All Coming Out In The Wash

Ah, the Magdalene Laundries again. I always pronounce their name "Mawdlin", like the Oxbridge colleges. Everyone should.

It would obviously have been better for those girls in trouble to have slept on the streets, wouldn't it? They would have had better lives as the beggars or prostitutes that they would otherwise have been, wouldn't they? They would have been so much better-treated over here in those days, wouldn't they? 

The work of a washerwoman is beneath human dignity, isn't it? Leaving school at 14 and going into work was otherwise unheard of among people now in their seventies and eighties, wasn't it? No one else of that generation ever experienced violence at work, did they?

South of the Border, insofar as there was wrong done, then the Irish State, and not the Catholic Church, has clearly accepted the blame for it, since it is the Irish State, and not the Catholic Church, that has paid out to the victims of it. But now attention has moved to Northern Ireland. Get out of that one.

Oh, and tell me how, exactly, the French Republic was defining paedophilia, since it has no age of consent, whereas the Catholic Church makes it a specific canonical offence to have sexual conduct with anyone under the age of 18 regardless of the local secular law?

It is obvious who has the moral high ground there. Or in Britain, come to that. The age of consent here is lower than 18, and is in any case meaningless in practice due to the Gillick competence that ought to be called Thatcher competence.

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 had not received a written apology by 30th September 2021, nor was any such thing to be published in full in The Northern Cross.

Financially, I would then have settled for the reimbursement of my victim surcharges. One would not wish to have to sue the Church. But while I am not yet in a position to act on it, I must now declare my intention in principle to do so.

And if I were to be defeated at the next General Election, then I would seek to have that result overturned in the courts on grounds of undue spiritual influence by the Safeguarding Office of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, naming all relevant persons in the court papers. It has come to this.