Bad Faith

Sadly, but undeniably, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse could have looked anywhere and found what it has chosen to find in 40 bodies that had at least the potential to provide ideological and organisational alternatives to its own position. Indeed, it could no doubt have looked to itself, since on its own figures, at least one of its members must be a perpetrator of child sexual abuse. It is almost worth looking forward to that one in the next year or so.

Everyone is getting it in the neck, one way or another. But look at who are being hit hardest. Haredim, who are pejoratively labelled "ultra-Orthodox", and everything about whom is at once incomprehensible and repulsive to the metropolitan liberal elite. And Jehovah's Witnesses, who would certainly refuse to fight in that elite's beloved wars even if it were legally obligatory to do so. Yesterday's report was clearly completed before the dramatic change of foreign policy direction in very recent days. Following that change, expect plenty of spiteful lashing out from those who never wanted it.

The neoliberal and neoconservative safeguarding-industrial complex has controlled most of the Feared Forty for decades, and the IICSA's reports confirm that it is worse than useless at its nominal function. Anyone would think that what was really being safeguarded were sexual access to children, in accordance with the 1970s academic and professional formation of the safeguardians. On that note, the scandalous allegation against me on 2nd March 2020 was recanted under oath at Durham Crown Court on the eleventh of that month, calling gravely into question my convictions the next day by exposing that key character witness as unreliable, a fact that was not mentioned in closing statements or in summation.

Unless, as is widely assumed, the real reason for them is the content of this book, then the sanctions imposed upon me in my absence on 2nd March 2020 are void. I expect a written apology by 30th September 2021, and for it to be published in full in The Northern Cross. Financially, I would then settle for the reimbursement of my victim surcharges. One would not wish to have to sue the Church. If I were still subject to any sanction by the Church at the time of the next General Election, and if I were to be defeated at that Election, then I would seek to have that result overturned in the courts on grounds of undue spiritual influence.