Prisons – Behind The Facade – Service Shenanigans

The Poisonous Tentacles Of The Home Office

The Observer Online is reporting that ‘outreach workers’ for homelessness charities in London have unwittingly gathered information which has been used to deport some of the people whom they aspired to help. Charity workers were told to collect sensitive data on rough sleepers – including their nationality, gender and factors concerning their mental health – which was then stored on a database by the GLA (Greater London Authority). An FoI request has now confirmed that the GLA passed the data to senior immigration officials in the Home Office who used it to track down rough sleepers from the EU and central eastern Europe and then deported them under guidelines introduced by the Home Office in May 2016. The charity St Mungos has said that they were told that the database was established to ‘identify emerging needs’.

This whole saga reminds me of the conversations that I used to have with a friend of mine at Bangor University who is a Jewish scholar. As the University HR Dept sent around increasingly intrusive ‘monitoring forms’ for no good reason requesting info about people’s gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and disabilities, I expressed concern to my friend that such information was being collected, particularly as the then Director of HR, Lyn Meadows, was a poisonous cow who was known to be accessing personal data relating to staff to use against them. (Meadows was also breaking confidentiality and sharing information with third parties.) My friend observed that people of Jewish heritage are always very sensitive about providing data relating to their religion/ethnicity because of course this sort of data had been used by the Nazis to target Jewish people. I tried to refuse to provide such data at one point and a senior colleague told me that if I did refuse to provide it, Meadows would undoubtedly then try to target me for refusing to adhere to University policies. So that is how Lyn Meadows was able to ask staff if they were gay or transgender or had sensitive health problems and they were forced to co-operate with this gross invasion of privacy!

So now The Observer has told a cautionary tale with regard to ‘monitoring’. The Director of Liberty, Martha Spurrier, has commented that the Home Office’s conduct is reflective of a ‘crisis of compassion’ within the UK political system and a consequence of the hostile environment for illegal immigrants created by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. Martha asks ‘who knows where else the Home Office’s poisonous tentacles have reached’?

This is all very timely because I’ve been reading about the workings of the Home Office recently. I’ve been working my way through Ken Clarke’s autobiography – it’s a real treasure trove and I’ll be blogging about it in detail soon – and he details his time as Minister of Justice in the Coalition Gov’t. Ken describes his battles with what he felt was a very illiberal culture in the Home Office, a culture which was obsessed with being seen to be tough on immigration and on crime, even if the policies didn’t work or backfired. He of course had previously been Home Secretary under John Major and had been replaced by Michael Howard, who was rather more on message where law n order was concerned. However it was when Ken was Justice Minister that he described a battle with the machinery of the Home Office which seemed to try to obstruct him on matters if he was too liberal. The Permanent Secretary whilst Ken Clarke was Minister for Justice was a Sir Suma Chakrabarti and he was responsible for running the Crown Office under the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (that’s a dual role). During Suma’s tenure that was Lord Charlie Falconer, then Jack Straw and then Ken Clarke. Sir Suma left the Home Office in 2012 to become President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, but he’d been Permanent Secretary at the Ministry for Justice since Nov 2007. So one presumes that Sir Suma was substantially contributing to that illiberal culture, if not leading it. Theresa May was Home Secretary between May 2010-July 2016. Suma overlapped with Theresa then – and Theresa’s one preoccupation when she entered the Home Office was immigration. In terms of timescales, it may be assumed that the wheeze to collect nationality data on rough sleepers and then use it to deport them after changing the rules in order to allow this must have been dreamt up some time ago – no doubt on Theresa’s watch. Perhaps Suma had something to do with it as well.

Readers will have noticed Suma’s surname – Chakrabarti. There is of course another Chakrabarti who used to work for the Home Office – Shami! Between 2003-2016 Shami was Director of Liberty. During her time there Shami campaigned against ‘excessive’ anti-terrorist legislation. Shami started her career as a lawyer though – and after graduating, in 1996 she secured a position as a barrister in the Home Office. That was the Home Office under the Tories – when Michael ‘prison works’ Howard was Home Secretary! Now he won’t have been at all liberal – so I don’t think that young Shami will have been working on some very fine causes whilst she was a barrister in the Home Office. The Tories were voted out in 1997 and Jack Straw became Home Secretary. Jack was no liberal once he got into office either which is why so many people who had voted Labour were so disappointed. Shami didn’t begin working for Liberty until 2001, when she joined them as in house counsel. Has anyone spotted what I have? What major public inquiry took place between 1996 and 2000 which concerned the Welsh Office – and the Home Office? The Waterhouse Inquiry! The high level cover-up into the abuse of children in north Wales and the associated paedophile ring. Shami will have known all about it. The Home Office were very much involved because of the collusion of the North Wales Police with the abuse – and of course some of the kids in care had ended up in prison or in Risley Remand Centre, institutions which were the responsibility of the Home Office. Bryn Estyn, the home where some of the most serious abuse occurred, was formerly run directly by the Home Office. Of the staff from Bryn Estyn who went to prison for child sexual abuse, a number had been employed there when it was still run by the Home Office. I always wondered why Liberty didn’t take up the cause of patients in the mental health system who had been abused whilst they were kids in care. Although poor old Liberty’s track record on child abuse isn’t too hot – in the days when it called itself NCCL it was affiliated to PIE. When that hit the media a few years ago Shami lost no time in telling everyone what a shameful part of the NCCL’s history that was and that the organisation had been ‘infiltrated’ by paedophiles. They didn’t need to ‘infiltrate’ Shami – Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey, Patricia Hewitt, Henry Hodge et al were so dim that they let them in. They’ve got the excuse that they were fools playing identity politics – what’s your excuse for your stint in the Home Office whilst the Waterhouse whitewash was happening? We keep being told what a fine legal mind you’ve got and how committed to justice you are – you didn’t consider offering your services to the victims of the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal free of charge then? Not that anyone else did either – although loads of radical lawyers provided such a service to the NUM during the Miners’ Strike…

I do keep wondering – Suma and Shami. Are they by any chance related? Suma was born in 1959 in Bengal but he went to school in London. Shami was born in 1969 ‘to Bengali parents’ and grew up and went to school in London. Could Suma possibly be Big Brother?

Suma joined the Civil Service in 1984. He initially worked for the Dept that was the predecessor to DfID (Dept of International Development). Then he was seconded to the World Bank. He was then Private Secretary to Lynda Chalker (Cons), Minister of State for Overseas Development (Foreign Office). Suma was head of AID Policy and Resources. In 1996 – when Shami joined the Home Office! – Suma worked in the Treasury. It was the Treasury who, in 1995, paid Mary Wynch a pittance and told her to piss off and not bother them again. Mary had been ruined as a result of misconduct by the Home Office, among others. (See post ‘The Mary Wynch Case – Details’). After that, Suma held a Cabinet Office post with responsibility for creating the new Performance and Innovation Unit to support Blair. He then headed the Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat and had a foot in the Dept of Transport, Local Gov’t and Regions. In 2001 it was back to DfID again, where Suma was Director-General for the Regional Development Programmes. He oversaw 1200 staff in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. Readers may be aware that there have been long standing allegations of corruption at DfID. In Dec 2009 Suma gave evidence at the Iraq Inquiry.

What about Shami’s progress after she joined Liberty? She certainly hit the big time and was feted by the liberal media and the BBC who really loved her. She entertained the nation with accounts of her existence as a diligent schoolgirl from an ethnic minority who had a burning ambition to become a lawyer to seek justice on behalf of the oppressed. She does not explain how a few years working in a corrupt Home Office which had spent years concealing a paedophile gang who murdered some of the witnesses to their activities fitted in to that plan.

Shami’s mask has slipped on occasions though. She is an Alumnus of the LSE and they were so proud of her that they gave her a place on their governing body. She was on there when the LSE received a donation of £1.5 million from Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saef. Shami’s excuse was that she didn’t attend the Council meeting in 2009 when the donation was approved. I did not ever hear her make any public comment about the PhD that the LSE awarded to Saef though – it was alleged to have been written by someone else, I think a member of staff at LSE. Shami was a keen supporter of the lawyer Phil Shiner who was struck off in 2016 for misconduct after he made false allegations of abuse against British troops. After the publication of her book ‘On Liberty’, Shami was sued for libel by Martin Hemming, the former legal advisor to the Ministry of Defence. Shami also famously headed the Inquiry that Jeremy Corbyn set up to investigate the allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Shami joined the Labour Party herself at about the same time! Her report concluded that anti-Semitism or Islamophobia weren’t issues in her party. Two months after her report was produced, Jeremy Corbyn put her name forward for a peerage! The Vice-President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews described the situation as a ‘whitewash for peerages scandal’. But Lady Chakrabarti knew all about whitewashes by then – she’d learned at the knee of the best, the Home Office. In Oct 2016 Lady C was appointed Shadow Attorney-General.

As someone with principles, Shami has always made it clear that she opposes grammar schools because she believes that they result in social division and segregation. Shami of course didn’t think of sending her own son to a grammar school. He attends Dulwich College, one of the most exclusive public schools in the UK. I understand that he’s slumming it at Dulwich College after he failed to get into Eton.

Shami lives in Lambeth. Of course.

It’s The Sun Wot Won It

Readers of my vintage will recognise the title of this blog post – it was the headline that The Sun ran on 11 April 1992 as they crowed about their role in the unexpected Conservative victory at the General Election. The Tories had not expected to win, Norman Lamont’s handling of the economy was not proving very successful and they were expecting a thrashing at the polls. In the days leading up to the election, the right wing press had metamorphosed into vehicles of abuse against Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party, culminating in the The Sun’s notorious front page on the day of the election which screamed ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?’

I’ve been reminded of that particular hate campaign because I’m currently reading Gyles Brandreth’s autobiography ‘Breaking The Code’ in which Brandreth details his selection as Tory candidate for Chester, his subsequent election as MP for Chester and his ‘political career’ – Brandreth and his chums spent much time chortling smugly as the UK media hurled abuse and not infrequently downright lies at the Labour Party. Interestingly enough though, even Brandreth didn’t expect a Tory victory.

In my post ‘I Want Serious Money Now Please’ I detailed the reasons which caused me to believe that Brandreth must have known that his predecessor as Conservative MP for Chester, Sir Peter Morrison, was molesting under-aged boys and why I thought that Brandreth must also have known about the allegations of a paedophile ring operating in north Wales and Cheshire. Morrison was of course known to be visiting children’s homes in north Wales and one person made a statement alleging that Morrison had raped him when he was 14, at the infamous Elm Guest House near Barnes Common, just around the corner from Gyles’s home. Boys from north Wales were known to have been trafficked to the Elm Guest House and to locations in Chester.

Gyles’s book, which is based on his diaries, begins the account in 1990 when he decides to embark on a political career. In between the constant name-dropping of members of the Royal Family and folk from showbiz and boasting about his performances as characters such as Baron Hardup in panto, Gyles describes how he ingratiates himself to leading lights in the Conservative Party and pretty much randomly sets his eyes on a few potential seats, one being Chester. As in the case of his Oxford Union contemporary Ann Widdecombe (see post ‘Doris Karloff – Honest About Her Expenses But Not Much Else’), Gyles knows nothing about the constituencies that he aspires to represent and just like Ann gains his knowledge from visiting the local public library just before meeting the selection panel. Gyles describes his visit to Chester library and how he soon understood the constituency, but he notes whilst leafing through copies of the local papers that the sitting MP Sir Peter Morrison – who is standing down at the next election, hence the vacancy – is never mentioned. However Gyles has looked up Peter Morrison as well and he likes what he discovers – an impeccable profile: Eton, Oxford, White’s, Pratt’s, the son of Lord Margdale, a brother who’s an MP and a sister who is Woman of the Bedchamber to the Queen no less! Gyles can’t wait to meet him – he soon does, he goes to visit Morrison at Morrison’s house, 81 Cambridge Street, London SW1. Gyles is truly bowled over – not because Morrison is charming or witty or engaging, but because Morrison is really posh. When Gyles gets to meet the members of the City of Chester Conservative Association he finds that a lot of them are really wowed by the very poshness of Morrison too – they’re particularly impressed because Morrison has pictures of himself at Eton in his bog. There’s another reason why Gyles is starry eyed about Morrison – Morrison is PPS to Thatcher (Morrison occupied this role between 1990-92) and Gyles suspects that Morrison might even share an office with Thatcher! Gyles is one of those Tories who just loved her and would do anything to touch the hem of her cloak…

When he begins hobnobbing with the City of Chester Conservative Association, Gyles meets someone even more worth knowing than a Sir who’s sister’s vocation in life is toadying to HM the Queen. Gyles discovers that the Duke of Westminster is President of the Association! He’s so posh that the rest of the Association have to call him ‘Your Grace’. Gyles also knows that the Duke of Westminster is one of the richest men in the UK and is a close friend of the Royal Family. Unfortunately though Gyles oversteps the mark when he finds himself in the presence of the Duke and calls him ‘Gerald’ rather than ‘Your Grace’. It’s a black mark, but thanks to several hours of intensive toadying by Gyles’s wife Michele (the lady who wants Serious Money, as described in a previous post) who remembers to grovel in the right manner, the black mark against Gyles is forgiven. There is another budding Conservative candidate up against Gyles, a Jacqui Lait, who it is mentioned has been beavering away for the Tories for years and who Gyles and his wife have to admit is very good. In fact she’s so good that she even knows Things About Europe and Michele is sure that Jacqui will be selected. Another budding candidate, described as ‘Peter Morrison’s man’, is mentioned but not expanded upon – it is merely observed that he doesn’t seem to have a spouse. Amazingly enough though poor old Jacqui is blown out and the Association selects Gyles! I cannot help but wonder whether this might have something to do with Gyles having previously spent many months toadying to HRH the Duke of Edinburgh – Gyles was busy raising many thousands of pounds for the Royal Family in the guise of charity work – and of course all those letters that he’d written to senior figures in the Tories that he’d got to know from his time at Oxford or in showbiz. Gyles certainly gets around – parties at Jeffrey Archer’s, (parties at Robert Maxwell’s as well, Gyles isn’t fussy) and endless social engagements where he rubs noses with Royals. Well what does working your arse off for the Conservatives for years mean in comparison to Gyles’s ruthless networking? Jacqui Lait must have felt like voting Labour after that.

Once Gyles was selected did he relocate to Chester and get to know the constituency? Not exactly. He went straight ‘home’ to London, noting how much he’d missed it having to spend so much time in Chester telling everyone there how committed he was to them. People kept asking him difficult questions about whether he would be living in the constituency and sending his children to local schools. Poor old Gyles had to explain that although of course he would be living in the constituency, his children would remain at school in London. Gyles’s idea of ‘living in the constituency’ was actually to rent a very expensive house there whilst he pissed off around the rest of the UK appearing in panto or dining with influential Conservatives. He spent a lot of time in the early months of 1991 schmoozing with Peter Morrison as well as of course with the Royals. Gyles hobnobbed with David Hunt the Secretary of State for Wales, the Deputy Chief Whip Alistair Goodlad, Neil and Christine Hamilton – he really likes them, they’re as much fun as Peter Morrison! -Chris and Lavender Patten (Gyles didn’t know them, but a mate of his introduced him which was essential what with Patten being Chair of the Conservative Party) and numerous others.

Gyles ensures that his family are seen around Chester as well – although Michele hates the place and bellyaches about all the travelling between there and London as well as the cost of that travelling and of course his kids are still at school in London. The public schools of Chester might not have been good enough for Brandreth’s kids, but in June 1991 he does manage to tempt his daughter up to the Chester Regatta and Flower Show, where he makes sure that she ends up in all the photos. Gyles observes that it’s known that the Labour candidate – a dreadful little oik who Gyles can’t stand – is having marital problems, so there won’t be too many happy family snaps taken during his campaign.

In July Gyles is in serious need of a break, all the toadying and wining and dining having really taken it out of him, not to mention the bother of having to go to Chester on a regular basis although of course he does live in the constituency, so Gyles and Michele pop off to Venice! He has a lovely time and begins to plan his career as a Cabinet Minister and summarises by observing ‘Ain’t life grand!’.

In September, Gyles attends ‘a gala event in the Association’s calender’, Peter Morrison’s Annual Pimms Party. Gyles notes that the party workers fall into two camps – a group who believe that Morrison is past his sell-by date, has let himself go, is out of touch, gives out all the wrong signals and believe that he’s ‘let the seat slide’ and another group who ‘love the grandeur of the man’ and of course who also love the pictures of him at Eton in the bog. Also in September, Gyles watches the Granada drama ‘Thatcher: The Final Days’. Gyles is appalled at the ‘demonisation’ of Peter Morrison in this drama – Peter was blamed for Thatcher losing the leadership to John Major. Gyles observes that ‘in the papers the knives are out for him’, ‘this helps explain why he’s getting out’ and ‘it may explain the drinking’. However Gyles notes that ‘the programme didn’t portray him as either a lush or an old queen, though we can see he’s the one and we assume he’s the other’. Gyles remembers that it was a Jeremy Hanley who at the time of Morrison’s appointment as Thatcher’s PPS quipped that she’d ‘got herself an aide who knows how to carry a handbag’.

So there was a lot of ribaldry about Morrison’s homosexuality then. But just read what Gyles says next: ‘at Sunday’s do at Peter’s place one or two were whispering behind their hands about his alleged sexual preferences – but I don’t think they know that Michele and I have been told several times on the doorstep – in no uncertain terms – that the MP is a ‘disgusting pervert’ who is ‘into little boys’.

They couldn’t have made it much clearer Gyles.

Gyles is undeterred! In Oct 1991 he joins Peter Morrison at the NFU meeting and then Gyles busies himself preparing his speech for the Tory Party Conference. He’s impressed to find that the Conference is so stage-managed that Gyles actually describes it as ‘rigged’. Gyles’s own speech is on the subject of the Citizen’s Charter! Of course – being one as dedicated to the welfare of the citizens as Gyles is. Gyles is bowled over by the guest of honour at the Conference – it’s a man called William Hague, PPS to Norman Lamont, the Norman who at that time was screwing the economy. After the excitement of the Conference – Michele was so wowed by Thatcher that she had ‘tears in her eyes’ as Thatcher swept the stage -it was entertaining Judy Hurd, wife of Douglas the then Foreign Secretary, who was the guest of honour at Chester racecourse charity lunch. Then it was the State Opening of Parliament – to which Gyles had been invited by the Duke of Edinburgh! November 1991 also saw the death of Robert Maxwell. Gyles reminisces about going to parties at Maxwell’s house and admits that Maxwell was a ‘monster and a crook’. Gyles and Michele’s company did a lot of work for Maxwell nonetheless.

By Dec 1991 Michele is so pissed off with Chester and the boring tedious oiks to whom she constantly has to be civil that she berates Gyles for ever applying for the candidacy there. She had wanted him to wait for a suitable seat in London to come up, but tells him that he was just determined to become the candidate for Chester: ‘you’d have walked over your dying granny to get it. I know you.’ Gyles observes in response ‘She does’.

One presumes that Gyles’s granny didn’t actually die during the process of him pursuing his goal of becoming the Conservative MP for Chester. However quite a few other people died during that time who were not a million miles away from Chester. They were the victims of the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal. There had been premature deaths of those children for years, but things really started hotting up in 1991, the year that Gyles began to bust a gut in order to take over the seat of a man who was, he knew, a child molester. Let’s just look at a few things that happened in 1991 and a few of the events in the years before, which led to all the action in 1991.

In 1987 Alison Taylor, a social worker for Gwynedd Social Services, blew the whistle on serious child abuse in north Wales. Alison was dismissed after doing this. She refused to keep quiet however. She met with Councillors, representatives of the North Wales Police Authority and police officers themselves. In Jan 1987 she wrote to Margaret Thatcher the PM and described abuse that she had witnessed.

Something else happened in 1987 as well which involved the two of the people whom Brandreth found such good fun and whose company he cultivated in 1991, namely Peter Morrison and Neil Hamilton. In 1987 it was alleged that Morrison had joined a group of MPs including Michael Grylls, Neil Hamilton and Michael Brown, who took money from Ian Greer on behalf of third party clients. In the Cash for Questions Inquiry which was later held, Ian Greer Associates admitted that Morrison received payments after Morrison ceased to be an MP. Hansard quotes Greer as stating that he made two commission payments, perhaps three, ‘for client referrals’ to Morrison between 1993-94.

In Feb 1988 Alison Taylor wrote to Tony Newton, the Health Minister regarding the child abuse happening in north Wales.

In July 1991 a letter was sent to the Chief Constable of North Wales Police informing him that there were concerns being expressed that a paedophile ring was operating in north Wales. In August 1991 a police investigation began into the abuse of children in care in Clwyd. In Sept 1991 HTV broadcast a film about Alison Taylor’s allegations regarding abuse in the children’s homes in Gwynedd – the home manager featured in the film, Nefyn Dodd, was trafficking the children to Dolphin Square in London to a Tory lobbyist and speechwriter of Thatcher’s who had an apartment there, although this wasn’t revealed in the film. In Dec 1991 the Independent on Sunday published an article about child abuse in north Wales. In Dec 1991 the North Wales Police expanded their investigation to include abuse in children’s homes in Gwynedd.

Throughout the late 80s/early 90s there were a steady stream of young people who had grown up in care in north Wales found dead. There were also a number of convictions for abuse against child care workers in north Wales. A number of people were tried at Court in Chester. Gyles was not unaware of the existence of the British judicial system. On one of his many jollies, in Sept 1991 Gyles went to lunch at the Old Bailey ‘as a guest of the Sheriff’. Gyles accidentally walked into a Court in session and was very impressed with the barrister at work. He asked a Clerk who the barrister was and was told that it was Michael Mansfield who ‘looks after the IRA and that sort’. Sadly Mr Mansfield – nor any of his radical lawyer colleagues – looked after the people who were being abused by the social services and mental health services in north Wales. Whilst some of them were being molested by Peter Morrison.

Like Gyles I can remember 1991 very clearly, although I wasn’t keeping a diary. I remember it well because whilst Gyles and Michele were grovelling to the Duke of Westminster and being impressed by Peter Morrison in early 1991, I was hounded out of a job at St George’s Hospital Medical School after the network of the Top Doctors who were concealing the paedophile ring that Morrison was involved with stalked me (see posts ‘St George’s Hospital Medical School, 1989/1990’ and ‘A Network Stretching To London?’). There were also a number of attempts by the Top Doctors in north Wales to have me imprisoned for serious offences after they perjured themselves and to have me declared dangerous and banged up without trial (see posts ‘The Night Of The (Dr Chris) Hunter’ and ‘The Sordid Role Of Sir Robert Francis QC’). Top Doctors at St George’s Hospital Medical School and Springfield Hospital colluded with this, although they knew about the criminal activity and sexual abuse of patients by their colleagues in north Wales (see post ‘Some Very Eminent Psychiatrists From London…’).

Ain’t life grand!

In 1992, as it became clear that there would be an election before long, Gyles began an endless round of photo-opportunities with VIPs. He was well aware that a lot of people in the country were not faring very well because he kept meeting them, even in a place like Chester. It all became a bit of a pain in the bum for Gyles and Michele as they were obliged to meet the small potatoes who bored them and held meetings in dull little halls instead of the splendour of the Grosvenor Hotel and sometimes Gyles and Michele even found themselves wasting their time with people who weren’t going to vote Conservative.

There were high spots however – staying at Neil and Christine’s grand place in Nether Alderly (‘Mrs T is their goddess’) where Neil told Gyles that he expected to be a Minister soon because the ‘Whip’s Office look after their own, that’s their job’; drinks with Lord Waddington when he visited Chester; a visit from Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd who was told by Central Office that he could spend ‘forty-five minutes in Chester’; another visit from David Hunt the Secretary of State for Wales (who was of course at that time sitting in the Welsh Office along with the crooked lawyer Andrew Park and the corrupt Medical Ombudsman Professor Robert Owen concealing the barrel of shit in north Wales); Gyles dined with Shirley Porter (best remembered for her gerrymandering in Westminster Council as well as for the sale of those three cemeteries for literally pennies when they were worth millions and then departing to live in Israel to avoid paying the enormous fine after her conviction); had sherry with the Dean of the Cathedral; lunched with the Retired Masonic Fellowship (Masonic corruption did of course play a big role in the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal, particularly in terms of the Masonic connections between the North Wales Police and the corrupt lawyers and judges on the Chester and Wales Circuit); received a visit from Jeffrey Archer, then Michael Heseltine, then John Major, then Tony Newton, then Peter Lilley! The Tories brought all the big guns out for Chester in 1992 then – I wonder why there was such desperation over that particular seat?

Gyles decided to give his own campaign a little boost by writing letters to the local papers using pseudonyms, telling everyone what an impressive candidate that Gyles Brandreth was.

So what was happening in north Wales whilst Gyles did all this? The allegations that children in care had been sexually molested – particularly boys in the homes Bryn Estyn and Bryn Alyn near Wrexham, about 12 miles from Chester, came thick and fast. In Jan 1992, Dean Nelson, a journalist preparing a story for the Independent, returned to north Wales to look for evidence against Gordon Anglesea, a senior officer with the North Wales Police. (Anglesea was finally convicted and imprisoned for abusing boys in care in Wrexham last year.) In the same month that Gyles dined with the Retired Masonic Fellowship – March 1992 – police carried out dawn raids in Wrexham and arrested 16 men and one woman, all but one being former staff of Bryn Estyn. ‘No evidence’ of pornography or a paedophile ring was discovered and 16 of those arrested were released with no charges by the end of the day. (In the following years, a number of them were arrested again, convicted and imprisoned for the abuse of boys in care in north Wales.)

In the hours leading up to polling day, Gyles notes in his diary how deeply unsavoury Labour activists are – ‘ugly’, ‘red-faced’, ‘appallingly overweight’. He does concede however that they do a bit better than the Tory activists in meeting ‘the old dears’ during the campaign. Sadly for the Labour Party, meeting the old dears wasn’t enough and on 10 April 1992 Gyles was elected MP for Chester. How chuffed he was! The first person outside of his constituency to congratulate him seems to have been David Hunt, Secretary of State for Wales, who sent him a letter on official Welsh Office paper which even had the address of the Welsh Office printed in Welsh. Shortly after Gyles’s victory, his old mucker the Duke of Edinburgh and HM the Queen visit Chester to distribute Maundy money – the Chester Tories were delighted to see them. Letters of congratulation to Gyles then came thick and fast from John Major, Michael Portillo and Norman St John Stevas!

There is then a gap in Gyles’s account until 23 April 1992 when he notes that Frankie Howerd has died.

During the two weeks or so that Gyles keeps us guessing with regard to his own activities, an event in Brighton took place which no-one with an interest in the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal will ever forget. On 18 April 1992 a fire broke out in a flat at a party – a number of people attending the party had formerly been in care in north Wales or were close to people who had been. Five people were killed – two died from multiple injuries when they tried to jump to safety, one died after losing his grip whilst hanging onto the building at a height and two people died of smoke inhalation after being trapped in the flat. Seven people managed to escape by climbing down a drainpipe at the back of the building and several other people impaled themselves on railings after jumping to safety. A man called Trevor Carrington allegedly confessed to starting the fire – he was found dead days after his ‘confession’.

A verdict of unlawful killing was eventually returned regarding the arson attack. One witness has stated that John Allen, the owner of the Bryn Alyn Community where children were abused, told him that he would meet them at the party but Allen never turned up. John Allen is currently in prison after being convicted of abusing children in care in north Wales. John Allen also ran a business in child porn and owned a number of brothels in London and Brighton to which he trafficked boys who’d been in care in north Wales. One former resident of the children’s homes in north Wales who didn’t die in the fire but who was seriously injured alleged that the former residents of the children’s homes had been murdered and that they had knowledge of sexual liaisons involving politicians. This man later gave evidence against John Allen in Court. He was found dead days afterwards. For further details of the Brighton fire see posts ‘The Silence Of The Welsh Lambs’ and ‘Updates, Common Themes and News, May 5 2017’.

In the days and weeks that followed the murder of five people who might well have been able to act as witnesses against Peter Morrison and others, Gyles got down to business in his new role as MP for Chester. In his maiden speech in the Commons he mentioned that ‘Peter [Morrison] served the Prime Minister’s illustrious predecessor so ably and so loyally’. Michele had by now started bitching about the low salaries of MPs but Gyles notes that at least now that he’s been elected his train and air fares are paid for. He gloats about making an insulting speech directed at Neil Kinnock which he passes off as his own but has actually been scripted word for word by the Whips’ Office. He mentions the presence of Sir Nicholas Fairbairn in the House and describes him as ‘mad’ and ‘perpetually drunk’. Fairbairn has since been accused by a woman whose father was friends with him of molesting her when she was a child.

Not that the world had yet finished with anyone who was still alive who might be able to give evidence against the people who abused children in care in north Wales. In May 1992, an Early Day Motion was tabled by Plaid MP Elfyn Llwyd opposing the closure of Garth Angharad. Garth Angharad was described as a ‘hospital for mentally abnormal criminals’ and was owned by Paul Hett, a struck-off solicitor who was later condemned at the Waterhouse Inquiry and who also owned and ran a number of ‘residential schools’ in which children were abused. People who alleged that they’d been abused in care tended to find themselves in Garth Angharad. For the names and backgrounds of everyone who signed that EDM please see posts ‘Further Information On Garth Angharad Hospital’ and ‘More On Those Who Signed That Early Day Motion’.

Thus Gyles’s career in politics was launched. As well as the five people who died in the Brighton fire, in 1992 two other former residents in children’s homes in north Wales were found dead as well. In Sept 1992 The Observer ran a story on child abuse in north Wales children’s homes and two former residents appeared on TV accusing Gordon Anglesea of having abused them. After the programme was broadcast another former resident rang the BBC and made further allegations. Not that any of this is mentioned in Gyles’s book – although he does document other scandals such as David Mellor’s affair and the subsequent tabloid revelations.

So whilst Conservative Central Office flooded Chester with Tory bigwigs prior to the election and Tories in Chester discussed Morrison’s ‘sexual preferences’, the folk on the doorstep told Brandreth that Morrison was molesting under-aged boys. Which indeed he was. The whole of the City of Chester Conservative Association will have known what Morrison was doing yet no-one said a word to the police who were investigating an alleged paedophile ring a few miles down the road. Neither did any of them speak up after the Jillings Investigation (see post ‘It’s A Piece Of Cake’ for the details of the Jillings investigation and just how dreadful the abuse of children that had gone on was) or during or after the Waterhouse Inquiry, the cover-up organised by William Hague ie. the guest of honour at the Tories Conference who had so impressed Gyles four years previously. Chester is renowned as a centre of law. My documents are littered with the names of legal professionals and judges in Chester who were party to perjury. Gyles will have come across them – it would not be possible to be the MP for Chester and not encounter them. Gyles rubbed noses with other people who have been involved in the cover up or who knew what was going on and kept quiet, such as David Waddington, Matthew Parris and Edwina Currie. As for Norman St John Stevas, that devotee of the Queen Mother, who was another to congratulate Gyles on his election victory – well when I worked at St George’s, there was someone else who worked there who was a young gay man well-acquainted with the gay scene at the time. He told me then that there was a problem with some politicians abusing children. One name that he mentioned was that of Norman St John Stevas – he told me that it was common knowledge that ‘he is holding spanking parties with little boys’ and that ‘no-one knows how he is getting away with it’. Well in north Wales and Brighton someone got away with murdering the witnesses.

So what of the people who knew what Morrison was up to but remained silent, which is why he at least got away with it. The President of the City of Chester Conservative Association, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster. A big mate of Prince Charles. A mentor to Prince William whilst William was growing up. Gerald Cavendish’s son is godfather to Prince George. Gerald’s wife is William’s godmother. Gerald died in August 2016 ‘suddenly’ when he was only 64. A statement was issued at the time saying curiously that there were no suspicious circumstances. It was later alleged that he’d had a heart attack. In 1998 Gerald Cavendish experienced severe depression which was attributed to the strain of running his business. He was the third richest man in the UK and owned swathes of Belgravia and Mayfair, as well as Scotland, so he can’t have been worried about money. In 2000 it was said that he had suffered a nervous breakdown.

Gerald Cavendish enjoyed field sports, was an enthusiastic member of the Territorial Army – he reached the rank of Major-General – and was involved with many charities. His charity work included benevolent work for services personnel and working with young offenders and drugs. Rather like Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, one of the Top Doctors who concealed the paedophile gang in north Wales! Gerald was a Committee Member of Nuffield Hospitals from 1995 until his death. There’s a Nuffield Hospital in Chester – Dafydd worked there! Gerald was a life Vice-President of the NSPCC from 1988 until his death. The NSPCC that said nothing about the child abuse in north Wales, the NSPCC which was ‘supported’ by Jimmy Savile, the NSPCC that worked with and then merged with Esther Rantzen’s Childline – which ignored calls from youngsters who were abused in care in north Wales. The NSPCC who – very inappropriately – were involved in running the ‘helpline’ for adults who were giving evidence in the police investigation into the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal in the 1990s. The NSPCC helpline was managed and staffed by colleagues of the paedophiles. At least one of the people being ‘supported’ was found dead whilst they were being ‘supported’ by the helpline. Gerald was the President of Scope 1982-2005 and President of RNIB. He was Pro-Chancellor of Keele University 1986-93. Jane Tunstill, one of the members of Jillings’s team appointed to investigate child abuse in Clwyd in 1994, obtained a Chair at Keele University immediately upon finishing the investigation. The Jillings report maintained that there was widespread serious child abuse happening in Clwyd children’s homes but overtly stated that they would not speculate on whether a paedophile ring was in operation. Gerald was Chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University 1992-2002 and Chancellor of the University of Chester 1995-2016. Then Gyles became Chancellor! Gerald was also a Committee Member for the Prince’s Trust and Patron for the Princes’s Trust for North West England from 2001. A number of other people named on this blog as concealing the paedophile gang in north Wales were members of the Prince’s Trust.

Gerald was the executor of Diana, Princess of Wales’s will.

Gerald was a very influential man. I suspect that if he had chosen not to back Morrison, Morrison would have been finished.

In 2007 Gerald Cavendish stepped down as Assistant Chief of Defence Staff (Reserves and Cadets) after prostitutes working for the very expensive U.S. escort agency Emperor’s Club named him as one of their clients. The most high profile scalp in the scandal was that of New York Governor Eliot Spitz who also resigned as a result of it. Mr Spitz had spent so many thousands of dollars with the Emperor’s Club that he had resorted to some creative accounting in order to try to cover his tracks but was found out. Gerald Cavendish was so rich that he won’t have needed to do that.

Gyles’s book mentions two other loyal members of the City of Chester Conservative Association – Gwyn Gough, the Secretary and Jill Everett, the Deputy Chairman. So they ‘managed’ the time bomb that was Peter Morrison as well then.

Jeremy Hanley, Gyles’s mate who cracked jokes about Morrison knowing how to carry a handbag is Sir Jeremy Hanley, who was Conservative MP for Richmond and Barnes 1983-97. So he was Brandreth’s local MP then before Gyles ever got a sniff of standing for Chester. Hanley was Conservative Party Chairman 1994-95. He was for a brief time PPS to Chris Patten – who was Party Chairman whilst Brandreth was crawling his way into the Commons. After he left politics, Hanley went in for being a company director, including a Director of the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce.

What about Morrison’s membership of those ‘exclusive’ clubs which so impressed Gyles, White’s and Pratt’s? There are an awful lot of members of White’s who, like the Duke of Westminster, could have finished Morrison off if they’d chosen to publicise what seemed to be an open secret among people who knew Morrison. Members of White’s include Prince Charles (he held his stag party there before marrying Diana), Prince William, Norman Lamont and Georgie Greig. Greig is at present the Editor of the Mail On Sunday. He previously worked on The Sunday Times and has also been the Editorial Director of The Independent On Sunday and the Independent. Greig’s sister was a Lady in Waiting to Diana. David Cameron was a member of White’s until 2008 when he resigned because White’s refused to admit women. Cameron’s father Ian had been a member for donkeys years and was the former Chairman. So who let Morrison in then?

So that, based on Gyles’s own account, is how It Was The Sun Wot Won It. Assisted by a Tory Party who knew that they had a child molester in their midst but were buggered if those ugly, red-faced, appallingly overweight Labour activists were going to win the day – and of course helped by someone who was prepared to murder the witnesses. At least Gyles’s greedy social climbing vile empty headed wife Michele now has Serious Money. How does it feel then Michele? Was it worth the brutalisation, rape and murder of a considerable number of young people who were drawn from the social class that you despise? Or do you manage to put that out of your tiny brain when you and Gyles are talking Teddy Bear Museums with the Royals?

Before finishing this post I just clicked on BBC News Wales online and I see that an enormous row has broken out over a fairly innocuous tweet sent out by Leanne Wood. In response to the Barcelona attack, Leanne tweeted ‘Ofnadwy/terrible. Is this more far-right terrorism? My thoughts are with all those affected’. The world and his wife have gone apeshit, particularly the Welsh Conservatives and UKIP. Janet Finch-Saunders, Conservative AM for Aberconwy, has said that Leanne’s tweet was ‘morally depraved’. No Janet, that was Peter Morrison, all those who kept quiet about him and whoever it was who killed the witnesses. UKIP have tweeted to Leanne ‘how dare you associate us with murderers?’ Er – I hate to draw this to your attention UKIP, but one of your leading lights in Wales is a man called Neil Hamilton. Who knew a man called Peter Morrison very well indeed – and someone killed a number of people who’s testimony could have put Peter Morrison behind bars. As if on cue, dear old Hamilton himself has waded into the fray and is quoted on BBC News Wales as saying that ‘Leanne Wood is clearly not fit for purpose. She is an embarrassment not only to Plaid Cymru but to the whole of Wales’.

This is the Neil Hamilton who lost his seat in Cheshire in 1997 after getting himself in the most appalling mess after some events involving cash in envelopes. Conservative Central Office begged him not to stand because he was far more of an embarrassment than Leanne could ever be, but Neil stood anyway. He was opposed by BBC journalist Martin Bell who stood on an anti-sleaze ticket. Neil’s wife Christine – who Gyles found to be such a delight, just like Peter Morrison – harangued Martin Bell in public and memorably asked who would vote for a man who wore a white suit. As it turned out, thousands of people would and they did, because they were desperate to see the back of the Hamiltons. Years later Neil Hamilton sneaked into the Senedd – I suspect because most of the people who voted for him didn’t know what he’d done in Tatton in the 1980s and 90s and they certainly won’t have known what he did when he was in the Federation of Conservative Students. But even the political geeks who did know probably weren’t aware that he was mates with a man who was known among the voters of Chester to be molesting children. Come off it Neil and Christine, you’ll have heard what Morrison was up to – and anyway Gyles has now admitted it to the world in his autobiography.

When ‘Breaking the Code’ was published, Brandreth was on record as saying that the Whips take a very harsh view of anyone who leaks their practices, but he thinks that they’ll probably forgive him. But is the wider world going to forgive you for keeping quiet about a child molester when witnesses to the gang that he was part of were murdered Gyles?

Close Your Eyes And Make A WISH

The feminist campaigner Julie Bindel has written an article in the Independent Online about prostitution. I can’t agree with everything that Bindel publishes but on a lot of matters she’s still a breath of fresh air. However there are matters on which I am sure that Julie is remaining silent when she shouldn’t be – which is odd, because Julie Bindel has not been afraid to place herself in the firing line on a number of subjects. One of those issues on which she remains curiously quiet is the way in which a lot of women ended up in secure mental health settings because they had alleged sexual abuse at the hands of the social services or mental health services. Bindel and others – including Helena Kennedy QC – formed ‘Justice for Women’ back in the early 1990s and worked very closely with the women’s prison system and the mental health system. They will have known what was happening to women in those systems and the ways in which so many women ended up there. They did not utter a word. My posts ‘Eve Was Framed – As Were A Lot Of Other People’ and ‘Ieuan Stands Down – And Other Updates’ details the work of ‘Justice for Women’ and some of their high profile cases. I also explain how Helena Kennedy had relied on the ‘court room skills’ of Professor Nigel Eastman of St George’s Hospital Medical School to win cases. Eastman was one of the psychiatrists at St George’s who knew about the abuses and criminal activities of Dr Dafydd Alun Jones and Dr Tony Francis (Dr X) in north Wales and kept schtum (see post ‘Some Very Eminent Psychiatrists From London…’.) In her book ‘Eve was Framed’ Kennedy also praises the work of Dr James Earp from Leicester – James Earp was the first ‘second opinion’ to whom I was referred who was also brought up sharp against the malpractice of the Top Doctors in north Wales but decided to keep quiet (see post ‘An Expert From England’). Of course there was a paedophile ring in operation in Leicestershire involving a powerful figure – Lord Greville Janner. I suspect that Earp knew about that and wasn’t going to tangle with him, let alone take on Dafydd et al, who were concealing the paedophile gang that was directly supplying boys to the Westminster Paedophile Ring.

In her article, Bindel mentions Emma Humphreys. Emma was born in Dolgellau, north Wales, had a very difficult life and ended up working as a prostitute whilst a teenager. She killed her pimp when she was 17 and was imprisoned. ‘Justice for Women’ took up her case, secured her release and Emma became one of their cause celebres. Sadly Emma died from an overdose just three years after being released from prison. There are a lot of unanswered questions about Emma’s case and her death took place in very worrying circumstances. ‘Justice for Women’ have never raised some very obvious questions (see posts ‘Eve Was Framed – As Were A Lot Of Other People’ and ‘Ieuan Stands Down – And Other Updates’). Yet an Emma Humphrey Memorial Prize was established by ‘Justice for Women’ – Julie’s article in the Indie contains a link to the relevant webpage. One of the Patrons listed on the webpage is Vera Baird QC – Baird represented Emma Humphreys on appeal. Like Helena, Vera has built her reputation on being a feminist barrister. Yet like Helena, Vera has metaphorically got into bed with people who have inflicted great harm on the very people whom she claims to have been fighting for. My post ‘News Round Up, August 15 2017’ described how Lord Charlie Falconer effectively removing Legal Aid resulted in people who had been abused by the health and welfare services being completely unable to obtain justice, which of course rendered New Labour’s much boasted about Human Rights Act meaningless. Vera Baird was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State to Charlie Falconer in the Department for Constitutional Affairs when Legal Aid was withdrawn.

The Emma Humphrey’s Memorial Prize webpage contains a link to WISH, Women in Secure Hospitals (formerly known as Woman In Special Hospitals). WISH was established in the late 1980s to represent women detained in Ashworth, Rampton and Broadmoor. Like ‘Justice for Women’, WISH will have known that a lot of these women had been banged up because they had complained of being abused by the children’s services or the mental health services (see posts ‘Socio-Political Context Of North Wales Mental Health Services In The 1980s’ and ‘Ieuan Stands Down – And Other Updates’). They will have known that those women were being sexually abused all over again in those secure hospitals and they’ll have known about Jimmy Savile as well. They did not breathe a word. The current WISH website is spectacularly lame. The biographies of the people listed as Trustees suggests that none of them would be capable of taking on institutionalised corruption in psychiatry – indeed the absence of WISH in highlighting any of the serious problems that are now being admitted to be rife in mental health care suggests that indeed none of these people could take on the mental health establishment. Instead the WISH website is littered with very familiar things – advocacy, gender mainstreaming, references to the way that the services ‘make women feel’ etc. Not a word about violent or sexual assaults on patients, not a word about miscarriages of justice, not a word about deaths in secure mental health units, nothing. However WISH does mention that it provides advocacy services for women in a number of Cygnet hospitals. Cgynet Healthcare is a multi-million pound American company which is rapidly gobbling up huge swathes of the UK NHS. The Medical Director of Cygnet is Robert Kehoe, a man who was happy to submit a pack of lies about me, Brown, the Hergest Whistleblower, my lawyer and even my PhD supervisor in an ‘expert witness report’ (see post ‘An Expert In Resistant Service Users’). A lot of eyes and ears were very firmly closed when someone decided to make a WISH.

The institutional abuse to which some of those women in secure hospitals had been subjected but whose interests WISH failed to effectively represent was the forerunner to the large scale abuse and trafficking of disadvantaged young people that is leading the news bulletins at the moment.

Yesterday Sarah Champion resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench team after an article appeared in The Sun using comments from her with regard to the widespread sexual abuse of girls in Rotherham – Sarah is the MP for Rotherham. I applaud Sarah for her campaigning on this matter, but as I have repeatedly stated on this blog, this is not only a matter of ‘South Asian’ or ‘Muslim’ men sexually exploiting white girls – the press are highlighting those cases involving South Asian men but have ignored the other cases in which the same sort of crime was perpetrated by people who were not South Asian or Muslim. Unfortunately Sarah didn’t choose her words too wisely – although if she had made more nuanced comments I doubt that The Sun would have run the article – and she now stands accused of racism. Sajid Javid has tweeted a response to Sarah’s resignation saying that we ‘need an honest open debate on child sexual exploitation’.

We could start by admitting that it has been going on for decades and that by the 1980s it had metamorphosed into a form of organised crime that was evident in the social services of most UK local authorities – and that ALL political parties colluded in denying and concealing it at the highest levels. Javid’s own Conservative Party were instrumental in this – the Home Office under Leon Brittan ‘lost’ dozens and dozens of crucial files with details of Westminster figures involved in child abuse and under John Major, William Hague – in his capacity as Secretary of State for Wales – organised the Waterhouse Inquiry into the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal which was the biggest whitewash that has ever been conducted in Wales. Radio 4 broadcast an interview with Hague by Peter Hennessey this morning and Hague spoke frankly about having to be ‘ruthless’ in Gov’t and remove people if they were a liability. He could have added that when the scandal was so great, stretched back so many years and involved so many people that you couldn’t just remove them, one organises a large scale cover-up a la Waterhouse.

The Times also commented extensively on Sarah’s resignation today, questioning how it was possible to change attitudes without causing offence. They could start by working on one of their own journalists, Matthew Parris. Parris has admitted attending parties with his mates at an Italian venue known as the ‘villa of shame’ where ‘boys who were always willing’ were supplied. Before becoming a Tory MP Parris worked as Thatcher’s correspondence secretary – so he will have known all about the sex parties with under-aged boys that Sir Peter Morrison the MP for Chester and Thatcher’s aide was known to be attending. Parris also worked in the Foreign Office so he was in a position to know about Sir Peter Hayman, the UK diplomat who was a paedophile and was eventually convicted for that. Another person who has had doings with The Times is Gyles Brandreth, who became the MP for Chester after Morrison stood down. My post ‘I Want Serious Money Now Please’ explains why I believe that Brandreth knew about Morrison’s activities. I’ve just begun reading Brandreth’s autobiography ‘Breaking The Code’ and I note that he mentions that he has been friends with Edwina Currie since they were at Oxford together. That’s the Edwina who described Peter Morrison in her own book as a ‘pederast’. The Times reminds us that in 2011 when it first began reporting on the sexual abuse of white British girls by gangs of South Asian men, Jack Straw described those girls as being seen as ‘easy meat’.

Jack’s own hands are not clean. He was Margaret Hodge’s deputy on the Housing Committee in Islington Council whilst the Council’s homes were rife with paedophiles who were abusing the children. Islington Council were repeatedly told what was happening and ignored it. In 1986 the Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens raised serious concerns about child abuse in Islington. A whistleblowing social worker disappeared in fear of their life and was assumed to have ‘gone abroad’. (There’s another rather more worrying possibility which comes to mind when someone disappears after telling people that they rumbled crime so serious that they’re in fear of their life.) In 1995 the White Report confirmed everyone’s worst fears – Islington children’s homes had been infiltrated by gangs of organised paedophiles and the Council had failed to act. Margaret Hodge was famously sued by a man who had been abused whilst in the care of Islington Council when she was Council leader after he wrote to her and told her what had actually happened to him and she insulted him.

This is where we now come to Jeremy Corbyn. This blog has detailed how scores of figures in the Tory Party and New Labour knew about organised child abuse and said nothing, but it seems as though Jeremy knew as well, although he has now issued a statement stating that the ‘Harris-Savile scandal shows how serious the problem of sexual abuse is, the way it can arise in different parts of society and the need for effective action to tackle it’. A correspondent to this blog, Mike Claybrook, left a link in my comments column a few hours ago to an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn from John Mann, a fellow Labour MP. John Mann details how Jeremy was told on a number of occasions what was happening to children in Islington, but like nearly everybody else Jeremy did not take appropriate action. The Labour Party are currently organising the speakers for their forthcoming conference. Keynotes lined up include Diane Abbott, Keir Starmer and John McDonnell. Abbott was former Head of Press and PR for Lambeth Council, which had a problem with paedophiles in it’s children’s homes every bit as big as the problems in Islington and north Wales (see post ‘Tower Hamlets, Paul Boateng and Tessa Jowell’). Keir Starmer, whilst he was DPP, personally ordered an intervention in a massive police corruption trial in south Wales which caused the trial to collapse (see post ‘A Future Leader Of The Labour Party?’). The police on trial had been involved in framing innocent people for the murder of Lynette White, a young woman in Cardiff who had given an interview to the BBC about how she was forced into prostitution as a child. My post ‘A Few More Who Might Be Able To Answer Questions’ gives the reasons why I think that John McDonnell also knew about the large scale sexual abuse of children in care in London in the 70s and 80s.

The Chief Executive of the EHRC has also jumped on the bandwagon, stating that it was a ‘real shame’ that Sarah Champion had resigned ‘over sensitivity about language’. What is an ever bigger shame is that Dr Rachel Perkins has a seat on the EHRC – Perkins was Clinical Director of Springfield Hospital whilst they concealed evidence concerning organised child sexual abuse.

But whilst everyone is now banging on about the serious problem of child sexual abuse and how we’re all fully aware of it now and ooh we’ll never ignore it again, just look what was reported from Cardiff Crown Court yesterday. Dr Armon Daniels, a GP, was found to be in possession of more than 16,000 indecent images of children and 850 indecent video films of children. He received an 8 month prison sentence – suspended for two years. The GMC has given him an ‘interim suspension order’. We have learned nothing – in the 70s, 80s and 90s the paedophile ring in north Wales was facilitated by the Top Doctors. No-one would act because they were fucking doctors – everyone knew what they were doing, but the GMC made excuse after excuse not to take action against them. Meanwhile witnesses were found dead after giving evidence against the paedophile gang. How much worse could it have got? Yet now we’re all supposed to be so aware, a Top Doctor is caught with more than 16000 images – oooh dear, well perhaps we’ll suspend him just for a little while… Dr Daniels might as well have murdered a few of the witnesses, there’d have been no investigation.

Regarding wrongdoing in the NHS, news hot off the press is that Sir Leonard Fenwick, the CEO of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – the longest serving NHS executive in the country – has been sacked for gross misconduct. Details of his alleged sins have not been released but it has been confirmed that the Trust has ‘reported a number of concerns’ to the NHS counter-fraud and security management service. The dismissal of Sir Leonard is particularly intriguing because the Trust that he ran was in the news earlier this year, after it was alleged that a ‘sex ring’ was operating in the hospital, the leading lights of which were two consultants who were caught having sex with female staff on hospital premises whilst on duty. Sir Leonard tried to force the resignation of the Top Doctors involved but the dismissals were stopped by the Trust Chair Kingsley Smith and non-executive director Bryan Dodson – the Top Doctors were reinstated within twenty minutes and an ‘outside HR specialist’ brought in to investigate Sir Leonard for ‘bullying and abusive behaviour’. Now I know one thing about the NHS – although senior executives are very powerful, the mass force of the medical establishment is even more powerful. The two groups hate each other and are constantly trying to get one up on each other. The ‘sex ring’ consultants were caught on the job as it were – sex on duty on the premises was witnessed and loads of indecent e mails written during working hours and on the NHS IT system were found. What if the Top Doctors had gone running to the BMA and MDU for help once the scandal broke? Again and again in institutions I have seen examples of people who have been caught doing something that they shouldn’t turn the tables on any manager who tries to discipline them by levelling a charge of ‘bullying’ against the manager concerned. This is why institutions like universities and hospitals are so difficult to manage. Dr Alberto, the one competent, patient-friendly decent psychiatrist that the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board has was accused of bullying by the bunch of psychopaths who work at the Hergest Unit – whose patients regularly committed suicide – when he challenged them about their lethal practice.

So was Sir Leonard up to no good as well as the Top Doctors and this was only discovered during the course of a major investigation? Or has Sir Leonard been the subject of an NHS stitch-up? Either way Sir Leonard is out on his ear – whilst the shagging Top Doctors and their bedfellows are still in their jobs and have not been identified.

The Parliamentary Ombudsman in England carried out a survey which discovered that 58% of the families of elderly people who had concerns about their care whilst they were in the hands of the NHS did not complain because they feared that it would make matters worse. Sadly they are probably quite right – they would be faced with the usual passive-aggression from the NHS, the nearest they’ll ever get to an admission of service shortcomings is ‘I’m sorry you feel like that’ (rather than ‘I’m sorry that we’ve nearly killed your grandmother’) and that’ll only happen after letters have been exchanged for two years. If the complaining patient has inadvertently discovered a paedophile ring being facilitated by the Top Doctors they’ll find it nigh-on impossible to ever get NHS treatment again, a campaign of slander will be conducted against them and they may well find themselves up in court on serious but ludicrous charges.

Whilst we’re on the subject of the conduct of the Top Doctors in north Wales, the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales Nick Bennett has stated that the number of complaints against the NHS in Wales has continued to rise and a huge proportion of the complaints are about the Betsi, particularly Ysbyty Glan Clwyd. Not that Ysbyty Glan Clwyd will suffer any ill-effects – the Betsi have proudly announced that they’ve put forward a ‘business case’ for a new vascular unit in Ysbyty Glan Clwyd costing £2.7 million. This comes after a 2015 report from the Royal College of Surgeons confirming dreadful behaviour on the part of the vascular surgeons and an admission that they were making decisions based on their needs not the patients. The vascular surgeons went apeshit at the suggestion that a reorganisation of the service might take place and their former colleague Dr Christine Evans went into battle on their behalf, disguised as The Patients Voice aka the North Wales Community Health Council. They’ll be cracking open the champagne down at The Raven, the community pub in Denbighshire that Dr Chris helps run, now that the Top Doctors have been rewarded with a unit worth millions to misbehave in after screaming and screaming until they were sick. Likewise the special care baby unit costing millions is well underway, that’s going to Ysbyty Glan Clwyd as well, specifically to the obstetrics service that was so crazed that the student midwives from Bangor University were withdrawn and a hit-squad from the Welsh Gov’t were sent in with the aim, in their own words, of ‘achieving normality’. I wonder if they’ve achieved it yet. But this is how things are done in the NHS – if the Top Doctors are really unhinged and are killing people, the building is blamed and they’re given a brand new building in which to continue their misconduct. As at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh. It was the fault of the building. The building was actually weird but splendid, one of the best examples of architecture of that sort in the UK. It was in the hills with lovely views and squirrels in the grounds. Unfortunately Dafydd and Gwynne were in there as well, lobotomising people, molesting them, drugging them and refusing to ever let them out. That was the problem, rather than the building. So new buildings were created across north Wales – and Dafydd and co took up residence in the new buildings! Guess what? Not much changed. A few new people arrived and they did try, but they were pretty soon hounded out and ten years after Denbigh shut it was clear that things were still grim. Now once more, it is all being blamed on the buildings. Indeed it is so much the fault of the buildings that there are now ‘home treatment teams’. But it’s the same dreadful staff on those teams so the empowered service users are now insulted and threatened in their own homes by the Angels instead of in the hospitals.

The Welsh Ambulance Service continues to excel – another elderly person, 88 year old Anton Kusz, died after an eight hour wait for an ambulance after fracturing his hip. A narrative verdict was returned at the inquest. Just in case anyone thought that this death might have had something to do with an 88 year old man being left on the ground with a fractured hip for eight hours.

Dafydd, Lucille and CAIS could hit the jackpot again soon. The Welsh Gov’t is about to shell out another £2.1 million for projects tackling ‘rough sleeping and youth homelessness’ and it has been suggested that a cut of this dosh could be used to fund a ‘Black Mamba Day Centre’ to care for people who’ve overdone it on the Mamba and are terrorising Wrexham by ‘standing still like zombies’. The paedophiles’ friend, Arfon Jones the North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner, thinks it’s a great idea, but he does tend to support anything that might pass a few more million in the direction of CAIS.

Lastly, the 40th anniversary of Elvis’s death hasn’t escaped the Betsi. The Rev Wynne Roberts, the hospital chaplain at Ysbyty Gwynedd, has been doing some more dressing up and pretending to be Elvis. For the background on Wynne and the many reasons why he should not be a hospital chaplain, please see post ‘Music Therapy Anyone?’. But as a correspondent to the blog noted a few months ago when the Betsi tried to reconstruct Wynne as a ‘music therapist’, why would anyone want a proper chaplain when the Betsi has got a ‘singing Elvis-impersonating vicar who shags his parishioners?’.

News Round Up, August 15 2017

There’s been quite a few stories in the news over the past few days which have touched on matters previously discussed on this blog. There was a lot of publicity given to a ‘modern slavery’ case in Lincolnshire, in which eighteen ‘vulnerable people’ were found to have been kept as slaves, some of them having been there for many years. Guess what? It was revealed that they included people who were homeless or destitute, with mental health problems or drug or alcohol problems – in other words Empowered Service Users. Somebody from the Red Cross was given air time to comment on one news bulletin, then someone from the Salvation Army was given air-time later in the day to make a few more observations on the case. Both banged on about vulnerable people who hadn’t asked for help. Can we be sure of that? Could the slaves possibly have been like those residents of Prestwood Homes – which was also a trafficking organisation – (see post ‘A Convenient Arrangement With The Private Sector) and had actually tried to run away or told people what was happening, but were simply ignored, as the Prestwood residents were when they told MIND what was going on? Both the Red Cross and Salvation Army have spent years working with the groups of people from whom the Lincolnshire slaves were drawn – have they been asleep? I’ve worked with those groups of people too and I have been telling people for years that they are being abused in multiple ways. Furthermore the Red Cross have known about something very worrying in north Wales for a long time – they have known that Gwynedd Social Services has been refusing to discharge it’s duties. Because about ten years ago the Red Cross were doing what Gwynedd Social Services should have been doing re providing support for vulnerable people. I was told that the Red Cross were actually doing a very good job and that those on the receiving end of their ‘services’ were most grateful. But I was also told that people were being left virtually destitute and the Red Cross were not always able to plug the very big gaps. Why didn’t they publicise what was going on – that Gwynedd Social Services were breaking the law and leaving people destitute? Surely the Red Cross had a duty to flag this up, behind the scenes if necessary. Did no-one think to write to Carwyn? Or did they, only to be ignored like I was when I brought the criminal activities of the mental health services in north Wales to the attention of the Welsh Gov’t? If this is the case Red Cross, get blogging now and let everyone know what is happening.

Another news story also demonstrated the way in which the Third sector has colluded with institutional neglect and abuse. Action for Children released frightening statistics relating to the numbers of children and families who are being turned away after they have asked for help from social services. The Action for Children report confirmed what I already knew – that children are being constantly put at risk by social services depts across the UK. It has been happening for years and it is how scandals like those which involved Baby P or Aaron Gilbert arise – the death of a child, the aftermath of which sees the social services robustly defending their lack of action, stating that the death was ‘unforeseeable and unpreventable’ and that the people directly responsible for the death (usually some very inadequate parents known to social services) are the only people responsible and that social workers really cannot be blamed in any way. Much as I applaud Action for Children for coming clean about the degree of neglect and indifference that is prevalent, I wish that they’d gone public on this years ago. Furthermore, where are the other children’s charities who also knew that this was happening? Barnardos? The NSPCC? Dear old Childline and Esther? Anyone there?

As more and more of Blair’s flagship policies unravel I have been entertained to listen to the New Labour Ministers who forced the policies through in the face of criticism who have now been wheeled out to tell everyone how badly things are going wrong. Lord Adonis has been absolutely everywhere in the media during the last few days, screaming blue murder about the state of UK universities, the problems being caused by high tuition fees and the enormous sums now being earned by Vice-Chancellors. Who started all this off? One Lord Adonis, back in the days when he was being robustly promoted as the Brains behind New Labour HE policy. He and his colleagues were told again and again by sociologists that this Was Not Going To Work, but they ignored everyone. I even received a letter from one of the HE Ministers – Bill Rammell – myself after I wrote to him. It was a very friendly letter, telling me that he wished me the best with my research and that he’d like to read the outputs, but that I would soon see how successful Labour’s HE policies are. No, I never did see that, instead I watched universities become increasingly chaotic, increasingly stretched and increasingly unable to do what they were supposed to do. No-one actually reversed any of the policies that weren’t working, instead universities were encouraged to become even more marketised and because successive Gov’ts couldn’t afford the policies that they were implementing, the only option was to charge the students a fortune in tuition fees. As for Vice-Chancellors’ salaries – VCs have been positively encouraged to think of themselves as businessmen rather than academics and universities have been encouraged to Compete For The Best Staff, so it is hardly surprising that some VCs have joined in the bonanza. Others feel justified in accepting high salaries because the institutions that they are running are actually so troubled that it is often quite a feat to keep the show on the road. These are your chickens coming home to roost Adonis and I don’t think that the world of HE needs any more advice from you.

Not that Adonis’s own colleagues dared tell him that his big idea was causing serious problems – they all toed the New Labour line. On one occasion I attended a debate re ‘education and employment’ with a few politicians on the panel, one of whom was Eluned Morgan, now Baroness Morgan, representing Labour. Firstly Eluned trotted out the myth that the country needed nearly all young people to go to university to fill all the highly skilled jobs in the Knowledge Economy. I told Eluned that I had not yet found the Knowledge Economy, although I’d been looking everywhere for it for quite a few years. What I did find were coffee shops and nail bars. Lots of them. Eluned gave me a very snotty look and simply repeated that the Knowledge Economy was with us and that all these highly paid jobs in it needed the graduates that were being produced en masse. Well Eluned, I’m still waiting to find the Knowledge Economy, it’s a bit like Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, we keep being told that it exists but no-one’s actually seen it. Graduates are now getting seriously pissed off that they are unable to find well-paid jobs, even after they’ve worked for no pay in ‘internships’, so perhaps you could let them know where the Knowledge Economy is hiding.

After Eluned explained all about the Knowledge Economy, she then went on to explain that she came from Ely and that she was about the only person in Ely to go to university and it will now be really great because everyone from Ely would soon be going to university. Of course it is true that in mine and Eluned’s day, getting into university was a minority activity and one that had much more to do with one’s social class than anything else, but all the HE policy that Eluned just couldn’t bring herself to criticise has done is to devalue graduate level qualifications and engender an enormous amount of snobbery between universities, as the Russell Group make it quite clear that they’re in a rather different league to everyone else. One might as well give everyone in Ely a PhD and tell them that this represents social mobility. In fact Eluned would probably support such a policy if it advanced her own interests.

I have long since wondered how someone as vacuous as Eluned and with so few achievements under her belt ended up being given a seat in the Lords in 2010. (A cynic suggested a few months ago that it was because she was friendly with the Kinnocks.) So I did a bit of googling. I was interested to discover that the Woman From Ely who made it to university against all odds actually attended Atlantic College, one of the most expensive public schools in Wales. She did come from the mean streets of Ely though – her dad Bob was a clergyman there (he’s a Rev’d Canon and he’s got an OBE). Bob was big in the Labour Party too – in 1974 he was elected to both Cardiff City and South Glamorgan County Councils and in 1977 he became Leader of the Labour Group. Readers might remember my two recent posts ‘I Want Serious Money Now’ and ‘Corruption Bay Special’, in which I explained how many millions of public money was spent on the development of Cardiff Bay, which benefited some very rich businessmen and their friends but very few other people. Bob was reported as being ‘firmly behind the £25 million scheme that led to the building of a new County Hall at the centre of the former Cardiff docks area’. Bob was of course one of the Councillors who was going to be sitting in that County Hall. Bob might well have known David Rowe-Beddoe, the Chair of the WDA that provided the dosh for the development of Corruption Bay – Rowe-Beddoe was for many years Chair of the Representative Body, the organisation that oversees the funds of the Church in Wales.

Eluned herself has obviously been seduced by some of those who made a fortune out of Corruption Bay – she is Chair of the Cardiff Business Partnership, which not so long ago carried out some ‘research’ that ‘showed’ that Wales would benefit from another agency just like the WDA. Cardiff Business Partnership made this claim at about the same time that Cardiff University’s School of Management maintained that abolishing the WDA was a decision that the Welsh Gov’t would regret (‘Fings might get broken if the WDA isn’t resurrected to give us millions’). Eluned is an Honorary Distinguished Professor at Cardiff University. The ‘overview’ of her on the University website states that a Professor David Boucher had observed that Eluned had been elevated to the Lords and that Cardiff University ‘look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with her’. Tribute was paid to Eluned’s previous activities in the European Parliament and her ‘vast experience in relation to specific policy sectors – such as energy’ [Morgan was] ‘Labour spokesperson on Energy, Industry and Science’ [she] ‘authored the European Parliament’s position on the Energy Green Paper and Electricity Directive’. The website goes on to note that Eluned is now employed by SWALEC (the former South Wales Electricity Board, which was of course privatised), ‘a company very keen to look at opportunities for closer collaboration in Innovation and Research and Development in Wales’. I clicked on the ‘teaching’ part of Eluned’s profile because I was curious to find out exactly what the Honorary Distinguished Professor taught, but there’s nothing listed.

Eluned has another role in Cardiff University as well – she is a member of the External Advisory Body to the Welsh Governance Centre.

Eluned was elected to the European Parliament in 1994. She didn’t only busy herself there – she was a founding member of the Yes for Wales cross party group which campaigned for the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales. In which she now has a seat, after being elected in May 2016 as the AM for Mid and West Wales from the regional list. Whilst Eluned was an MEP she was successful in obtaining a great deal of convergence funding for Mid and West Wales, so presumably she reckoned that they owed her one. Before the National Assembly was established Eluned had been for many years sitting on the Welsh Labour Party Executive. As a result of this she was appointed to the Welsh Assembly Advisory Group responsible for developing the standing orders of the National Assembly for Wales.

Eluned has worked as a researcher for both S4C and the BBC.

After the Ely riots in 1991 Eluned’s dad Bob told the local populace that there was no excuse for rioting and that they were ‘excreting on their own doorstep’ (presumably if Bob was really Of Ely, he would have used the phrase ‘shitting on their own doorstep’). Bob did however observe that the conditions in which the rioters lived were dire. One wonders why Bob didn’t push for a £25 million investment in Ely like he did in order to get himself a new County Hall in Corruption Bay. Eluned didn’t Fight For Ely from the European Parliament after she was elected either, presumably because she was far too busy writing the position that the European Parliament were going to take on the Energy Green Paper and Electricity Directive before taking a job with SWALEC herself.

I have another observation regarding Eluned’s dad Bob and his commitment to the people of Ely. Many moons ago before Bob was the Rev’d Canon or had bagged an OBE or had become leader of the Labour Group in Cardiff or even had a daughter in the Lords, Bob trained as a social worker before entering the priesthood. In the late 60s Ely Hospital was the centre of one of the worst scandals that there has ever been in the UK regarding the abuse of patients. Bob was never tempted to get his teeth into that one then to help the folk of Ely…

There is an article in the Daily Post today speculating on an expected forthcoming Cabinet reshuffle by Carwyn. The Post mentions that an Eluned Morgan is ‘expecting promotion’. Well you know how it is Carwyn, Fings Break…

The Post also mentions that Jane Hutt is expected to leave the Welsh Gov’t soon. I think that the sooner Jane Hutt is out of Gov’t the better. I haven’t paid much attention to Jane Hutt on the blog, but I am certainly well aware of her presence on the planet. Jane Hutt was the first Health Minister appointed by Rhodri after the National Assembly was created. She was eventually forced to stand down in 2005 after NHS waiting lists just grew and grew and grew and people demanded her head on a platter. But there was of course something rather worse than the long NHS waiting lists on Jane’s watch – yes, it was the mental health services in north Wales. It was on Jane’s watch that the North West Wales NHS Trust were refusing to treat suicidal people who then killed themselves and when staff from the same Trust were perjuring themselves in order to have patients arrested and convicted of serious offences if they had dared complain. Jane was Health Minister when I was accused of ‘threatening to kill’ the manager of the Hergest Unit and e mails were sent out by Patricia Gaskill, Ysbyty Gwynedd’s solicitor, asking for ‘more nurses down the police station please’ to make fallacious statements about me. It was on Jane Hutt’s watch that I was violently assaulted by staff in the Hergest Unit and prevented from reporting the matter to the police, it was on Jane Hutt’s watch that it was documented upon my medical records that I had ‘set fire to the Hergest Unit’ (I hadn’t) and was refused all support. I of course was one of the lucky ones in as much as I actually stayed alive. It was on Jane Hutt’s watch that the Hergest Unit’s patch achieved the accolade of having the second highest suicide rate among women patients in England and Wales. Jane is a well-known feminist and before going into politics helped found Welsh Woman’s Aid and was Director of Chwarae Teg, a Third sector organisation dedicated to achieving gender equality!

Of course, Jane didn’t only have responsibility for Health – her full title was Minister for Health and Social Services. SOCIAL SERVICES. Jane was appointed to that role in 1999. The Waterhouse Report was published in 2000. One person mentioned in the Waterhouse Report was Glanville Owen. He was Deputy Director of Social Services whilst the paedophile gang raged and Glanville appointed a man known to be supervising the people abusing the children to a position as Head of Children’s Services. When Jane was Minister for Health and Social Services, Glanville Owen was Chief Exec of Gwynedd Community Health Council. The patients’ voice! Not only did Glanville lie to me in an effort not to investigate my complaint about Hergest but he lied again when I revisited him and then failed to investigate my complaint anyway.

Jane hit the jackpot again in 2007 – once all that talk about a paedophile ring operating in the social services in north Wales causing havoc had died down, Jane became Minister for Children!

Er – Jane??? Any comments?

So what was Jane’s background before entering politics? Well her dad was a Top Doctor at Tommy’s, a Professor of Pathology to be precise. Jane didn’t study medicine herself – she instead ended up at the LSE and in 1972 completed a Certificate in Social Work! The official blurb about Jane tells us that she has ‘lived and worked in Wales since 1972′. But she doesn’t tell us what she worked AT, until she mentions that she was appointed as the co-ordinator of Welsh Women’s Aid in 1978. So what did you do in the missing six years then Jane? Did you perhaps work as a social worker? Jane’s biography does mention a few other things though. That she was a Councillor in South Glamorgan County Council and that she was the former Vice-Chair of the Social Services Committee! She was also a non-executive director of Cardiff Community Health Care Trust.

I can state with some certainty that Jane has knowledge of the paedophiles and the paedophiles’ friends. You find out a lot about that sort of thing if you’re involved with Women’s Aid – and you don’t find out what you are told by Councillors or social workers, you get it straight from the horses mouth. That is, from the mothers of the children who are being abused, or from the women who were abused themselves or from the women are being threatened or harassed by corrupt health and welfare professionals to keep them quiet. Jane would have known. But after Jane would have heard from the people on the receiving end, Jane probably hobnobbed with some of the paedophiles’ friends who concealed it all. Because as explained in previous posts, some of them had connections to Cardiff. Some of the paedophiles’ friends were graduates of Cardiff – and of the LSE.

Ioan Bowen Rees, the Chief Exec of Gwynedd County Council between 1980-91 who appointed Lucille Hughes as Director of Social Services – who then used her position to conceal and facilitate the paedophile gang – and who then did everything he could himself to conceal the gang when it’s activities were brought to his attention, had previously worked in local government in Cardiff. Ioan Bowen Rees was an authority on local government, his work in this area was known on a Europe-wide basis, he’d have been popping down to Cardiff all the time. Bowen Rees was later appointed a member of the working party that advised Ron Davies the then Secretary of State for Wales on matters regarding the National Assembly as it was brought to life. Of course Jane will have known him and I bet that Eluned Morgan did as well. Ioan Bowen Rees’s successor as Chief Exec of Gwynedd County Council was Huw Vaughan Thomas who originally came from mid-Glamorgan. Huw continued Bowen Rees’s sterling work in concealing the paedophile gang and accepting legal advice from the Council’s own corrupt lawyers not to speak to Alison Taylor, the social worker who blew the whistle on the paedophile gang. In 1996 Gwynedd County Council was abolished once Wales could bear the embarrassment of it’s existence no longer. Huw busied himself with his other interests – many of which were in south Wales. Between 2002-04 Huw was a member of the Richards Commission into the powers and electoral arrangements of the National Assembly of Wales. In 2010 Huw was appointed Auditor General for Wales. Jane Hutt was Minister for Business and Budget 2009-11 and Minister for Finance 2011-16. She’ll probably maintain that she’s never met Huw Vaughan Thomas now that she’s been outed on this blog.

Full details of the atrocities that were happening in Gwynedd in the children’s services and mental health services whilst Bowen Rees and Vaughan Thomas ran the county and the very great lengths to which they and everyone who worked for them went in order to ensure that none of them were ever prosecuted or even dismissed can be read in my post ‘I Know Nuzzing…’ It all went on whilst Jane built her reputation on the back of Women’s Aid and Chwarae Teg. For readers in England, ‘Chwarae Teg’ translates as ‘Fair Play’.

The one thing that none of this has been is fair play.

As well as being Minister for Health and Social Services and Minister for Children, at one point Jane was Minister for Assembly Business and Chief Whip with responsibility for Openness in Gov’t, Communications Strategy and co-ordinating Gov’t Policy re Children and Equality of Opportunity.

You need to leave Gov’t quickly Jane – you should never have been there in the first place.

Jane’s online profile mentions that she was a very close friend of the former First Minister Rhodri Morgan.

Another sinner with a benevolent smile on his face mentioned in the Daily Post article is Mark Drakeford. The Post reports that because Drakeford supports Jeremy Corbyn, some would like to see him take over as leader of Welsh Labour when Carwyn stands down. In such circumstances I’d ask Carwyn to stay in his job until Mark Drakeford is pushing up the daisies and is in no danger of becoming First Minister.

Like Jane, Drakeford was once a social worker – with Dyfed County Council, although that particular bit of info seems to have disappeared from the internet. Ever since I pointed out on this blog that not only was there a paedophile ring operating in Dyfed but that Ioan Bowen Rees invited a team of ‘senior officers’ from Dyfed to ‘investigate’ the children’s services in Gwynedd after complaints were made of abuse and neglect in a children’s home. Only a few years previously Ioan Bowen Rees had been County Secretary of Dyfed. However Mark Drakeford’s online biography is fessing up to him having been a probation officer, a youth justice worker and a Barnardos programme leader in Ely. What the fuck is it about Ely??? I shall have to get down there and see this place for myself. The probation service did of course know all about the paedophile gang in north Wales. Not only that, but some of the paedophiles and their friends had worked in the probation service themselves and some of them joined the probation service after they’d wreaked havoc with the kids in care. A number of the paedophiles and their friends had also worked with Barnardos.

What else did Mark do before he was elected as AM for Cardiff West in 2011? Well between 1985-93 he was a Labour Councillor with South Glamorgan County Council. He’ll have rubbed noses with the Rev Bob and Jane then. As well as a few of those involved with the development of Corruption Bay. Between 2000-10 he was the Cabinet’s Health and Social Policy Advisor – so he was in post throughout the reign of Queen Jane of Fair Play and the reign of the nakedly corrupt Dr Brian Gibbons of This Correspondence Is Closed fame. Drakeford took over Rhodri’s seat when he stood down. Shortly after his election Drakeford became Chair of the Assembly’s Health and Social Care Committee. So it was natural justice when the barrel of shit that is the NHS in north Wales that Drakeford et al had covered up for so long exploded in Drakeford’s face in 2013 in the form of Tawel Fan after he was appointed Health Minister. Between 2003-13 Mark Drakeford was Professor of Social Policy at Cardiff University, so presumably he understands how serious research fraud is. I wrote to Drakeford when he was Health Minister telling him of the research fraud involving the development of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy carried out by Professor Mark Williams et al (see post ‘The Biggest Expert Of The Lot’). I did not receive a reply but about three weeks later I read a newspaper article about MBCT which included comments regarding the benefits of MBCT from Mark Drakeford accompanied by a nice photo of Drakeford with the researchers involved in this fraud.

More recently I came across an online advert for a conference in Cardiff concerning the undesirability of blaming social workers in the event of scandals in social work. Drakeford was a keynote speaker, along with Sharon Shoesmith. Shoesmith was of course the Director of Children’s Services in Haringey when the disaster which ended with the death of Baby P took place. Sharon was memorably interviewed by Eddie Mair on the radio and told him that the ‘service’ that she ran had been judged to be a four star service. Mair asked her how many stars she thought that she’d get for this. Shoesmith was famously sacked by Ed Balls but sadly Balls forgot to follow policy, Shoesmith sued and was awarded nearly one million in compensation. She gave a number of media interviews constructing herself as the victim, stating that her life had been destroyed. Unlike Baby P, Sharon made a Lazarus-like recovery and recently emerged from the LSE with a PhD – the subject of her thesis was her involvement with the Baby P case. She has now written a book based on her thesis. If Drakeford ever did become First Minister he’d probably appoint Sharon as Minister for Looked-After Babies. There won’t be any danger of Drakeford blaming any social workers for anything.

Note to Jane and Mark: People DIED at the hands of the paedophile gang you fucking idiots.

Someone else who will have known all about the paedophiles and their friends is Howard Thomas. Indeed some of them even worked for him – Howard Thomas was Chief Probation Officer for North Wales 1985-96. Howard is a keen writer of letters to newspapers (there’s a letter from him in today’s Daily Post). He’s been doing this for years. Howard writes really good letters too, describing the folly of imprisoning disadvantaged and dispossessed people with mental health problems. Latterly Howard has taken up the cause of Women – has he been talking to Jane? – and is arguing that far fewer of them should be imprisoned. Howard is clearly a man of some influence – Hansard records that in Sept 2012 Howard gave written evidence to the Justice Committee, again regarding the imprisonment of vulnerable people. Whenever I read one of Howard’s letters I agree with every word. I’d really like to meet Howard. Years ago I wanted to meet Howard to talk to him about penal policy. Now I’d like to meet him to ask him why he employed paedophiles as probation officers, and why he has never mentioned the paedophile gang during his many years of campaigning. I’d also like to remind him that whilst he was Chief Probation Officer, the paedophiles’ friends had me unlawfully arrested and illegally detained in the North Wales Hospital Denbigh and that numerous victims of the paedophile gang were found dead, including some who had dared give evidence against them and five who all died in one arson attack. The carnage on the ground whilst Howard ran the North Wales Probation Service is all very inconsistent with the letters that he’s been writing to newspapers since he retired. Or indeed with the evidence that he gave to Parliament.

Howard Thomas is a former member of the Parole Board. As is Huw Vaughan Thomas. Jane Hutt will probably turn up on there soon along with Dafydd and Lucille.

On the subject of crime and punishment, the consequences of another New Labour flagship policy which everybody told them at the time was a stupid and dangerous idea has been widely discussed in the media over the last few days – indeterminate prison sentences for public protection. This was part of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, one of David Blunkett’s madder brainwaves whilst he was Home Secretary. He was told that it would lead to people who had committed trivial crimes as a result of mental health problems being incarcerated for years, but Blunkett ignored all advice. He was busy being Tough On Crime And The Causes Of Crime – although not with paedophile gangs with connections to Westminster obviously – and was ensuring that ASBOs were being handed out to teenagers with Tourettes syndrome, so nothing was going to stop Blunkett. It has now been revealed that although this disastrous policy was discontinued in 2012, there are still thousands of people with mental health problems banged up in prison who haven’t actually done very much. But the Parole Board knows that they’re Too Dangerous To Let Out. And we all know who sits on the Parole Board… The case being highlighted in the media is that of a suicidal man with mental health problems who has now been in prison for eleven years because he set fire to a mattress. His mother was interviewed and explained that people didn’t believe her when she told them this, they maintained that her son must have committed a serious crime to be banged up for thirteen years. I believe her. Particularly if he dared complain about Top Doctors who were concealing a paedophile ring. Who was Blunkett’s deputy at the Home Office, the Minister of State for the Criminal Justice System and Law Reform, who actually did the legwork on indeterminate sentences, pushing through such a controversial policy? It was none other than Baroness Patricia Scotland QC, who picked up her peerage whilst she was the barrister acting for the Welsh Office at the Waterhouse Inquiry – the Inquiry which covered up the extent of the activities of the paedophile gang that operated in north Wales for decades with the knowledge of the Welsh Office.

I’m hoping that someone will remind the media of someone else who is in prison as a direct result of David Blunkett wanting a bit of publicity for being Tough On Crime – Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes is currently in prison after being convicted in July 1996 of the rape and murder of Sophie Hook in Llandudno. There was absolutely no forensic evidence against him at all and a number of people involved with the case were those who also concealed the paedophile gang. Howard Hughes has learning disabilities and mental health problems and passed through both Bryn Estyn – where he claims that he was abused – and Garth Angharad, the ‘hospital for mentally abnormal criminals’ that was actually owned by Paul Hett, a struck off solicitor who was one of the paedophiles’ friends and which served as a prison for people who had complained about the paedophiles and their friends. David Blunkett personally intervened in the case of Howard Hughes and gave him a 50 year tariff. Full details of Hughes’s case can be read in my post ‘News Round Up – And Murder Most Foul’.

Of course Blunkett overhauled the legislation relating to sex offences in 2002, ‘tightening protection against rapists, paedophiles and other sex offenders’.

Yet more fall-out from another New Labour cock-up occurred after Denzil Lush, a retired senior judge in the Court of Protection, went public regarding his concerns over what is happening in situations involving the Power of Attorney. Denzil Lush is the leading authority on this legislation and is now publicly stating that he would not advise anyone to utilise it after a number of high profile cases of people who have been abused or fleeced by others to whom they have granted Power of Attorney. Lush maintains that there are not sufficient safeguards and he fears that there may be many more cases of vulnerable people who have been abused or swindled under this system. Again, when the legislation was passed, there were warnings that it would leave vulnerable people open to abuse.

The Power of Attorney system is administered by the Minister of Justice and the Office of the Public Guardian, which is an executive agency of the Minister of Justice. The Office of the Public Guardian replaced the Public Guardianship Officer (it’s a bit like the Judean Peoples’ Front and the Peoples’ Front of Judea) and came into being on 1 Oct 2007. Now one would have thought that with a new Office dealing with the most sensitive of cases involving the most vulnerable people losing control over their liberty, their money, their possessions and decisions concerning ALL aspects of their life because they have been deemed to lack capacity, the Gov’t would have been very careful indeed whom they appointed as Chief Exec of this Office. Particularly as they had been warned repeatedly that people with learning difficulties and mental health problems would be placed at risk. Did the Gov’t appoint a lawyer perhaps, someone with a track record in protecting the rights of people and with an understanding of legislation? No. They appointed a man called Richard Brook. Who had just stepped down from his role as Chief Exec of MIND no less.

Brook was Chief Exec of MIND between 2001 and 2006. Brook was Chief Exec of MIND when I wrote and told them about the abuses and assaults being carried out by Hergest staff, as well as the staff perjuring themselves in an attempt to secure convictions against patients for serious offences if those patients had complained. I received an extraordinary letter back, written as if addressing a young child, telling me that I had to find a Yellow Pages telephone book, look under ‘solicitors’, choose one and go and tell them. Brook was also Chief Exec of MIND when Prestwood Homes – which was trafficking female residents into sex work and male residents into unpaid manual labour – were using the free facilities provided by MIND in north Wales such as drop-in centres, walking groups etc in order to claim that ‘clients’ had a full social programme of activities. Prestwood charged thousands of pounds a week for a ‘placement’, the MIND activities were provided completely free. Furthermore, Prestwood clients TOLD the staff at the MIND drop in centres that they were being abused. One female client of Prestwood who had been raped as a child was locked in a room whilst pornography was screened at high volume as ‘therapy’. This young woman was told that if she didn’t ‘co-operate’ at Prestwood she would be taken back to Liverpool, dumped on the street and refused further ‘services’. Those ‘clients’ were slaves and it was happening with the full knowledge of MIND. What happened to that young woman? She disappeared. She never showed up at MIND again after she blew the whistle and Prestwood announced that she was ‘no longer a client’. What did the MIND rep do? She told Robin Holden – who was at that time a manager of the Hergest Unit – who told her that ‘we know all about Prestwood’. Holden is now an ‘executive’ for MIND. Are these people completely stupid? They were told by a 19 year old girl that she was being held captive and abused – she then disappeared off the face of the earth. Another person knew about Prestwood – because I told him, as did a number of other people. That was Geoff Lees. Who is now Director of Vale of Clwyd MIND. Would the whole bloody lot of you – Sue Sayer, Robin Holden and Geoff Lees – now like to go to the police and tell them all that you knew about Prestwood? For details of the full horror that was Prestwood and for details of the untimely death of a support worker who had witnessed truly dreadful things there, see posts ‘A Convenient Arrangement With The Private Sector’ and ‘News Round Up And Crime Report, May 14 2017’.

So who was the Minister responsible for the Office of the Public Guardian when it was created and when Brook was appointed? The Minister concerned was the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice – a man called Charlie Falconer. A old friend of Tony Blair’s, Blair’s former flatmate when they were both junior barristers and the first person to be given a life peerage by Blair, whereupon he immediately joined the Gov’t as Solicitor-General. Falconer joined the Home Office in 2002 and in 2003 joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and as Lord Chancellor ‘for an interim period’ – because Blair planned to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor without discussion. He was told that would not be possible without primary legislation so the plan was dropped. So instead the roles of Lord Chancellor were reorganised, the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs took over some of the responsibilities of Lord Chancellor and also became the sponsoring dept of the Secretary of State for Wales and the Secretary of State for Scotland. What a very tight stitch-up it all was.

Charlie Falconer is married to another lawyer – Marianna Hildyard QC. She specialises in cases involving children, sexual abuse, the placement of children for adoption and trafficking! In 2009 she was made a Deputy High Court Judge.

Should anyone accuse me of going into Grassy Knoll territory here, I would urge you to carefully read and digest the information that I’m posting on this blog. This CANNOT all be a coincidence. There has been a systematic promotion to high office of people who have played key roles in the cover-up of the North Wales Paedophile Ring. Once in office those people have implemented laws and policies that have either criminalised people who have been victims of or are witnesses to the activities of that ring, or made it nigh-on impossible for they or other vulnerable people to have their complaints heard and investigated. Yet all this has been very cleverly designed in the name of equity, ‘protection’ of the vulnerable or human rights. Charlie Falconer himself boasted to an audience in Bangor a few years ago that the Human Rights Act that his Gov’t had passed would mean that no-one would now suffer indignities in care settings – they could sue under the Human Rights Act. What he didn’t mention was at the same time, his Gov’t had virtually abolished Legal Aid, so in reality no-one could sue for anything, no matter how gross the abuse. Along with me in that audience were two lawyers who were fighting cases on behalf of people who had been abused by the Hergest Unit and/or Gwynedd Social Services. Those lawyers were nearly put out of business when Falconer et al withdrew Legal Aid. But that was no doubt most convenient – because those lawyers were of course fighting the Top Doctors and Social Service managers who had concealed the fucking paedophile ring. I and the two lawyers wanted to question Charlie. He wouldn’t take questions from anyone though, he said that he had to dash off for another important engagement. I found out the next day that he’d actually gone to a reception with a carefully selected group of senior academics who could be relied upon not to ask Charlie any difficult questions.

As for the appointment of Richard Brook from MIND as the first Chief Exec of the Office of the Public Guardian – Charlie knew that he’d be onto a winner there. Which was the most high profile case which involved the former Public Guardianship Officer abusing their position? It was the case of Mary Wynch in north Wales. Who had been illegally arrested, imprisoned in Risley Remand Centre and then in the North Wales Hospital Denbigh for a year by Dr Dafydd Alun Jones. Dafydd declared Mary insane and Mary’s money and property was removed from her by the Public Guardianship Officer. When Mary finally got out of Denbigh she successfully sued Dafydd et al and it was admitted that she was not and had never been mentally ill. She was awarded damages but Dafydd and co never paid up. Mary never recovered her money or her property. MIND knew about all of it and did nothing. As ever. But then Dafydd’s mistress Lucille Hughes was trafficking boys to the Westminster Paedophile Ring and Dafydd was banging up anybody who complained or asked questions in the North Wales Hospital. The full details of Mary’s story can be read in my post ‘The Mary Wynch Case – Details’.

I Want Serious Money Now Please

I switched on the radio earlier but immediately switched it off again, because Gyles Brandreth was on there. I didn’t need to hear him tell the world how brilliant he is or bang on about how he established a Teddy Bear museum, which seems to be mostly what he does during his many appearances on light entertainment shows on TV and radio. Although I am not interested in listening to Brandreth, it did remind me that I need to blog about him, because his former career is relevant to this blog.

Most people know that Brandreth is a former Tory MP, but fewer people know that he was the Tory MP for Chester between 1992-97. In fact Gyles took over the seat from the former MP for Chester Sir Peter Morrison. Regular readers will know that Peter Morrison molested children in care in north Wales. Some of Morrison’s Tory colleagues have admitted that they knew that he was abusing boys and at least one of them has maintained that Thatcher was told about this but she appointed Morrison Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party nonetheless. Brandreth himself is very reluctant to talk about Morrison but has indicated that he knew nothing of Morrison’s activities. How likely is this?

The north Wales paedophile ring was known to extend into Cheshire – even Ronnie Waterhouse admitted that in the Waterhouse Report. John Allen, who owned the Bryn Alyn Community and trafficked the boys in his ‘care’ to brothels in London and Brighton and is currently in prison after being convicted of abusing children in north Wales, owned a children’s home in Cheshire as well. A witness at the Waterhouse Inquiry talked about being taken to a big house near Chester where he was molested. By the time that Brandreth had been elected for Chester, allegations of terrible child abuse in north Wales and Cheshire had recently appeared in the London based media. Brandreth was an author, journalist and broadcaster. His wife was a writer and publisher. They will not have missed the stories about the paedophile ring in north Wales and Cheshire.

Brandreth will have no doubt heard the stories from other sources as well. Although Brandreth didn’t stand for election until 1992, he is on record as having said that he had always wanted a political career. He was President of the Oxford Union in 1970 and his contemporaries there were Ann Widdecombe and Edwina Currie, who by 1992 had both worked closely with the people who had concealed the activities of the paedophile ring. Brandreth has spoken publicly about the good friendship that he enjoyed with Widdecombe at Oxford. He is a gregarious man who remained friendly with many people active in the Conservative Party – I’m sure that something will have been said to him, particularly when it got around that he was standing for Chester.

Of course, whilst Gyles was MP for Chester, John Jillings and his team conducted their inquiry into the north Wales paedophile ring and then in 1996 all hell broke out when it was announced that the Jillings Report would never be made available because the contents were so incendiary that Clwyd County Council’s insurers’ legal advisors had threatened to withdraw insurance cover if the contents of the Report were made available, even to members of the Council (see post ‘It’s A Piece Of Cake…’). There had also been a police investigation into child abuse in the region and in 1996 William Hague announced that Sir Ronald Waterhouse would be holding a public inquiry into the matter. Just as Brandreth got elected, five people with connections to the north Wales child abuse scandal were killed in an arson attack (see post ‘The Silence of the Welsh Lambs’).

Brandreth never heard any of this discussed????

Perhaps after he was elected, Gyles simply never rubbed noses with anyone who might have known Peter Morrison or who knew about the concerns over his activities? Unlikely – one thing that Brandreth did successfully do whilst he was MP for Chester was campaign for University status for Chester College. Chester were most grateful and in Dec 2016 appointed Brandreth Chancellor of the University of Chester. Campaigning for your local college to acquire University status involves a lot of hobnobbing with precisely the sort of people whose hair will have been standing on end in the wake of the rumours swirling regarding the activities of the recently departed MP.

Brandreth served in John Major’s Gov’t as a Whip and as Lord Commissioner in the Treasury. He’ll have been particularly well-briefed as a Whip – they are notorious for digging up dirt on MPs and using it to coerce people. Brandreth was interviewed by Lynn Barber for the ‘Guardian’ in 2005 and he discussed his ‘exciting’ time as a Whip with her. He stated that as a Whip ‘you often have to smooth people, you have to take them aside and say “you know the PM really loves you.” Then with other people you have to say “Do you know what the message from No 10 is? Fuck off. We’ve had enough. Five years ago we advanced you £10,000 – do you remember that? Just remember that, because we need you in the lobby tonight”‘.

So Gyles didn’t spend all his time talking about Teddy Bears and Scrabble and woolly jumpers then. Imagine what this intimidating shit would be saying if he had knowledge of child sexual abuse among colleagues past and present and he wanted them in the lobby. Of course, John Major’s Gov’t was often on very shaky ground which is why they will have often needed a Whip to carry on in the way in which Gyles boasted of.

Elsewhere in the ‘Guardian’ interview Barber states ‘he says…that everything he does…is a performance’. He explains that his work as an after-dinner speaker is lucrative – the money is good ‘though not as good as Cherie’s’. Indeed money seems very important to Brandreth, or more precisely having a great deal of it is. His wife grumbled about him being a backbench MP on £50,000 pa and when he lost his seat she decided that she’d had enough of the penury that comes with a salary of 50k in a household with other sources of income at the same time and told him ‘I want serious money now please’.

Mrs Brandreth got serious money as well. Brandreth boasts that he lost his seat on the Thursday and started work on LBC on the Saturday. Of course since then the bumptious vacuous bastard has never been off the radio and TV, although he never says anything of substance. Gyles also decided to try his hand at interviewing, his first try being an interview with the Duke of Edinburgh! It brought him into close proximity with the Royals and associated Courtiers, but Gyles wasn’t at all daunted because he had ‘sat on committees with the Prime Minister’. His interview with Phil the Greek was so successful that it led to a five year contract with the ‘Sunday Telegraph’! At this time of course, Amanda Platell was the press manager for Conservative Central Office and was keeping all the crap relating to the paedophile ring and the Waterhouse Inquiry out of the media (see post ‘Did Glenda Occupy A Key Role In Keeping It All Out Of The Media?’).

Brandreth’s media career really took off after he left Parliament, in the way that the careers of so many of the lawyers who defended the paedophile gang at the Waterhouse Inquiry did after the Waterhouse Report was published (see post ‘This Is What Happened To Nicola, Niclas, Merfyn, Joan and Kathryn’). Was somebody grateful to him for something perhaps? For such a tosser his social occasions really draw in the big names as well. Gyles is President of the Oscar Wilde Society and hosts an annual Oscar Wilde Party – guests have included Camilla Duchess of Cornwall, Stephen Fry, Derek Jacobi, Joanna Lumley and Julian Fellowes.

Toadying interviews conducted with Gyles have remarked on how successful his three children are – one is a barrister, one is a journalist and one is a Gov’t economist. Their paths in life probably wouldn’t have been the same if they had been kids in care being molested by Peter Morrison whilst corrupt lawyers on the Chester and Wales Circuit along with powerful figures in the media and Gov’t concealed it all, but if their dad had information about such matters that could have helped them considerably.

These days Brandreth lives in Barnes in south west London and his name appears on a website listing notable people who live in Richmond-Upon-Thames. Barnes was the location of the brothel the Elm Guest House which was staffed by children in care and where high profile people, including Westminster figures, were alleged to have abused them. At least one boy from the children’s homes in north Wales has stated that he was trafficked to the Elm Guest House and in 2015 the ‘Daily Telegraph’ reported allegations that Peter Morrison had raped a 14 year old boy there. There was also a paedophile ring operating in Richmond-Upon-Thames involving children in local authority care. Dr Alice Levinson, one of the Top Doctors from Springfield Hospital who concealed the criminal activities of the Top Doctors in north Wales whilst they facilitated the paedophile ring, now lives in Richmond-Upon-Thames and has a psychotherapy practice there. Although Alice knew that Dr Dafydd Alun Jones was sexually exploiting patients and that I was suicidal because of Dafydd and Dr Tony Francis (Dr X) constantly having me arrested, she recommended that I be referred to forensic services for ‘containment’. Alice consulted Lucille Hughes for evidence of my ‘dangerousness’ – Lucille was named in the Waterhouse Report as knowing that a paedophile ring was operating in the social services whilst Lucille was Director of Gwynedd Social Services but failed to act. Alice might be a neighbour of Gyles’s!

Brandreth has written a book about his time as an MP. I haven’t read it, but I think that I ought to. However I do know that he has prefaced that book with a quote from PM Arthur Balfour: ‘nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all’.

Some things do matter Gyles. Admittedly not Teddy Bears or woolly jumpers or being the world’s best Scrabble player or getting in the Guinness Book of Records for making the longest after-dinner speech or even your wife’s naked greed – but a vicious paedophile ring with a side-line in pornography and drug dealing and connections in Parliament who are framing innocent people who stumble across them matters very much. Particularly when people who have dared give evidence against them keep being found dead.

Gyles – it’s your turn to speak for one minute without hesitation, repetition or deviation on the subject of ‘Organised Crime – How I’ve Become Very Rich By Keeping Quiet About It’.

Someone else who was in need of Serious Money and who certainly got it is a Lord Crickhowell, who features on an item on BBC News Wales today. The item is entitled ‘Cardiff Bay: What Has Thirty Years of Development Achieved?’ and follows on with a few pearls from Lord Crickhowell who ‘hailed the regeneration of the former docklands as a success’ but stressed that to ensure even more success, a ‘more co-ordinated approach’ to further development is needed. Lord Crickhowell certainly knows all about co-ordinated approaches and the ‘success’ of the Cardiff Bay development. Cardiff Bay is lovely, but there is much grief about it in Wales because the benefits of the successful regeneration of Cardiff Bay have not spread to the rest of south Wales yet alone to west, mid or north Wales. Many people in those regions are still living in cardboard box in’t middle of road despite the luxury down in Cardiff Bay. One person who has done very well indeed out of the regeneration of Cardiff Bay though since he co-ordinated the redevelopment there is a man called Lord Crickhowell.

The Welsh blogger Jac O The North has written an excellent account of the raw corruption that was involved in the development of Cardiff Bay. Jac has compiled a ‘factsheet’ with the history and details of the dodgy deals, sleights of hand and conflicts of interest involved which can be downloaded from his blog. I know that ‘factsheets’ are usually laughable documents produced by the NHS or MIND which fail to explain that the ‘medication’ that you have just been prescribed could well kill you, but Jac’s factsheet regarding Corruption Bay is in a league of it’s own. I highly recommend it. I will provide a summary of Jac’s research here – and pose a few questions and possibilities that Jac hasn’t raised, almost certainly because Jac’s research into corruption doesn’t usually involve delving into the wrongdoing of the health and welfare services.

Jac’s factsheet describes ‘how political power and influence was blatantly and systematically abused for almost twenty years so that vast sums of public money could be used for corporate and private gain and how the Welsh establishment and the Welsh media either acquiesced, turned a blind eye or was simply too scared of the culprits to defend the public interest’.

Cardiff Bay is built on the site of the former docklands. When the coal industry ended, the owner of Cardiff docks, Associated British Ports (ABP), was left with an eyesore and a financial liability. ABP was privatised by Thatcher’s Gov’t in 1982/3 whilst Nicholas Edwardes aka Lord Crickhowell was Secretary of State for Wales. Edwardes was the MP for Pembrokeshire and was Secretary of State for Wales between 1979-87. He had extensive shipping interests and through these business contacts and personal links with ABP.

Following the privatisation of the docks, Edwardes spent a few years working to set up a publicly funded body to regenerate the privately owned docklands. This led to the creation of a quango, the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation (CBDC) in 1987. The chair of CBDC was Geoffrey Inkin, a failed Tory candidate and friend of Edwardes. Inkin was also Chairman of the Land Authority for Wales (LAW) which acquired land for development. LAW had the power of no-appeal compulsory purchase, could smooth out difficulties with planning regulations and could get priority treatment from utilities. The key to the commercial success of Cardiff Bay was the £200 million+ barrage across the estuary, which created a lagoon across the ‘unsightly’ mud flats therefore making the Bay more attractive to investors and those buying, leasing or renting land and property from ABP.

Thus ABP had it’s own private quango pouring public money into the company from which ABP would reap profits. Although ‘the largest waterfront regeneration scheme in Europe’ was paid for by public money, ABP still owned the existing buildings and land as well as everything built on it. The amount of public money that was admitted to have been spent on Cardiff Bay was £500 million – there are suspicions that it was actually much more.

In 1987 Edwardes stood down as an MP and in order to receive his share of the bonanza that he’d engineered, he joined ABP as a Director in 1988. In May 1988 Edwardes was also appointed Chairman of the National Rivers Authority (NRA) – that was the body that was adjudicating on the barrage.

Edwardes and Inkins’s influence via the Cardiff and County Club, the Welsh media and other agencies ensured that any Welsh institution or body that might add to the Bay’s prestige or boost ABP’s profits was approached to locate there. The Welsh media uncritically plugged the project.

So Edwardes, the father of the whole scheme, was a Director of the company reaping the benefits and head of the environmental agency that theoretically had the power to sink the whole project.

A Gov’t Bill getting the barrage through Parliament was passed in 1993 and ABP and CBDC effectively became one entity. However it transpired that no-one wanted to rent, lease or buy Crickhowell House, a huge office block on the development. In 1993, the Welsh Office, headed by Secretary of State for Wales David Hunt, took out a 20 year lease at a total cost said to be in excess of £20 million. As Crickhowell House only cost £11 million to build, that resulted in a very healthy profit for ABP-CBDC. The building was allocated to the Welsh Health Service’s Authority, although they never occupied more than about 1/3 of the building.

In the mid-1990s Wales experienced the saga of the Opera House which was proposed for Cardiff Bay. The leading light in this plan was none other than Nicholas Edwardes, in his capacity as a Trustee (or equivalent) of the Welsh National Opera Company. A competition was held to design the Opera House which was won by Zaha Hadid, but it was never built. There was a lot of squabbling over Hadid’s design, but many people also wanted a new rugby stadium for Cardiff. The dosh was coming from the Gov’t in London who wouldn’t fund both and in the end a new rugby stadium proved a much more popular choice, so that went ahead. Edwardes and Inkin tried to get the rugby stadium sited in the Bay, but that plan failed.

After the devolution referendum in 1997, Ron Davies, the new Secretary of State for Wales, started negotiations with the leader of Cardiff Council for Cardiff City Hall, the building earmarked for housing the new National Assembly of Wales. The negotiations broke down – there have been allegations of skulduggery – and nominations for other sites for the National Assembly began. It was decided to locate the National Assembly in Cardiff Bay, in a new building. Blair’s friend Richard Rogers was the architect who had the winning design for the new building – I’d love to know how that happened, Rogers’s claim to fame was designing the Millennium Dome which was a national joke.

At about this time, Grosvenor Waterside Developments became visible – this was the property arm of ABP, used to disguise ABP involvement.

Ron Davies announced that until the new Assembly building was completed, the temporary home for the Assembly would be in Crickhowell House. Rhodri Morgan, at that time a Labour MP, described Crickhowell House as ‘the very embodiment of that corruption-ridden, semi-colonial, Tory past…’ Rhodri was opposed to the barrage and preferred City Hall as the location for the Assembly. Jac wonders whether it was this that caused London to prevent Rhodri from leading the Labour Party in Wales – Blair famously did all he could to prevent Rhodri Morgan becoming First Minister although it backfired on Blair and Rhodri did end up eventually becoming First Minister. Jac speculates that perhaps Blair et al feared that Rhodri would have taken the Assembly to City Hall.

Jac describes powerful influences at work to keep the location of the Assembly in the Bay. He notes that although there had been much Tory sleaze behind this – Edwardes et al were desperate to have a big prestigious building located in the Bay – the incoming New Labour Gov’t showed no sign of exposing or even undoing the sleaze. Jac speculates that Blair’s 1997 administration allowed the scam because the greed of the ABP-CBDC and the cliques and cabals in Cardiff resulted in Welsh political life being sucked into Cardiff – which suited the control freakery of the New Labour Gov’t, who viewed Wales as dangerously red and dangerously insubordinate and it would be easier for London Labour to manage the sheepshaggers if they were reduced to one city. Jac wonders whether Edwardes told the holders of the purse strings in London that the Cardiff Bay project was too far gone to call back and that the project would fail without a prestigious centrepiece to attract investors. If Cardiff Bay failed, London Labour would look as bad as the Tories. Who would benefit? Plaid – whom London Labour and the Tories perceived to be beyond the pale.

Jac supplies details of an HTV ‘Wales this Week’ episode from July 1999. The programme exposed a secret deal involving extending the lease of Crickhowell House and Alun Michael AM who was then First Secretary (First Minister) – Blair’s choice of First Secretary who had been forced upon a Wales that did not want him as First Secretary – denying the deal, but then admitting it. The programme also exposed the lies that were told regarding the cost of the land that was allocated for the Assembly building. Jac believes that the programme was designed to embarrass the Labour Party, as many questions relating to the Tories’ part in the corruption and the cock-ups went unasked. The Chairman of the HTV Group was one Nicholas Edwardes – who, along with the Tories, was not mentioned during the programme.

The Civil Service mandarin who was instrumental in the machinations to locate the Assembly in Cardiff Bay was Rachel Lomax. Lomax left a prestigious job with the World Bank in 1996 to take up her appointment as Permanent Secretary in the Welsh Office. Jac questions the machinations engineered by Lomax and suspects that the ‘official’ version of events is untrue. Lomax was moved to the DSS (DWP) in Feb 1999.

Jac sums up by mentioning that Alun Michael was the MP for Cardiff South and Penarth, that his constituency included Cardiff Bay and that prior to becoming an MP Michael was a Councillor in Cardiff. So he wanted the Assembly in the Bay. Cynog Dafis (Plaid) also supported the location of the Assembly in the Bay, although Dafis’s own constituency in west Wales didn’t benefit from the Cardiff Bay development. Jac notes that the Welsh media were also robustly in support of the Assembly being in the Bay. At one point Rhodri Morgan announced that the building of the new Assembly had been put on hold – in response to this announcement, Grosvenor Waterside sent a letter threatening legal action if building was not commenced. Jac wonders why Rhodri didn’t call their bluff, as the grounds for legal action was shaky and the threatened exposure of what that company had actually done would have soon shut them up – Jac believes that although Edwardes and his Tory friends weren’t at all supportive of devolution, they were desperate for the Assembly to be located in the Bay to ensure that the development was a success.

Jac has researched and published all of this because he is outraged that millions of pounds of public money has made Nicholas Edwardes and his mates very rich through bank-rolling a project that has been of very little benefit to the rest of Wales, much of which is still desperately poor.

Jac’s research re the details of Edwardes’s massive scam cannot be faulted. However, with regard to Jac’s speculation as to why politicians who would have benefited greatly from exposing Edwardes kept quiet – Jac has missed something of major importance that tied Edwardes and the Tories, Blair and co, Rhodri and even Plaid all up together, although they hated each other. That was the paedophile ring in north Wales and the associated cover-up.

As explained in previous posts, Nicholas Edwardes was Secretary of State for Wales during the years covering Mary Wynch’s unlawful arrest and incarceration by the paedophiles’ friends, he was in post when the paedophile ring was running riot and when Alison Taylor first started blowing the whistle on what was going on, he was in post when Geoffrey Dickens was running his campaign to expose the Westminster Paedophile Ring and named Sir Peter Hayman in the House, he was in post when child care staff in north Wales were being convicted in court of serious offences against children yet the Welsh Office was failing to inspect the children’s homes and he was in post when Geoffrey Dickens handed his dossier with details and names of Westminster paedophiles to Home Secretary Leon Brittan – who then ‘lost’ the dossier. He was in post when Margaret Thatcher was told that Sir Peter Morrison was molesting boys. And on a minor note, he was in post when I first made representation about the criminal activities of the paedophiles’ friends as well. Under Edwardes, the Welsh Office concealed the whole lot.

As detailed in previous posts, the cover-up at the Welsh Office continued under successive Secretaries of State for Wales – including David Hunt, who was also named in Jac’s account. Jac mentions the arrival of Rachel Lomax at the Welsh Office in 1996, after her removal from a high-flying job with the World Bank after just a few months. Rachel Lomax was mentioned in my post ‘So Who Was It Exactly Who Appointed The Corrupt Old Bastard?’. She was the Permanent Secretary in the Welsh Office once the Waterhouse Report got underway and she remained there until Ronnie Waterhouse had heard the evidence and discredited the witnesses. Lomax then buggered off when that had all been dealt with, whilst Ronnie set about writing the Report and reassuring everyone that no political figures had been involved in the abuse of children. Lomax was a very big hitter – she had been dragged back from the World Bank, obviously for something important.

Lomax began her career with the Civil Service in 1968 in the Treasury. She was Principal Private Secretary to Nigel Lawson when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer 1985-86. She was Deputy Chief Economic Advisor in the early 1990s. In 1994-95 she was Head of the Economic and Domestic Secretariat at the Cabinet Office. Then she was Vice-President and Chief of Staff to the President of the World Bank.

This was a woman who was part of the Tories’ inner circle and who was completely trusted by them. She got them out of one hell of a tight spot – and not just one that resulted from the development of Corruption Bay. Remember, by the time that Lomax had arrived in the Welsh Office, scores of victims of and witnesses to the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal had been found dead. There was no danger of Blair’s lot saying a word either, because as explained previously scores of Blair’s buddies in the New Labour Gov’t had been running the London Councils who had sent children in their care to north Wales where they were abused or whose own children’s homes had been infiltrated by paedophiles (see post ‘The London Connection’). Alun Michael was born and went to school in north Wales and had previously been employed as a ‘youth worker’. He was one of the people who signed the Early Day Motion opposing the proposed closure of Garth Angharad, a hospital for ‘mentally ill criminals’ where a number of those who had been victims of the paedophile gang had ended up. Neither were Plaid going to blow the gaffe – Dr Dafydd Alun Jones had been a Plaid candidate and other Plaid politicians, especially in north Wales, were representing constituencies where the paedophile ring was operating in the local social services, who were loudly proclaiming their defence of all things Welsh eg. in Gwynedd. Cynog Dafis had previously participated in some fancy footwork with the Green Party in order to successfully unseat a Lib Dem who signed an Early Day Motion calling for an investigation into the case of Mary Wynch (see post ‘A Few of the Relevant Politicians Re Mary Wynch’s Case’).

The whole lot of them were over a barrel. They must have all begged Lomax to help them out of that mess, not one of them could have exposed Edwardes’s money-making scheme because they’d all helpfully not asked any awkward questions whilst he and his successors at the Welsh Office had covered up a paedophile ring and the associated serious corruption in medicine and the law. As for Rhodri – well when the Jillings Report was withheld he had made furious comments about Welsh politicians not being allowed to know the details of a paedophile ring operating on their own patch. But I suspect that Rhodri knew what would happen if he exposed Edwardes and Corruption Bay – the whole thing would explode and the presence of a gang of murdering paedophiles on Welsh soil would be blamed on the Welsh sheepshaggers in the Assembly. So he went and appointed Brian fucking Gibbons as Health Minister who did his bit by covering up the criminality of the paedophiles’ friends the Top Doctors.

One further point. Edwardes was MP for Pembrokeshire. Long after reports of the paedophile gang in north Wales became public, there was a huge trial in Swansea – of a long-standing paedophile gang in Pembrokeshire.

So what became of the lovely Rachel Lomax, who allowed Nicholas Edwardes to get away with milking the taxpayer of millions and kept the lid on child rapes, prostitution, trafficking and a few murders, as well as institutional corruption in medicine and the law? Well after leaving Wales completely wrecked in the wake of all that, Rachel became Permanent Secretary at the DWP (formerly the DSS). In 2002 she moved to the post of Permanent Secretary at the Dept of Transport,along with her Secretary of State Alistair Darling. She then joined the Bank of England – and left there in 2008, just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, to ‘pursue other interests’. So unlike her dozy git of a boss Alistair Darling, Lomax knew that she had assisted in crashing the global economy and got the hell out of there. Regarding her ‘other interests’ – in Dec 2008 Lomax became a non-executive director of HSBC holdings and a member of their audit and risk committees and in Dec 2010 she joined BAA (now Heathrow Airport Holdings) as a non-executive director.

So for what should Rachel Lomax stand trial first then? Concealing a massive swindle on the part of a Gov’t Minister, concealing a paedophile gang who killed a number of people or crashing the economy? If you’re reading this Rachel, Inspector Knacker would no doubt like to hear from you.

The ‘Celtic Iron Lady’ And Yet More Recent History

The press in north Wales is currently publishing tributes to someone who has just died who was described as a farmer from Denbighshire and a ‘leading figure’ in country life in the region. It was mentioned that the man in question purchased a large pig farm he was younger, was keen on racehorses and was a leading light in the NFU as well as in the Conservative Party. Intriguingly the article in the Daily Post Online stated that this farmer was a freemason. Details of his family were supplied and it seems that his family were actually a local wealthy family with multiple business interests. Of course my antennae started twitching when I saw the words ‘Denbighshire’, ‘leading figure’ and ‘freemason’ in close proximity. A mate of Dafydd and Gwynne’s perhaps? The ‘farmer’ would be about the right age to be a mate of theirs. But then I noticed something even more interesting – at the end of the article, it named the siblings of this farmer who had predeceased him. One was his sister – Beata Brookes, a Conservative politician.

Beata Brookes is a name from the past. When I arrived in Bangor in 1981 most people whom I came across supported Plaid, but every so often Bangor would be covered in blue Vote Conservative posters with the name of Beata Brookes emblazoned across them. I learned that Beata Brookes was the MEP for north Wales. I also soon found out that she was hated by many people, truly loathed, but no-one ever explained why – although to be fair, I never asked. In much the same way that in parts of the UK in the 1980s one would overhear people using the phrase ‘it’s that bloody woman’ and know that they were talking about Margaret Thatcher, in north Wales it was often a phrase used about Beata Brookes. Last night I did a bit of research. As is so often the case these days, I wish that I had done this research years ago – and I also wished that when I was young I had stopped to enquire further when local people had told me how much they hated Beata Brookes.

Beata Brookes was born in 1931, the daughter of a wealthy family in Denbighshire. So she’s about the same age as Dafydd and Lucille, the paedophiles’ friends then. Beata studied at UCNW (now Bangor University) and became a social worker – just like Lucille! Of course, Beata was about the same age as Dafydd and Lucille. Readers familiar with north Wales will already understand that with the region having the networks that it does, Beata will definitely have known Lucille. She therefore probably knew Dafydd as well. For readers in England who might need more convincing, not knowing how north Wales works – and certainly worked in the mid-twentieth century – here’s the clincher. Beata worked as a social worker for Denbighshire County Council, although it is documented that she also worked as a ‘director for a north Wales company’ and as a ‘farmer’. I can’t find a record of the name of the company, I presume that it was a family business – and presumably, as with her brother, ‘farmer’ meant landowner. So Beata was from an affluent local Tory family (Beata joined the Young Conservatives at fifteen and ended up as the national vice-chairman), the male members of whom were freemasons and she worked as a social worker for the Council which collaborated with and concealed the wrongdoing of Gwynne the lobotomist and Dafydd. Beata will have known what was going on in the North Wales Hospital Denbigh. I bet she’ll have known about something else as well – the physical and sexual abuse of children, which had been going on in the region for decades. Scores of those who were named in the Jillings Report and Waterhouse Report as senior managers of the children’s ‘services’ which by the 1970s were known to be rife with paedophiles had worked for Denbighshire County Council as far back as the 1950s, as detailed in previous blog posts.

Was it possible that Beata was one of those who knew about the beatings, the buggery, the rapes, the lobotomies of awkward customers, the incarceration of anyone who crossed Gwynne or Dafydd’s path, the sexual abuse of psychiatric patients as well as of children, the financial abuse of vulnerable adults, the incarceration of homosexuals, the deaths and disappearances, but felt completely overwhelmed and helpless? Er, no – as Beata progressed in her career, she acquired positions which point to her being one of the key figures who ensured that the lid was kept on all of it. In 1963 the Conservative Government appointed her to the Welsh Hospitals Board, the authority directly responsible for the North Wales Hospital Denbigh. She remained in that post for eleven years. Whereupon she became a member of the new Clwyd Health Authority – which took over the running of the North Wales Hospital! And nothing changed at all – homosexuals were still tortured in the name of ‘aversion therapy’ although homosexuality had been decriminalised, women who had given birth outside of marriage were still incarcerated in there, Gwynne the lobotomist was still employed there (and I bet that he was still carrying out lobotomies as well, they were breaking every other law out there, they won’t have given up on their most effective weapon), young people who had been abused were being banged up in Denbigh in the 70s, Dafydd was shagging his way around the institution – life carried on in that place as it had for the previous decades. Of course by 1974, John Allen had established the Bryn Alyn Community and business was booming – children in care from across the UK were being ‘placed’ there, to be sexually abused and trafficked into prostitution. As were the boys at Bryn Estyn at that time. Jillings and Waterhouse admit that by 1974, children in care right across north Wales were being starved, used as free labour, violently assaulted and sexually abused. Some ended up in London and Brighton being abused by the Westminster Paedophile Ring. Dissenters found themselves in the North Wales Hospital or Risley Remand Centre.

So Beata was up to her eyes in it as a member of Clwyd Health Authority. But Beata was a member of a few other things as well – including Clwyd County Council Social Services Committee! So she definitely knew about the kids who were being abused in the ‘care’ of the social services then. Beata played a blinder though – like Dafydd and Lucille, she ensured that she was involved in so many organisations that she remained in control of all outlets. She sat on the Family Practitioners Committee for Clwyd and she was a member of the Council for Professions Supplementary to Medicine – that will have kept any GPs or others who were unhappy with what was going on silent – and she also held ‘several voluntary sector posts in north Wales relating to the disabled and mentally handicapped’. Beata was even President of the North Wales Association for the Disabled! There was no escape for complaining patients or relatives – or indeed other healthcare professionals – from Beata, Gwynne, Dafydd and Lucille. They had the whole region completely stitched up. Although Beata and Lucille couldn’t join the masons because they were women, Dafydd, Beata’s brother and no doubt Gwynne were able to do that bit to gain dominance there.

Not only was Beata occupying influential positions in the local authority and voluntary sector, but she began her political climb at an early age too. After her stint with the Young Conservatives, she joined the grown-ups clubs. She was elected to the National Union of Conservatives and Unionist Associates. In 1955 she was elected as a Conservative Councillor for Rhyl Urban District Council. In the same year she fought Widnes for the Tories in the General Election. In 1961 Beata was the Tory candidate in the Warrington by-election. In 1964 she stood for the Tories for Manchester Exchange in the General Election. In 1970 she threw her hat in the ring for the West Flintshire nomination for the Tories but was beaten by Sir Anthony Myers. My God Beata was desperate to get into Parliament. I don’t think she wanted to do that to help the poor sods whom Dafydd and Gwynne were abusing and killing or the kids that Lucille – and indeed Beata’s colleagues in Clwyd Social Services – were prostituting either.

In 1979 Beata was elected to the European Parliament as MEP for north Wales! Did she use her power to try and assist those in the clutches of Dafydd, Gwynne and Lucille? Of course not – Beata ended up on a number of committees and is remembered as feistily fighting for agricultural and industrial interests in north Wales, but no, she didn’t give a stuff about the welfare or indeed the lives of those who had fallen into the hands of a bunch of pimps and gangsters. It was of course in 1979 that Mary Wynch was unlawfully arrested and incarcerated in Risley Remand Centre and the North Wales Hospital – for a year (see post ‘The Mary Wynch Case – Details’). That hit the London based media. Of course Beata knew about it.

Beata remained an MEP for ten years. Throughout the Mary Wynch scandal and the aftermath – and during those years in the mid and late 80s when Alison Taylor went public on the paedophile ring that was operating in the social services in north Wales. Beata remained silent throughout. Yet every account of Beata’s political career stresses how effective she was, what a ‘fighter’ she was, how she was ‘formidable’ (which in politics usually translates as ‘vile’) and how she was known as the ‘Celtic Iron Lady’. (Brookes was a hard-right Thatcherite.)

In 1983 Brookes’s desperation to bag a seat in the Commons – although she was a sitting MEP – caused a crisis in the Conservative Party. What is now described as a ‘bitter feud’ broke out which centred around Brookes. Boundary changes resulted in the creation of a new constituency, Clwyd North West, a seat that was centred on Colwyn Bay, the location of the HQ of the North Wales Police which was mired in corruption and concealing the paedophile ring. Gordon Anglesea, an Inspector at Colwyn Bay, was actually a member of the paedophile ring. Colwyn Bay also housed a few other bent professionals, including Professor Robert Owen, the Medical Ombudsman for the Welsh Office, who concealed Dafydd’s criminal activities in the late 1980s. Denbigh was a town virtually entirely populated by staff or the relatives of staff of the North Wales Hospital, but people occupying the more senior positions in Clwyd County Council and it’s services frequently lived in the Colwyn Bay area or in the Conwy Valley. They’re the posh bits of that region.

The natural candidates for the Tory nomination for Clwyd North West were the sitting Conservative MP for West Flintshire, Sir Anthony Meyer and the sitting Conservative MP for Denbigh, Geraint Morgan. Some people were grumbling about Geraint Morgan who was perceived to be rather more committed to his work as a barrister than his duties as an MP and although Anthony Meyer was very popular in some quarters, he was dangerously civilised for Thatcher’s Conservative Party and kept disgracing himself by doing things like making positive noises about the EU, not wanting to hang people and not wanting to kill the Argies. It didn’t go down very well at all with some. A group of local Tory activists urged Brookes to put her name forward for the nomination. Meanwhile, Conservative Central Office produced a list of 65 possible names – Brookes’s was not among them. A huge row followed and complaints were made to the 1922 Committee. The Chairman of that Committee, Edward Du Cann, even discussed postponing the selection meeting with the Conservative Party Chairman Cecil Parkinson, such was the rumpus. In the end the selection meeting went ahead.

Brookes, Meyers and Morgan all attended the meeting, at which Brookes made a speech praising Thatcher. Brookes won the selection vote among the Clwyd North East Conservative Executive. Meyers alleged that the meeting was a fix, that Brookes had set out to oust him by stealth by using EU funds to promote her candidacy and ‘usurp the functions’ of the House and that Conservative Central Office were in on the conspiracy. Morgan observed that speaking at the meeting was like ‘speaking to a nobbled jury’. Meyers maintained that the local members were ‘resigning in droves’ and threatened to run as an Independent. He then discovered that he had not been invited to the adoption meeting. Myers challenged this in the High Court and won – they ruled that he should have been invited. Some 800 members turned up to the meeting where the decision not to invite Myers was reversed. Sir Anthony Myers was subsequently nominated and then won the seat for the Tories by a long way.

Whilst I was reading about all this, I couldn’t help noticing the year in which the Tories in Clwyd tore themselves apart – it was 1983. We know that Beata was ruthlessly ambitious, was a woman who bludgeoned people into submission and was sitting on a paedophile ring supplying under-aged boys to Westminster figures and was keeping a lid on the criminal activities of a mental health service that was concealing the paedophile ring. It has been admitted by member of the Conservative Party that Sir Peter Morrison, the Tory MP for Chester, was abusing boys in care in north Wales. Between 1981 and 1985 the Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens held his campaign to expose ‘VIPs’ that he maintained were sexually abusing children. Dickens maintained that this abuse was associated with a trade in child pornography worth a great deal of money. This was exactly the business that John Allen ran. Dickens began his campaign in 1981 when he named Sir Peter Hayman in the House using Parliamentary privilege. In 1983 Geoffrey Dickens handed the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan a dossier with the names and details of VIPs, including Westminster figures, that Dickens maintained were paedophiles. Brittan ‘lost’ that dossier. Since then of course, there have been allegations that Brittan was one of those paedophiles himself. Before he died Geoffrey Dickens talked about the serious unpleasantness and threats that he received after he spoke out.

So Beata herself and a group of ‘local activists’ were very keen for Beata to get into Parliament – so keen that some unlawful dirty tricks were employed, which Meyers alleged had involved Conservative Central Office. The constituency involved in the bun-fight was home to numerous police officers, local officials and professionals who were concealing the paedophile ring that Dickens was trying to expose. I wonder if they were among the ‘local activists’ who were doing pretty much anything to get Brookes into that seat? What if they were worried that Dickens’s campaign was going to gain traction and the whole bloody lot of them would be caught? Sir Anthony Myers sounds the sort of person who would not be complicit with such serious criminal activity, but Beata had been already, for years. The ideal candidate!

The cunning plan didn’t work, but Beata continued as an MEP until 1989 when she was ousted by the Labour candidate. Beata continued to mouth off if she felt like it – in 1983 she protested after the BBC held an interview with John Jenkins, a Welsh activist who had been imprisoned for a bombing campaign at the time of the Investiture. Oh the irony – in his younger day, Dafydd made links with Irish Republican activists after declaring his commitment to the nationalist cause (see post ‘A Network Stretching Back Decades…’). He also participated in the Tryweryn campaign. Like Dafydd, Beata had some media connections – she had worked as an ‘occasional television interviewer’ when she was younger.

Even being voted out didn’t stop Brookes. In 1993 she became Chair of the Welsh Conservative Party and supported John Major whilst he was under fire. She was also Chair of the Welsh Consumer Council and was re-appointed in 1994, despite criticism of her potential conflict of interest by the National Consumer Council and by Rhodri Morgan, who told John Major that the appointment ‘undermined an already disreputable system of patronage’.

The evil cow was awarded a CBE in 1996. In her old age there were still indications of the deals that she was doing on a local level. Brookes hit the media in 2003 regarding a dispute over car boot sales that she was holding on her land in Rhuddlan. In 2000 she had managed to gain permission to hold car boot sales on 28 Sundays every year and then in 2003 she gained permission to hold car boot sales on 14 Saturdays every year. She offered the land on which the car boots were held for the use of the National Eisteddfod. Helping out the National Eisteddfod can work wonders, particularly as Dafydd and many of the paedophiles’ friends are involved with it. (A true but horrible story – some years ago there was an awful shock for a lot of people when it was revealed that one of the people who had been appointed to run something for the children at the Eisteddfod, a nursery I think, was someone from the south of England with convictions for paedophilia. Any ideas how he got in there then Dafydd?) Beata won the day, but the dispute cost the local council many thousands of pounds. What Brookes’s passion for car boot sales was all about I don’t know, but it does remind me of a quip from ‘Private Eye’ years ago, when they were still publishing the imaginary letters from Denis Thatcher, ‘Dear Bill’. One of the letters made a reference to a ‘friend of Maurice’s’ who ran car boot sales – Denis commented that ‘I had no idea that he was a member of the Mafia’.

Readers may remember that in my post ‘Doris Karloff – Honest About Her Expenses But Not Much Else’, I described how Anglesey Conservative Association were desperate to snare a then unknown Ann Widdecombe as their candidate despite Doris knowing absolutely nothing about Wales or Anglesey and not showing much interest either. I speculated that back in those days of the St David’s Laundry in Bangor (see post ‘The BMA And It’s Ethics’), it may very well have been Widdecombe’s uncompromising anti-abortion stance that was the attraction. I wonder if Brookes was involved with that selection panel. Welsh Tories are a bit thin on the ground, it is highly likely that they either roped Brookes in or that she insisted on being part of the process.

There is an outstanding conundrum. Brookes’s obituaries mention that she married a fellow Tory activist Anthony Arnold, but that they divorced in 1963 and Brookes then insisted on being addressed by her maiden name and title, Miss Beata Brookes. It was highly unusual to be a divorcee in 1963 – although dispensing with an unwanted husband was very much easier if you were a woman with money as was Brookes – and divorced women routinely still referred to themselves as Mrs whatever their married name was. The only divorced women who persisted in calling themselves Miss were ageing starlets like Miss Diana Dors or Miss Zsa Zsa Gabor who still called themselves Miss no matter how many times they had been married and divorced. (Miss Joan Collins still does.) So Brookes really broke the mould there – if any readers know what that was all about, please do tell, Beata would hardly be the first to be flying the feminist flag.

In 2013 Brookes joined UKIP. She became very angry with Tories like Cameron calling UKIP ‘fruitcakes’ and ‘clowns’ and stated that ‘you don’t behave like that in politics’. No, what you do is take part in a conspiracy to conceal a vicious paedophile ring and remain silent even when the victims who have been brave enough to give evidence against that ring start turning up dead. Lest anyone needs reminding of just what the Celtic Iron Lady was party to, here’s another quick resume – witnesses were found hanging from trees, hanging from stairwells, dead from overdoses although they’d given up drugs years previously, were found inexplicably dead in cars, some were run over and killed on roads and one teenaged boy was found in a local town with unexplained injuries so serious that he died from them a few hours later. This doesn’t include the people who ‘committed suicide’ after being ‘helped’ by Dafydd and his colleagues. Neither does it include the five people with connections to the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal who were killed in an arson attack at a party in Brighton, to which they had all been invited. The partygoers variously died from smoke inhalation or burns and some people escaped by jumping out of windows and were impaled on the railings below. A man who was alleged to have ‘confessed’ to starting the fire was hit by a lorry and killed himself a few days later.

Beata Brookes died in her eighties in the comfort of the Spire Yale Hospital (a private hospital in Wrexham) in 2015. So she didn’t risk her neck with the NHS that she had helped poison or in one of Dafydd’s ‘nursing homes’. Upon hearing of her death, Andrew R.T. Davies, the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, described Beata as an ‘incredibly talented politician who will be sorely missed’ whose ‘career was varied and hugely successful and I pay tribute to everything she did within public life, the voluntary sector and for the Welsh Conservative Party’.

Victorian Values anyone? Or shall we just go Back To Basics?

What of Beata’s rivals from the 1983 campaign whom she had so ruthlessly tried to shaft?

Geraint Morgan was the Conservative MP for Denbigh between 1959-83. So he spanned the Years of Brutality and Lobotomies then. He cannot possibly been have been as bad as Beata Brookes, but like others who have held political ambitions in the direction of the Denbigh area such as Ieuan Wyn Jones and Paul Flynn, Geraint wasn’t going to even whisper in protest – he was after the votes of all the Denbigh staff, the patients didn’t have votes to cast. Although Geraint was appreciated for being a Welsh speaker and was known to dutifully reply to constituents when they raised issues with him, Geraint had other interests. He was a barrister and busied himself with that. After the 1983 dust-up, Morgan resigned from the Conservative Party and supported Plaid, although he never became a member. That’s the Plaid who embraced Dafydd as an activist and candidate and included so many other people who said nothing about the paedophile gang or the abuses at the North Wales Hospital, although they all knew about it. Geraint Morgan was eventually appointed a Crown Court Recorder. He worked on the Northern Circuit. As did Sir John Kay, who issued a High Court injunction against me on the basis of Jackie Brandt and Keith Fearns perjuring themselves, Keith Fearns never having met me and Brandt having met me two or three times. At the time Fearns and Brandt were employed as social workers by Gwynedd Social Services and I now have copies of the letters exchanged between Lucille Hughes (Director of Gwynedd Social Services), Ron Evans (the lawyer employed by Gwynedd County Council), Jackie and Fearns, in which Evans and Lucille instruct Fearns and Brandt to make statements about me. John Kay issued that injunction just before Geraint Morgan was appointed a judge. Like so many featured on this blog, Geraint was a law graduate from Aberystwyth University and a member of the Gorsedd of the Bards.

The one person who does not seem to have been dwelling in the same cesspool as everyone else was Sir Anthony Meyer. He had previously had a career as a diplomat in the Foreign Office and served in the British Embassies in Paris and Moscow. He was elected as the Conservative MP for Eton and Slough in 1964 but lost the seat to the Labour MP Joan Lestor in 1966. His defeat was attributed to his refusal to play the ‘race card’ in what had become a heated debate about immigration. He sought another Tory seat, but had great difficulty, being on the very liberal wing of the Tory party and being a very enthusiastic European. An old Etonian contact, Nigel Birch, who was the MP for West Flintshire, then asked Sir Anthony if he would replace him as the candidate as he was standing down. Sir Anthony was elected for West Flintshire in 1970. He was popular but very critical of Thatcher. After surviving the bunfight in 1983, in 1989 he famously stood as the stalking horse against Thatcher in a leadership challenge. He knew that he didn’t have a hope of winning, but it did the trick – it encouraged a few other people to challenge her soon afterwards. He was deselected by the Conservative Party for his ‘treachery’ in 1992 and later joined the Lib Dems. So although it was Geoffrey Howe who delivered the killer blow, we have Sir Anthony to thank for kick-starting Thatcher’s demise. We also have him to thank for keeping a bloody monster out of Parliament when he mounted a High Court challenge to her and her henchmen in 1983.

Whilst I was reading about Beata, I saw across another name that I’d previously come across as well – Tom Ellis. Brookes was re-elected as MEP for north Wales after defeating Ellis in 1984, when he stood for the SDP.

Tom Ellis went to Ruabon Grammar School and studied chemistry at UCNW (Bangor University). In 1957 he became manager of Bersham Colliery. He was President of Wrexham Fabian Society and in 1970 was elected the Labour MP for Wrexham. In 1981 he defected to the SDP – Ellis was one of the founder members. He became President of the Welsh Social Democrats. After boundary changes in 1983 he stood for the SDP in Clwyd South West but lost. As MP for Wrexham, Tom Ellis is someone else who will have heard about the paedophile ring – Bryn Alyn and Bryn Estyn were located just outside Wrexham. He’ll have known about the horrors of the North Wales Hospital Denbigh as well. But as I detailed in my post ‘Dr Death’, the Top Doctors of north Wales were attracted to David Owen like flies around a honeypot. And their support was just so much more valued than the support of people who ended up dying so that the Top Doctors and the paedophiles’ friends could continue with their noses in the proverbial trough. Dafydd, Gwynne and Lucille really did have it all sewn up nicely – although virtually everyone knew what they were doing.

News Round Up, August 11 2017

The fall-out from the Newcastle sexploitation case continues in the media (see post ‘Lest We Forget…’), but a slightly modified version of the blame-game has emerged – it’s not South Asian men that are the problem, it’s Muslim men. No – these cases are happening across the whole of the UK as was admitted by the National Crime Agency, but the mainstream media is choosing to report those cases involving South Asian/Muslim men. My post ‘Did Glenda Occupy A Key Role In Keeping It All Out Of The Media?’ explains in detail why the en masse sexual abuse and trafficking of children in north Wales in the 1980s and 90s never received the media attention that it should have. The people named in that post are still controlling the UK media and they are choosing which cases to highlight. I note that Peter Saunders, who established NAPAC (the National Association for People Abused In Childhood), observed that there has been a major problem with the sexual abuse of children by representatives of the Catholic Church. How many of them were South Asian or Muslim men? Whilst I’m glad that Peter made public comment about this, Peter has missed a trick as well. He stated that the problem was that many ‘men’ were abusing young people. Yes it does tend to be men that are carrying out the actual abuse – but this blog has named an awful lot of women who facilitated and concealed such abuse, suppressed complaint or discredited complainants. Once more I emphasise that the common theme is the abuse of vulnerable people who were in the clutches of the health and social care system. The headlines at the moment are concentrating on the abuse of ‘white girls’, but many of the victims are boys and I bet that they are not only white boys either. However, most of the victims are from disadvantaged social groups.

The Mail Online today has published an interview with Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP for Keighley. Ann has told the Mail that she is greatly relieved that this sort of crime is now being dealt with because for many years she was trying to bring attention to the sexual abuse of white girls by South Asian men but was ignored by ‘politically correct’ people who accused her of racism. I am friends with someone who knows Ann Cryer who told me years ago that Ann is not racist and that she was trying to represent and protect some people having a very hard time. (Ann also raised the issue of forced marriages and honour killings before anyone else dared to.) Ann was the MP for a constituency with a high South Asian population – so in Ann’s constituency, the abuse will have been substantially carried out by South Asian men, that is indeed what Ann will have witnessed. I know that she was accused of racism, my friend told me years ago that there was a witch-hunt against Ann Cryer by those with vested interests. I suspect that to accuse Ann of racism was simply the easiest way of discrediting her in that community.

This blog has provided numerous details concerning people who have tried to speak out about organised sexual abuse in health and social care settings or the abuses of a psychiatric system which has proved so useful in concealing it. Alison Taylor wasn’t accused of racism – she couldn’t be, everyone involved in the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal was white British. Alison was accused of exaggerating, of being ‘devious’, of being ‘worse than a troublemaker’ and of using her ability as a novelist to embellish her accounts of the abuse. Mary Wynch wasn’t accused of racism – she was a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’. I wasn’t accused of racism – I was a ‘known troublemaker’, ‘psychotic’, ‘manipulative’, in possession of a ‘borderline personality disorder’, ‘highly intelligent and plausible’ with an ability ‘to get people on my side’ and ‘likely to end up in a ward for the criminally insane’. The Hergest Whistbelower wasn’t accused of racism – he was accused of ‘cherry picking’ ‘attractive young women’. My former PhD supervisor wasn’t accused of racism when he made a witness statement regarding the way that I had been harassed, intimidated and slandered by the mental health services – he was called ‘naïve’. The people who gave evidence at the Waterhouse Inquiry regarding the abuse that they’d suffered in care in north Wales weren’t accused of racism. It was instead stressed that they were drug addicts, had criminal convictions, had mental health problems or were simply ‘very poor witnesses’.

Having said all that, I need to add a caveat here. In north Wales ‘racism’ involving ‘ethnic minorities’ wasn’t an issue. But relations between the ‘Welsh’ and the ‘English’ were sometimes used to muddy the waters. My post ‘I Know Nuzzing…’ described how a number of self-appointed guardians of Welsh culture and the Welsh language used this as a smokescreen to hide their gross misconduct. Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, when it was convenient, reminded everyone of his Welshness and his dedication to the Welsh nation. Whilst his mistress Lucille Hughes facilitated a paedophile ring trafficking youngsters from Wales to be sexually used by Westminster figures and whilst Dafydd himself banged up anyone who complained about what was happening. At the same time as selling his services as a ‘sex therapist’ or ‘expert’ to anyone who’d line his pocket, no matter what their language or nationality.

Race and allegations of racism reared their heads in Keighley because there is a substantial ethnic minority population there. In other parts of the UK where race and racism is very obviously not a factor in organised sexual abuse or professional malpractice, some other excuse will be made as to why the victims and whistleblowers mustn’t be believed.

Ann mentions someone previously named on this blog in her Mail interview – Ken Livingstone. She explains how when she met Ken and discussed her concerns with him, he told her that what she was encountering in Keighley was what he and others had encountered in London ten years previously but in London they now ‘understood’ the ‘communities’ involved. Ken ‘doesn’t remember’ this meeting but I can believe that he did say it – Ken is an unscrupulous wily old politician who’ll use any excuse to get himself out of a tight spot (he has recently tried to discredit opponents by calling them Nazis or declaring them insane). My post ‘The London Connection’ details how some of the London boroughs not only were running children’s services that had been infiltrated with paedophiles but were also sending children in their care to north Wales where they were abused. Ken and the GLC were in the thick of it and before Ken ran the GLC he was a Councillor in Lambeth, who were sending children in their care to north Wales and whose own children’s homes were rife with paedophiles. Ken was also one of those politicians who signed the Early Day Motion in protest at proposals to close Garth Angharad, the privately run ‘hospital for mentally abnormal criminals’ in Gwynedd which housed some of those who dared complain about the abuse that was going on (see post ‘More On Those Who Signed That Early Day Motion’).

An item featured on BBC News yesterday involved Dr Peter Wheeler, Diana’s former doctor (he identified her body after her death). Wheeler is being sued by the widow of Stefanos Vavalidis for negligence, after Wheeler, in his capacity as a ‘private doctor’, spent a number of years prescribing methotrexate for Stefanos’s psoriasis but failed to monitor Stefanos by blood tests as recommended. Stefanos died in 2016 from liver failure, which an inquest decided was ‘most probably’ associated with methotrexate toxicity. The solicitor from Leigh Day who is acting for Mr Vavalidis’s widow has stated that despite ‘specialising in healthcare since 1985…[this is the] worst case of repeated, persistent, negligence that I have ever come across’. He hasn’t been party to the activities of the north Wales mental health services then.

Wheeler is being represented by the MDU. His surgery met all five essential standards in it’s last CQC inspection four years ago. He has however admitted to a breach of his duty and is under investigation by the Metropolitan Police as well as by the GMC. Stefanos’s widow has observed that 18 months after his death, she still doesn’t know whether the GMC will actually be bringing fitness to practice proceedings against Wheeler. Readers are recommended to read Dr Sara Ryan’s blog regarding her experience with the GMC – Sara’s son Connor Sparrowhawk died whilst in the ‘care’ of Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust and the psychiatrist responsible for his care is currently up in front of the GMC. Sara has been on the receiving end of many months of non-communication and disrespect from the GMC, the psychiatrist concerned previously described Sara as a ‘toxic woman’, lied about her and is shedding tears on the witness stand now that she is finally facing a fitness to practice hearing. She continues to work as a psychiatrist in Ireland after being suspended from the register in the UK.

Another story concerning a healthcare professional from England features that of ‘married NHS psychologist’ Markus Themessl-Huber, who is currently the subject of a Health Care Professions Council Tribunal after conducting an affair with a female patient who had previously been sexually abused. Following her relationship with Themessl-Huber, she took an overdose. The Tribunal heard that Themessl-Huber, who worked for NHS Tayside, wooed his patient with chocolates, cake and cheese and spent therapy sessions holding hands with her, rubbing arms or exchanging hugs whilst she sat on his lap. Whilst doing all this Themessl-Huber also falsified his timesheets to conceal the time that he was spending out of the office with the patient.

Themessl-Huber’s rationale for his misconduct was for his patient ‘to be in close proximity to men’. I’ll be interested to hear what the verdict in this case is, because in the 1990s it was actually standard practice in Broadmoor and Ashworth to encourage female patients – who had very often been sexually molested – to enter into relationships with male patients, who were very often sex offenders or even murderers. This was packaged as ‘therapy’ for both the female and male patients. It’s every woman’s dream obviously, a sex offender or murderer as a partner.

A watered down version of the same line of ‘therapy’ involving rather hackneyed ideas of gender roles that was even more widespread and often dished out to female patients with anorexia involved encouraging patients to dress in a ‘feminine’ way if they were thought to have issues with their gender. The writer Laurie Penny was on the receiving end of this when she developed anorexia as a teenager and she has written a bit about it. It was done by some therapists with the best of intentions, but obvious factors – such as someone just wanting to wear trousers on that occasion – tended to be misinterpreted. I was told some years ago that unbeknown to me at the time, one of the geniuses from the Hergest Unit believed that he knew that I was ‘well’ when I was wearing a dress. Which is seriously weird because I owned both dresses and trousers and what I chose to wear when was bugger all to do with if I felt depressed or not. But then a number of people believed that I used to have pink hair because I was bipolar. No, I just liked pink hair. And the Hergest Unit changed my diagnosis on a regular basis depending upon what they wanted to deny or have me arrested for anyway.

The full blown Themessl-Huber therapeutic techniques however were alive and kicking in an appallingly abusive chain of ‘nursing homes’ in north Wales, Prestwood Homes, much more recently (see post ‘A Convenient Arrangement With The Private Sector’). Prestwood was, as I have described previously (see post ‘News Round Up And Crime Report, May 14 2017’), very obviously a trafficking organisation, softening up female ‘service users’ for sex work and packing off male ‘service users’ to ‘placements’ in which they would work in labouring jobs for little or no pay. I witnessed female residents being told that ‘Sue loves you’ (‘Sue’ being Suzanne Hamlet, the highly abusive manager of Prestwood who was in a same sex relationship with Lynda Holland, the other highly abusive manager of Prestwood) and being encouraged to hug and cuddle ‘Sue’ as ‘therapy’, to overcome past experiences of sexual abuse. Other therapy involved young women who had been molested being locked in rooms whilst pornography was screened and being ordered to ‘work with’ male support workers, yes, to acclimatise them to close relationships with men. Prestwood got away with this – and much worse – for years until finally a POVA inspection commented on the ‘bad practice’. Prestwood were ordered to stop their ‘therapy’. The dreadful Sue n Lynda used to publish an in-house magazine (called most appropriately ‘Pulp’) and they reported POVA’s criticism with disgust in ‘Pulp’, commenting that ‘it’s the world we live in’. ‘It’s the home we live in’ observed Brown.

BBC News Wales reported yesterday that the charity ‘Crisis’ has predicted a massive increase in homelessness in Wales over the next few years and are busy telling the Welsh Gov’t what they need to do about this matter. Like other Third sector organisations mentioned on this blog, ‘Crisis’ is not all that it is cracked up to be. I and a friend did a stint with them years ago, volunteering to work at one of their famous ‘open Christmas’s’ in London. There were tons of enthusiastic volunteers but the management was chaotic and volunteers were angered at the lack of people skills displayed by the organisers. The homeless people partaking of the ‘open Christmas’ all had to wear a different style of ID badge to the volunteers which pissed them off and were not given a voice in the organisation, which was a great pity because some of them obviously had abilities which could have been put to good use. It was instead made very clear that they were the paupers in receipt of our charity. ‘Crisis’ perpetuated another big lie too – they made a name for themselves by claiming that ‘no-one is ever turned away’. They were. As I left the building in the middle of Christmas Day, I found a young man sitting on the pavement just down the road, in very inclement weather, blankets soaked in the rain, begging. I asked him if he knew that there was food and shelter available about half a mile down the road and he told me that he’d already tried to get into the ‘open Christmas’ but had been turned away because they were ‘full’. That wasn’t surprising because at that time there were a great many homeless people in London and it was understandable that ‘Crisis’ wouldn’t be able to cater for them all, but they didn’t admit that.

‘Crisis’ kept quiet about other things as well. Anyone working at ‘Crisis’ was brought up sharp against the neglect and abuse of the mental health services as well as the dreadful attitude of the Top Doctors to people who don’t have anywhere to live. One young man had come to ‘Crisis’ seeking advice from their Top Doctor (Crisis enlisted the help of a Top Doctor and held a ‘clinic’ for the duration of the ‘open Christmas’). He had been attacked whilst sleeping rough in London and was stabbed, sustaining a serious injury to a kidney. He had been taken to a central London teaching hospital, had been operated on and was then discharged virtually immediately, although he had nowhere to live and no-one to help him. That would not have happened to someone with a home and people around them to witness events. This young man was in considerable pain and his wound wasn’t healing which was why he was seeking medical advice from ‘Crisis’. I’ve never noticed them speak about such matters, but they’ll have plenty of evidence.

‘Crisis’ these days is a much, much bigger charity than it was when I volunteered, but I suspect that the management is still questionable. I know that the ‘cook in charge’ of one of their recent ‘open Christmas’s’ was someone who has harassed and made unfounded malicious allegations against at least three vulnerable neighbours of hers and who was some years ago dismissed from a position as an assistant psychologist after she was deemed to be a danger to vulnerable people. She was good enough to blog about her work for ‘Crisis’ – not as an expose, but to let the world know what a charitable person she is – and it was clear from her account that chaos and mismanagement reigned.

‘Crisis’, like MIND, the NSPCC et al is now big business. In the year 2012-13, ‘Crisis’ had a turnover of over £22 million and had 280 staff. A look at recent Chief Execs of ‘Crisis’ suggests that like MIND et al, ‘Crisis’ is run by people who are making a career out of managing huge charities which are receiving millions in grants from Gov’t – those Chief Execs in turn sit on Gov’t advisory Committees. It is a convenient relationship but not one which is conducive to coming up with solutions to problems. The current Chief Exec of ‘Crisis’ is Jon Sparkes. He was before his present appointment the Chief Operating Officer of UNICEF and prior to that head of Scope. I don’t know anything about UNICEF but I have heard much criticism of Scope. Jon Sparkes replaced Leslie Morphy as Chief Exec of ‘Crisis’. Leslie Morphy is now Vice-Chairman of Oxford Brookes University, a member of the Home Group Board and the Chair of an unidentified charity ‘focussed on supporting newborns in Vietnam’.

This is big business and the rewards are huge salaries, gongs, invitations to Buck House and for some, seats on bodies such as the EHRC. There are still some well-motivated people involved in charities but it can be a frustrating business if your charity is dependent upon Gov’t grants – no-one will dare speak out if Gov’t does something unacceptable or which simply won’t work. I was previously involved with a Third sector women’s organisation in Wales. All the Trustees were excellent and very genuine, but there was one issue in particular that they wanted to speak out about. The organisation was ordered by a Welsh Gov’t Minister to remove a sentence from one of it’s reports – because the sentence was mildly critical of the Welsh Gov’t. The Minister who pressurised that organisation is a Minister who continually touts herself as a Minister representing the feminist cause, who has built her reputation upon being the founder and former head of a major Welsh charity fighting for women’s equality and who dishes out awards for ‘Women of Achievement’ in Wales. At her last such ceremony she gave an award to a woman who formerly worked at Bangor University who was the most ferocious self-serving bully and who attempted to close down four departments which, if she had succeeded, would have put a considerable number of other women out of work. The charity that I was involved with did not carry on like ‘Kids Company’, but sadly the Kids Companies of the world do very well for themselves – if they toady to Ministers and tell them what they want to hear they can draw down millions.

The Third sector has it’s own publications, it’s own awards ceremonies and it’s own websites advertising career opportunities and Gov’t funding opportunities. It is no longer a voice independent of Gov’t/the state, it employs people who have been trained in Gov’t/state agencies and it reproduces the same problems as Gov’t/state organisations do. For years I thought that the symbiotic relationship between Gov’t and charity that spilt over into corruption was just evident in MIND. Then I noticed it in other mental health charities. Then in drugs/alcohol charities. Talking to other people who have worked for a whole variety of charities it is clear that the back-scratching and corruption is endemic. With regard to charities providing health and social care services, as far as the ‘support workers’ on the ground ‘supporting the clients’ are concerned, it is low pay, masses of responsibility and no recognition. Union membership in this sector is never discussed. The supervisors and managers are frequently Angels or social workers who have disgraced themselves in their previous career.

There has been much discussion on the Welsh political blog Jac O The North recently regarding the Third sector in Wales. Jac and a number of his correspondents take a right wing nationalist perspective and are scathing about the Third sector because it is bank-rolled by the Welsh Gov’t and is responsible for attracting many people with social problems into Wales. This should not be interpreted as only a right wing or nationalist argument, it is indeed happening and the result is vulnerable people not receiving the support that they need. Cheap property and the availability of Gov’t grants is resulting in a lot of charities housing disadvantaged people from England in rural Wales. Usually the biggest concern is the neglect or abuse of the vulnerable clients themselves, but there is now a growing business in the provision of ‘services’ for sex offenders or other people whose behaviour may well be very distressing to those living around them. For me, the salient issue is England exporting it’s citizens who need care and are costly to the state to parts of Wales which does not have the infrastructure to support them. Wales is then derided for having so many citizens categorised as ‘disabled’ or in receipt of benefits, the implication being that we’re all ignorant bastards who ignore the dear old public health experts’ advice and have willingly got ourselves into such a state that we can’t work. No, England has sent us thousands of people that they will not look after and do not want.

Yesterday it was reported in the Daily Post Online that ‘homelessness charity’ The Wallich has just won a Court Appeal giving them permission to house homeless people with histories of sex offending and drug use in Colwyn Bay. The Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which serves that region, is in special measures as a result of the institutional abuse of mental health patients, it’s mental health services have collapsed, it does not have any services for sex offenders and ‘substance abuse services’ are provided by Dafydd and Lucille’s charity CAIS. The area houses a chapter of the bike club ‘The Outlaws’, two of whose members were recently convicted of drug dealing on a massive scale and has seen turf wars between rival drug dealers which has resulted in stabbings, shootings and murders. It is not the best place to house sex offenders and people with drug problems.

The Third sector con seems to have been going on for a long while. A friend told me the other day of how he caused a diplomatic incident at an Amnesty International meeting in Birmingham years ago. He had asked the person presiding over the meeting when they were going to support the Birmingham Six, who at that time were still languishing in prison. Amnesty supported Nelson Mandela, but no they would not support the Birmingham Six ‘because they had a fair trial’. No they didn’t, they were framed and spent years in prison because just about everybody involved in the case had lied. Even Amnesty wouldn’t admit that the British justice system was bent. Probably because someone had applied for Gov’t funding or wanted a gong.

The Welsh media are once more reporting on the rural GP crisis. Dear old Dr Eamonn Jessup, a regular on this blog, has been mouthing off again regarding the ‘rapidly escalating rural GP crisis’. Eamonn and his mate Dr D.G.E. Wood featured on this blog recently after I discovered that they are popping over to Cyprus and advertising their services as ‘real British doctors’ to folk unacquainted with them (see post ‘I Think That We’ve Been Here Before’). One of these real British doctors – Wood – was instrumental in threatening, harassing and lying about me in his efforts to conceal the criminal activities of his mates Gwynne the lobotomist, Dafydd and Dr Tony Francis (Dr X). Those three were of course in turn concealing the North Wales Paedophile Ring. Eamonn regularly screams and screams until he is sick, he started doing this when Edwina Hart was Health Minister and Mary Burrows was CEO of the Betsi and they were both trying to address the corruption and misconduct in the north Wales NHS. Whilst trying to depose Edwina and Mary, Eamonn promoted a Facebook group, ‘Higher Pay For Doctors’. Eamonn and ‘Dave’ have been leading lights in general practice in north Wales for decades and have both been involved in GP training. So if GPs don’t want to work in north Wales it is very probably something to do with them.

To illustrate the GP crisis in north Wales there has been much lamenting that two local practices are closing. One is the practice of Dr Adriaan Smits near Bontwnog. This is the practice that was recently found to have unlawfully dismissed it’s practice manager because she dared to complain about the vile behaviour of one GP towards both staff and patients. The other GPs colluded with him, framed her for embezzling money and unlawfully sacked her (see post ‘Top Doctors In Trouble Again And News Round Up’).The other sad loss is of the appalling Dr John Morris Jones whose practice at Penygroes is shutting it’s doors now that Morris Jones is retiring. This is a man who hung up on me when he was supposed to be performing on call duties when I rang, because I had complained about his mate Dr Tony Roberts of the Hergest Unit (see post ‘One Dangerous Fucker’ for details). I was actually ringing in response to a much nicer female doctor who had been worried about my condition a few hours earlier and had asked me to ring back. Morris Jones did not tell me that she was still in the office and he did not tell her that I was on the phone asking for her. When he realised that it was me ringing he simply said ‘she’s not here’ and put the phone down. Since this event I heard a number of first hand stories of Morris Jones refusing to treat or insulting the residents of Penygroes. This lethal git raked in the best part of £100k pa for risking the lives of people in that village. No-one will be any the worse off after the closure of these two surgeries, the NHS will simply save itself a great deal of money. Perhaps Jessup and Wood would like to piss off to Cyprus on a permanent basis and hand over the remit for GP training to others, then maybe trainee GPs will stop running away from north Wales screaming.

A story from south Wales – a groping NHS male nurse has been found guilty of seven counts of sexual assault at Cardiff Crown Court, although it is not reported at which establishment he was employed. He is said to have been molesting female colleagues for the last four years ‘at an NHS hospital’ – although I bet he’s been doing it for far longer, he’s not just going to have spontaneously turned into a sex offender for no good reason four years ago. He gave the reason for his groping as him not being able to help it. Which was always the excuse used by sex pests in days gone by. In fact Jimmy Savile used to make comments like that when he pretended to faint with desire at being surrounded by so many dolly birds on ‘Top of the Pops’. When he wasn’t asking four year old girls if he could be their boyfriend whilst they were trapped in a hospital bed. Not of course that Esther ever noticed any of this.

An inquest at Ruthin has heard that an elderly resident in a ‘care home’ at Rhos-on-Sea died as a result of serious untreated pressure sores. The manager of the home failed to call a GP and wouldn’t let anyone else call one either. I’m tempted to say that the elderly lady would probably only have encountered Jessup, Wood, Smits or Jones anyway, so who knows if the outcome would have been any better if a GP had been consulted.

The Daily Post Online are reporting on a major trauma – that patients in north Wales might ‘lose their watchdog’. Yes the Welsh Gov’t are ‘consulting’ regarding the future of the most ineffective watchdog in the land, the yapping Jack Russell that is the Betsi/North Wales Community Health Council, the subject of a number of previous posts (eg. ‘High-Level Shenanigans At The Community Health Councils’). That is the ‘independent voice of the patients’ which has a considerable number of retired Top Doctors and their allies sitting as members, including former Hergest psychiatrist Dr Sadie Francis, former facilitator of the paedophile ring Glanville Owen (Deputy Director of Gwynedd Social Services whilst the paedophile ring operated in that organisation) and the mummy of them all ‘Dr Chris’ aka Dr Christine Evans, retired surgeon from Ysbyty Glan Clwyd. Long time readers of this blog may remember me reporting on Dr Chris’s adventures many months ago. At one time Dr Chris was leading the CHC – she also most helpfully wrote a blog in her capacity as a Councillor which made it quite obvious that Dr Chris’s loyalty was first and foremost to her former colleagues at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd, who along with other vascular surgeons in north Wales were scrapping among themselves, failing to co-operate with anyone and making decisions which prioritised their own lifestyles and wishes rather than patients’ needs. Unsurprisingly they were the subject of a highly critical report suggesting that at least some of their units should be shut down. They screamed and screamed until they were sick and then enlisted the help of Dr Chris, who pledged her support for them on her blog. Dr Chris had every right to support her former colleagues even if they were foul and incompetent, but she shouldn’t have been passing herself off as the independent voice of the patients whilst doing so. Furthermore the independent voice of the patients was still working as a surgeon herself – she was going on jollies with other surgeons, working as an examiner and doing a bit of charity work as a surgeon. Her effectiveness as the independent voice of the patients was limited by her habit of only remaining in Board meetings long enough to say what she wanted in defence of her colleagues and then walking out.

Hilda Foxall, whose husband died whilst on the care of Bryn Hesketh Unit in July 2015, has been conned into defending Dr Chris and co. Hilda has told the Post that her husband died from kidney problems and sepsis and that the CHC helped her gain answers from the Betsi. The CHC probably didn’t tell Hilda that her husband should never have died in the first place – the Betsi has been prioritising and ‘training’ it’s staff in sepsis for a good ten years now and they still miss the symptoms every time. Furthermore Hilda’s husband died in 2015 – that was long after the Betsi was placed in special measures by the Welsh Gov’t for the institutional abuse of patients in Tawel Fan ward. Where were the staff responsible for the abuse in Tawel Fan redeployed (none of them were disciplined except for the nurse who blew the whistle on the abuse, who was sacked)? Bryn Hesketh. So they were very likely to have been the very people responsible for failing to look after Hilda’s husband properly.

The Betsi have stated that they ‘value’ the CHC’s work and that they ‘have a good working relationship with the CHC’ and that they ‘work in partnership with them’. Of course they do, the CHC is the best friend that the Betsi could possibly have, their members are either complete dickwits or former employees of the NHS and their partners in crime.

Plaid AM Llyr Huws Gruffydd has sprung into action – the Llyr who knows exactly how bad the mental health services are because I wrote to him in detail about one my friends who was left to kill himself by the Hergest Unit. Llyr is defending the clapped out bunch of con-artists that is the CHC and had told the post that ‘leading politicians’ such as Andy Burnham ‘regretted’ the scrapping of the CHCs in England. Andy will have been horrified at the scrapping of the CHCs – Andy Burnham was the Minister who, along with Alan Johnson, refused over 80 requests from concerned colleagues to hold an inquiry into Mid-Staffs. The CHC helped keep the lid on all those patients who died up there….

Lastly, I have to report a triumph for those we know and love. Jimmy Burns, the police officer and former Hergest Unit nursing assistant who has been on trial in Caernarfon Crown Court for attempting to pervert the course of justice and assault, has been cleared, along with another police officer, despite a body camera worn by a third officer filming Jimmy Burns shouting and swearing at a man whom they had arrested and then spraying pepper spray in his face, although the man under arrest was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car at the time. Jimmy and his colleague seemed to have had a helping hand from the judge, Huw Rees, who yesterday ordered the jury to clear Burns’s colleague. Jimmy’s barrister was a man called Wyn Williams. Who is married to one of Burns’s former colleagues, a psychiatric nurse at the Ablett Unit! I’m glad that Wyn has been able to effectively represent his wife’s former colleague. Because when my solicitor sought an opinion from Wyn Williams regarding the conduct of the mental health services towards me – including his view regarding the evidence of criminal activity and collusion on the part of the Ablett Unit – somehow it all fizzled out. In fact I remember meeting Wyn, but I don’t actually remember receiving a report from him. Thank goodness that he was on the ball for Jimmy!

After noticing which barrister had represented Jimmy, I did a bit of research on Judge Huw Rees who had been so helpful to the defendants. Huw Rees is a law graduate of the University of Aberystwyth, like so many lawyers and judges named on this blog. Huw was formerly a barrister based in Iscoed Chambers, Swansea and listed ‘sexual abuse cases’ as one of his specialities. Some years ago he was involved in the high profile case of the paedophile ring in west Wales. Since Huw has been sitting as a judge, he has shown a great deal of understanding towards certain offenders. In the last few days he passed sentence on a man who punched his girlfriend in the face, breaking her cheekbone. Huw observed that he wasn’t a violent man and passed a community sentence rather than a prison sentence. I’m not sure how Huw concluded that the man involved wasn’t a violent man, because he already had a caution for a previous assault on a female partner. Huw Rees was also most understanding in 2015 when he presided over the trial of a primary school caretaker who had been found in possession of more than 600 child abuse images – he escaped a prison sentence too. As did a Colwyn Bay man who carried out a serious sexual assault on a woman, he got away with a community sentence. In one of his judgements, Huw made reference to people knowing his sentencing policy towards sex offenders – this seemed to be a reference to Huw being known to favour less draconian sentences in such cases. I don’t think that prison sentences do much good myself and I would prefer a world in which greater understanding was shown towards more offenders and indeed the availability of therapeutic programmes for certain sex offenders, such as those found in possession of indecent images.

But Huw comes down like a ton of bricks now and then. In April 2017 he jailed a man from Bangor for three years after his two young children had been ‘exposed to heroin fumes’. Caernarfon Crown Court heard that the father didn’t mean to harm his children, the offence happened as a result of his own drug addiction. Whilst presiding over the trial of a teenaged girl from Bethesda who had kicked a man (she had played as a professional junior footballer) whilst he was lying on the ground after he’d been in fight with her and two of her companions, Huw denounced her as ‘feral’, stated that he would not tolerate anyone who kicks someone when they’re on the ground and imprisoned her, although she had only inflicted minor injury. She sounded like a cow – but there was one aspect reported regarding the case which was not fully explained. That was, a comment that the girl had ‘felt threatened’ as a result of something that had happened on the bus upon which she, the man whom she kicked and another youth had been previously travelling. The only info regarding the circumstances leading up to the fight was that those involved were on a bus when some comments were passed – the teenager and the youth with her texted another man who met them when they all got off the bus and it was then that they had a fight with the man who ended up getting kicked by the teenager. So something happened on the bus – that allegedly upset a teenaged girl and caused a fight between two of her male companions and another man. But we don’t know what it was.

Since 2012, Huw Rees has been a legal member of the restricted patients’ panel of the Mental Health Act Tribunal. Which could well be great news if you’re a mentally ill sex offender but not so great news if you’re a mentally ill teenaged girl who’s lashed out after feeling threatened by someone. Whatever, if you’re a mentally ill wife-beater you’ll be well away if Huw’s sitting on the Tribunal.

The Great And The Good

As promised I’ll provide brief reviews of those Top Doctors and their associates who have popped up in the media today. The first one that I heard was Cathy Warwick, Chief Exec of the Royal College of Midwives on the ‘Today’ programme this morning. As well as awakening to the Mental Health Crisis which has been with us for years, the UK has now awoken from it’s slumber regarding the Maternity Care Crisis. It has been revealed that during 2016 nearly half of the maternity units in England temporarily shut down at some point as a result of a ‘bed shortage’. Some of the media reports have attributed the problems to ‘women choosing to give birth at a later age’ thus increasing the number of complex deliveries, or ‘a higher number of obese mothers’. So it’s the patients’ fault then, I thought that perhaps it might be, they’re all old and fat. Now and then the real reason for the problem has been mentioned – the NHS is short of thousands of midwives. Discussions have been held about the possible reasons – such as pay or the loss of training bursaries. The one factor not mentioned is that good midwives won’t work in an NHS where women and babies are regularly put at risk or where the midwives are scapegoated for cock-ups that are beyond their control – I actually know midwives who have left midwifery who have not hesitated to state that these were the reasons why they left their jobs.

So Cathy was wheeled out to comment on Radio 4. She didn’t admit the real reasons why midwives are fast becoming an endangered species either. But then she is very much part of the problem. Cathy Warwick has led the RCM since 2008 and knows exactly how dreadful some maternity care is. Not only has she never spoken out about this, but when James Titcombe, a former advisor to the CQC, was a little too critical of the state of maternity services for her liking, she wrote to the Chief Exec of the CQC and asked them if they could persuade James to be ‘less antagonistic’ on social media. James ended up resigning from his post as a result of the relentless pressure that he was subjected to by the midwifery establishment.

James Titcombe had good reason to be blunt about the danger that women and babies are regularly placed in – his own baby died as a result of negligence at Furness Hospital. Not only that, but after James was faced with a less than honest response following his son’s death, he did a bit of digging and found that many other babies had died at that hospital and that there had been a major cover-up regarding the dreadful conduct of a small number of midwives. James faced extreme hostility and efforts to silence him after he had been appointed to his role with the CQC and at one point a midwife even sent out a tweet about it being difficult to disagree with a ‘grieving and angry man’ who was blaming a whole profession for his loss. James had every right to be angry and of course he was grieving, his baby had died. Furthermore he wasn’t blaming a whole profession for his loss, he had simply very skilfully demonstrated that the ‘whole profession’ closes ranks and risks patient safety and that it is a considerably dishonest profession. In 2015 James commented that the National Review of Maternity Care failed to examine the current quality and variation in safety on maternity wards. Anyone want to admit that he was correct?

Not only has Cathy Warwick failed to speak out regarding the many problems in NHS maternity services, but she’s kept very quiet about the systematic way in which independent midwives have been prevented from practicing. A number of them such as Beatrice Carla were subjected to high profile show trials at the hands of the NMC and were driven out of the profession in that way, but because a few dared to persist their insurance was then withdrawn and midwives are legally unable to practice without insurance, so it was curtains for them. It is unlawful for women to give birth unaided in the UK, so unless one is very wealthy indeed and books oneself into somewhere like the Portland Hospital – which provides lovely grub and rooms as good as the best hotels but has presided over some major clinical disasters itself – it’s off down to the local NHS Unit for everyone now, even if the one nearest to you is lethal. The only way around this is for a woman to lie about her delivery due date and give birth ‘accidentally’ at home. Which is actually what some women are resorting to if they’ve previously had a really bad experience in hospital.

This is no way to treat women is it. The biggest laugh of all is that whilst risking women’s and babies safety, Cathy Warwick maintained that as a feminist she would make an ‘executive decision’ on behalf of the RCM to support the abolition of any time limits on abortion – members were not balloted. Hundreds of furious RCM members who had conscientious objections to abortion protested but Cathy ignored them.

Cathy rakes in a good deal more than the average midwife – in excess of £100k pa. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by that hallowed institution St George’s Hospital Medical School in 2007.

Then Radio 4 inflicted a Top Doctor upon it’s listeners on ‘The World At One’ – John Ashton, who was fuming away about the health of ‘northerners’ and maintaining that what was needed was more funding for public health in the north. Ashton’s angry near-rant followed clips of interviews with a number of northern men who all showed a healthy disrespect towards the BBC journalist when he quizzed them about their smoking habits and diets. Ashton banged on about the sins of Public Health England in spending far more per head of population in the south than they do in the north and also got in a mention of the ‘male identity crisis’ as well. The male identity crisis is not something that is going to be solved by the Gov’t giving more money to bodies like Public Health England or indeed by Public Health England upping their budget for the north. There is massive inequality between the south and the north but Public Health England is not the sort of body which will address the sort of inequality that needs addressing. John Ashton sounded so furious that I thought that it would be worth googling him because I hadn’t come across his name before.

Professor John Ashton has passed through the hands of a few institutions that have been named on this blog as concealing the wrongdoing of the Top Doctors – the University of Southampton, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Liverpool Medical School. Ashton is the former Director of Public Health for Cumbria – well the NHS had a few problems in Cumbria didn’t it John, which were of course concealed. Such as all those babies who died in Furness Hospital, one of whom was James Titcombe’s son. It was also the NHS in Cumbria which appointed William Bingley to a senior role in the regional Trust – the William Bingley who colluded with the criminal activities of the Top Doctors in north Wales whilst he held senior positions with MIND and the Mental Health Act Commission. Bingley ended up resigning from the Trust after his business activities and associated conflicts of interest were made embarrassingly public. He ended up with a Chair in Mental Health Law and Ethics at the University of Cumbria, so he didn’t go far.

John Ashton might have known about Dr Dafydd Alun Jones and the paedophiles’ friends in north Wales himself. In 1986 John Ashton was employed as a Senior Lecturer in Liverpool Medical School. It was in 1987 that Dafydd told me that if I dropped my complaint against him he’d have a word with his friend who was a Professor in Liverpool Medical School and he’d get me a place there. In the summer of 1984 I had been told by a friend of Sonia Maxwell, the daughter of Terry Maxwell the Clinical Director of Ysbyty Gwynedd, that Sonia had been offered a place to study medicine at Liverpool regardless of her A level results before she had even applied ‘because they know her dad’. Ashton himself whilst he worked in Liverpool in 1986 established a pioneering needle exchange scheme for addicts. So I presume that Ashton knew the pioneering psychiatrist Dr John Marks from Liverpool who achieved impressive results regarding the reduction of harm among drug users, who in the early 1990s wanted to go to north Wales to work. Whose appointment was blocked by Gwynedd Health Authority because they wanted to give the contract for ‘substance misuse services’ to Dafydd. Which indeed they did (see post ‘The Evolution Of A Drugs Baron?’)

John Ashton originally trained as a psychiatrist. He has also worked in family planning and reproductive medicine. He’ll know all about the fertility treatment scams which have been discussed on this blog then.

In Feb 2007 the Manchester Evening News reported that Ashton was quitting his NHS post because he was fed-up with Gov’t reorganisations of the NHS and ‘red tape’. He stated that he was contemplating a career in politics.

He obviously changed his mind because between 2013-2016 John Ashton was President of the Faculty of Public Health. He was suspended from his post at one point after sending out a tweet referring to a group of people as ‘cunts’. I think that they had disagreed with him over something.

In July 2014 Ashton pledged his support for a change in the law to allow doctors to act in cases of ‘assisted dying’. The suicide statistics for north Wales suggest that Dafydd et al have been helping people on their way for years.

John Ashton has been very robust in his support of some other Top Doctors. In 2012 he took on the UK media after an article appeared in the ‘Independent’ stating that Clare Gerada, the Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, had a vested interest in opposing the Gov’ts NHS reforms. Ashton charged into battle on her behalf, robustly defending her and later accused the Dept of Health of trying to gag him, saying that he had felt ‘bullied’. He should have just sent them all a tweet calling them cunts.

Who was the oppressed woman whom Ashton valiantly defended? Clare Gerada was the Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners between 2010-2013. She is a London based GP with interests in mental health and substance abuse. So she’ll know how crap the mental health services are then. Not that she’ll have ever publicly admitted it – because she’s one of the lot who trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley! In the 1980s – when the Maudsley’s finest alumnus Dafydd was concealing the paedophile ring and illegally imprisoning people in the North Wales Hospital Denbigh. But Clare will already have been schooled in the art of keeping quiet in the face of people doing unscrupulous things – she studied medicine at UCL. In 1992 Clare began working as a GP in Lambeth – the Lambeth that, like north Wales, ran children’s services teaming with paedophiles. The Lambeth who – until the 1990s – was also sending children in it’s care to children’s homes in north Wales where they were abused. Did you really not ever notice any of this Clare?

In April 2016 Clare was elected to the Council of the BMA. Clare is also a member and honorary fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

In Sept 2016 Clare was named as one of the Lib Dems new ‘Beveridge’ group of advisors – although she had been a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party until the EU Referendum. Perhaps she was one of these people who threw a hissy fit because they thought that Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t enthusiastic enough about the bankers club which is the EU.

Clare is a convenor of the cross party political group ‘More United’. I suspect that the only unity that Clare shows is with that of other Top Doctors.

There is a nice photo of Clare on her wiki entry. She is carefully posed – in a similar position to that famous pose adopted by Helen Mirren when she was photographed a few years ago to demonstrate that the over-65s can still look wonderful in a bikini. Clare isn’t wearing a bikini though, she’s wearing a boring but very expensive dress and for some reason is clutching an equally boring designer handbag in such a way as to ensure that it is featured in the frame. Clare must have spent ages getting that photo right, it even looks as though it was professionally done in a studio. The caption above the photo reads ‘Lady Clare Wessely’. Because that’s who she is – she’s married to a Sir!

The Sir to whom Clare is married is another Top Doctor, Professor Sir Simon Wessely, the Professor of Psychological Medicine at Kings College London and the Director of the Kings Centre for Military Health Research. If I presented ‘Woman’s Hour’ I’d call Clare and Simon a ‘power couple’.

Sir Simon is also an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at Kings College Hospital and at the Maudsley! Indeed he studied at the Maudsley in the mid-1980s. And at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is a Civilian Consultant Advisor in psychiatry to the British Army.

He was knighted in 2013 for his services to military healthcare and to psychological medicine. In 2014 Simon was appointed President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Yet the mental health services are such a mess…

In an interview with the ‘Lancet’ in 2007 regarding the controversy over Wessely’s position concerning Gulf War syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome, Wessely excused himself by saying that he was ‘keen to get published’. So what else did he publish in a hurry without thinking about it? He maintained however that regarding chronic fatigue syndrome, he was subjected to ‘a relentless, vicious, vile campaign designed to hurt and intimidate’. Never mind Simon, at least you weren’t illegally imprisoned, fitted up for crimes that you never committed, hounded out of jobs, subjected to an organised slander and discovered two attempts to set fire to your house, which is what happened to me after I complained about Dafydd and the Top Doctors. Of course most of the people who gave evidence against the paedophile ring that Dafydd et al concealed were found dead. That is what constitutes a relentless, vicious, vile campaign designed to hurt and intimidate, not a bit of criticism of some rather sub-standard research and ill-advised public comments.

Simon Wessely is a member of the Gov’ts Mental Health Taskforce, that one Chaired by Paul Farmer – who’s known all about the wrongdoing of Dafydd et al for at least ten years. Ever since I wrote to him about it.

Wessely was instrumental in setting up the Committee on Acute Psychiatric Care investigating out of area psychiatric placements which was Chaired by Lord Crisp, the man whom Blair put in charge of the NHS at one point. Crisp resigned from his position running the NHS when he realised that he (Crisp) didn’t actually know what was going on. Acute psychiatric care is now so bad that some NHS organisations have placed patients in France because they were unable to find placements anywhere in the UK.

When Wessely ascended the throne at the Royal College he stated that his priorities would include improving the image of psychiatry and psychiatrists, improving recruitment to the speciality and ensuring excellence in education and training. He’s done brilliantly there hadn’t he, no doubt he’ll be elevated to the peerage soon and Lady Clare can purchase a new outfit for the occasion.

Health Services Journal named Simon as one of the ‘Top 100 Clinicians’ in 2014. But then HSJ named Katrina Percy as CEO of the year. Katrina Percy was CEO of Southern Health which oversaw the deaths of hundreds of patients with mental health problems and learning difficulties, one of those deaths being of Connor Sparrowhawk. The Top Doctor responsible for Connor’s ‘care’ at Southern Health is currently facing a GMC tribunal. Yesterday she admitted 28 ‘failings’ in relation to Connor’s care.

In Feb 2017 BBC News online reported that had been a 50% increase in unexpected mental health deaths – including those due to suicide, neglect and misadventure – in three years. The Dept of Health maintained that the increase was due to ‘changes in recording and investigating deaths’. Perhaps that meant that the DoH had stopped lying about the situation. Simon announced that the ‘services are about to get worse’. The services were so bad by then that they couldn’t get much worse – perhaps Simon meant that the horrible truth could not be concealed any longer. Marjorie Wallace (see post ‘One Dangerous Fucker’) was gobsmacked that the DoH had started admitting the dire state of affairs as well – she claimed to be ‘shocked’ by the figures.

Another guest on the ‘Today’ programme this morning was the barrister who is acting for the 17 year old girl who was the subject of Sir James Munby’s comments that society will have blood on it’s hands if a place in a suitable mental health unit cannot be found for her. The barrister described the girl’s current living conditions – alone in a cell, with only a mattress. As I have explained previously these are exactly the conditions to which some patients in mental health units are subjected – there is no guarantee that the treatment of that young woman is going to change in any way with a move from custody to ‘psychiatric care’. Her barrister also explained that at present, the way in which that young woman is restrained is by people ‘sitting on her’. The journalist conducting the interview was horrified. I’m sorry to burst her bubble, but ‘sitting on people’ in order to ‘restrain’ them happens in mental health care settings as well – and it is the Angels who do it. There was for many years a notorious dreadful building in Bangor called Neuadd Deiniol that was laughingly described as a home for people with mental health problems. The care was dreadful, one man choked to death in there and his body wasn’t discovered for a few hours – although he was being ‘observed’ every twenty minutes of course – and the only people who worked there for any length of time were people who couldn’t get a job anywhere else. At one point virtually all the patients there were Dafydd’s but after a while Neuadd Deiniol extended it’s welcome to patients of other Top Doctors as well. I got it straight from the horses mouth – I encountered a rather weird woman who was employed there as a nurse in charge and she cheerily recounted how they had to ‘sit on’ patients. A care assistant – who was no paragon of good practice herself – witnessed the conversation and challenged the Angel, saying that there were never any circumstances in which one should sit on a patient. The Angel was baffled and reiterated ooh no, you’ve got to.

As mentioned in previous posts I have suspected that once more the BMA are on a course of action in which they are going to scream and scream until they’re sick. It’s been confirmed by an article in Mail online today. The BMA have organised a ballot of ‘senior GPs’ across England regarding the possible suspension of new patient registrations. In other words, if the GPs vote yes, surgeries will refuse to take on any new patients. Which means that no-one will be able to change doctors, or register with a new practice when they move house or find a new doctor if their doctor retires or dies. Richard Vautrey of the BMA suggested a ban on new registrations as a form of industrial action in protest at ‘the lack of funding for surgeries’. It is reported that the Top Doctors are ‘angry’ at, among other things, the prospect of weekend opening. There is of course still quite a lot of funding for surgeries and for the salaries of Top Doctors. In fact GPs are still benefiting from the notorious out of hours contract that the BMA negotiated in 2004 which means that they can opt out of evening and weekend responsibilities but still earn in excess of £100k pa.

But did Top Doctors who worked as GPs offer a better service before they became as ‘angry’ as they are at present? This blog has posted much about a number of GPs who have conducted themselves appallingly, such as Dr D.G.E. Wood and Dr K. Shah who assisted Dafydd et al in their criminal activities. But even GPs in positions further removed from Dafydd and his mates were capable of some pretty dreadful things. My post ‘A Trade In People – Between London And North Wales’ described how a group of Top Doctors, assisted by some crooked lawyers, swindled a vulnerable brother and sister from London out of their inheritance and relocated them to north Wales after their mother had died in suspicious circumstances in Warlingham Park Hospital, although they had never even visited Wales previously. The financial swindle was perpetuated by Top Doctors in London, as was the most serious abuse and neglect to which these this family had been subjected, but the full details of their history was known to the GPs at Bethesda surgery. Those GPs also witnessed the serious poverty that they were living in and the dreadful neglect towards them by the Arfon Community Mental Health Team. They were not the only patients who were neglected by that surgery, the village was alive with anecdotes of very poor practice and not only with respect to vulnerable mental health patients. I attributed nearly all of this to the general level of poor care offered by that surgery, although there was one GP there who was noticeably better than the others.

There was one GP in that practice though who was quite competent when he wanted to be – when treating his friends for example – but who seemed to be incredibly negligent or ‘make mistakes’ in certain other circumstances. I witnessed him completely blank someone when they reported a case of sexual abuse to him for example – neither did he ever follow that report up. He also seemed to want to exert an astonishing level of control over the brother of the vulnerable family from London. He refused to refer this man for specialist care when he requested it, he told the man ‘not to bother’ when the man expressed an interest in voluntary work and intriguingly when this man had a short-lived sexual relationship with another woman who lived in the village, he virtually demanded full details of their sexual activity. His interest in the details of this man’s life were inexplicable – the GP wasn’t ever interested in providing him with a better level of care, or better living conditions and the sexual relationship that he was so interested in was consensual, between adults and non-exploitative. Neither was an unplanned pregnancy an issue because of the age of the woman involved. A couple of years after this, the same GP was involved in the death of a patient, a young man, S.

S had an older brother, J. J was notorious locally. He was in care as a child, developed drug and mental health problems by his mid-teens and ended up in the notorious Risley Remand Centre for burglary. I was friends with one of his foster parents who not only told me about the violence and abuse to which J had been subjected when he was young but also told me of the beatings and abuse that he and other young men suffered whilst in Risley Remand Centre. My friend did try and challenge the authorities regarding what was happening but she realised that the prison service was a law unto itself and she got nowhere. When J was released from Risley Remand Centre, he resumed his lifestyle of hard drug use, petty crime and dossing down in other peoples houses when they allowed him to. My friend continued to keep in contact with him. However S, his younger brother, was much more stable. He never became involved in crime or drug use and at the time that he died he was actually performing very well at a local FE college. Despite the differences between them S and J were on good terms and communicated regularly.

Then something happened to J that really concerned my friend. He was referred to Dr Dafydd Alun Jones. J began telling my friend some very bizarre things about his encounters with Dafydd. Dafydd told J that he loved him. (A number of other patients also reported that Dafydd had told them that he loved them.) J then appeared on a TV programme telling a few porkies in support of Dafydd when there was an attempt to force Dafydd into retirement in the mid 1990s. My friend asked J why he had gone on TV saying those things and he replied that he’d been paid to do so. Although J had a drug problem, Dafydd did what he was notorious for doing – he supplied J with any drugs that J requested. Whilst all this was happening J could be seen in Bangor openly selling hard drugs to school children. A number of people reported this to the police but no action was taken.

My friend then moved away from Bethesda and I didn’t hear any further details of J’s interactions with Dafydd although I was aware that J was still ‘Dafydd’s patient’. A few months after my friend left the village, there was a huge pubic scene in the GPs surgery. S and J’s mother was screaming abuse at one of the GPs and calling him a murderer. It transpired that S had died the night before – he was 18. He had been taken ill at home and the family were concerned that he had meningitis. They had rung Bethesda surgery and a GP had visited and stated that he ‘didn’t think’ that it was meningitis, it was just flu. S’s condition deteriorated and a few hours later they rang the surgery again. This time a different GP arrived – the GP who took such a close interest in the activities of the man from London. Again S’s parents expressed their concern that S might have meningitis. The GP told them quite categorically that S did not have meningitis, told them to give S paracetamol and not to call the GP again. Later that evening S started to lose his vision. His dad drove him to Ysbyty Gwynedd. By the time they had got out of the car S told his dad that he could no longer see. S died a few hours later. He had meningitis.

S’s death caused a huge amount of bad feeling in Bethesda, he was a popular young man. His mum made a complaint and attempted to have an investigation into her son’s case opened but got nowhere. The GP who had told her husband that S didn’t have meningitis, to give him paracetamol and not to call them out again told third parties that S’s mother’s distress was due to guilt ‘because the wrong son had died’. At the time I just put S’s death down to yet another monumental cock-up on the part of Bethesda surgery. But something was brought to my attention this morning. That is, that S was yet someone else who will have known what Dafydd was up to – because J will have told him – who would be a credible witness but who died as a result of a ‘mistake’ on the part of the NHS in north Wales. J is still alive. But J is like all those witnesses who gave evidence at the Waterhouse Inquiry – he has a history of drug abuse and mental health problems as well as a criminal record and people who didn’t know him would never believe a word that he said. The GP whose actions led to the death of his brother retired last year, although he’s only in his late 50s. He told some people that I know that he was fed up of working and could afford to retire so he would.

So was Dr Gareth Jones a truly incompetent GP who didn’t notice the terrible abuse and fleecing of a vulnerable family at the hands of a circle of crooked professional people and who just had an inexplicable desire to exercise control over this family – and a few years later made a disastrous mistake when someone who had been a witness to Dafydd’s wrongdoing developed the symptoms of meningitis? Or was something even more unpleasant happening?

The ‘Today’ programme doesn’t just provide Top Doctors with air-time, it does of course have a daily slot set aside for people with theological interests. So imagine my surprise when the person introduced as the presenter for Thought For The Day this morning was Rabbi Laura Janner-Krausner, Greville Janner’s daughter! This morning Laura was talking about ‘healthy holiness’, but of course the last time that I heard Laura on the ‘Today’ programme she was spitting blood in the direction of those people who claimed that her father had molested them when they were children in care in Leicestershire – Laura’s insistence that it is the easiest thing in the world to falsely convict an innocent peer for child sexual abuse prompted my post ‘It’s A Piece Of Cake’. Laura memorably said of Greville that ‘he was great and he was good’, which why she and the extended Janner clan were going to defend his name and silence those who had dared make allegations against him. (She didn’t manage to explain why the CPS admitted that there was enough evidence to prosecute Janner as long ago as the early 90s but for some reason they didn’t or that his own lawyer fully expected him to be charged with child abuse, which is why they had George Carman on speed dial.)

As well as being a lawyer and a politician, when he was younger Greville wrote a few books. I found one in a second hand bookshop some weeks ago. It looked a rather boring book called ‘Janner’s Complete Letterwriter’, but in the light of Laura’s insistence that the author was ‘Great and Good’ in the face of many other people maintaining that he was a lying child molester who used his mates in high places to keep himself out of trouble, I thought that I’d buy the book and read Greville’s advice re writing letters.

Greville’s book isn’t simply a guide to correct grammar and style. The stated aim of ‘Janner’s Complete Letterwriter’ is to show the reader how to achieve want they want. Greville seems to have made an in-depth study in Getting What You Want. He dispenses advice on how to write letters that will enable one to maximise profits, to fire staff without any comeback, to insult and upset people without using insulting or abusive words, to ingratiate oneself to people who are in a position to do one favours, to flatter, to praise and to appeal for money from very rich people.

‘Janner’s Complete Letterwriter’ commiserates with the reader that one of the drawbacks of hurting someone by letter is that one isn’t there to watch the ‘enemy’ read it, although he does explain that if one later hears that the recipient of one’s letter has been seen moaning and groaning in the bankruptcy courts, the letter has obviously hit home. He helpfully supplies some examples of ‘final, rude, rebuffs’. He explains that if one is ‘attacked by a commercial loud mouth look for his business groin: take aim and fire hard’, that through ‘calculated coolness you can make the other man feel like a worm’, that ‘some lies are forgivable’, that ‘the letterwriter needs to know how best to disguise the truth’, that ‘sometimes the truth is just too horrible to tell’, that ‘courts of law are not courts of morals and justice is sometimes cruel’, that ‘if lies must be told at least tell them well’, that ‘the lying letter is as much a fact of business life as the lying witness is a regular occupant of the witness-box’, that ‘when the lie is a large one, you have two alternatives: you may either build up to it by a series of minor fibs, or you can shout the big fib from the start’ and that ‘the fact of course is fiction’. Greville chooses some interesting sub-headings for his chapters – ‘irony and sarcasm’, ‘at the expense of others’, ‘the sting in the tail’ are just a few examples.

‘Janner’s Complete Letterwriter’ is a masterclass into how to deceive, intimidate and manipulate without anyone being able to describe exactly how one is doing so. When branching off briefly into advice regarding how to conduct oneself in person, Janner explains that it’s most important to always smile, even if you are knowingly inflicting damage upon someone. One of the children who alleged that Janner had abused him made a reference to ‘the smiling man’.

In the introduction to his book Greville thanks his son ‘Daniel Janner, BA (Cantab), barrister’ for his help in preparing the book. That’s Laura’s brother, who since his father’s death has threatened to sue the arse of those who made allegations against his dad if they dare repeat them.

A Peer, More Top Docs and News Round Up

Readers who follow the ‘comments’ section of my blog will have noticed that my correspondent Richard Card has mentioned a man called Norman Warner a number of times. Warner is a former civil servant who worked in the DHSS with Secretary of State for Health and Social Security Barbara Castle back in the 1970s – Warner and Jack Straw were Castle’s advisors. Straw does make mention of his work with Warner and Castle at that time in his book ‘Last Man Standing’ – he stresses what a good team they made. Richard alleges that Castle, Straw and Warner continued a cover-up – one that originated with Sir Keith Joseph before them – over numerous deaths of children placed in a ‘care setting’ by Islington and Hackney between 1954-72. Richard also alleges that a former DHSS civil servant called Celia Hensman was involved in concealing wrongdoing back in the early 70s and that Keith Joseph blocked an inquiry into deaths of people in the care of the Sue Ryder organisation. Richard mentions that he was threatened with action under the Official Secrets Act in 1976 when he was suspected of having given information to ‘Panorama’ regarding the discharging of mental health patients homeless to seaside resorts. He also states that loopholes in the benefits system in the mid-70s were exploited by the IRA and that Kent Police Authority in 1997 called for an inquiry into the role of Jack Straw and Norman Warner regarding this. Jack Straw suppressed this call for an inquiry himself in his capacity as Home Secretary in 1997 – so Jack sat in judgement upon himself… After reading ‘Last Man Standing’ it doesn’t surprise me.

One thing that struck me as I investigated further after Richard contacted me, as I investigated the history of MIND and indeed struck me when I first investigated the history of the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, was what a very long history there has been of patients being abused and harmed by the NHS and social care system and of this being concealed at the highest levels. I was chatting to Brown about this and he observed that abuse and harm of patients was effectively built into the system from the very beginning.

I confess to having been a bit slow off the ground when Richard first mentioned Norman Warner – I had come across his name before regarding allegations of concealing wrongdoing, but it was so long ago that I presumed that Warner would now be dead or at least out of action. How wrong I was. Norman Warner – Lord Warner as he has been since 1998 – is still very much with us.

Warner describes himself as having been a ‘career civil servant’ since 1960. As mentioned above he was an advisor to Barbara Castle in the 70s – he was also Senior Policy Advisor to Jack Straw in 1997-98 when Straw was Home Secretary. Warner was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Dept of Health between 2003-07 and was Minister of State in the Dept of Health between 2005-07. He was Director of Social Services for Kent County Council 1985-91 and was Chair, City and East London Family Services Authority 1991-94.

OK – so Warner was in the higher echelons of Whitehall dealing with matters DHSS throughout the 60s and 70s. I bet he heard those allegations about the en masse sexual abuse of children in care in north Wales. Warner will also have been party to the grim activities of the mental health services during that period of time. His stint at the Home Office will have ensured that he knew about all manner of interesting things as well. Regarding his position as Director of Social Services for Kent – will they have been the same Social Services in Kent which were identified as having screwed up so badly in the case of Michael Stone at that time? As for Warner Chairing the City and East London Family Services Authority – scores of children in care from London boroughs, as well as from East London, were packed off to children’s homes in north Wales where they were abused. That continued into the 1990s.

This blog has provided numerous examples of people knowing about dung heaps being commissioned by Gov’t to lead investigations or inquiries into the said dung heaps on the basis that they can be relied upon to be critical enough for people to believe that the job has been done, but not so critical as to reveal just how deep and smelly the dung heap is. Two prime examples of such safe pairs of hands are of course dear old Professor Robert Bluglass and Sir Robert Francis QC, it’s why their talents were called upon so often. Well guess who Chaired the 1992 National Inquiry into the Selection, Development and Management of Staff in Children’s Homes? Norman did! This resulted in the Warner Report that was referred to in the Waterhouse Report. I have a sneaking suspicion that Norman knew that many of the staff in children’s homes were appallingly abusive long before he Chaired that Inquiry. Not that things got any better even after Warner published his Report – in 2014 Norman was appointed as the Commissioner to oversee improvements in Birmingham City Council’s Children’s Social Care Services, following a highly critical review. I had information about the serious problems in those services as long ago as the mid 1980s (see post ‘Amber Rudd, The Miners’ Strike And A Memory Jogged’). But who was one of the expert advisors to the Waterhouse Inquiry some ten years after I heard about those services? The former Director of City of Birmingham Social Services Adrianne Jones of course! Furthermore Adrianne utilised the Warner Report for her work with Waterhouse… As well as from the London boroughs, many of the children in care placed in the hands of the paedophile gang in north Wales came from the West Midlands.

Norman obviously knows that the NHS is crap because his solution is to privatise it. In 2013 he voted with the Tories and the Lib Dems in the Lords regarding proposed NHS regulations that Labour maintained would enable companies to bid for almost all health services. Warner was the only Labour peer to do so.

In 2009 Norman admitted to being a paid advisor for the General Healthcare Group and was also the Chairman of the NHS London Development Agency. He is a Director of Sage Advice Ltd and an advisor to Xansa and Byotrol – all companies that hope to sell services or products to the NHS. In addition Warner holds a position with Apax Partners, one of the leading private equity investors in healthcare.

Norman has been Chairman of the Youth Justice Board and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. He is a member of the Advisory Council of the think tank Reform. Reform likes to believe that it is coming up with fresh thinking and solutions, but it’s always seemed to me to be the Allyson Pollock of think tanks – it identifies real problems, it does know what’s going on, but it only tells half the story…

In Oct 2015 Norman resigned the Labour whip after having a hissy fit about Jeremy Corbyn. I’d take that as a compliment Jeremy…

Regular readers will know that I often end up very cross when various Top Doctors and their associates are wheeled out in the media to either tell barefaced lies, mislead the audience or to simply fail to mention a few uncomfortable truths. One serious offender in this regard is the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4 – although it may be a case of me noticing the syndrome there because it’s one programme that I listen to virtually every day. It occurred to me that I could start delivering a new service for readers of the blog – every time that I hear one of these sinners, I could provide a little review. On Friday, whilst discussing the Mental Health Crisis that has existed for years but to which the UK has only just woken up, ‘Today’ interviewed Dr Susan Mizen, from the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Susan sounded rather more contrite than the Top Doctors usually do – well what on earth can she say in the defence of her profession after recent revelations? So I did a bit of research on Susan.

Susan is a ‘Consultant Medical Psychotherapist and Jungian Analyst’ and is Chair of the Medical Psychotherapy Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She trained at the Cassel Hospital in Fulham and at the Society of Analytical Psychology. Susan worked as a Consultant Medical Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital. She now works in Exeter, where she provides a service for ‘severe and complex personality disorder’, along with a ‘therapeutic team using a psychoanalytic model’. Susan has a ‘longstanding interest in neuroscience and neuro-psychoanalysis’.

Now Susan may be a committed, ethical practitioner. But one reason why some psychiatrists find ‘psychotherapeutic psychoanalysts’ so useful if they are concealing wrongdoing is that they can pretty much explain away any misconduct on the part of practitioners no matter how serious it is in terms of the alleged internal psychological processes of their patients. For a splendid example of this, please read the details of the letter that Dr Alice Levinson at Springfield Hospital wrote about me in the wake of her and her boss Dr Robin Jacobson being faced with Dr Dafydd Alun Jones’s extraordinary comments over the phone to Jacobson, after which they concluded that he was sexually exploiting patients (see post ‘Some Very Eminent Psychiatrists From London…). Those two KNEW what Dafydd was doing – yet it was my alleged inner mental processes that were perceived to be the problem after I had complained about him. Furthermore although Jacobson documented his concerns about Dafydd’s and Dr Tony Francis’s (Dr X’s) misconduct, he then followed their recommendations to consult Lucille Hughes regarding ‘evidence’ of my ‘dangerousness’. That’s the Lucille who was Dafydd’s mistress, who a few years later was named in the Waterhouse Report as knowing that a paedophile ring was operating within Gwynedd Social Services whilst she was Director of those Services, but not taking any action. The Lucille who had never actually met me…Levinson now has a private practice in Richmond and supervises other therapists. The last I heard, Jacobson was working at the Priory in Roehampton.

I am not alone in having had such an experience. I have a good friend who had suffered gross abuse and neglect at the hands of the Hergest Unit who ended up spending a lot of money with a psychotherapist who was also a Jungian analyst after the Hergest Unit flatly refused to treat him after years of severe clinical depression. The therapist/analyst tied himself up in knots attempting to explain away the malpractice that my friend had experienced from the Hergest. My friend later discovered that this man had ‘trained’ along with some of those who worked in the Hergest Unit.

The use of the analyst’s ‘knowledge’ to facilitate their own wrongdoing whilst problematizing the patient – or others – seems to be well-established in psychoanalysis. I have discussed people like Andrew Skarbek previously on this blog (see post ‘One Dangerous Fucker), but I did read some years ago that some analysts themselves have identified that abuse of clients – particularly sexual abuse – is a big problem in psychoanalysis. I used to know a woman who was a Jungian analyst who told me the same thing – she also maintained that their conferences were notorious shagfests and that another very obvious syndrome was that of young female analysts being trained by much older influential male analysts which frequently led to somewhat exploitative sexual relationships.

Some months ago I read Leo Abse’s book on Margaret Thatcher, ‘Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice: Politician’s Psycho-biography of Margaret Thatcher’. Abse was a Labour MP who had a very big interest in psychoanalysis and came from a family with many connections in that field. When he first published that book there were a lot of allegations of misogyny levelled at Abse, but that wasn’t what I noticed most when I read it. Abse’s attempts at analysing Thatcher did throw up something which I haven’t noticed anyone else document – the effect that Thatcher’s grandmother had on her development. Much has been written about Thatcher’s idolisation of her father and her poor relationship with her mother, but throughout Thatcher’s childhood the family shared their accommodation with Thatcher’s grandmother, a Spartan Victorian character and Abse convincingly argues that she was the real formative influence on Thatcher. Yet it’s also clear that Abse uses analysis to excuse or justify rather unpleasant behaviour of his own. Of course, I knew something whilst I was reading Abse’s book that wasn’t known when he first published it – that Leo Abse was suspected of being a paedophile and indeed he was recently the subject of an historic abuse investigation by the police.

Susan Mizen seems to be trying in her work to combine neuroscience with her other interests. I’m not sure that is possible – for a start, the concept of a personality disorder is very much in the eye of the Top Doctor. The Hergest churned out people with that diagnosis for two reasons: A. The care was so poor that patients very often did not recover, so their continued distress was blamed on their putative ‘personality disorders’ – even though many of those patients had previously received different diagnoses from the Hergest itself or indeed received different diagnoses when they consulted practitioners elsewhere. B. That diagnosis was given to patients who dared complain in order to discredit them – and the Hergest Unit was shite, so a lot of people complained. The Hergest diagnosed so many people with ‘borderline personality disorder’ that I’m sure, like their suicide rate, it must have constituted a statistical outlier. It was an ongoing joke among some of the better practitioners in the area – ‘oh someone else with a borderline personality disorder’. I know one patient who was diagnosed as such by the dreadful Dr Marie Savage. This patient spent a while scrutinising DSM and pointed out to me that even by DSM standards the ‘criteria’ recorded by Savage herself didn’t fit the DSM criteria – Savage seemed to have conflated two different sub-types of personality disorder. This person was quite correct, but even if Savage had actually known what she was doing, the criteria for borderline personality disorder effectively simply describes a very distressed person who uses many of the strategies that people use these days to try and relieve that distress. Furthermore, many such behaviours attributed to BPD are the very behaviours induced in people if they are subjected to the sort of mistreatment routinely dished out by so many of the practitioners at Hergest and the associated mental health teams. No wonder so many people are suffering from it.

In the face of diagnostic problems like this, how can Susan Mizen ever hope to correlate the measurement of neurotransmitter levels with BPD diagnoses, which is what she seems to be interested in if the seminars and research promoted on the website on which she appears are anything to go by. I am referring here to the ‘Confer’ website, which states that it is ‘online continuing education for psychologists’. ‘Confer’ is an appropriate title – my own records, as well as those of other people who have managed to obtain theirs, shows that ‘conferring’ is exactly what is going on – derogatory letters about patients sent back and forth between Top Doctors, making a note of who has complained about whose mates and who has worked with who – ‘but Dr Jones trained at the Maudsley with Bob Hobson’, ‘Professor Bluglass investigated this complaint himself’. The sub-text is crystal clear – has this bastard complained about anyone that we have connections with? The diagnoses conjured up have far more to do with that than any alleged character traits or neurotransmitter levels.

The Confer website has a few other things of note too. As well as measuring neurotransmitter levels in people with BPD, another team took MRI scans of ‘people in love’, as well as ‘people who had just been dumped’. There’s no mention of whether MRI scans were taken of those who had done the dumping to assess them on the Confer Heartless Bastard Inventory.

Susan Mizen also features on the British Psychoanalytic Council website, where she is touted as being the NHS Consultant Lead for the Devon Personality Disorder Service (based in Exeter). Susan therefore presumably works in the south Devon NHS which is so troubled that last year their Chief Exec narrowly escaped a prison sentence, where a young mentally ill man ended up dying in police custody and where a nurse received the biggest compensation award that a UK whistleblower has ever received after being unlawfully dismissed by the CEO who escaped prison by the skin of her teeth (see post ‘NHS Chief Executive Collapses In Court After Being Spared Jail’).

Susan also compiles Court Reports, as do many of those named n shamed on this blog, including Dafydd and Robert Kehoe. The British Psychoanalytic Council website’s ‘latest news’ column is running a feature entitled ‘helping people affected by Grenfell Tower fire’. Perhaps Susan and her mates are finding them somewhere to live, because I think that’s their biggest problem.

I have also found a powerpoint presentation of Susan’s, ‘The Talking Therapies Taskforce – New Savoy Partnership’. Is the Savoy perhaps the name of the hotel where the partnership meets – after all Dr David Crossley always used to arrange for the training events of the All Wales Psychotherapy Network to meet in an agreeable hotel. So essential was the hotel to the success of the training that when the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board ran out of dosh to subsidise Crossley’s hotel-based training events, they stopped. Likewise the staff mindfulness training offered by the Bangor University Centre of Mindfulness Research and Practice is always held somewhere very agreeable, usually at Trigonos, a rather nice place in the Nantlle Valley. The service users’ mindfulness sessions however are held in a drafty canolfan (village hall) or a disused chapel somewhere….

Susan is currently researching for a PhD in neuroscience. She has set up a programme for patients who are ‘in locked in and secure hospital placements’ who present a high risk to themselves in terms of suicide. Susan is researching the ‘complexity of their difficulties’. What would make for a far better PhD is an in-depth exploration of the biographies of those patients and the processes by which they actually came to be ‘locked in’ and at risk of suicide…

Susan mentions that she works with people with ‘very severe narcisstic disorders in the NHS’. Whether they are staff or patients she does not clarify.

The ‘Today’ programme this morning also ran an interview with a Top Therapist, Phillip Hodson. Hodson was discussing sexual fetishes in the wake of viewers of a recent episode of ‘Poldark’ finding themselves unable to cope with a scene involving toe sucking. They hadn’t better read too much about recent Chinese history then, because Mao Tsetung had a foot fetish and used to suck the feet of his concubines – the feet in question easily fitted into his mouth, because the women involved had tiny deformed feet as a result of foot binding. Hodson describes himself as a psychotherapist and sex therapist – he is massively media friendly and has spent years sitting on morning TV sofas or appearing in women’s magazines and tabloid newspapers answering questions and proffering advice. Hodson’s website states that he has ‘lectured widely around the world’ to people including doctors, psychologists, counsellors and health professionals. Hodson is famous for urging everyone to ‘talk about it’ -especially men, because we know that they ‘bottle things up’ (not that we’d ever want to resort to gender stereotyping) and that is Not A Good Thing. Hodson runs a private practice in north London. He may be an excellent therapist himself, but like so many Phillip is not being that honest or helpful as he implores people to ‘talk about it’. Should they try and do so in an NHS context, the chances are that they will be in for a very rude awakening – there is unlikely to be a listening ear like Phillip available.

I know a man who when he was in his early 40s approached his GP regarding a sexual problem. It wasn’t related to anything unlawful such as paedophilia, it was much more mainstream – part of the problem involved a minor physical problem that was actually eventually resolved by circumcision and the other part of the problem involved obsessive thoughts concerning a fairly common fetish. This man was told by his GP that he had to have a referral to the mental health services at Ysbyty Gwynedd (this was in the months before the Hergest was built). He was met with naked hostility from the psychiatrist to whom he was referred who told him that he certainly wouldn’t be dealing with such problems, my friend would be referred to a sex therapist called Caroline Bertalot. Bertalot refused to see him unless he was admitted as an inpatient – although he hadn’t been referred as a mental health referral. He agreed to inpatient admission. He remained on the ward for three weeks – and eventually found out by accident that Caroline Bertalot had been in dispute with Gwynedd Health Authority and had left her post. No-one had told him – the psychiatrist who had referred him to Bertalot had been away and no nurses would interact with him on the ward because ‘you’ve got sexual problems and we’ve been told not to speak to you’. It got even more bizarre. The psychiatrist returned and the now desperate patient tried to talk to him to request a circumcision because he was regularly in agony and fairly sure that he had a physical problem. The psychiatrist actually yelled at him ‘will you stop talking about your willy’. The patient could not work out what was going on – eventually a junior doctor turned up, examined him and recommended a circumcision, which was done and did resolve the physical pain that this patient was in.

The patient then continued to try and get help for his psychosexual problems. I know this man well and what he endured at the hands of the Hergest Unit – which by now had opened – was quite extraordinary. They just could not handle sexual difficulties, none of them. There were two staff who were very skilled at working with girls and women who had been abused – although the elephant in the room was that Dafydd had spent years sexually exploiting patients and this was never acknowledged – but there was no service available at all for men. I told my friend years ago that I thought that this was something to do with the presence of the paedophile ring – they were facilitated by the mental health services and they targeted boys in care. Who grew up into men with sexual problems. No-one was going to provide a service because of what would be revealed. My friend used to tell me that I was a conspiracy theorist – but when the Jillings Report was finally released, there it was, an admission that there was no service at all in any part of north Wales for men with psychosexual problems.

My friend had many adventures in an attempt to gain help. He was referred to a nurse who believed that even oral sex ‘wasn’t normal’ and who was far too embarrassed to talk about the presenting problems. He was reviled by the psychiatrist who had referred to his penis as a ‘willy’ and many years later after gaining his records via the help of a lawyer showed me the craziest letters that had been written by this psychiatrist, stating that no matter how distressed my friend became he was not going to be offered psychosexual counselling.

So why did my friend continue with the Hergest Unit? Because they didn’t tell him that the psychiatrist had ordered a ban on psychosexual counselling – they instead told him that he had mental health problems and that they would treat him for them. My friend continued to explain very clearly that his depression, his anxiety and the way that he felt about himself was directly related to his sexual difficulties. He was ignored. He was sent to many of those named on this blog – Marie Savage, Professor Mark Williams et al – and got no help from any of them. He was instead constantly told that he had a ‘personality disorder’. Of course. Like me, he was subjected to malicious allegations that he had ‘threatened to kill’ staff. Like me, when he obtained his records, he was able to map the fallacious allegations made by members of the Arfon Community Mental Health Team as they became increasingly florid. A notoriously dreadful CPN called Tom Harney – known among patients as the ‘alcoholic alcohol counsellor’ – had initially claimed that my friend had threatened to hire a hit man and have him killed (yes, that was documented on the medical records). Within weeks Harney had upped the ante and was claiming that my friend had threatened to have Harney and his family killed – my friend didn’t know that Harney had a family, in the way that I didn’t know that Harney’s colleague Bridget Lloyd had any children when she told the police that I was a danger to her children. But then Dafydd told Bluglass that I’d used ‘foul and abusive language’ in front of his young children when I had no knowledge that any such young children of his existed.

Like me, for years my friend was either refused treatment, or treated for problems that he didn’t have after crazy inaccurate diagnoses had been made or was constantly arrested. Like me, once he obtained his medical records, he discovered that it was Dr David Healy who had ordered staff to have him arrested rather than treat him. It was actually the two of us together when we compared our records who finally concluded that after all we’d been through at the hands of the mental health services, it really wasn’t us that had been the problem. It was them – they were incompetent, they were malicious, they were punitive, they were dishonest and the thing that really screwed everything up was that they had been concealing a paedophile ring in the region and that had caused havoc.

My friend never ever managed to receive the sort of help that Phillip Hodson urges everyone to request from the ‘services’. He didn’t even ever manage to access it in the wider UK outside of north Wales – because everyone whom he approached conferred with the dear old Hergest who immediately denounced my friend as a complete git. One particularly unhinged Top Doctor wrote to another Top Doctor stating that my friend ‘destroys therapists’. It was they who very nearly destroyed him. Eventually my friend paid for private treatment, outside of the UK. That’s what he had to do to escape the toxicity of the paedophiles’ friends. But you won’t hear a word about that from Phillip Hodson.

Yet another Top Doctor featured on Radio 4 today on the ‘World At One’ – Simon Fishel. Simon Fishel was discussing fertility treatment and to what degree that it should be available on the NHS, in the wake of news reports that in many parts of the country the NHS is substantially withdrawing support for fertility treatment. One news report item this morning reported angry criticism from an organisation called Fertility UK. Unlike so many of those who staff the mental health services in north Wales, Simon Fishel is neither daft nor crackers. He has been involved with IVF from the very beginning and worked with Robert Edwards who pioneered IVF. We have moved a long way from what Edwards and Steptoe did – IVF is now big business and often a ruthless very unscrupulous business. Simon Fishel will be fully aware that some of the practices used by some of his colleagues are unethical – ‘treatments’ are knowingly being robustly promoted which everyone knows have a very low success rate and in some cases there is no clinical evidence at all for their use. For an account of the excesses involved in fertility treatment see post ‘The BMA And It’s Ethics’. As for Fertility UK – they are a marketing organisation. For details of those involved in Fertility UK, please see post ‘Professor Prestigious And His Associates’. Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe worked long and hard for many years on relatively modest salaries because they were motivated by scientific interest, as well as their desire to assist people with fertility problems. Many people owning fertility clinics are now multi-millionaire business people who’s aim is to maximise their profits. Simon Fishel is in a position to make a very valuable contribution to the debate, but he needs to be honest about some of what is going on.

It was refreshing to read the headline in ‘The Times’ today – ‘NHS Abuse Of Mental Patients ‘Endemic’. Yes, it is, no matter how much rubbish we hear from the Betsi or NHS unions about the Angels and Top Doctors being constantly at the mercy of dangerous psychiatric patients in the mood for murder. ‘The Times’ has published an utterly damning report which makes it quite clear that it is the patients who are being abused, assaulted and sometimes killed in mental health settings, not the staff. It was certainly a breath of fresh air, particularly as they stressed how much force and coercion that patients are regularly subjected to. Norman Lamb and Luciana Berger have both spoken in support of patients – but what has taken them so long? I note that the Dept of Health has issued a statement saying that ‘serious incidents remain rare across the NHS and our guidance makes clear restraint should only be used as a last resort’. The DoH knows as well as I do that they are telling porkies. There were hundreds of ‘serious incidents’ – involving deaths of mental health patients -in Southern Health NHS Trust alone in England. If we’re talking Wales, there’s a death associated with the dear old Betsi on an almost weekly basis. Since I have been writing this blog – for just over one year now – there have been two occasions on which there were media reports of the deaths of two psychiatric patients in one day in north Wales.

Neither is ‘restraint’ only used as a last resort – of course it is by good staff, but my experiences at the Hergest Unit and Parkhead Hospital Glasgow demonstrate that there are some staff who delight in ‘restraint’ and use it as an excuse to assault patients. A friend at the Hergest Unit witnessed the sexual assault of a young woman patient under the guise of ‘restraint’. The only reason why the DoH can claim that serious incidents are rare and that restraint is used as a last resort is that the DoH is relying on documentation compiled by the Top Doctors et al themselves – they have a habit of denying their own wrongdoing. All student teachers are taught that under no circumstances must they even touch a child – whereas student psychiatric nurses on placement witness their ‘mentors’ bullying and intimidating the people that they are paid to care for, shouting at them that if they ‘refuse medication’ they’ll ‘give it to them anyway’ and then witnessing the aforementioned ‘mentors’ pinning patients to the floor and ripping off their underwear to forcibly inject them with anti-psychotics. I know student nurses who have tried to report abuse even more flagrant than this – which is of course still actually legal – and they have been told off for using ‘strong words’ if they have dared mention ‘abuse of patients’ and have been asked if they’d ‘like to rephrase that’. (Note to student nurses in north Wales – if you are confronted with these techniques, which you probably will be should you report abuse of patients, refuse to ‘rephrase’ what you have witnessed and stand your ground. The NHS needs you far more than it needs clapped out old hypocrites like Grace Lewis-Parry who have spent their careers turning a blind eye to the most dreadful practices.)

I ended up purchasing a copy of ‘The Times’ to read the report regarding the violence of the Angels in detail and I was most surprised to see that Bangor University and the Vice-Chancellor Professor John Hughes were starring in ‘The Times’. There was a story about Professor Hughes’s house and that now notorious bedroom of his that was alleged to have been done up using Laura Ashley furnishings at great cost. I was reminded why I don’t usually bother with ‘The Times’ – everybody else reports the stories first. John Hughes’s bedroom was featured months ago in the ‘Daily Post’ and they even supplied a photo of a pastel room a la Contemporary Barbara Cartland, obviously presuming that John Hughes has a taste for pink boudoirs. ‘The Times’ also mentioned his salary and the fact that Bangor University staff are ‘facing redundancy’.

It seems to be open season on VCs at present, I think that the VC of Bolton started it all off with that ill-advised photo of him next to his Bentley, accompanied by his comment that students like being taught by someone with a Bentley. (Students actually like being taught by people who know their subject and take an interest in them – most students these days are taught most of the time by the more junior staff who rarely own Bentleys.) The Mail online published a really ferocious attack on Professor Craig Calhoun, the outgoing Director of the LSE, concerning the enormous amount of money that the LSE have given him. I sat next to Craig Calhoun at a conference dinner once amazingly enough and he was incredibly friendly and democratic and said ‘hi, I’m Craig’. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, me being a research fellow from Bangor who’d only recently finished a PhD – it was a bit like being greeted by President Obama, what does one actually say? What was interesting about the Mail online savaging however is that they levelled it at Craig Calhoun rather than the new Director of the LSE – who I suspect will demand even more money than they paid Craig Calhoun, because she’s some sort of banker. Craig Calhoun is at least an internationally recognised sociologist and sociologists do not tend to be as greedy as bankers.

I usually take a very critical stance towards people who believe that they have a divine right to huge salaries, but whilst I worked at Bangor I noticed an Interesting Phenomenon. There was a big obsession among a lot of people with the alleged excesses of the then VC and a very obvious plan among some to bring him down. There were allegations of the owning of a Porsche – in reality for a long while he actually drove an elderly thing with a blowing exhaust which I think might have been a Saab. Then there were the allegations of a chauffeur -no, that wasn’t true either, a chauffeur did eventually appear some years later but it seemed to be a chauffeur shared between a number of the senior staff. Then there were the Vicious Rumours – these reached their height when the VC’s wife was terminally ill with a brain tumour at which time people were being told that he was virtually frequenting brothels. I never managed to find out who was at the bottom of it all, but the Vicious Rumours were certainly fuelled by some of the staff involved with nurse training and social care/social work – I watched that lot very carefully because as I’ve mentioned elsewhere not only had many of them earlier in their careers been involved in working with those who facilitated the paedophile ring, but they spread some pretty nasty lies around about me as well. Well I knew what they had bloody well been involved with didn’t I.

The paedophiles’ associates were unsurprisingly not among the highest performing staff in the University and they were very defensive about this. As the whole of the UK HE system became increasingly more obsessed with league tables and REF results, the paedophiles’ associates and others who had been in their posts for a long time but had done very little adopted a siege mentality and tried to destabilise the institution. At one point they seemed to go on some sort of unspoken strike. Virtually all their teaching and marking was being given to the postgrads to do, but the paedophiles’ associates didn’t do any research either. What made them so difficult to deal with was that they were past masters at shouldering the blame for their lack of effort or wrongdoing onto other people. After one of the RAEs, I sat in a departmental meeting in which the results were analysed, followed by the usual grilling of how can we do better next time. The person presenting the analysis was one of the Professors, who was one of the staff whose own work had been judged to be ‘internationally excellent’. The two old cows sitting in front of me – one of whom had not even been entered for the RAE and the other who had actually attempted to submit her contribution to a Welsh dictionary as an entry – spent the entire meeting tut tutting, remarking on how crap Bangor was, repeating ‘ofnadwy’ (‘awful’ in Welsh). Who had actually let the side down in the RAE? Those two. They were in terms of the RAE results, the two who were indeed ofnadwy.

There were other various techniques used to cause as many problems as possible, including ‘support staff’ – such as some of the librarians – who made it their goal in life to be as unsupportive as possible. Then there were the Finance Clerks Who Said Ni – if one was working on a grant application, the finance clerks who were employed to complete the staff costs etc constructed numerous hoops for the researchers to jump through before they would agree to help and then once one had jumped through all the hoops they refused to help with the application anyway. When I first encountered the Finance Clerks Who Said Ni, I presumed that they just wouldn’t help me because I was junior and unknown. But one day I witnessed a well thought of Professor (not a git, a really nice man) ask for assistance with his grant bid and one of the Finance Clerks Who Said Ni simply returned his notes straight back to him and said ‘you’ve got to fill in all the costs’. So the more enthusiastic academic staff were doing the teaching, writing the publications, writing the bids – and then doing the job of the finance clerks and battling around the library with bugger all assistance as well. Which made for a great deal of work. Whilst those we know and love did bugger all.

After watching all this for a few years, I began to wonder whether the VC’s salary actually represented a sort of compensation payment for all the shit that was thrown at him and the attempts to undermine him. Everyone KNEW that scores of the staff who had previously worked in the region as Angels, social workers, clinical psychologists etc had worked in close proximity to those who perpetuated the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal, but no-one actually mentioned it. I know that in all institutions the boss is a target, but Bangor University – like the whole of north Wales – was living with the legacy of the paedophile gang and it certainly showed in the parts of the institution that employed former health and social care practitioners. The nursing tutors and social work teaching team were highly dysfunctional and the most appropriate course of action would have simply been to dismantle them – but whenever anyone tried to broach the problem that they were, there’d be a wailing and a gnashing of teeth and accusations that the University authorities were launching an attack on those who care…The psychology dept was also very dysfunctional but in a different way (see post ‘He’s Not The Messiah, He’s A Very Naughty Boy’) – but that too employed people who had worked and still did work as mental health practitioners in a grossly abusive service…

There was one person at Bangor who knew that those we know and love were trying to render the institution unmanageable, who was actually fantastically supportive to researchers whom he knew were keen. That was an historian, Professor Duncan Tanner. Sadly Duncan died – suddenly, years before his time, just when he was doing so much for the University. He died as a result of a cock-up at Ysbyty Gwynedd that should never have happened.

From what I gather, the problems at Bangor are greater than ever now – the paedophiles’ associates linked up with their partners in crime in the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board and now claim to be conducting world beating ‘health and social care research’ – which they very obviously are not. That Board is in special measures and is under investigation for the abuse of mental health patients. If John Hughes needs to make a few people redundant, he doesn’t have too look to hard to find a few whose services could be dispensed with – although knowing the way of the world, those we know and love will do what they have always done, sit tight and engage the help of UCU whilst the junior staff who are on short term contracts will be the ones who’ll get the chop – or the folk from humanities, on the grounds that ‘healthcare research’ is just too important to be cut… After all, the paedophiles’ associates know that nobody else will employ them no matter how rude they are about Bangor.

‘The Times’ today featured a Top Therapist as high profile as Phillip Hodson – Professor Tanya Byron. Tanya is a Clinical Psychologist who describes herself as a ‘clinician, journalist, author and broadcaster’ who works with ‘psychological and emotional issues’. Tanya is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Edge Hill University – she is also their Chancellor. Tanya appears on TV constantly and specialises in tackling what is alleged to be difficult behaviour in children. As with Phillip Hodson, I have known for years that being someone who trained as a Clinical Psychologist, Tanya will be fully aware of just how dire and abusive mental health services are – although that never gets a mention in any of Tanya’s media offerings. I knew that one of Tanya’s parents was a big figure in the media world – that tends to be the case with BBC ‘experts’, despite their ‘expertise’ there’s often a family connection to the media that helped them along – in fact her dad is the film and TV director John Sichel. I had always presumed that Tanya had acquired her qualifications and then headed straight for the BBC -but I found out today that she did actually work as a Clinical Psychologist in the NHS for 18 years, working with drug addiction and mental health problems. So Tanya will definitely know the gory reality then. I note that Tanya did her MSc in Clin Psy and her PhD at UCL – the UCL that has featured so often on this blog in terms of the concealing of the shite… The UCL that is also host to some very influential well-connected people who are in a good position – and have good cause – to conceal the shite.

Tanya has undoubtedly joined the ranks of the Concealers of the Shite herself now – she has worked with the Home Office and in 2007 was commissioned by Gordon Brown to lead an investigation into the effect on children of video games and the internet. Gordon probably should have commissioned her to provide an honest analysis of the practices and effectiveness of the mental health services.

One of Tanya’s less well-received media contributions was ‘The Life and Times Of Vivienne Vyle’, a spoof based on the dreadful Jeremy Kyle. Tanya stated that it’s aim was to be a ‘black comedy with pop psychology at the root’. Tanya is not as offensive as Jeremy Kyle, but her offerings are merely a more up-market form of pop psychology – and she’s no more honest than Kyle.

Tanya has presented ‘All In The Mind’, the weekly pack of lies that Radio 4 broadcasts about the mental health services. I look forward to hearing how Claudia Hammond deals with the latest revelations regarding the reality of the UK mental health system – for years now Claudia et al have given no clues at all that there are any shortcomings on the part of the Top Doctors.

Another media figure who’s keeping schtum about the practices of the Top Doctors is comedian Harry Hill. Harry Hill is a Top Doctor himself – he trained at St George’s Hospital Medical School and then did a stint in neurosurgery in London. Hill has stated that he gave up medicine because he ‘didn’t feel in control of what was happening’. I bet he didn’t. I would imagine that Harry Hill witnessed some dreadful things which is why he waved them all a not-so-fond farewell – but even though he now works as a comedian and has done so for years, he’s still keeping the Top Doctors’ vow of silence…

The news reports from north Wales are telling of a hoard of drugs and cash that has been seized by police in Conwy and in Mold a man had his throat slit in an act of revenge over a drugs debt. So Dafydd, Lucille and CAIS are still doing a fantastic job tackling ‘substance misuse and associated problems’ in north Wales then – it’s what the Welsh Gov’t give them millions for.
The Daily Post was emblazoned with screaming headlines a few days ago concerning 22 year old Hannah Turtle from Flintshire who has been charged with murdering her seven week old baby by poisoning him with anti-depressants. If that wasn’t a big enough clue that this will turn out to be another tale of tragedy at the hands of the mental health services, it was reported that Hannah’s previous address had been given as Llanarth Hospital in Abergavenny, but at her most recent Court appearance she was stated to be of no fixed abode. OK – new mother with depression left to cope without sufficient support, ends up killing her baby, only after that is she admitted to hospital, but now she’s out again, discharged as homeless and facing a murder charge…

The Daily Post and BBC News Wales online are also very excited about the trial of two police officers at Caernarfon Crown Court for attempting to pervert the course of justice – one of them is also on trial for assault. The details coming out from the trial points to a great deal of misconduct. PCs James Burns and Robin Humphreys arrested Michael Stanley in Penrhyndeudraeth. Fortunately for Mr Stanley – who was later charged with assaulting a police officer, criminal damage to a police car and a public order offence – a body camera being worn by another police officer filmed his arrest. The footage was played to the Court and showed Burns grabbing Mr Stanley by the throat and spraying pepper spray in his face whilst he was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car. After Burns and Humphreys returned to the station, they both lied in their statements. The charges against Mr Stanley were ‘discontinued’ last summer – no doubt when it was revealed that his arrest had been filmed. The Daily Post reports that Mr Stanley was known to the police’ and is a ‘prolific offender’. His previous convictions consist of very similar offences to those which have now been ‘discontinued’. Perhaps no-one was wearing a body camera when he was arrested then. I used to know Jimmy Burns – many years ago he worked as a nursing assistant at the Hergest Unit. His colleagues at Hergest were all very keen for him to undertake nurse training because they thought that he was so good – but he wanted to join the North Wales Police. If he’s found guilty as charged – actual bodily harm, common assault and attempting to pervert the course of justice – I’m sure that Martin Jones could find him another job at the Hergest. After all, Martin was one of the managers at Ysbyty Gwynedd when Burns was employed by them previously – and I think that Dr Peter Higson, the current Chair of the Betsi, was still employed as one of the senior managers of the mental health services in north Wales at the time.

Now that symbol of neoliberal penality, HMP Berwyn, is up and running in Wrexham – thanks to Hywel Williams MP and David Hanson MP begging for this monstrosity in north Wales – the Welsh Gov’t wants to flog off a bit more of Wales to the Home Office to build yet another prison, this time in Port Talbot. It would seem that the residents of Port Talbot are not quite as easily duped as the residents of north east Wales and people in Port Talbot are objecting. I’m glad that somebody is, I’m not quite sure why so many politicians in Wales are so in love with the notion of locking up thousands of dispossessed people with mental health and drug problems – particularly in the wake of the admissions of just how serious the problems are in UK prisons. It was only last week that there were riots…

There is also trouble at t’ mill in Bangor – ‘Sports Direct’ ordered all their staff to speak English only ie. NOT WELSH. It wasn’t a very good idea, has caused an enormous row and now the Crack of Doom aka Meri Huws the Welsh Language Commissioner has entered the fray (for info on Meri see posts ‘Let Me Enlighten Lord Gnome…’ and ‘Local Accessories’). Meri will only make things worse. The most sensible course of action would be for the Welsh Gov’t to sack Meri and reinvest the money that they have been wasting on her inflated salary into organising a boycott of ‘Sports Direct’. Mike Ashley will worry far more about losing money than he will about receiving silly letters from Meri.

MIND Are Out For Mental Health – Never For Themselves Of Course…

MRegular followers of this blog will know that I – and some of those commenting on my posts – have been bringing to public attention the appalling hypocrisy of MIND, an organisation claiming to be the ‘voice of the service user’ whilst concealing serious abuses in the mental health services and even entering into ‘partnerships’ with abusive services and individuals (see posts such as ‘The Mysterious Silence Of MIND’, ‘Newly Discovered – Parabl’ and ‘The Commissioning Of Parabl – And Yet More History’).

I have explained that I first became aware of the corruption of MIND when I went down to see William Bingley, their Legal Director, in 1987 regarding the criminal activities of the north Wales mental health services. Bingley admitted that he knew all about the wrongdoing of Dr Dafydd Alun Jones and indeed he knew a lot more than I did. I gave Bingley yet more evidence re Jones et al but not only did Bingley continue to keep quiet regarding Dafydd and co but when Bingley later became Chief Exec of the Mental Health Act Commission, he and that organisation continued to collude with Dafydd and Dr Tony Francis (Dr X), although they knew about the continued illegal detention of people and abuse of the Mental Health Act in north Wales. I knew from my meeting with Bingley that he knew an awful lot about Dafydd – including the deaths in Dafydd’s ‘care homes’, the allegations that the wrongdoing in north Wales was linked to Freemasonry and the existence of Dafydd’s extensive ‘sex therapy’ practice and the possible purposes of that business. I have no idea whether Bingley knew that Dafydd et al were concealing the paedophile ring that was operating in north Wales at the time though – the paedophile ring that was concealed again at a higher level by Thatcher’s and Major’s Gov’ts. However before Bingley began working for MIND, he worked as a research assistant for Matthew Parris, A Tory MP who had previously worked as Thatcher’s correspondence secretary. A man whose autobiography told of his summer trips – in the company of friends – to a place in Italy that they named the ‘villa of shame’, where they would be visited by ‘boys’ whom Parris described as ‘always willing’. For more background on Parris and his connections, see post ‘A Pretty Classy Piece Of Operation’.

I had thought that I had previously dug up a substantial amount of shit and compromising info on MIND, but I’ve spent a bit of time doing more research on a few other key figures in that organisation and I’ve found much more worrying info – that organisation has been compromised for decades. Here are a few of the highlights that I have dug up.

The current Chief Exec is the disgusting Paul Farmer whom I have blogged about previously. Farmer’s reputation is plummeting fast as a result of his enthusiasm for MIND to land contracts from the Dept of Work and Pensions, contracts that are all about forcing ‘service users’ into employment that may well be unsuitable and for which they may well be too ill. Farmer’s enormous salary has also been made public by disability activists – he trousers in excess of £100k pa for his role as the Voice of the Service User – and I’m delighted to say that this unscrupulous git has been met with protests on his travels around the UK. I was expecting the BBC to wheel him out for him to give his comments regarding the latest round of bad news re the UK’s mental health services, but mercifully we were spared that for once. Had he done the rounds of the BBC studios perhaps somebody would have finally asked him why he and his lame organisation have kept so quiet about the crisis – which has been evident for many years. Of course Farmer also knew all about the criminal activities of the north Wales mental health services many years ago. When I wrote to Peter Hain in his capacity as Secretary of State for Wales in approx. 2005 giving him full details of what had happened to me t the hands of the mental health services, I cc’d the letter to the Chief Exec of Rethink (I didn’t cc it to MIND because I knew that they were ignoring what was happening in north Wales) – who at the time was one Paul Farmer. I never received a response, although a few months later Farmer then became Chief Exec of MIND!

But what of previous CEOs of MIND? Before Farmer, the CEO was Richard Brook, who was appointed in 2001. Brook was CEO when I e mailed MIND HQ about the assaults being carried out by Hergest Unit staff on patients – only to receive an e mail back written as though it was to a small child telling me that what I had to do was go to the yellow pages and look up ‘solicitors’ and go and talk to one of them…. At this time the ‘service user reps’ for the Hergest were heavily involved with MIND – those reps who wet themselves at the thought of confronting Hergest staff and managers concerning the gross abuses that were endemic. One of those ‘service user reps’ admitted to me that she knew that residents in Prestwood Homes were being abused – furthermore, Prestwood Homes were taking full advantage of free MIND facilities such as walking groups, drop in centres etc without paying MIND a penny, although Prestwood were charging thousands of quid a week for a ‘placement’. Somebody else involved with MIND knew about the abuse of residents at Prestwood as well – Geoff Lees, who is now Director of Vale of Clwyd MIND. I told him about it, whilst he was still working as a social work tutor at Coleg Menai in Bangor. I know that a number of other people told him what was going on at Prestwood as well. For details of the horrors at Prestwood and the unfortunate death of a young woman support worker there who witnessed even more that I did, see posts ‘A Convenient Arrangement With The Private Sector’ and ‘The Commissioning Of Parabl – And Yet More History’.

Richard Brook was able to publicise unacceptable practice if he felt like it though. In 2004 the ‘Daily Mail’ ran an article entitled ‘Why I Resigned Over This Disgraceful Happy Pill Cover-Up’. The article explained that Brook had resigned from the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulation Authority) after he discovered that they had known about the side effects of the anti-depressant Seroxat but had not publicised them. Brook claimed that he had been threatened with legal action by Prof Kent Woods, the CEO of the MHRA, if he revealed that the MHRA had been ‘sitting on’ it’s knowledge of Seroxat’s side effects. Brook stated that MIND had been ‘tracking Seroxat’ for a decade’. So MIND knew about Seroxat and it’s problems as well then – but then they’d known about the problems in north Wales since 1979 at least, when Mary Wynch was illegally arrested and imprisoned (see post ‘The Mary Wynch Case – Details’) and had done or said nothing. In this article, Brook mentions the ‘Panorama’ programme about Seroxat that had been screened the year before – that will be the programme that featured Dr David Healy, who worked at the Hergest Unit! So MIND had got into bed (so to speak) with two psychiatrists from north Wales – Dafydd, who years before had been involved with MIND and David, as he Bravely Spoke Out. Brook told the Mail that following the ‘Panorama’ programme, MIND held a demo outside the offices of the MHRA. As opposed to outside of the Hergest Unit, where patients were being assaulted, framed for serious crimes, refused treatment no matter how ill they were and were committing suicide.

Brook maintains that he went to see the Health Minister Lord Warner to tell him of his concerns regarding SSRIs and Warner told him that he would speak to the MHRA. Warner then simply issued a guide to doctors detailing the max recommended dose of Seroxat (that must have been why Dr Richard Tranter, Healy’s friend, protégé and PhD student prescribed a friend of mine three times the maximum recommended dose of Seroxat then). It was at this point that the man of principle Brook resigned from the MHRA. Brook told the Mail that there was an urgent need for an inquiry into the MHRA and stated that many people involved with the MHRA also have connections to the pharmaceutical industry. Which is true – but then MIND’s hands are as dirty as those of any advisor to the pharmaceutical industry.

In Jan 2006 Brook featured in a BBC News online report and commented on the mental health of people living in rural areas. He stated that ‘the extent of mental health problems in the countryside is likely to be hidden’ – it was in north Wales, it was hidden by MIND, they knew that huge numbers of people were being given a diagnosis of ‘borderline personality disorder’ and refused care after being told that they were ‘untreatable’. At the time the area served by the Hergest Unit had the second highest rate of suicide for women in England and Wales.

After defending people with mental health problems so successively, upon leaving MIND Brook was appointed CEO of the newly created Office of the Public Guardian! Just the sort of person that was needed in such a position obviously. After a year guarding the public, Brook then became CEO of the deaf-blind charity SENSE.

MIND’s CEO before Brook was Judi Clements, who was in post between 1992-2001. So she oversaw those crazy years in which I was repeatedly arrested by the mental health services for ludicrous reasons, in which Dafydd resisted efforts to shut down the North Wales Hospital Denbigh and for his pains walked away with the contract to provide ‘substance abuse services’ for North Wales (see post ‘The Evolution Of A Drugs Baron?’) – the years which also saw the massive cover-up of the paedophile ring in north Wales which was the Waterhouse Report, in the wake of which a lot of people who’d been victims of that gang as children were found dead after becoming ‘users’ of the mental health services. Judi’s tenure also spanned the years in which Prestwood Homes were established and became big business within just a few months, what with the constant supply of vulnerable people from secure hospitals available for Prestwood to traffic them…

Something must have happened on Judi’s watch, because there is virtually no info from MIND available about Judi, it’s as though she never passed through their doors. However, there is some info about her in an article in HSJ from 2010. HSJ told us that after being Chief Exec of MIND for nine years, she was leaving due to health related problems, namely diabetes and arthritis. A David Peryer, the Chair of Trustees of MIND, stated that Judi would be ‘sorely missed’ – so that’s why they subsequently air-brushed her out of history. Preyrer mentioned that MIND was currently undergoing restructuring to concentrate on ‘supporting local offices’. These were of course the ‘local offices’ which included those in north Wales who were so helpfully providing free services to Prestwood Homes and who then began entering ‘partnerships’ with CAIS to provide yet more ‘services’ after being handed contracts by the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board – many of whose former staff and their friends were now working with MIND.

Judi didn’t just leave MIND, she did a Richard Tranter and left the UK for New Zealand. Despite the diabetes and the arthritis, Judi seems to have bounced back and in 2005 when she relocated to New Zealand, she landed a job as Chief Exec of the Mental Health Foundation over there. She ‘moved on’ in 2015. In Feb 2015 Judi featured on the website of the New Zealand Law Society, promoting her forthcoming seminar on Mindfulness for the New Zealand Law Society Auckland Branch. On this website Judi was described as an ‘experienced Chief Exec in the NGO sector’ with a ‘background in law, social policy, housing, local government and management practice’. It was explained that ‘after a successful career in local government service management, policy and practice development, Judi moved to the NGO sector’. So which failing local authority did Judi work for prior to keeping the lid on the barrel of shit in MIND then? Judi has an LLB – so she will recognise serious crime when she sees it. Or indeed conceals it – or even facilitates it.

Judi has sat on ‘several Gov’t advisory groups covering mental health, social policy and NGO development’.

Between 1989 and 1992, Ros Hepplewhite was Chief Exec of MIND. Whose reign also spanned the Dafydd years, but then the Dafydd years have gone on for the last five decades so everyone’s implicated where Dafydd is concerned. So perhaps it’s more helpful to mention that Ros’s reign spanned the period of time during which St George’s Hospital Medical School and Springfield Hospital colluded with Dafydd – although they knew what he was up – to in his attempts to have me labelled dangerous and banged up. The early 1990s of course also saw allegations that a paedophile ring was active in north Wales involving political figures appear in the London based media. Dafydd and his mistress Lucille Hughes were concealing and facilitating this paedophile ring – it was Dafydd and Lucille to whom St George’s Hospital and Springfield turned for ‘evidence’ of my dangerousness. It was in 1992 that five people with connections to the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal were killed in an arson attack on a flat in Brighton (see post ‘The Silence of the Welsh Lambs). So Ros was pretty close to some serious action.

However I can’t find any references to Ros’s activities at MIND. Although Ros did hit the headlines after she left MIND. In 1993 Ros was appointed CEO of the Child Support Agency – which was a Gov’t disaster as big as the NHS IT system that had to be shelved after a few billion had been spent on it. Although unlike the CSA, the failed NHS IT system was not thought to have contributed to anyone’s suicide…Ros was famously removed from her post and the CSA metamorphosed into something else because Gov’t could not withstand the embarrassment any longer.

I have found a reference to Ros on the blog of the Labour MEP for London, Mary Honeyball. Mary’s post dated Jan 11 2010 discusses examples of what she believed was outrageous sexism. Honeyball believes that Ros was removed from her post as a result of such sexism – nothing to do with the suicides of distraught parents then, or the numerous parents who were never able to collect their maintenance payments, or the absent parents who used every trick in the book not to pay up leaving their former partners destitute whilst the CSA refused to listen to their pleas for help… Tragedies as a result of the chaos that was the CSA involved both men and women – and of course the children. Honeyball entertainingly stated that Dame Barbara Mills the DPP was also the victim of sexism. Babs has featured on this blog previously – she was the DPP whilst the CPS found excuse after excuse not to mount prosecutions against numerous paedophiles despite stacks of evidence being presented (see post ‘A Future Leader Of The Labour Party’). Mary Honeyball also extended her ‘sympathies’ to the former Home Secretary Jaqui Smith, who was ‘hounded’ for being a ‘high profile woman’. No, Jaqui Smith became a source of national entertainment when it was revealed that her husband had rented porn films, the cost of which Jaqui had then reclaimed on her Parliamentary expenses. In a desperate attempt to salvage herself in the eyes of a nation rolling around laughing, Jaqui then tried to construct herself as a latter day Mary Whitehouse and began speaking out about Porn and Sex, which culminated in her presenting a documentary about prostitution. Unfortunately she did this whilst wearing one of those brightly coloured plastic macs when she was filmed under street lamps, which caused one of the better Radio 4 comedians – it might have been Sue Perkins – to comment that Jaqui looked like something out of ‘Band of Gold’.

Mary Honeyball ends her post by explaining that she speaks as someone ‘who ran’ the Association of Chief Officers of Probation in the mid-90s – she mentions that she didn’t have a background in probation, but that she was appointed on the basis of her other talents. So that’s why at that time some of those accused of molesting children in north Wales or failing to act when their colleagues were molesting children found it possible to move into careers with the Probation Service.

Ros Hepplewhite was CEO of MIND whilst the most dreadful scandals involving the abuse and even murder of patients occurred at Ashworth and Broadmoor. Don’t remember the Voice of the Service Users saying much about all that at the time.

At the time of my initial encounters with Dafydd and the paedophiles’ friends in the mid-80s, the CEO of MIND was Christopher Heginbotham – he’d been appointed CEO in 1982. He was in post at the time that I had my meeting with William Bingley. I suspect that Chris and Bingley might have been chums – Heginbotham was appointed CEO in 1982. Bingley was working as lobbyist for MIND at that time and landed his plum full time post there in 1983. Bingley’s mother Lady Juliet Bingley was also a bigwig in MIND and was Chair 1978-84. Furthermore Heginbotham departed from MIND in 1989 – Bingley ‘moved on’ into the post as Chief Exec of the Mental Health Act Commission in 1990. Bingley eventually wound up in the Chair of Mental Health Law and Ethics at the University of Central Lancashire and then in a role at the University of Cumbria after resigning from his post as Chair of an NHS Trust when a few awkward questions were asked about his business interests. Heginbotham also eventually secured a position at the University of Cumbria. References to William Bingley seemed to have disappeared from the MIND website recently, but I know that MIND named a building after him in Lancashire, ‘William Bingley House’. I wonder if it’ll be a bit like the fall out after Jimmy Savile’s death and MIND will end up renaming the building in a desperate attempt to pretend that they’d never met Bingley? But guess what? Heginbotham ended up in Lancashire too – where I presume that he still is.

Bingley and Heginbotham were at MIND when Savile was appointed General Manager of Broadmoor. I do not remember them questioning the appointment. What’s the betting that there’s some photos somewhere of dear old Jim with folk from MIND that are now well hidden? Should anyone know of any, please do let me know…

Heginbotham is a Director of something called ‘Values Based Commissioning Ltd’ in Lancashire, which began life in 2011. The other Director is a Christine Heginbotham. It is described as ‘health and social care consultancy’. Christopher Heginbotham has also published a book on Values Based Commissioning of Health and Social Care. So what is this all about?

According to an article in HSJ from June 2013, ‘Values Based Commissioning’ (VbC) ‘aims to put users’ views at the heart of reshaping services’. The discussion concerns the commissioning of mental health services by CCGs (Clinical Commissioning Groups) and it is explained that ‘expertise’ in this area is ‘varied’. However, as readers may have guessed, a few aficionados are on hand to help! HSJ quotes words of wisdom from Rethink’s Associate Director of Policy, Research and Campaigning, Victoria Bleazard, as well as Sophie Corlett, Director of External Relations at MIND. A Joint Commissioning Panel on Mental Health (JCPMH) was established in 2011, which is co-chaired by the Royal Colleges of Psychiatrists and General Practitioners – this Panel produced ‘guidance’. VbC is ‘a new type of commissioning’ (which must be why it involves the same old people and institutions as the previous commissioning did), ‘prioritising service users’ values and experiences’ (the Royal Colleges mentioned, Rethink and MIND have such good track records in that area don’t they).

HSJ identifies a Dr Neil Deuchar as the architect and champion of VbC – he’s a psychiatrist from Birmingham, a specialist advisor on commissioning and JCPMH Co-Chair. The other Co-Chair is Liz England, a GP who is Mental Health Lead for a Locality Care Group within a CCG and National Institute for Health Research Clinical Lecturer at the University of Birmingham. Deuchar is quoted as saying that ‘patient power is the key’ and that ‘co-production between patient and carer groups, clinicians and commissioners is vital’. There then follows a bit of asinine text headed by the words ‘what do service users think?’

So Christopher Heginbotham saw an opportunity then – an insane system was devised by a Gov’t that had relied on the likes of Heginbotham and his mates at MIND for advice, this insane system was then explained to the world by HSJ and promoted by MIND and their friends, by which time Heginbotham had written his book and set up his company – presumably with Mrs Heginbotham – to serve the insane system. The insane system was entirely dependent at every stage on the involvement of the very same people and institutions that were colluding with the likes of Dafydd and the paedophiles’ friends.

Is it surprising that five years down the line we have Sir James Munby, the President of the Family Courts, hitting the roof because there is virtually no provision in the whole of the UK for a suicidal 17 year old girl who is due to be released from ‘secure custody’? Although no-one has explained why a girl in her state is IN secure custody, allegedly alone in a seclusion room from which everything has been removed except a mattress on the floor. That’s going to do her a power of good isn’t it. Furthermore I guarantee that I know how that barbaric regime will be described on that girl’s records – there will be a reference to her being ‘nursed’. I have heard mental health nurses taking about ‘nursing’ people in ‘seclusion’ or ‘nursing’ them ‘on a mattress on the floor’. The whole system is completely nuts and the people working within it have been sent nuts by it if they weren’t already nuts when they took up their employment.

If readers have been impressed by the calibre of MIND CEOs described so far, hold on to your hats whilst I tell you about Heginbotham’s predecessor, Tony Smythe, CEO from 1974-82. Smythe’s incumbency pre-dated the internet, but Smythe was quite something and info about him is still available online. Smythe’s full name was Clifford Anthony Smythe. He categorised himself as a radical anarcho-pacifist until the day that he died in 2004 and was involved with a number of political causes. He was appointed General Secretary of the NCCL in 1966, a post that he held until 1971. It was in the 70s that it became clear that the NCCL had been infiltrated by paedophiles who had conflated their cause with gay liberation – paedophiles also infiltrated the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) at this time and a number of those guilty of abusing children in north Wales were active in CHE. Smythe was at one point Vice-President of CHE. In 1971 Smythe became involved with MIND. His obituary describes him as establishing an ‘executive committee’ which led to ‘service users becoming involved in management and policy decisions’ and that this ‘chimed with Tony’s anarchist belief’.

Now this talk of the active involvement of ‘service users’ also surrounds Bingley and his mother. Which ‘service users’ do people think that the Bingleys and Smythe liberated? Psychiatry was dreadful in the 70s and early 80s – it was particularly gross in north Wales but it was pretty grim everywhere else as well. There is no way that ‘service users’ had any voice anywhere in the 70s – who are MIND actually talking about? Radical ideas were bandied around by people like Laing et al but these ideas didn’t touch mainstream psychiatric practice – it is dishonest to pretend that they did. I am wondering if all this guff about the active involvement of ‘service users’ in MIND is simply a glorified reference to one or two influential people in the organisation who may have had mental health problems themselves at some point. Of course Dr Dafydd Alun Jones told everyone that he suffered from a ‘nervous illness’ himself – it was a good excuse when he was challenged about his appalling conduct.

CHE was usually led by people who were gay themselves, so I was interested to read that Smythe had a ‘lifelong partner’ Jeanne and five daughters. Jeanne died in 2001.

Smythe and Jeanne were involved with Haringey MIND long after Smythe had stepped down from his post as CEO. Tony Smythe was listed as a Director of Haringey MIND between 1998-2000 and Jeanne between 1990-92 and between 1996-97.

I have mentioned previously that Dr Dafydd Alun Jones had a contact in Haringey Social Services – when I finally got out of the North Wales Hospital in Jan 1987, he told me that he had rung Haringey Social Services to ‘let them know’ that I would be living on their patch. This was not any sort of referral for aftercare – this was just the way that Dafydd conducted himself. I have also mentioned that I now have copies of letters between Alun Davies, the manager of the mental health services in Gwynedd and Laurie Wood, the manager of the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, in which they discuss their ‘friend’ at St George’s trying to find out which dept I was working in when I started working there in 1989 – there is also a reference to their friend accessing mail that was sent to me at St George’s in an attempt to discover my home address. There is no clue as to the identity of this friend in my documents, but whilst I was working at St George’s I was visited by a junior doctor called Jimmy Schroff who had come to find me because he’d heard that there was a girl from Bangor working there – Jimmy Schroff seemed to know everyone whom I had made a complaint about in north Wales and furthermore he had done his GP training in the practice of Dr D.G.E. Wood (see post ‘St George’s Hospital Medical School, 1989/1990’). Jimmy Schroff died some years ago – his widow works at the Betsi.

Tony Smythe was also a Director of an organisation on the Embankment called Reach Volunteering in 1990/91. In 1992 and again between 1995-2001 Jeanne was a Director of ‘an inclusive community hub’ called the Markfield Project.

Tony Smythe kept interesting company. He was acquainted with an actress called Adrienne Corri who died in 2016. Corri had a cult following and was noted for being rather excessive, sometimes swearing aggressively at her own audiences. She was friends with Ronnie and Reggie Kray. In the days before they were both banged up when it dawned upon everyone that despite hanging out with Barbara Windsor and Adrianne Corri they were a pair of vicious thugs. Who had also murdered people. Ronnie of course ended up in Broadmoor and there was a lot of huffing and puffing from some Tory MPs when it was revealed in the press that he had superstar status in Broadmoor, was politely called Mr Kray by the prison officers (who according to the likes of Professor Robert Bluglass were ‘nurses’) who generally pandered to him. What the Tories expected from an institution which Edwina Currie had appointed Jimmy Savile to run I do not know. Perhaps they should have taken a bit of notice of the other patients who complained that they were being beaten up and sexually abused by the ‘nurses’. As well as by Savile.

In 1968 whilst Tony Smythe was still leading the NCCL, they sponsored a production of Samuel Beckett’s play ‘Come and Go’ which starred Adrienne Corri. It was advertised as ‘gala entertainment concerning depravity and corruption’. The evening included other entertainment as well and was compered by George Melly. The George Melly who was famously promiscuous but whose wife was very tolerant of his desire for an open marriage. Much has been written about Melly’s bisexuality and his penchant for numerous extra-marital relationships, but his wife was I suspect much more tolerant than most people realised. Many years ago, George Melly came to do a gig at Theatre Gwynedd in Bangor. I know a man who was at the time of Melly’s performance in Bangor 16 yrs old. Melly paid to have sex with him. This was whilst the age of consent for gays was still 21. I have never seen Melly’s name included among the Rolfs or the Saviles or the Gary Glitters, which is extraordinary, particularly as some years before he died Melly gave an interview to a newspaper mentioning how much he enjoyed caressing the thighs of pre-pubescent boys. Yet no-one commented on this at all. Melly retired to Wales of course – to the Brecon Beacons.

Tony Smythe’s years as CEO of MIND covered the period of time which saw Mary Wynch unlawfully arrested and illegally detained in Denbigh for a year by Dafydd. Whilst she was in Denbigh Mary told me that she witnessed the patients in Dafydd’s ‘young people’s ward’ having sex with each other – after being encouraged to do so by Dafydd – whilst the nurses watched the show. Mary approached MIND for advice regarding her unlawful imprisonment. William Bingley admitted to me that MIND received grant funding from Gwynedd Health Authority and that Dafydd wrote to MIND telling them that he would block their dosh from Gwynedd if they advised Mary. Bingley told me that they didn’t succumb to Dafydd’s threats. However I now know that Bingley wasn’t in the least bit truthful regarding his stories of fighting for patients rights. What’s the betting that they slung Mary overboard lest they lost their dosh from Gwynedd Health Authority? Bingley also admitted to me that Dafydd had been a ‘leading light’ in MIND himself in the 1960s.

The General Secretary of MIND immediately prior to Smythe was Mary Appleby. She was CEO from 1951-74. Whilst Dafydd was a leading light in MIND! At the same time that Gwynne was lobotomising people and the paedophile ring was growing and growing, assisted by John Allen’s collection of children’s homes, the Bryn Alyn Community, which was doing a roaring trade in accepting children from across the UK but particularly from the London boroughs and the West Midlands…

Appleby died in 2013 and her obituary in the ‘Guardian’ mentioned that she became involved in MIND because there were mental health issues in her family. The ‘Guardian’ tells us that it was as a result of Mary’s efforts that MIND (then still called the National Association for Mental Health) became hugely influential, employing 200 people and was consulted by the Gov’t, the judiciary, the NHS and social workers’ organisations. In the early 70s a group of Scientologists tried to join MIND. Scientologists, although they are a rather eccentric group of people themselves, famously loathe psychiatry. They attempted to join MIND after alleging that psychiatrists were illegally imprisoning people, torturing people and were ‘carrying out perversions’. Mary fought the Scientologists in the High Court to keep them out of MIND. However, she allowed Dafydd to remain in.

Mary Appleby worked in both the War Office and the Foreign Office. She Chaired the Bench of Magistrates in an inner London juvenile Court for many years. She contributed to Gov’t Inquiries on mental health and social services. She sat on the appeals panel for the BBC and ITV and was a Member of the Immigration Appeals Tribunals. She also sat on the Selection Committee for the Civil Service. A pretty well-connected and influential lady then – even at Whitehall level.

Tony Smythe took over from Mary Appleby in 1974, but Appleby remained a Vice-President of MIND until her death in 2013. She will have not only had substantial influence regarding the appointment of Smythe, but she wielded considerable influence over that organisation for decades. She will have known exactly what sort of people were being appointed, what they were getting up to and indeed what they were concealing, ignoring or colluding with.

So what about those who have Chaired MIND? Let’s take a look at some of them….

Between 1969-78 Christopher Mayhew MP was Chair. Mayhew spent many years as a Labour MP but in 1974 he defected to the Liberals. In 1974 the Liberal MP Cyril Smith was busy abusing boys (and had been for some years) but it is now admitted that there was assistance from the security services in ensuring that he was never prosecuted (see post ‘Dr Death’). Mayhew is perhaps most famous however for taking part in a mescaline experiment in 1955 with Dr Humphrey Osmond. The plan was to film Mayhew on a mescaline trip for ‘Panorama’ but the programme was never broadcast. Humphrey Osmond was a psychiatrist who was well-known for his research into hallucinogens and schizophrenia – he was the man who administered mescaline to Aldous Huxley in the 50s which resulted in Aldous Huxley writing ‘The Doors of Perception’. Osmond also experimented with peyote when he went to stay with Native Americans.

So Mayhew was a man up for experimentation. He was given a peerage in 1981.

Between 1978 and 1984, William Bingley’s mother Lady Juliet Bingley was Chair. Juliet Bingley grew up in Harley Street – her father was a surgeon at Barts. She studied social administration at the LSE, during which time she undertook a placement in Liverpool at the Personal Services Society. In 1945 she qualified as a medical almoner (what we would now call a social worker). Her first job was at Barts. Juliet Bingley was married to Admiral Sir Alec Bingley who in 1959 was appointed NATO commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet in Malta. The family only spent three years in Malta but Juliet got to work out there. She became involved in the development of health services for elderly people – but she was also good mates with the former Prime Minister of Malta, Dom Mintoff. Mintoff had just resigned as PM, which meant that Malta was under direct rule from London – Juliet became the ‘messenger’ between Mintoff and the London Gov’t and continued to play this role throughout the 70s and 80s during the various crises in Anglo-Maltese relations. Alec Bingley died in 1972 which was when Juliet became involved with MIND. She was initially Chair of the Local Associations Committee before becoming Chair of the whole organisation. In 1973 she also took up a post as medical social worker at St Marks, a hospital for gastro-intestinal disorders in London and was Chair of the Heads of Departments Committee there.

Juliet Bingley was busy with other charity work as well as MIND. In 1979 she founded the National Association for Colitis and Chrohns and she was also a founding Trustee of the Carr-Gomm Society, a charity now working for the homeless.

Well with a mum and dad with backgrounds and connections like that William Bingley was certainly not going to do anything to put Dafydd out of action whilst he and Lucille facilitated a paedophile ring supplying boys to Westminster figures and others in London who were enjoying the protection of the security services at the time. Come to think of it I don’t think that Juliet would have been particularly inclined to put a stop to Dafydd’s activities either – and she was incredibly well-connected among the very Top of the Top Doctors as well as the highest echelons of Gov’t should she need to protect him…

How did the Bingley clan ever manage to convince anyone that they were the Voice of the Service Users?

The person who succeeded Juliet as Chair of MIND was Lord David Ennals – he was Chair between 1984-89. Ennals was a Labour politician. In 1967 he was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Home Office under Jim Callaghan. The Home Office that was at that time directly managing Bryn Estyn, where a brutal regime overseeing the violent sexual abuse of teenaged boys was becoming established. Ennals became Minister of State for Social Services in 1969. He lost his seat in 1970 and it was then that he became the ‘Mind campaign’ Director for the National Association of Mental Health. This campaign was established to fundraise but also to clarify the policies and aims of the organisation – as a result of the campaign in 1972 the charity changed it’s name to MIND. It was whilst Ennals was Chair that Tony Smythe was appointed Chief Exec – supposedly on the basis of his ‘human rights’ experience. Ennals remained campaign director until 1973 and was re-elected to Parliament in 1974. He lost his seat again in 1983 and was elevated to the Lords – then he popped back to MIND again to become Chair.

Ennals has a few close relatives who are worth mentioning. His younger brother Martin was a human rights activist and Secretary-General of Amnesty International. His son Paul has fingers in numerous pies.

Sir Paul Ennals was Chief Exec of the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) between 1998-2011. That’s the NCB to whom Peter Righton, a social care expert and academic who was a founder member of PIE and a convicted paedophile, acted as a ‘consultant’ (see post ‘The Waterhouse Tribunal – Who Was Involved And What Happened To Them Subsequently?’). Despite such worrying connections, the NCB, being an umbrella organisation, has links with many other organisations, including Barnardos – some of those involved with child abuse in north Wales had worked for Barnardos. The NCB also collaborates with the NSPCC – which works with Esther Rantzen’s Childline (see post ‘Ian Brockington’s Mischief’ for the questionable background of Valerie Howarth, the first Chief Exec of Childline) – and works in partnership with the Department of Health.

Paul Ennals is Chair of Haringey Local Safeguarding Children Board; South Tyneside Local Safeguarding Children Board; Gateshead Local Safeguarding Children Board; Sunderland Local Safeguarding Children Board. I do not know why Ennals has interests in both Haringey and the north east of England but I presume that he does a lot of commuting. If anyone living in the north east hopes to escape Paul Ennals’s safeguarding when they hit 18, they’ll be disappointed – he also Chairs the Safeguarding Adults Board of Gateshead and South Tyneside.

Before Ennals was involved with the NCB he was Director of Employment at the RNIB. He has Chaired or played a leading role on numerous Gov’t taskforces, working groups etc concerned with SEN, disabled or very young children.

Between 1994-2001 David Peryer was Chair of MIND. Peryer had previously been Director of Humberside Social Services. On 23 April 1998 Peryer gave evidence to the Select Committee on Health, along with Liz Sayce (Policy Director of MIND), Peter Wilson and Dinah Morley. Wilson had been Director of Young Minds for six years, was a child psychotherapist and had ‘many’ many years ago’ been a social worker. He had also worked in child and adolescent mental health at another institution familiar to readers of this blog, the Maudsley. In addition Wilson stated that he had worked in ‘child guidance’ in London. Dinah Morley was the ‘professional services manager’ for Young Minds. She had previously been the Assistant Director of an unidentified London borough, responsible for mental health and children’s services. Before that she ran a multi-disciplinary mental health team. She is also a member of a Health Authority.

So these witnesses all had vast experience of working in organisations and fields that had screwed up badly. Indeed Peryer told the Committee that he began working the field of child protection in 1977 in East Sussex, ‘shortly after the Maria Colwell case’. Maria Colwell was the first high profile death of a child in recent decades that was attributed to the fuckwittery of the welfare services.

The Committee were happy to rely on the advice of this bunch nonetheless. Liz Sayce in particular had a lot to say to the Committee. She was keen to tell the Committee of the sort of problems that ‘service users bring to us’ – did they include abusive psychiatrists, mental health staff perjuring themselves in order to secure convictions against them or their illegal detention in secure units? No, the service users complained of being bored in day hospitals. So Liz recommended that day hospitals should be shut and service users encouraged to attend college. I remember the results of Sayce’s recommendations well. The day hospitals were indeed closed down – nothing replaced them, so service users had nowhere to go at all and lost touch with their friends whom they used to meet in the day hospitals. So service users ended up being bored at home, alone. In the two years following the closure of the day hospital at the Hergest Unit, service users could be seen hanging about in the local towns destitute. A number of them died. As for ‘going to college’ – well a very small number of ‘service users’ benefited greatly from this and it turned their lives around. However Sayce’s ‘encouragement’ of such activity was interpreted by mental health teams as ‘coercion’ and certainly in north Wales numerous ‘service users’ were frog marched into college courses – they were told that they would lose social services support if they didn’t ‘take responsibility for getting better’ and enrol. Many of them did not have the academic ability needed for the courses that they had been coerced into joining and even more of them were far too fragile emotionally to cope with a college course. I knew of one course in which at the beginning of term about 15 service users enrolled at the behest of their mental health teams – every one of them withdrew before the course was half-way through and two of them were so distressed that instead of handing in essays to their tutor they handed in suicide notes and accounts of how they had been sexually abused by members of their chapel when they were children. The college ‘counselling service’ was in no way equipped to deal with the difficulties that these students were encountering. Not that the mental health team cared – once the ‘service user’ had enrolled, the mental health team ticked a box marked ‘recovered’ and forgot about them. A lot of ‘service users’ paid a very high price as a result of Liz Sayce’s advice.

No-one noticed – Sayce fucked up peoples lives all over again a few years later once she had been appointed Chief Exec of the Disability Rights Commission and a leading light on the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. It was Sayce that advised the Gov’t – what with her unique insight and being the Voice of the Service User – to close the Remploy factories on the grounds that they were ghettoes. Hundreds of Remploy staff volubly protested that they loved working at Remploy, that their disabilities were such that they couldn’t hold down other jobs – Remploy staff came forward with the most harrowing accounts of their mistreatment in previous workplaces and begged for Remploy to be reprieved. But Nurse Liz knew best and in 2012 told anyone who would listen in no uncertain terms that Service Users must be Included, that Remploy was Old Fashioned and that the Gov’t proposed Access To Work Fund was far more Empowering (it was also much cheaper and merely involved chucking a few hundred quid at a few service users to pay for simple adaptions on things like cars). The Gov’t followed Sayce’s advice and shut the Remploy factories down. Many of the former Remploy staff never worked again and are now on benefits. Furthermore I think that Theresa May et al are now proposing to whittle away at the Access To Work Fund anyway.

The Gov’t is still grappling with the advice that Liz gave them in 1998 – she recommended that health care and social care should NOT be merged. That’s why there is still such extreme inequity in the treatment of those people classed as needing ‘social care’ as compared to those whose needs are categorised as ‘medical’. But somebody was stupid enough to allow Liz to ‘lead’ on creating the Disability Agenda forming the basis of policy for the next two decades….

In Jan 2017 Liz announced her retirement from the Disability Rights Commission – she’d been shortlisted for a post as a Disability Commissioner on the European Human Rights Commission! For fuckwittery, arrogance and sheer irresponsibility, Liz is only matched by Rachel Perkins.

In 2001 David Henry took over as Chair. I can find no info about David Henry at all other than that whilst he was Chair of MIND he was given two free tickets worth £1,500 for the opening ceremony to some grand event in his capacity as ‘leader’ of a UK charity.

The present Chair, Ryan Campbell, has been in post since 2012. He was formerly the CEO of a ‘drug, alcohol and mental health charity in the south east of England’ and is currently the CEO of Demelza Hospice Care in Hindhead, Surrey. Ryan was previously involved with Age Concern and has been an expert advisor to Gov’t on the development of health services; is the author of DoH guidance to commissioning in the Third Sector; has been an advisor and taskforce member to DoH guidance on High Impact Changes in Health and Social Care (2008); and was the UK rep to the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse.

Ryan is also a member of something called the ‘Association of Chairs’, which seems to be no more than a collection of freeloading dipsticks who become Chairs of outfits like MIND. Ryan explains on their website that he joined the Association ‘because I need a network’. Of course you do Ryan. To propel you onwards and upwards in the face of your dismal performance in order that one day you too can bag a seat in the Lords or a place on the EHRC alongside Rachel bloody Perkins.

It is because of people like this lot that so many other people are dying and suffering in the UK’s health and welfare system.

NB. BBC News Wales and the ‘Daily Post’ online are reporting that there is pressure on Wales to provide ‘fix rooms’ in which drug users can inject heroin. North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner Arfon Jones – he who as a young PC chauffeured Gordon Anglesea to the venues at which Anglesea molested boys and who many years later as Police and Crime Commissioner ‘made a mistake’ which resulted in Anglesea’s widow receiving 50% of his police pension although Anglesea died in prison as a convicted child abuser – is fully in support of the idea. Well it’s another great business opportunity for Dafydd and Lucille at CAIS – they can provide shooting galleries in which the CAIS clients can inject the goodies which they have been sold by their ‘peer guides’ and draw down a grant from the Welsh Gov’t to fund it all! I used to know someone who always quipped that CAIS stood for ‘Come And Inject Some’.

Anyone for co-production?