Protection Racket

Like playing the music of Mikis Theodorakis, compelling Jews to inform on each other to the Gentile authorities would be a breach of the sacrosanct IHRA Definition of Antisemitism. Get out of that one.

There is child sexual abuse throughout society, so there is child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, in the Anglican churches, and in each of the 38 religious organisations that have today been opened up to the same vilification.

As much as anything else, that exposes the uselessness, at least in relation to its official role, of the safeguarding-industrial complex that has controlled most of those 40 bodies throughout the present century. Anyone would think that the true purpose of that complex were something else entirely.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse could have looked anywhere, and with the same results. It chose those 40 targets because the kind of people who end on these things have a very particular ideological position that has been in government continuously since the Budget of December 1976, and which has been restored to its accustomed hegemony by the replacement of Jeremy Corbyn with its embodiment, Keir Starmer.

Or has it? The immediate and longer-term results of the 2019 General Election may yet beg to differ. Either way, the hegemon can do without 40 or more potential, and in many cases already a lot more than potential, centres of resistance. So it is using something that could be used against anything, most certainly including itself, and moving to take direct control of those 40 or more possible rivals.

Does it care about child sexual abuse? Quite the reverse. There is certainly no less than there has ever been, and quite possibly more. In hegemonic circles, sex with young teenagers, at least, is as endemic and as acceptable as cocaine use.

Through the safeguarding-industrial complex, those circles have already controlled most of the Feared Forty for decades. Today's report and its two predecessors have still managed to find child sexual abuse in all of them. That, though, is not what this is really about.

The scandalous allegation against me on 2nd March 2020 was recanted under oath at Durham Crown Court on 11th 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.