharing between prisons and probation officers and all probation staff have received new, mandatory training on when offenders should be recalled and, it added, an extra 800 probation officers are in training.
The system is a mess. Prison doesn't work, unless you lock up offenders for ever. Attempting to drive profit out of "managing" offending behaviour is, frankly, ludicrous. Setting a handful of overworked, inexperienced, ill-prepared probation officers to reverse the effects of generational unemployment, entrenched familial offending, a drink- and drug- steeped culture and an over-aquisitive, over-sexualised society can only have fairly predictable outcomes - more lives wasted - both those of victims and perpetrators. And if society needs a scapegoat for McCann's crimes - other than McCann himself; don't look to blame probation officers, look at the 26 years of Home Secretaries who ripped apart the Probation Service's structure, underpinning legislation, social work ethos, cohesion and identity, driven by an American-derived political and financial model and not by the Scandinavian approach, which actually works - if it's rehabilitation you're after, as opposed to ruined lives and sensationalist headlines.
.............................................................................
Someone else who's probably sorry. But quite cross.
Eleven Home Secretaries in 26 years, the longest tenure being that of Theresa May, the shortest only a year. But - brilliant people, quickly master the brief and do as they are told. During these 26 years, the Probation Service was abolished and the inception of its successor agency, the National Offender Management Service changed the pattern of correctional services delivery in England and Wales. In turn, it then became Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.
The Offender Management Bill, introduced in Parliament late in 2006, was intended to enable probation areas to become trusts as part of wider government policy to open up the provision of correctional services to greater competition from the voluntary, community, and private sectors. The privatisation of probation services continues to produce “troubling” results. The Chief Inspector of Probation disclosed that probation supervision for one in four low-risk offenders in Gwent is no more than a phone call every six weeks. HM Inspectorate of Probation maintains half of cases have no proper assessment of risk of harm - so describing an offender as low-risk is more of a guess than an assessment. Most risk assessment tools rely heavily on the concept that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour - but as most offences go undetected, the past behaviour of an offender consists of those few offences that are on his record. Junior officers working for Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) sometimes manage over 200 cases each; though at most, 60 can be managed safely.
The probation service in London is understaffed and many probation officers are inexperienced. Probationers are seen too infrequently and some are overlooked. A proper risk assessment is not done in the majority of cases.The Justice Select Committee said the 'Transforming Rehabilitation' programme had brought the probation system into a "mess", staff morale was at an "all-time low" and newly released prisoners got "wholly inadequate" support. The committee said that splitting the service between a national body and 21 rehabilitation companies lead to a two-tier system, reducing voluntary sector involvement. MPs said the companies' efforts to reduce re-offending is "disappointing" and some staff are not trained to deal with cases they are assigned.
Against this shambolic background, Joseph McCann received a fixed term sentence for committing an offence of burglary and was released automatically at the half-way point. He was then seen by probation officers 10 times in the two months following his release in February. That's once a week, short of taking the chap home with his very own probation officer, that's probably as intense as the Probation Service does. The last probation appointment was in April,only days before he carried out the first rape in a series of offences over 15 days against 11 women and children, aged between 11 and 71 in London and the North West; for which he received 33 life sentences with a minimum term of 30 years in December 2019. He was found guilty of 37 charges relating to those victims, including eight rapes, false imprisonment and kidnap.
Chief Inspector of Probation Justin Russell carried out an independent review of the case, published on 30th June 2020. Mr Russell said there were ‘major failings’ in the way the case was handled, adding: ‘McCann was managed by an unstable team, lacking experienced and skilled practitioners. They suffered from poor management oversight, high workloads, poor performance and high staff turnover.’
McCann – who had a long history of “serious offending” and breaching court orders – saw 10 staff over 11 years, with three different probation officers responsible for his case in the months leading up to his prison release in February 2019.
“There were signs that he posed an increasing risk to the public. There was evidence of his potential for sexual offending,” Mr Russell said. Crucial information, recorded on different systems by various authorities, was “lost” in handovers between staff. In 2013 prison officers identified that McCann – “with the collusion of his family – was attempting to find a ‘young girl’ for his release”. But this “key intelligence” was not passed to probation staff, meaning they did “not have a clear picture” of who they were dealing with and were making decisions based on “inadequate” assessments, Mr Russell said.
McCann’s ability to manipulate staff was “underestimated” and the level of threat he posed to the public was downgraded “too soon” after his prison release, the report added.
An internal Ministry of Justice review published in March revealed a catalogue of errors in the case after McCann’s sentencing judge described him as a classic psychopath.
Details of police intelligence from 2003, which said McCann and a relative had been involved in the abuse and sexual exploitation of young teenage girls, was discussed at a meeting attended by the offender manager responsible for his case between 2010 and 2013.
One member of probation staff was demoted over the case.
Among 13 recommendations made to prison and probation services, Mr Russell said staff need better access to all relevant records, including historical case files, urged jails to share information, better scrutiny of recall decisions and more beds at bail hostels where offenders leaving prison are monitored by probation, which is where McCann should have been housed after release instead of with relatives.
The Ministry of Justice said McCann’s crimes were “horrendous” and it had already apologised to victims for the “unacceptable failings”, adding: “We have greatly improved information sharing between prisons and probation officers and all probation staff have received new, mandatory training on when offenders should be recalled and, it added, an extra 800 probation officers are in training.
The system is a mess. Prison doesn't work, unless you lock up offenders for ever. Attempting to drive profit out of "managing" offending behaviour is, frankly, ludicrous. Setting a handful of overworked, inexperienced, ill-prepared probation officers to reverse the effects of generational unemployment, entrenched familial offending, a drink- and drug- steeped culture and an over-aquisitive, over-sexualised society can only have fairly predictable outcomes - more lives wasted - both those of victims and perpetrators. And if society needs a scapegoat for McCann's crimes - other than McCann himself; don't look to blame probation officers, look at the 26 years of Home Secretaries who ripped apart the Probation Service's structure, underpinning legislation, social work ethos, cohesion and identity, driven by an American-derived political and financial model and not by the Scandinavian approach, which actually works - if it's rehabilitation you're after, as opposed to ruined lives and sensationalist headlines.
.............................................................................
Someone else who's probably sorry. But quite cross.
Those remarks: ‘Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived and again there’s no point in arguing against globalisation or Western civilisation. They are all products of it, we are all products of it." were uttered during an
online interview with Brexit campaigner Darren Grimes for YouTube channel Reasoned UK.
Dr Starkey is now effectively out of a job; out of several jobs in fact. Probably out of even more jobs now than he had held when I started writing this. He's probably not going to have too many more opportunities of being nasty to fellow-panellists on various PBC and Channel 4 punditry platforms.
Vice-chancellor of Canterbury Christ Church University Professor Rama has apologised to staff and students at the university in Kent who have been offended and upset by the ‘appalling’ comments.
He said: ‘Widely reported comments by historian David Starkey during a recent online interview are, in our view, completely unacceptable and do not reflect the values of our university and community. We have therefore terminated, with immediate effect, Dr Starkey’s visiting professorship.....I would like to say sorry to colleagues and students who will have been offended and upset by such comments of this appalling nature, and in particular in these challenging and difficult times for us all.’
Pressure was growing for him to have his fellowship at the University of Cambridge removed but instead it has accepted his resignation.
The 75-year-old academic has also resigned from the Mary Rose Trust.
Dr. Starkey could be stripped of his honorary degree by Lancaster University
Publisher Harper Collins tweeted: "The views expressed by David Starkey in his recent interview are abhorrent and we unreservedly condemn them. Our last book with the author was in 2010, and we will not be publishing further books with him. We are reviewing his existing backlist in light of his comments and views."
I think he was trying to be clever, in his usual, I'm cleverer than you are, way. Far cleverer. He was letting us stupid folk know that the word genocide is a hybrid combination of the Greek word γένος (genos, "race, people") and the Latin suffix -caedo ("act of killing") and that the failure to emiminate all black people proves that there was no genocide. All he succeeded in doing was proving that although he may understand the word's derivation, he has no conception at all of the word's meaning. And he really, really, shouldn't have used the qualifier, Damn. He probably Damn-well realises that now. Damn.
mr ishmael had his number, alright, back in 2009:
It is only among such a morally and culturally bankrupt political-showbiz elite that the odious David Starkey, an indifferent history lecturer, could have so ascended from complete anonymity to being acclaimed keeper of his own personal professorial sewer. Like hereditary broadcaster Jon Socks, tough guy Dave is now on a lifetime stipend from the taxpayer-funded Channel Four, one of that channel's modest and self-effacing clever people. Starkey's bitch-history, his over-rehearsed, mean-mouthed whining, consign scholarship and objectivity to, well, history, and promote instead his own told-you-so spite and ugliness, his apparently endless monarchical theses voice his nasty, bitter, little view that too many historians have been what he insists on calling straight, when he means normal, that there is a whole camp-but-true tapestry of history, expertly-stitched by bum-bandits like himself, bloodied and martyred, suppressed by nasty Christian bullies, locked away in the censors' closet; that all great historical figures were really gay, just like him, the horrible little worm. Starkey's sodomite revisionism might be entertaining were it not for his over-dressed aping of stereotypical tee-vee presenters, his scowling pieces to camera, his arch cutaways, his leaden, cack-handed metaphors; his insistence that we take seriously not only the charmless, nasty little faggot himself but also his threadbare, misanthropic queen-bitching disguised as history.
Quicker to judge and damn and bully than a Presbyterian, Starkey peddles his bilious tripe to any who will pay him - normally us - and the wretchedness of Starkeyism, it's significance for the times is not his lame, anal anti-scholarship but that his trademark vileness was nurtured and promoted by the BBC. Radio Four's Moral Maze has lit our lives with a galaxy of mouthy, bad-tempered, bullying nonentities - Mad Melanie Phillips, anybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi; the Marxist fishwife, Clare Fox, of the bizarrely titled Institute of Ideas and the born-again Murdochite, Portillo himself, Mr Angry turned Mr Nice - all eager to condemn the lack of logic, as they see it, in the spoutings of some serve-them-right-for-going-on-the-programme vegetarian or would-be suicidee or flat-earther or homeopath or religious maniac; all, but Mad Mel especially, anxious to play a brutish, graceless, Rumpole, showing-off to the radio audience of teachers and probation officers and embittered blind people; all remorselessly self-promoting their media careers at the expense of some poor sap who believes in something other than Israel, Money, Abortion and New-Age Marxism. As though anybody in their right mind would give a flying fuck for the Daily Mail-funded thoughts of the ghastly Phillips. Grim and forbidding as these grotesques are, their rottenness - and indeed their media stature - is eclipsed by their former fellow-freak, Starkey. It was Radio Four which, instead of throwing him off, promoted Starkey's nastiness, raised him to a septic media grandeur, made vital to our national discourse Starkey's witless bullying; it's not as though he could even claim to be a licensed fool like the Beeb's other catspaw, Hislop; though a risible figure in his blazers and suits and costume jewellery, Starkey never even attempts humour, much less satire; no, cruelty, as is now the case elsewhere in the Beeb, is Starkey's ouevre. Between he and the ghastly baggage, former Maxwell bint, Robinson, and the screeching gay cook, Ramsay, and the arse-fixated Jonathan Ross we have tee-vee role models from Hell. Add the shameless, hypocritical kleptomania of the heir to the throne, of both houses of parliament; the out of control violence of the Cops and the unaccountable ruinous greed of City spivs is it really any wonder that drunken infants knife each other in the playground? Starkey, for all his hauteur, is a grubby little bastard, part of an axis of degeneracy, an historically bad example.
Starkey's latest wheeze was to denigrate, on Question Time, Hibernian bombast. Alex Salmond's deranged Jock-Nazi Tribesmen richly merit mockery, their construction of a mythical, fifty-five million strong, predatory Untermenschen just South of a fanciful border is their raison d'etre, "if only it werenae fer they English bastards we wouldnae be a nation a drunken, wife-beatin', cross-dressin' heidbangers whose main export - although we tend tae drink most of it at hame, the noo, an' we're European Champion Alkies, so we are - is poison, d'ye ken" is Salmond's tub-thumping mantra, and it earns him three salaries and three pensions, God bless the wee fat fucker; Burns is melancholy doggerel, English kids in Scotland are routinely bullied by their native peers, encouraged by sourfaced, embittered, inebriated, cross-dressing, patriotic parents; the Presbyterian highland and island strongholds are rife with child abuse; council corruption is breathtaking, far from scrutiny, their elites in Education, Health, Social Work and the like do just as they please. The Jock press is patronising and parochial and bent and rightly going down the toilet. Starkey's QT remarks, made stagily, self-aggrandisingly, as if by some applause-hungry pantomime dame, in themselves, therefore, are not controversial. Nor, to stanislavians, original.
It's just him. Starkey could read you the Sermon on the Mount and you'd want to go and jump in the shower afterwards; he could whistle Greensleeves and your ears would bleed, he could press large amounts of currency into your hands and they would break out in eczema. Starkey is dirty.
BBC millionaires Stephen Fry and Graham Norton cannot be on air for twenty seconds without mentioning sperm or buggery or both; it may be the temper of the times, it may be a liberation of the language, Lenny Bruce's crusade to take the sting from words like nigger by using them so much that they lose their venom, it may just be that those two queens, the one convinced that he's Oscar Wilde, the other that he's the main attraction at a sailors' gangbang, just love talking dirty on the tee-vee; Starkey, though, humourless and bitter doesn't even do this, Starkey is emblematic of the once mediocre - relishing their ability to bully the powerless; it is a sign of our time that Media makes us celebrate such malignance as Starkey, when we should, in fact, throw stones at him in the street.
Could be quite amusing at times, though
mr ishmaels's essays:
The Other Prince and the Other Paedophile drafted : 28/02/15
Nasty Little Faggot (extract) posted : 25/04/09
Nasty Little Faggot (extract) posted : 25/04/09
