EX-SENATOR STUART SYVRET BLOG | The resurgent blog of Stuart Syvret (original) (raw)
A SURVIVOR WHO SPOKE OUT
TO PROTECT OTHER VULNERABLE CHILDREN
Dannie Jarman – 18th December 2015 – R.I.P
Dannie has died. Her needlessly damaged – her cruelly wrecked life – ended on Friday 18th December 2015. A Person too young – too good – to die.
I’m too numbed by this brutal news to know what to say, how to think straight, at this moment. I’ll try and write a fitting tribute to Dannie in the coming days. For now, I think we should remind ourselves of her simple honesty, purity and strength; her willingness to speak-out against failed systems, so that other children should not suffer.
Dannie can be seen here, in this documentary, with her courage, speaking the truth for BBC Panorama: –
BBC Panorama – Jersey Child-Abuse
And this is Dannie’s Facebook page: –
Dannie Jarmam – a Jersey Survivor
For now, I’m re-posting an article I wrote back in 2008, when we still imagined there were people in the British Establishment who cared about such concepts as the rule of law.
I first published the following posting on the 14th April 2008 – and it refers to, and includes a speech I’d attempted to deliver to the Jersey parliament on its last sitting before Christmas 2007. At that time I was the senior Senator, and thus ‘Father of the House’, so tradition had it that I should deliver a speech of reflection on the year just past, and looking forward to the coming 12 months.
But this was no ordinary occasion. At this time – December 2007 – Jersey was being forced to confront the awful reality of many decades of concealed child-abuse – generations of suffering – wrecked lives – appalling levels of neglect – worse, highly evidenced examples of pro-active, collusive concealment of child-abuse by all of Jersey’s public authorities.
That level of state-sponsored child-abuse cover-up had even included the obstruction and oppression of me – of an actual Health & Social Services Minister – for trying to protect vulnerable children and trying to bring recognition and some kind of justice for abuse-survivors.
One of the key episodes of child-abuse I was trying to expose was the decade-long regime of terror carried out by Jane and Alan Maguire who ran the Jersey government’s Blanche Pierre Group Home. A regime of abuse all the relevant Jersey authorities had been aware of at the time – but which they strove – and still strive – to down-play and cover-up.
In those hard months of 2007 and 2008 – four years “pre-Savile”, so it was still a huge challenge to bring about public recognition of high-level child-abuse cover-ups – I had to go over the heads of the captured, ‘gone-native’ local BBC outfit, and make contact with the BBC at a national level. This led ultimately to a BBC Panorama program on the Jersey child-abuse cover-ups. With her guided and supported decision, I introduced Dannie Jarman to the BBC. Dannie was a victim of the States of Jersey – along with a number of other children, a victim of the psychopathic Jersey government employees Jane and Alan Maguire.
Dannie’s evidence – her strength – her leadership – her readiness to speak truth to power on behalf of so many other victims can be seen in the BBC Panorama program here: –
I had tried to make Jersey’s parliament of inadequate spivs & grifters face-up to the reality of the decades of concealed child-abuse; tried to make them understand, at an emotional level, the savage, crushing consequences on real little lives, of our failures.
The Jersey parliament being what it is – an accretion of crooks, morons, & crook/morons – they actually shouted-down my speech – barracked and abused me – and the directly – personally – expressly – conflicted head of the assembly, the London appointed Sir Philip Bailhache, cut my microphone and adjourned the meeting.
I was left standing there at my desk, looking up, staring at the roof windows, thinking – “this just didn’t happen. This is a nightmare. I’ll wake up any moment” – whilst the rest of my “esteemed colleagues” rushed off to the Old Library for their free Christmas lunch.
Anyway, a part of the speech the Jersey parliament refused to hear, referred to Dannie. This was the part: –
“Amongst our victims have been many many children who had not misbehaved; children who had to be taken into “care” for their protection; or children who had to be taken into the States-run institutions because of the death of their parent. I have met with siblings who’s mother died of cancer when they were little children. I have met with several of the victims of this particular States-run institution. But when I met with the brother & sister – now adults – and listened to their experiences – all I could feel were two things: shame – that the States of Jersey allowed these things to be done to them – and anger that upon the tragedy of the death of these young children’s mother from cancer – we – the States – heaped violence, cruelty, battery and abuse upon these already bereaved children who needed our care, support & love.
Towards the end of my conversation with them – they embraced tearfully, and the brother repeated a vow that no one would ever harm his sister again.
That meeting took place in a room in this building. And I confess at that moment I seriously considered walking from the door and never setting foot in this place again.”
That sister, that daughter, that survivor – that constituent of mine – was Dannie Jarman.
Dannie.
And now she’s dead.
She was as killed by the States of Jersey – killed by the Crown – as assuredly as if some Bailiff or Attorney General had stuck a knife in her heart.
There’s only so much a person can endure.
This is the blog-posting from 14th April 2008 – in which I explain the context of the December 2007 Christmas speech for Jersey’s child-abuse survivors – the speech the Jersey parliament refused to hear.
Let’s remember Dannie Jarman – in spite of her needlessly harmed, damaged life – she was able to have more strength, honesty, ethics and simple engagement with the necessary truth than all of Jersey’s accretion of entrenched gangsters and spivs combined.
I hope you’ve found a good place, Dannie, and are having the life there you were denied from having here.
Stuart.
THE SPEECH THE JERSEY PARLIAMENT REFUSED TO HEAR.
Empathy for Abuse Survivors vs. States Members Christmas Lunch.
A number of people have asked me if I would post the speech I attempted to make in the Jersey parliament in December last year. So I produce it here below this post.
Some background information.
Believe it or not – I am the “Father of the House” in the States assembly, this by dint of being the longest continually serving Senator.
And by tradition and custom, the Father of the House leads the Christmas speeches, made at the end of the last assembly meeting before the Christmas break.
Admittedly, these speeches are usually a load of hackneyed, smug and platitudinous rubbish.
But as I had spent most of 2007 learning of the terrible things endured by the survivors of the Jersey child abuse disaster – and attempting to battle on their behalf for truth & justice – I thought I would write a speech which addressed their sufferings.
Having spoken with many of the battered, abused and raped survivors of several generations – it seemed to me to be entirely apposite to express some kind of recognition and empathy towards them at Christmas.
This speech represents the first ever occasion a member of the Jersey parliament had stood in the assembly and acknowledged the truth of what had taken place and had tried to express how dreadful it was.
Now, to be sure, I knew the speech would be a departure from the clichéd effusions of self-congratulation which are usually displayed on these occasions.
And I knew it would deeply anger some members of the assembly who – even at that stage – were still trying to suppress the truth in an effort to conceal the utter folly of their decisions to side, during the year, with abusers and those who would conceal abuse.
However – it did not occur to me that the States of Jersey would be so degenerate, so cretinous, so immoral and so decadent as to actually stop the speech from being delivered.
Yet – that is precisely what they did.
Only about a quarter of the way through the speech, I was barracked, interrupted and halted.
And – in another of those ‘You Couldn’t Make It Up’ episodes – the Bailiff, Sir Philip Bailhache – Speaker of the assembly – sided with the mob.
He ordered me to stop delivering the speech. I declined, as the speech was ‘in-order’ – so he cut my microphone and adjourned the meeting.
You see – in addition to being very annoyed that a member should speak the truth – Jersey politicians were impatient to get to their Christmas lunch in the Old Library.
If you’re interested in this extraordinary episode, I have written about it in two previous posts, ‘Parallel Universes’ and ‘Anatomy of a Spin – Temps Passé #1’.
But I haven’t previously posted the actual speech I was prevented from delivering.
So here it is.
As you read this, bear in mind a few key facts:
It was the first ever speech by a Jersey politician which attempted to acknowledge the victims of decades of child-abuse in the island.
I attempted to give this speech as we approached Christmas.
Phil Bailhache – speaker of the Jersey parliament – in siding with the mob-rule of the Jersey establishment, became probably the only Speaker of a parliament in any western democracy who would support tyranny by the majority and prevent minority opinions from even being expressed.
Not one single sentence of the speech conflicted with any rules of procedure, standing orders or code of conduct – it was entirely ‘in-order’.
Therefore the halting of the speech – in addition to being a sickening display of immorality – was also an assault upon democracy and the rule of law. Phil Bailhache and his Jersey establishment allies had, precisely, zero legitimate grounds for preventing me from speaking.
I suppose, in many respects, it was the final illustration of an establishment drowned in its own moral turpitude, incompetence, hubris and decadence.
It was, perhaps, the moment when I realised my political career was over. I knew then, if I didn’t before, that I just had to get out of it and cleanse myself of the sensation of filth, decay and futility.
In my post “Parallel Universes” I described the way I felt attempting to deal with the banalities of the local media interviews in the immediate wake of this episode. I quote some of that post here:
“Midst this scene like something from ‘Drop the Dead Donkey’, I was asked a question which suddenly attracted my interest. I was asked by a BBC Jersey TV journalist whether I “was surprised at the attitude and actions of States members in response to my speech?”
I was about to tell the truth – “yes – very surprised. How could one imagine people objecting to an expression of empathy for abuse survivors?”
But then a greater truth struck me – of course I wasn’t surprised. Being shocked at this reaction by States members was like being surprised to discover that lawyers charge too much and string-out cases to maximise fees.
So, I answered. I forget the precise words, but it was something like this:
“Am I surprised at States members’ reactions? No, not really – after all, let’s face it, we all know the States assembly is largely a collection of gangsters and halfwits. So, surprised? No.””
Anyway – for those who have requested it – here is the actual speech that the Jersey parliament refused to hear.
Stuart.
CHRISTMAS 2007
FATHER OF THE HOUSE SPEECH TO THE STATES ASSEMBLY BY SENATOR STUART SYVRET
Sir, Your Excellency, fellow members – but especially the people we are here to represent,
As Father of the House, it is customary for the senior Senator to lead the seasonal exchange of greetings with which we end the year.
In these addresses, it is common to reflect upon the year past – and to contemplate the coming year. And it is the birth of Christ that we mark with these reflections and which we celebrate in this season of goodwill.
Christ taught many things in the course of His life. Amongst His teachings was the virtue of honesty.
For even though I am an ordinary, fallible person, with no particular religious convictions, still, I could not stand here and falsely claim that the past year has been an episode upon which we, as an assembly, could look back upon with satisfaction – or even self-respect. This has not been a year in which we have displayed wisdom, compassion or even basic common sense.
As is now public knowledge, we as a society – Jersey – this community – have begun the awful task of facing up to decades – at least – of disgraceful failure – and worse – towards children.
I will not refer to my personal experiences of 2007; perhaps I will speak of such things on another occasion.
Instead, I wish to speak of the children, the victims, the innocent – the many – who have been catastrophically failed by the edifice of public administration in Jersey – year in and year out. Decade after decade.
We like to imagine ourselves as being some kind of model community; a safe, well-governed and happy group of people. Whilst I cannot speak in detail of individual sufferings now; nor of the many betrayals – I can say this: that as far as I am aware the coming months and years are going to require the most painful reconsideration of our communal values, our competence – and our collective ethics.
Indeed, I am not aware of a more wretched and shocking example of communal failure in the entire 800 year history of Jersey as a self-governing jurisdiction.
How much worse could things be than the systemic decades-long betrayal of the innocents?
As we approach the birthday of Christ, we should reflect upon his words. When on an occasion, some little children were brought to Jesus, Jesus’ disciples became angry and rebuked those who had brought the children into Christ‘s presence. Scriptures then tell us, “But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them “ Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.”
Jesus is also recorded as saying, “And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name received me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea”
I would hope that these simple words – that place children and their welfare at the heart of human values – could be accepted by any decent person – regardless of their particular religious thoughts or beliefs.
Greater minds than mine have said that we may gauge the quality of a society by how it treats its children. Having learnt what I have learnt in the course of this year I have to say that our smug self-satisfaction as a charitable and civilised community in fact conceals a festering canker. For though it would be bad enough for us to have amongst our midst’s the abusers that are to be found in all societies – the victims in Jersey have been doubly betrayed – betrayed with indifference, betrayed with contempt, betrayed with the naked and idle self-interest of an administration that should have been protecting these – the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.
Sir, some people seem to enjoy being politicians. This is not a view I ever understood. My 17 years as a States member have, to me, been a fairly consistent period of struggle; on some occasions so Kafkaesque, so dispiriting that many times I just wished to cast it all aside and seek a civilised occupation instead. But nothing – nothing – nothing in those 17 years even begins to approach the sheer existential bleakness of this year; of trying to contact, to listen to, to help so many people whose childhoods and lives were wrecked by abuse – often abuse at the hands of the States of Jersey and its employees – and doubly wrecked by the conspiracy of cover-ups engaged in by public administration.
A few brave people – front-line staff, victims, and whistle-blowers began to bring these failings to my attention. As my understanding developed, I took extremely high-powered specialist advice on child protection issues – and I think this assembly should acknowledge with gratitude the involvement of Chris Callender, Andrew Nielson and their leader, Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform. The support and guidance of the Howard League was a great source of strength to me and those whom I was working with in Jersey.
Likewise Professor June Thoburn, who agreed to bring her world-renowned expertise to the post of Chair of the Jersey Child Protection Committee.
In particular I believe we should acknowledge the bravery, integrity and unshakable commitment to child welfare exhibited by Simon Bellwood. He alone – amongst the entire panoply of the child “protection” apparatus in Jersey – said that the way we were treating children in custody was simply wrong. He alone took a stand against the appalling ill-treatment of children who needed care – not abuse. That he was sacked for his efforts really speaks volumes, and illustrates well the ethical void within the system we are responsible for.
Sir, I repeat, we must focus upon the victims – and the friends and families who suffered along with them.
For a period of many months, I investigated these issues – and the more I investigated – the greater became my alarm and anger at what I was learning from people throughout our society. Jersey being the kind of place where many people know other people, the chains of contacts which developed – the networks of victims and witnesses simply grew and grew. Sometimes new revelations occurred – almost by the hour.
As I met, and spoke with people of all ages – young teenagers to retired people – it became clear to me that what we were facing was something far worse than occasional, isolated instances of abuse. What Jersey had tolerated in its midst was a culture of disregard, abandonment and contempt for children – especially those children in need; the vulnerable; the defenceless. During these dark days, when I contemplated how people could treat children in these ways, I was often reminded of the words of Sartre, when he said “hell is other people”.
But, the strength and bravery of the many victims was a source of strength to me as I contemplated several years of bitter struggle against the Establishment, who were clearly going to use the predictable range of oppressions against me in an effort to keep the truth concealed.
So when the States of Jersey Police Force took me into their confidence and gave me a comprehensive briefing about the work they were doing – it was as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I had been steeling myself for years of struggle to expose the truth and to seek justice for the victims. The realisation that I was not going down this road alone was a tremendous release – to me – and to the victims. So I must pay tribute to the leadership of the Police Force. This time – finally – there is no hiding place.
During my work I have had conversations with people – teenagers, parents, young adults and older people. People from all parts of society and all backgrounds. Many of these people – victims and witnesses – naturally enough found speaking about their experiences extremely difficult; and many of them were, and are, reluctant to become identified. Likewise the many brave front-line staff who still contact me regularly – notwithstanding the blocking by management of e-mails sent to me by Health & Social Services staff from their work computers.
Such is the climate of fear that victims, witnesses and decent staff experience, that very many of the meetings I have taken part in – have had to be arranged in great secrecy. For example, one brave employee who gave me very important information, made initial contact with me via a text-message sent from her daughter’s mobile phone.
I went about the back-streets, the housing estates, the tenement blocks, the foul, overcrowded and exploitative “lodging houses” in which the poor in Jersey often dwell. And I listened to people opening up; often for the first time in their lives speaking of what they experienced – what they saw – and how they had been failed by everyone. For many of these people, I was the first person in authority they felt able to speak to about what happened to them.
I listened to things – things sometimes said through tears – that I hope never to have to hear again.
As time passed, I found myself moving from these dark rendezvous with witnesses – going amongst the soaked and blackened streets – experiencing encounters with victims – and clandestine meetings with brave whistle-blowing front-line staff.
In the early stages of this odyssey – this drizzle-soaked sodium-lit quest amongst the night roads and back alleys of St. Helier – in the unspoken underbelly of Jersey – I realised what I was seeking – and finding – were ghosts.
Shades and spectres – the vaporous trails of long-departed children – still haunting the outer shells of people I met. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of these ghost children – in eye – or word – or gesture – and you want to reach out to them – but these burnt and vanished phantoms disappear into the scars, the tattoos, the needle marks, the self-harm lacerations, the haunted faces and the wrecked lives.
Although many of the people I met are in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties – I cannot but see them as children still. And many of these children have passed through the hands of the States of Jersey ‘system’ – I cannot bring myself to use the phrase “care”. Some of these children ended in custody for minor offences – and such was the cruelty, abuse, neglect and violence they suffered – many went on to become habitual criminals. When many of these people explained their criminal life-styles, they did so with humility, many candidly use the phrase ‘we were no angels’, and they have said they were not proud of the things they have done. But as a States member – I cannot look at these people – these victims – and not ask myself the awful question: “had these vulnerable, confused and angry children been treated with love and respect and care by the States, perhaps they would have avoided criminal life-styles; perhaps they would not be – in many cases – alcoholics, drug addicts – often broken and shattered beings, wrestling with mental health issues.”
Could I – could any of us – say with confidence that our failures have not contributed to, or led to, such tragic outcomes for so many people?
No, we cannot say that. We must, at the last, admit the awful truth that many of our regular inmates at La Moye Prison are there because of what we – the States of Jersey – did to them as vulnerable children – in the time in their lives when they most needed love, care, support & nurturing.
Amongst our victims have been many many children who had not misbehaved; children who had to be taken into “care” for their protection; or children who had to be taken into the States-run institutions because of the death of their parent. I have met with siblings who’s mother died of cancer when they were little children. I have met with several of the victims of this particular States-run institution. But when I met with the brother & sister – now adults – and listened to their experiences – all I could feel were two things: shame – that the States of Jersey allowed these things to be done to them – and anger that upon the tragedy of the death of these young children’s mother from cancer – we – the States – heaped violence, cruelty, battery and abuse upon these already bereaved children who needed our care, support & love.
Towards the end of my conversation with them – they embraced tearfully, and the brother repeated a vow that no one would ever harm his sister again.
That meeting took place in a room in this building. And I confess at that moment I seriously considered walking from the door and never setting foot in this place again.
Another, older, man I met explained his experiences of being a resident in Haute de la Garenne in the mid-nineteen sixties. Even for the “standards” of the day, the treatment of the children there was barbaric & cruel – at best; for worse things happened.
What really struck me about my meeting with this man was that he was not especially bothered at the treatment he received. I was touched and moved that his overriding concern was – and still is to this day – the fate of his best friend in that institution. He gave me the name, and some details, such as he could recall, from these days far ago in his childhood.
I was able to look into what happened to this boy who was in our care in Haute de la Garenne in the mid-sixties. Little information was available, but the Office of the Deputy Viscount was able to supply me with the following facts:
Michael Bernard O’CONNELL
- Aged 14 years • Died on 7th or 8th October 1966, by hanging from a tree, off Rue des Haies in Trinity. • Inquest held on 17th October 1966.
The memory of this young man is kept alive by his friends – children – people who had similar experiences and who – in the midst of their own struggles with their lives – keep the flame of their friend burning.
But let no one imagine that the things of which we speak are confined to the past; an age of dark and sick attitudes. No – today we have the very same problems.
Recently, I made the appointment and accompanied a young man to the police station so he could add his experiences to the present investigations. This young man had fallen foul of the law in some very minor ways as a young child – and thus he suffered the awful fate of falling into the maw of the so-called youth “justice” system of Jersey. Such was the counter-productive barbarity of the treatment meted out to him – and others like him – that his behaviour became more angry, bitter and lawless. At various stages he passed through Les Chenes and then Greenfields. This young man was, at one stage, held in near complete isolation for two months – passages of solitary confinement which went on for weeks. Having induced – unsurprisingly – a complete mental collapse in this child through this solitary confinement – the response of the institution to his needs was to send a “councillor” from CAMHS to speak with him – for half-an-hour – once-a-week.
As I listened to him recount his experiences over about 2 hours to the police officers who were conducting the initial interview, I kept looking at the vast cross-hatchings of self-harm scars which make his left arm look like a road map of New York, and I listened to him explain how he lay bleeding from these wounds alone in his cell and untended – as a child – I looked at him and I thought “we have done this to him”; “we have wrecked his life”.
It is striking just how many people who passed through the hands of the States of Jersey as innocent children emerged from the other side of that experience, bitter, angry, contemptuous and lawless. Former inmates – current inmates – and those about to become inmates – many many of them are our victims.
Society has a low regard for those who break the law, and that view is routinely echoed in this chamber. So it is not often a member asks us to reflect upon those who have crossed the law and to consider that amongst these people are many – far too many – children who were broken and betrayed in so many ways – especially by the States.
For amongst these people who find themselves imprisoned, these adults cast adrift – within them linger still the ghosts of the children they were – and the spectres of what they should have been.
So Sir – today – the expression of seasonal goodwill, the greeting, the recognition and the charity I stand to offer goes, from me at least, to all the victims of abuse, all those who have suffered – and all those whose childhood experiences have led them to become prisoners. Those who have languished in La Moye – or who are still there now – I want them to know that if their lives are wrecked, their actions driven by the nightmares of their childhoods – some of us understand. Some of us recognise them as victims – tragically and shamefully – often victims of the States of Jersey.
I wish to finish by quoting the final verse of a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter:
‘Somewhere in a dream like this The light of love leads us home Broken worlds will not be fixed Vengeance take us as thy own We’re just like beggars now On our knees we hear our names God forgives somehow We have yet to learn the same.’
(Excerpt from Dead Man Walking by Mary Chapin Carpenter)
Senator Stuart Syvret Christmas address to States of Jersey 2007
27th March 2008 Report to the UK Government
The Structurally Broken Judicial & Prosecution
System of the British Establishment
Tax-Haven of Jersey: no Hiding-Place
For an Establishment Trying to Cover-up
For Suspects such as
Jimmy Savile & Ted Heath.
On the 27th March 2008 the detailed report reproduced below this posting was sent to the then UK Secretary of State for Justice, Jack Straw MP.
The report describes the systemic and endemic breakdown in the law-enforcement and justice systems of the British Channel Island of Jersey; a breakdown in the administration of justice that had permitted and concealed decades of child-abuse.
At the time of writing in 2008, things appeared to have at last begun to change for the better in the island tax-haven, in that the Police Force was acting professionally & lawfully in investigating the illegal suffering inflicted on so many children. The Police Force was, however, in a lonely position – facing as it did the continuing intransigence and corruption of the prosecution and judicial systems in the Crown Dependency of Jersey.
To have any chance of succeeding in finally securing protection for the vulnerable and justice for the abused, the Police required the support and co-operation of unbiased prosecutors and judges. So it was that the Jersey politician (me) who had blown the whistle on the decades of child-protection failure wrote the report below and sent it to the then Labour government Justice Secretary Jack Straw. The report explained how many irredeemable structural defects and fatal personal conflicts of interest concerning child-abuse cover-ups beset the Crown prosecution and judicial systems of the Channel Island, and that only the UK government, in accordance with its duties and legal obligations, could clean-up the system.
Within eight months of receiving the report, Jack Straw MP, the UK Secretary of State for Justice, had supported Jersey’s corrupted & child-abuse-concealing oligarchy in illegally suspending the good Police Chief Graham Power and sabotaging the 2008 child-abuse investigations.
By December 2008 Straw was giving succour to the child-abuse concealing Jersey Establishment in enabling and facilitating them in planning their political oppression of me as the then leading opposition member of the Jersey parliament.
Before the end of April 2009, I had been subjected to an illegal massed dawn-raid by the then politically captured police, arrested for whistle-blowing, locked into a windowless police cell for over seven hours whilst the home I shared with my then partner (also a member of the Jersey legislature) was turned over from top to bottom – without a search-warrant – and the parliamentary and legally privileged communications between me and hundreds of my constituents were stolen by the politicised police.
The prosecution and subsequent Stalinist show-trial mounted against me was, ostensibly, for publishing evidence – in March 2009 – which showed the illegal cover-up of an episode of clinical serial-murder engaged in by a rogue nurse. Throughout the process of show-trialing me, the Jersey authorities insisted their “data protection” action had nothing to do with my work on exposing the child-abuse cover-ups.
However – some years later – following an inadvertent disclosure to me by Google during their capitulation to the child-abuse cover-ups of the Jersey government when extirpating my Blogger account – it became clear the Jersey oligarchs had been desperately pressuring Google to shut down the blog as early as November 2008.
At that time none of Jersey’s mainstream media was campaigning for the abuse survivors, and I was the only person publishing their testimony and supporting, documented evidence. In particular – I was the only media source in Jersey openly and strongly questioning and challenging what was obviously the illegal, politicised suspension of Police Chief Graham Power in November 2008.
The inadvertent disclosure by Google revealed that Jersey’s Data Protection Commissioner – Emma Martins, daughter of BBC Bergerac actor – and acquaintance of multiple chid-rapist and necrophiliac, Jimmy Savile – John Nettles – was, through a directly conflicted law-firm, Appleby Global, trying to get Google to shut down my blog so as to thwart my exposures of the child-abuse cover-ups. The law-firm Appleby Global had previously been Bailhache LaBesse, who had betrayed a number of Jersey child-abuse survivors – the victims of the Maguires – when “representing” those victims as legal-aid clients in 1999. The then Senior Partner of Bailhache LaBesse was William Bailhache – who was later appointed by London as Jersey Attorney General – who then had me arrested, prosecuted and driven out of the Jersey legislature – for exposing a number of child-abuse cover-ups – including the cover-up his law-firm had participated in in 1999.
The police-state, anti-democratic and crime-concealing raid, arrest and series of political show-trials I was subjected to, was planned and ordered against me by the very conflicted child-abuse concealing individuals I had expressly described and named in the detailed report to Jack Straw; individuals including the London appointed head of the judiciary and legislature, Philip Bailhache, his London appointed deputy Michael Birt, and Philip Bailhache’s brother, the equally conflicted William Bailhache who, by 2008 was the London appointed Attorney General and sole prosecution authority in Jersey.
These are evidenced – and wholly extraordinary – events.
Occurrences without precedent in the modern era of public administration in the British Isles.
From 2008 – through 2009 – and beyond, actual UK government Justice Secretaries – such as Jack Straw – actively supporting the overtly and structurally corrupt concealment of decades of child-abuse.
A course of conduct taken on, and continued by Straw’s Conservative successor as Justice Secretary – Ken Clarke.
Why?
Just why – how – what on Earth – could have been the motives of the very heart of the UK power-establishment to engage in such crazed – such anti-democratic – such lawless – acts as illegally suspending a Police Chief, and oppressing a leading opposition politician – both of who were simply carrying out their respective duties so as to expose and stop child-abuse cover-ups?
That question is almost – almost – rhetorical now.
Back then – 2008, 2009 and onwards – until 2012 – we were in the “pre-Savile” era. The powers-that-be in London will have known that “too much” – and “too deep” – child-abuse investigations in Jersey would sooner or later lead to Savile – and – terrifyingly for them – lead to others. As maddened and as doomed and as despicable as it now looks in the rear-view mirror – the British Establishment still believed – back then – they could keep the lid down on Savile – and all the similar “VIP” child-abusers – including the MPs, the Lords, the spies – the BBC – and all the accompanying sleaze, criminality and epochal shame of British public administration.
Now – as though the BBC, the MPs and MI5 chiefs weren’t as sickening enough – we even have a British Prime Minister as a possible child-abuser – certainly, one who is in-the-frame as a suspect, and who – like Savile – spent significant time in Jersey.
Ted Heath, Jimmy Savile – and others besides – were regular visitors to Jersey. Savile committed abuse here. It is suspected that former Prime Minister Heath may have. Certainly, we can be sure of this; for decades Jersey was a “soft-touch” for child-abusers. Indeed, the “conveniently” liminal, quasi-jurisdiction of Crown Dependency Jersey has been “legally” useful for all kinds of purposes – not least to the City of London Corporation. (Which is why it would have been terribly “convenient” for the British Establishment had they succeeded in their audacious – hubristic – attempt to rig the English child-abuse investigation by placing Lord Mayor of the City of London, Fiona Woolf at its helm.)
Seen in this light – child-abusing psychopaths such as Savile with connections to the very core of the British Establishment – and perhaps others like him – perhaps even a Prime Minister – having been on the potential event-horizon of the Jersey child-abuse investigation – it is not so surprising that Jack Straw – and then Ken Clarke – supported and endorsed the illegal sabotage of that Jersey investigation from back in 2008.
The November 2008 suspension of the Jersey Police Chief Graham Power was so startlingly illegal – so plainly devoid of due-process – so baseless – so corrupt – that not even the directly conflicted Wiltshire Police – with their history of burying child-abuse complaints concerning Ted Heath – could produce any credible disciplinary charges against Mr. Power, in spite of the Jersey & London Establishment throwing two years and £2 million at the attempt.
The then Justice Secretary Jack Straw had no meaningful justification for his involvement. All he would say to a fellow MP, Austin Mitchell, was that the ground for suspending the Police Chief was “serious”. In an e-mail to me on 20th February 2012, Mr. Mitchell said this: –
“I don`t think I lost interest in Graham Power`s situation after being told by Straw that it was serious. It clearly wasn`t, though I can`t remember what happened because it was such a frustrating business being fobbed off by Straw and then by Willy Bach who used to be a friend but then got totally absorbed by the system.”
Since then certain interesting things have happened to Jack Straw – and his Conservative successor Ken Clarke.
The real calibre of Jack Straw – his ‘judgment’ and ‘ethics’ – was exposed in an investigative journalism sting when Straw was covertly filmed offering his “services” as a well-connected parliamentarian to a putative Chinese business. “What can I offer you, what can I do for you?” said Straw: –
We’re entitled to ask – and in the war against child-abuse cover-ups we have a duty to ask – how many real, actual bribes has Jack Straw – former Home Secretary, former Foreign Secretary and former Justice Secretary – accepted?
In fact, we’re obliged – we’re duty-bound – to ask an even more obvious question: “what did Jack Straw know about the British “VIP” child-abuse cover-ups from his time as Home Secretary – when, later, he was endorsing and de facto supporting the Jersey oligarchy in illegally sabotaging the 2008 investigations in the island?”
We can be quite certain of this: money is no object – no object at all – to the Jersey oligarchy and its powerful protectors in the City of London and in Whitehall.
Detailed, evidenced submissions were made to Ken Clarke, too – when he had become Secretary of State for Justice – concerning the Jersey child-abuse cover-ups – and the concealment of other profoundly serious crimes in Jersey. He too – like Jack Straw – failed to act properly, preferring to let Jersey’s ermine-clad but undisguisably gangster regime run its illegal riot.
Since then Ken Clarke has been accused of indecently assaulting a young male actor who was playing beneath the age of consent when the alleged indecent assault is said to have occurred. For reasons that might – in usual circumstances – have appeared mystifying, rather than Clarke suing Ben Fellows for defamation, the state embarked upon the breathtakingly ill-advised and doomed attempt to prosecute Fellows: –
The London Establishment had taken a leaf from the Jersey Establishment book and attempted to criminalise their accusers. Not only to prosecute the whistle-blower – but to attempt to keep Ken Clarke’s identity secret as well. Even now there’s been curiously little focus from the British mainstream media upon just what an wholly extraordinary – frankly terrifying – course-of-conduct this was for the power-core of the British state to embark upon.
It was left to the small, web-based investigative journalism outfit – Exaro News – to challenge the secrecy rulings which would have kept Clarke’s identity secret.
Anyone genuinely concerned about the suffering of our fellow human beings – of people when they’re children – and who’s serious about stopping the state from being a component in the enabling and concealing of child-abuse – needs to become alert to the facts and evidence already in plain sight.
Much of what we need to know – and what we need to repair – doesn’t require five years of public inquiries to be brought into the light.
It’s there to be seen in the extant evidence.
Not least the “pre-Savile” illegal child-abuse cover-ups in Jersey – which were enabled – and continue to be enabled – by the British Establishment – by British Secretaries of State.
That is not to say that public inquiries aren’t needed, or shouldn’t happen; rather, that we need to bear constant witness to those facts which are already established so that the public inquiries be not permitted to elide & evade them.
And lest there be any doubt over the vital importance of that task – the task of placing ruthless scrutiny on all child-abuse “public inquires” – as a nation and an international community we can look at the incompetent – and remarkably biased – conduct of what we’re supposed to accept as a child-abuse “public-inquiry” in the British Crown tax-shelter of Jersey.
Stuart Syvret
REPORT TO JACK STRAW – 27TH MARCH 2008
From: Senator Stuart Syvret C/O Morier House St. Helier Jersey JE1 1DD
E-mail: st.syvret@gmail.com
27th March 2008
REPORT TO THE UNITED KINGDOM JUSTICE SECRETARY JACK STRAW MP CONCERNING CHILD ABUSE IN THE ISLAND OF JERSEY AND THE OBLIGATIONS OF THE BRITISH AUTHORITIES TO ENSURE THE RULE OF LAW AND THE GOOD ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE IN THE BRITISH CROWN DEPENDENCY OF JERSEY
Jack Straw M.P Justice Secretary House of Commons London
Dear Mr. Straw,
I write to you to draw to your attention a very serious range of issues for which you have responsibility, and to request that you use your constitutional powers to ensure the good administration of justice in Jersey.
Please forgive the length of this report – but the maters it deals with are of the utmost gravity.
The situation is this:
Hundreds of vulnerable children in Jersey have suffered the most appalling child abuse. This abuse has affected generations of people, leaving most of them with ruined lives. Others have committed suicide.
The scale of the abuses, their systemic nature – and the fact that they were able to take place largely unexposed and unpunished for decade after decade represents a catastrophic failing of ‘checks and balances’ in Jersey.
Such failure to protect vulnerable children calls into question the Rule of Law and the good administration of justice in the island.
Every part of the Jersey prosecutory and judicial apparatus is hopelessly conflicted in respect of any matter – civil or criminal – which may arise from the child abuse crisis in Jersey.
This fact is well-evidenced.
I will explain that evidence later.
Accompanying this e-mailed letter are two PDF files, the Sharp report, and the Dylan Southern Report.
Both reports evidence in detail disastrous breakdowns in child protection and the Rule of Law in Jersey.
Given the profound conflicts of interest concerning the Jersey prosecutory and judicial apparatus, no part of it is remotely capable of meeting the test of the “appearance of objectivity” which any credible judicial process must meet.
I am, therefore – and at the express request of a significant number of my constituents who are victims of the systemic child abuse in Jersey – writing to request that you use the constitutional powers vested in you to ensure good governance and the proper administration of justice in Jersey.
Structure of this Report.
In this report I detail the following facts:
1: The background to the present child abuse disaster in Jersey.
2: Your constitutional responsibilities and powers in respect of the Crown Dependencies.
3: The nature of the United Kingdom’s international obligations for what takes place in the Crown Dependencies.
4: The good name of the Crown – and why that good name is presently in serious jeopardy in Jersey.
5: The established and accepted doctrine of the separation of powers.
6: The conflictedness of the Jersey judiciary.
7: The conflictedness of the Jersey prosecutory service.
8: The established and accepted test of ‘the appearance of objectivity’ which any respectable judicial process must meet.
9: Democracy and the good administration of justice: recognising that they are not always the same cause.
10: The United Kingdom: jus cogens, erga omnes and Jersey.
11: Evidenced examples of possible criminality by senior figures in Jersey’s judicial and prosecutory services.
12: The present status of the current investigations of those senior figures by the Police Force.
13 Action that must be taken by you in defence of the victims, in the name of the Rule of Law, to defend the good name of the Crown and to meet the United Kingdom’s international obligations.
14: Conclusion.
1: Introduction.
As you will be aware, the island of Jersey is having to come to terms with at least seven decades of the most monstrous and persistent child abuse.
95% of which has gone unexposed and unpunished.
These crimes may have even included child murder.
The States of Jersey Police Force are still undertaking their investigations, and expect to make a substantial number of arrests.
The offences being investigated by the Police Force are not confined only to instances of abuse; they are also investigating the extensive cover-ups and concealments of that abuse – abuse which has taken place over many decades.
In this respect, they will almost certainly be seeking to bring charges of Perverting the Course of Justice, Attempting to Pervert the Course of Justice and Misconduct in a Public Office.
And it is this aspect of the crisis – the concealment of abuse and resultant perversion of the course of justice – that is of particular interest to you given your constitutional responsibilities and powers.
The central importance of this aspect of the Jersey child abuse disaster cannot be over-stated. Every community, sadly, has abusers within it. Other jurisdictions have also experienced well-documented examples of persistent abuse concealed for many years by certain institutions.
However – what makes the Jersey situation so extreme is the sheer quantity of victims – and the fact that the abuse was able to persist largely unexposed for generations.
This failure by the island’s authorities to adequately protect Jersey’s vulnerable children has been caused by a near-complete breakdown of effective checks and balances.
Whilst there has, plainly, been a catastrophic breakdown of oversight and regulation on the part of the island’s government – of more alarming concern must be the failure of the Crown in Jersey to properly fulfill its role with respect to good governance, the rule of law and the good administration of justice when dealing with child abuse.
I will explain these – well-evidenced – failures later.
I will now turn to your role and responsibilities in helping the people of Jersey re-gain the proper protection of the Crown, the rule of law and the good administration of justice.
2: Your constitutional powers.
As Justice Minister, a post formerly designated Lord Chancellor, you have ultimate power over the Crown Dependencies insofar as “good governance and the proper administration of justice” are concerned.
It is, naturally, disputed by the Jersey authorities of today that you possess these responsibilities and consequent powers.
Such a claim is historically and constitutionally unsustainable and readily disposed of.
Over the generations, most Jersey authorities – including its Crown-appointed officers – have accepted that the Crown ultimately has responsibility for – and thus the consequent power to intervene in – matters of “good government and the proper administration of justice”. In practice these responsibilities and powers lie with the UK government.
This view was the conclusion of the 1973 Royal Commission on the Constitution (the Kilbrandon Report)
I will refer to the Kilbrandon Report in more detail later.
3: The United Kingdom’s International Obligations.
Even setting aside the established, constitutional existence of an inherent power of the Crown to intervene in the Crown Dependencies for the purposes of good governance and the proper administration of justice, there are further – unambiguous – obligations upon, and therefore powers vested with, the United Kingdom.
Whilst the authorities of Jersey are customarily allowed to govern the island’s internal, domestic affairs, it is well-established that the United Kingdom does, indeed, carry responsibility for any international or foreign policy matter which bears upon the island.
The United Kingdom is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights. The island of Jersey is also a signatory to the ECHR. But in the case of Jersey, we are signatories to the Convention through the United Kingdom. This is also the case in respect of many other international treaties and conventions.
Therefore any breach of the Rights enshrined in the ECHR by the Jersey authorities, has the effect of placing the United Kingdom in breach of its Convention obligations.
To illustrate this point further we need only reflect upon the fact that any human rights case pursued by a resident of Jersey to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg is always designated [the plaintiff] ‘Vs the United Kingdom’
The fact that the United Kingdom carries responsibility for adherence to the Convention in the Crown Dependencies has long been recognised by London.
Let me give two, brief examples of intervention by London to ensure compliance with the ECHR by the Channel Islands.
Homosexuality remained illegal in Jersey up until the late 1980s. The island authorities of the day strongly resisted the arguments for change. The States of Jersey exhibited much prejudice, and resisted persuasion from London. There was an absolute determination by the States of Jersey to resist the necessary legislative changes.
But the criminalisation of homosexual acts was not compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Therefore the refusal of the Jersey government to meet its ECHR obligations had the effect of placing the United Kingdom in breach of its convention obligations. This fact was well-recognised by the authorities in London who made increasingly serious attempts to make the Jersey authorities undertake the necessary legislative changes. Yet still the traditional establishment of the island resisted.
Ultimately, therefore, Jersey was told by London “Either you change your laws as required – or we will do it for you – and impose the necessary legislation.”
The island’s authorities – reluctantly seeing the inevitability of legislative intervention – conceded in the final analysis and changed the law. But only did so after immense pressure – and finally the ultimatum “you change your law – or we will do it for you.”
In this case we see on the part of the authorities in London, a clear recognition of the fact that the UK is placed in breach of the ECHR if breaches of that Convention are permitted in the Channel Islands. Moreover – with such a consequence for the UK, it was also recognised that, ultimately direct intervention by London both could take place, and may even be necessary.
A further, more recent, example of intervention by the authorities of the United Kingdom in Channel Island domestic affairs is to be found in the case of Sark.
The island of Sark was – until very recent changes, which were required by the United Kingdom – Europe’s last functioning feudal society. Democracy did not exist as the Sark ‘parliament’ – the Chief Pleas – consisted of wealthy landowners who were not elected – but instead had an automatic seat in the assembly by dint of their property ownership.
The feudalism of Sark – whilst appearing quaint to some – was clearly wholly incompatible with several key clauses of the ECHR. This was, again, recognised by the United Kingdom. Not wishing to become in breach of the Convention, London brought immense pressure to bear upon the authorities in Sark and Guernsey to introduce functioning democracy. The ultimate threat was the imposition of legislation from London. So, although the traditionalists strongly resisted change – they recognised the inevitability of UK intervention and, reluctantly, changed their legislation so that it met the requirements of the ECHR.
There is also the view – indeed it was the conclusion of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Constitution in 1973 (the Kilbrandon Report) – that if the United Kingdom has an international obligation, then it must have the concomitant legal power to take such action as is necessary to ensure that the United Kingdom does not breach that obligation.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this will mean that if there were an international obligation binding on the United Kingdom as a result of, in this case the European Convention on Human Rights, the United Kingdom can assert that it was in law entitled to take action to ensure that Jersey performed its obligations.
Considering the above points, it is, therefore, clearly established that the government of the United Kingdom has the constitutional power – in the name of the Crown – to intervene for the purposes of good governance and of the proper administration of justice.
It is also clearly established that in respect of foreign policy matters – such as adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights – the United Kingdom carries responsibility for what takes place in the Channel Islands – and therefore has a concomitant power to ensure adherence to such conventions.
In the present case it is difficult to imagine a more serious ECHR requirement than ensuring the good administration of justice – that Article 6 of the Convention is adhered to.
There can, therefore, be no credible argument against your powers to intervene in order to ensure the rule of law and the proper administration of justice in Jersey.
4: The Good Name of the Crown.
Whilst Jersey is proud to be a self-governing jurisdiction – the apparatus of the state and its powers in the island is not based upon purely ‘indigenous’ institutions.
The island is proud of its status as a Crown Dependency, always expresses loyalty to the Crown – and, in particular, its judiciary enjoys the authority and credibility of association with the good name of the British Crown.
Indeed, it should be clearly noted at this point that the senior judicial and prosecutory officers of Jersey’s Royal Court are, in fact, appointed from London.
They are not accountable to any entity or public authority in Jersey.
It is, therefore, even more clearly demonstrated that the United Kingdom cannot wash its hands of responsibility for the standards and performance of its appointed agents in Jersey, such as the senior judiciary and Crown Prosecution officers.
It must be understood clearly – and there can be no escaping this fact – that if the Crown-appointed, Royal Court authorities in Jersey display any misfeasance or malfeasance then the good name of the Crown becomes blackened.
If the British state is content to allow the good name of the Crown to be used by Jersey, and if the Jersey authorities are likewise pleased to enjoy that credibility of association – then both sets of authorities must defend the reputation of the Crown from any possible hint of taint.
5: Separation of Powers.
In modern democracies it has long been recognised and established that there should be a separation of powers. Although in the United Kingdom some small, but largely symbolic, overlap in powers remains, in practice the Crown Prosecution Service, judges and the Courts are free from any political association, let alone political interference.
Thus the administration of justice in the United Kingdom is recognised to be amongst the finest in the world.
But in Jersey, an archaic and profoundly unhealthy overlap exists between the legislature and the judiciary. Moreover, this overlap also politically contaminates the island’s Crown Prosecution Service.
To briefly explain the conflicts of interest as manifested in Jersey’s arrangements.
The head of the island’s judiciary, its chief judge, is known as ‘the Bailiff’. But in addition to being the Crown appointed leader of Jersey’s judicial apparatus – he is also President – the equivalent of Speaker – of the island’s parliament, ‘the States’.
The present incumbent is Philip Bailhache. The present Jersey Attorney General is his brother, William Bailhache.
The deputy head of the island’s judiciary – and also deputy Speaker of its parliament is the ‘Deputy Bailiff’; the present incumbent being Michael Birt, a former Attorney General.
The present Attorney General is William Bailhache, the Bailiff’s brother. In Jersey the Attorney General is the de facto Director of Public Prosecutions and its Crown Prosecution Service.
His deputy is the Solicitor General, who is vested with similar powers.
Therefore we have the Bailiff and Deputy Bailiff – who are active and busy judges in Jersey’s Royal Court – also acting as Speakers in the island’s parliament.
And in this latter role, they frequently exercise extremely archaic supposed ‘powers’ to determine what bills may be tabled, or what questions may be asked, by elected members of the States assembly.
6: The Jersey Judiciary.
However, the major concern with the deeply conflicted position of Bailiff and Deputy Bailiff is in the exercising of their judicial functions.
Routinely chairing meetings of the Jersey parliament, both of these individuals are regularly exposed to all of the ideological arguments, purposes, disputes, motivations and political influences on display during the debating of legislation – laws they are subsequently expected to adjudicate upon.
These contaminating influences therefore clearly render both individuals incapable of meeting the necessary test of ‘the appearance of objectivity’ when hearing cases in the Royal Court.
However the conflictedness of these two individuals is even more serious. Both the Bailiff and Deputy Bailiff are deeply politicised individuals – indeed, often making little attempt to hide that fact.
By way of recent – and highly pertinent example – the Bailiff gave a political interview to the island’s only newspaper, the Jersey Evening Post. This was published on Saturday 15th March 2008.
In this interview he strove to repeatedly defend the island’s political establishment. This included making a number of quite clearly false assertions – such as ‘the island’s authorities are doing all in their collective power to ensure the truth emerges and that wrongdoers are punished.’ Numerous examples show this to not be the case.
He went on to make the political assertion that all was well and safe in child protection in Jersey today. This claim is also demonstrably untrue and simply the regurgitation of the ‘spin’ of the Jersey political establishment.
Most interestingly, he asserted that the Courts in Jersey were capable of dealing with any matter – civil or criminal – arising out of the child abuse disaster.
It apparently not occurring to Mr. Bailhache that by giving this political interview – in which he strove to defend the Jersey political establishment – he was simply demonstrating, through his own actions, the dangerous politicisation of his position as chief judge.
Moreover – he was demonstrating clear prejudice in respect of a number of matters which will, inevitably, come before the Jersey Royal Court.
The concern shared by very many of the victims, whistle-blowers and witnesses I represent is that the Jersey judicial apparatus is politicised, conflicted and incapable of constituting an impartial tribunal.
Judicial proceedings must be – and must be seen to be – completely objective.
Any individual who, or entity that, has a clear interest in a case – or who has expressed prejudice prior to proceedings – cannot remotely be regarded as meeting the test of ‘the appearance of objectivity’.
Having overtly sided with – and defended – the Jersey establishment, essentially the same oligarchy responsible for the decades of concealed child abuse, he has demonstrated that he holds a highly prejudiced personal and political bias in these matters.
Though it should not need pointing out, this fact clearly eludes the Jersey prosecutory and judicial apparatus: namely that the Courts should be entirely indifferent to the considerations or the reputations of the government.
The Political victory of this or that faction should play precisely zero part in any consideration concerning the rule of law and the good administration of justice.
The law is the law. And the Courts should be coming to an objective judgment on the law – and the facts of each case.
If such adjudication proves profoundly embarrassing or problematic for a government – that is simply ‘tough’.
Yet in Jersey we have a Court system so incestuously entwined with day-to-day political considerations that it is simply not competent to properly administer justice when to do so would be damaging for the Jersey political establishment.
We need look no further than the highly political and prejudiced interview given by Jersey’s chief judge, Philip Bailhache, to the Jersey Evening Post.
The hopeless position of the Jersey judiciary in respect of the present child abuse disaster is thrown into even starker relief by the UK Crown Prosecution Service guidance “Judicial independence, open justice and advance sentence indication”, a short excerpt of which I quote here: –
“Principle.
Judicial independence is fundamental to the Rule of Law.
The integrity of the Criminal Justice System depends upon a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal.
Justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done.
These principles must be followed by all CPS staff in the conduct of casework.”
In Jersey, the island’s judiciary has frequently committed itself to overt and explicit political positions, the effect of which is to have – by its own hand – rendered itself incapable of meeting the reasoned Principle quoted above. The Jersey judiciary cannot meet the fundamental independence test required by the Rule of Law.
A politisised judiciary cannot deliver a “fair and public hearing by an impartial tribunal” – when the tribunal in question has demonstrated itself to not be independent of partisan political considerations.
It is plain – even to a lay-person – that “justice must not only be done – but must be seen to be done.”
The Jersey judiciary cannot remotely hope to meet such a requirement under the present circumstances. So hedged about with conflicts and contradictions are the Jersey judicial and prosecutory functions, that every faction – every party – be they victims of abuse – or those accused of abuse – already holds the indigenous Jersey apparatus in contempt.
This is a matter of such fundamental importance I will return to it later.
But the inescapable fact is that no ‘reasonable person on the Clapham omnibus’ could even begin to see the Jersey Courts as ‘disinterested’ parties – with no stake in the outcomes of criminal or civil actions arising from the child abuse disaster.
7: The Jersey Prosecution Service.
Precisely the same observations apply to the prosecutory service of the island.
Turning to the position of Attorney General and the Solicitor General. Both of these Crown-appointed Law Officers are classified as members of the States assembly – in which they are able to give speeches in the course of debates. So whilst they do not, however, possess a right to vote in debates – nevertheless, they frequently exercise tremendous influence in the course of debates; this by giving “legal” opinions – or frequently by simply making overtly partisan and political remarks.
In theory they are members of the States assembly so that they may give “legal advice” to members during debates.
But in addition to “advising” the island’s parliament in this way – they are also the legal advisors to the individual Ministries and departments of the States of Jersey.
Essentially, they provide day-to-day legal advice to all parts of the executive – as would jobbing lawyers to their private clients.
This is not to argue that the Jersey government should not be able to take legal advice – but we cannot but recognise the fact these London appointed, Crown Law Officers should not be involved in providing partisan legal advice to a political executive function.
Were this insurmountable conflict not sufficient argument, we must turn to another – even starker – example of the hopeless and indefensible position of the present arrangements in Jersey.
The island does not have an independent Director of Public Prosecutions. It does not have an independent Crown Prosecution Service.
Instead – quite extraordinarily – these functions are fulfilled by the Jersey Attorney General and Solicitor General.
No prosecution in the island’s Royal Court can take place without it first gaining approval from either one of these two individuals.
Consider just how absurd and unsustainable this arrangement is?
As explained above, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General are both, routinely involved – on a day-to-day basis – in giving general legal advice to departments of the States of Jersey – as though they were private lawyers advising private clients.
But these are the very same two individuals who must then determine whether prosecutions take place.
We have, therefore, the truly remarkable situation whereby these Law Officers may have been giving jobbing legal advice to a States of Jersey Ministry one week – only for a file to land on their desk the next week recommending that the department be prosecuted.
Such a profound conflict of interests would be disturbing under normal circumstances. But today – we are considering the deserved prosecution of a number of States of Jersey departments and States of Jersey employees in connection with the child abuse disaster.
And it will – ultimately – unless you use your constitutional powers to ensure the impartial Rule of Law in Jersey – be either the Jersey Attorney General or Solicitor General who will have to decide upon such prosecutions.
The same people who have been providing – often seriously defective – legal advice to departments in respect of child protection and welfare matters for many years.
It is true that the giving of advice to departments is usually split between the Attorney General and Solicitor General – thus had one been giving legal advice to a particular department which subsequently faced criminal action – the determination of the prosecution would be considered by the other.
But for a variety of reasons, this arrangement does not approach satisfying an ‘appearance of objectivity’ test.
Both Law Officers work from the same building, and often take advice themselves from the same Crown Advocates working in their department. Both individuals are close colleagues – and generally share an interest in providing legal protection for States departments, de facto political support – and, of course, they share a common interest in protecting each other’s professional reputations.
How realistic, it must be asked, is the prospect of one of these Law Officers prosecuting a States department whose policies and actions transpired to be ultra vires but had been legally advised that such polices were lawful by the other Law Officer?
To this toxic mix of conflicts of interest we must also recognise that both of these post-holders are deeply politicised and have frequently engaged in public support for the political establishment of Jersey.
Would – we must ask – the proverbial “reasonable person on the Clapham omnibus” be expected to view these arrangements as reliably objective?
The answer to that question is plainly ‘no’.
If we take as a model, the Code for Crown Prosecutors, as issued by the Crown Prosecution Service of the UK, we see, at section 2, General Principles:
“2.2 Crown Prosecutors must be fair, independent and objective. They must not let any personal views about ethnic or national origin, disability, sex, religious beliefs, political views or the sexual orientation of the suspect, victim or witness influence their decisions. They must not be affected by improper or undue pressure from any source.”
The entire child protection disaster in Jersey – in addition to being catastrophic for the victims – also threatens – and justifiably so – the integrity and standing of Jersey’s historic amalgam of legislature and judiciary. The present episode represents a crisis for the Jersey establishment of greater threat than the Nazi occupation of the island – which the traditional local elites seemed to survive remarkably easily.
Even without the extremely serious conflicts of interest I will explain later, no reasonable person could imagine the present prosecutory service in Jersey to be impartial and indifferent to the political consequences of this or that prosecution and conviction.
The prosecution service as presently configured in Jersey cannot even remotely approach the necessary ‘appearance of objectivity’.
Even under normal circumstances, the present – deeply politicised and conflicted – nature of both the prosecutory and judicial apparatus in Jersey clearly could not continue.
It would be an historic anachronism – one incompatible with the good, objective administration of justice and the rule of law – even during uncontroversial times.
With the island confronting the child abuse disaster – the worst peace-time crisis in Jersey’s 800 year history as a quasi-independent jurisdiction – it is not even faintly credible to imagine the present arrangements can suffice or continue.
In many respects, that the traditional authorities in Jersey cannot – or will not – see that fact simply serves as final proof of their inadequacy and inability to furnish the people of Jersey with the effective Rule of Law and the good administration of justice according to accepted standards of jurisprudence.
8: The Necessary Appearance of Objectivity.
Although the above factual descriptions of the conflictedness of the Jersey prosecutory and judicial authorities are sufficient of themselves, we must further illustrate the case with an examination of the established principles of natural justice.
It is well-established in all respectable jurisprudence that the administration of justice must be both impartial – and appear to be impartial.
Any person appearing before a Court should be able to have faith in the fact that the judge is independent of Government and equally that the judge is independent of the parties.
Historically a person has a right to a audi alterem partem, or a fair trial, meaning a trial which is independent, impartial and timely. This has long been a common law entitlement.
The fact that justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done has been given specific judicial approval in the English case of R v. Sussex Justices, ex p McCarthy [1924] 1 KB 256.
In this case, a solicitor, whose firm acted for a defendant in a civil action for damages, had also sat as a clerk to the Justices in respect of the criminal aspect of the case. Whilst it was not suggested that the solicitor/clerk had been biased – the mere appearance of conflict was unacceptable.
Lord Hewart CJ said:
“A long line of cases shows that it is ……of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done ……. Nothing is to be done which creates even a suspicion that there has been an improper inference with the course of justice.”
Should there still be any doubt about the absolutely essential nature of the appearance of objectivity – simply consider the case of Lord Hoffman. He was one of the Law Lords who sat to determine whether the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was able to be charged and prosecuted.
Lord Hoffman – it was revealed later – was a supporter of Amnesty International. This mere appearance of bias was sufficient to cause the decision to be set aside.
These fundamental principles are further described and enforced in the European Convention of Human Rights.
“Article 6 – Right to a fair trial
In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law….”
The inescapable facts are these:
(a) Given what might be perceived to be the political pressure upon the island’s authorities to secure convictions – many of the accused will – without doubt – argue that they cannot receive a fair hearing at the hands of the judiciary of Jersey – it being so entwined with the political considerations of the day.
(b) Victims could also – justifiably – be of the view that prosecutions of those who harmed them will be confined to only the most extreme cases – this in order to minimise ‘reputational’ damage to the Jersey establishment.
(c) Plaintiffs in civil actions for compensation may, with good grounds, view the Jersey judicial processes biased against finding for them – or awarding them sufficient damages against the States of Jersey.
And let there be no misunderstanding about the seriousness of, or degree of, conflictedness of the Jersey prosecutory and judicial authorities.
For it is already a matter of public record, that Jersey’s Attorney General has advised the Chief Minister of Jersey to not apologise to any of the abuse survivors as this may increase the quantum of damages they may be awarded.
And let us remember – this is the same Attorney General who will be determining whether prosecutions should take place.
A man already committed to a partisan political position.
9: Democracy and the Good Administration of Justice.
It will, no doubt, be argued by the Jersey authorities – and if things run true-to-form, by certain advisers in Whitehall – that if these problems with the administration of justice exist in Jersey – if its present judicial and legislative arrangements need changing – or if there were public demand here for such change – then the island’s government, its parliament, can make those changes itself – if it so wishes.
That, it is claimed, would be the normal course of democratic self-determination.
There is, of course, an obvious and fatal flaw in such an argument. For it assumes that democracy – and the good administration of justice – are the one-and-the-same thing.
They are not.
The ‘democratic’ will of the mass – of potentially the mob – can very easily be opposed to objectivity, the rule of law, the human rights of minorities and the good administration of justice.
It may be that 100 people would wish to lynch 1 person – the ‘democratic’ will in action. But that ‘majority’ decision would be unlawful, unjust and barbaric.
Thus the political establishment of Jersey may decide to maintain “tradition”, and not embrace the impartiality of the good administration of justice. And may even have public support for such a position. But that ‘democratic will’ may result in oppression and trampling of the rights of individuals to justice. A denial of such things as a ‘fair hearing before an impartial tribunal’.
It is abundantly clear that there is not the remotest possibility of the Jersey political and judicial establishment agreeing, of its own initiative and free-will, to introduce such changes as an effective separation of powers.
We must, therefore, conclude that the United Kingdom authorities cannot rely upon an argument to the effect that “if change is needed, the island’s government can enact such change.”
Both the good name of the Crown, and the United Kingdom’s obligations under the ECHR, require that London take whatever measures are necessary to ensure the good, objective and impartial administration of justice – the effective Rule of Law – quite regardless of the political whim of the Jersey establishment.
10: The United Kingdom and jus cogens and erga omnes.
The case, the right, the power of the UK authorities to intervene is already categorically established, for the reasons described above. But even if the historic and constitutional case for Crown power in Jersey – especially in respect of the protection of its subjects and that of the good name of the Crown itself – was not so clearly established, we could consider the legal principles of erga omnes, which is argued by some to confer an obligation upon a state to the broader community of states. I think it fair to argue that the systemic rape, battery and torture of vulnerable children – possibly even their murder – must give justification to invoking erga omnes.
A similar argument applies to the legal principle of jus cogens – or the ‘compelling law’ that nation-states may be expected to honour. Whilst there may be arguments as to the applicability of jus cogens to particular circumstances – if jus cogens bears any credibility at all – it must surely do so in the case of a need to act to punish and prevent the abuse, battery and possible murder of vulnerable children.
11: Suspects who are members of Jersey’s judiciary and Prosecution Service.
We must always bear in mind the profound seriousness and truly horrifying nature of what has taken place.
Vulnerable children – already in need for a variety of reasons – used, abused, tortured – and even possibly murdered; children who were helpless – and yet were subjected to the most foul and despicable crimes.
It is clear that the scale and persistence of the abuse which has taken place in Jersey is such that it cannot be viewed as an aberration; some isolated crimes carried out occasionally by small, secretive groups of abusers.
That the abuse and suffering of these children was able to carry on for decade after decade after decade must force us to conclude that some, fundamental, structural failing within the island’s ‘checks and balances’ enabled the concealment to take place over generations.
Whilst public attention has been focused upon the police investigation of actual abuses, it should not be forgotten that the police are also enquiring into the concealment of abuse; the failure to report abuses – and the failure to punish those guilty of abuse.
I have been able to contribute to the police enquiry by furnishing them with evidence – and making formal statements to them in respect of what are a number of criminal offences; for example:
(A) Perverting the Course of Justice.
(B) Attempting to Pervert the Course of Justice.
(C) Misconduct in Public Office.
Whilst apprehending and punishing the abusers is, clearly, the priority – we must not lose sight of the question: “how were all of these terrible things able to persist for such a long period of time – and 95% of the offences go unreported and unpunished?”
For, in many respects, this question is the most fundamental. If we are to recognise and honestly accept the ‘cultural’ failings of the island’s public administration which led to the atrocities taking place and going unpunished – there can be no immunity from scrutiny; no deferential failure to challenge those in possession of great power – if those people have questions they must answer.
And many of them do.
The following senior figures – Crown appointed judges and prosecutors – each have well-evidenced, more than prima facie cases to answer in respect of one – or more – of the offences I describe above.
(A) Sir Philip Bailhache, the Bailiff; presently head of the island’s judiciary and the President of its legislative assembly, ‘the States’. Formerly the Attorney General, and thus then head of the island’s Crown Prosecution Service and Director of Public Prosecutions.
(B) Michael Birt, presently Deputy Bailiff, presently deputy head of the island’s judiciary and deputy President of its legislative assembly. Also a former Attorney General, thus then head of the island’s Crown Prosecution Service and Director of Public Prosecutions.
(C) William Bailhache, presently Attorney General and head of the island’s Crown Prosecution Service and Director of Public Prosecutions. Also the brother of the present Bailiff.
(D) Francis Hamon, presently a judge of Jersey’s Royal Court, and former Deputy Bailiff. A Governor at Victoria College during an extensive abuse episode.
(E) John Le Breton, ‘Jurat’ – a lay-judge – of Jersey’s Royal Court – formerly Vice-Principle of Victoria College during an extensive abuse episode.
As explained above – a fundamental concern that any civilised person must have is the question of the cover-ups and the concealments of abuse.
For it is that issue which makes the Jersey child abuse disaster so uniquely persistent and appalling in modern western democracies.
I will describe briefly the culpability of the five, above-named senior figures from the Jersey judicial and prosecutory apparatus.
I will then go onto describe and affirm the fact that these matters are being investigated by the Police Force.
The Bailiff, Sir Philip Bailhache, head of Jersey’s judiciary. Potential Criminal Offences.
Philip Bailhache cannot be seen to be objective. He is conflicted. The reasons for this are several. He is one of the individuals who need to face questions over his past failure to protect children from paedophiles. For example, when he was Attorney General, he failed to take the appropriate action to prevent the paedophile Roger Holland from joining the St. Helier honorary police. Holland then went on to abuse children whilst a parish police officer.
This gross failure must amount to a conflict of interest so severe as to make his position untenable. And that is to take a charitable view.
Philip Bailhache should face a charge of Misconduct in Public Office for this dereliction of duty alone.
The Bailiff, Philip Bailhache, was also the Chairman of the Board of Governors of Victoria College during the early phases of the child abuse which eventually lead to the conviction of Jervis-Dykes. The paedophilic activities of this man were brought to the attention of the School leadership again and again – yet he was allowed to remain in post and committing abuse for years before – eventually – being arrested and charged. Again, this is a matter that should be re-investigated. No person is above the Law. The Bailiff should be charged with both Perverting the Course of Justice, and with breaching his legal requirements to protect children from harm, as described in the Children (Jersey) Law 1969.
Philip Bailhache also unlawfully prevented my parliamentary response to the dismissal motion against me from being published. He also failed to declare a conflict of interest in this matter, as some of the evidence he was suppressing related to the child abuse offences committed at Victoria College when he was Chairman of the Board of Governors.
In similar vein, he unlawfully and undemocratically stopped me from delivering a speech of empathy for abuse survivors.
The Deputy Bailiff, Michael Birt, Deputy Head of Jersey’s Judiciary: Potential Criminal Offences.
The previous Attorney General – now Deputy Bailiff, Michael Birt – exhibited all of the politicised and conflicted behavior I described earlier. As is plain from the now widely distributed Sharp Report, the now Jurat Le Breton, who, at the time was Vice-Principle of Victoria College, should have been prosecuted at the time of the child abuse scandal at Victoria College. Just as should the Principle, Jack Hydes. Just as should Francis Hamon, a Governor of the school at the time and a person who went on to become Deputy Bailiff. A person who still remains a senior Judge in Jersey’s Royal Court.
Another individual who, without question, should have faced prosecution is Piers Baker, the man described in the Sharp Report engaging in willful attempts to obstruct justice – and who – infamously – said to the Police at the time of the investigation that paedophilia was “teachers perks”.
Whilst an overwhelming case could be made for the prosecution of Le Breton, Hamon, Hydes and Baker for Perverting the Course of Justice, an even more relevant Law, the breaking of which renders each man answerable to a Court, was the then current Children (Jersey) Law 1969.
I quote Article 9 here:
“9 Cruelty to children under 16
(1) If any person who has attained the age of 16 years and has the custody, charge or care of any child under that age willfully assaults, ill-treats, neglects, abandons or exposes him or her, or causes or procures or permits him or her to be assaulted, ill-treated, neglected, abandoned or exposed, in a manner likely to cause him or her unnecessary suffering or injury to health (including injury to or loss of sight, or hearing, limb, or organ of the body, and mental derangement), he or she shall be liable to a fine or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years, or to both such fine and such imprisonment.”
Le Breton, Hamon, Hydes and Baker should have been prosecuted for breaking this part of the Law. Unambiguously so. At best, all four of these creatures ‘caused’ or ‘permitted’ the children to be ‘assaulted, ill-treated, neglected, abandoned or exposed in a manner likely to cause him or her unnecessary suffering or injury to health’.
No such prosecutions took place. It is plain that the then Attorney General – now Deputy Bailiff, Michael Birt – placed the “reputational” considerations of the Jersey Establishment above the proper protection of children – and above the Rule of Law.
But this was not the only example of political considerations overriding the Rule of Law. The then Attorney General, Michael Birt, also abandoned a prosecution for another set of very serious offences against children.
The case I refer to was the prosecution of Mrs. Jane Marie Maguire and Mr. Alan William Maguire. The Act of Court records that the prosecution was abandoned on the 20th November 1998.
“Her Majesty’s Attorney General declared that he abandoned the prosecution against Alan William Maguire and Jane Marie Maguire on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to support it.
“The Court therefore discharged the said Alan William Maguire and Jane Marie Maguire from the prosecution and, by virtue of Article 2(1) (c) of the Costs in Criminal Cases (Jersey) Law, 1961, ordered the payment out of public funds of the costs of the defence”.
And it is the battery, torture and abuse of children, as committed by these two, which is part of the subject matter of BBC Panorama, scheduled to be broadcast on Monday 31st March 2008.
The Maguires were routinely beating, abusing through grotesque punishments, neglecting and treating with great cruelty many of the children that passed through the group-home they used to run for the then Education Committee, which body had responsibility for child “protection” at the relevant time (1980s to mid-1990s).
When I was Minister for Health & Social Services, just one of the many issues I recently had drawn to my attention by whistle-blowers was the case of the Maguires. I requested access to the relevant files.
I read the two very substantial lever arch files and one smaller ring-binder file. The evidence contained in these files is absolutely compelling. Many witness statements, affidavits of victims, statements from other members of staff, an “internal” report from 1990 by the Children’s Service, which concluded that the actions complained of were happening – and, essentially, a catalogue of utter savagery against the children.
Notwithstanding this plain and evidenced conclusion reached in 1990 – 8 years before the police came to know of the crimes – the Children’s Service of the day failed to inform the police of the abuse – instead allowing Mrs. McGuire to “retire” from running the group-home – and instead to come and work in the Family Development Centre.
Purely through happenstance, the States of Jersey Police became aware of the abuse episode – 8 years later – in 1998.
The Maguires were investigated and charged.
Yet Michael Birt, the then Attorney General, asserted, as in the record of Court I quote above, that there was “insufficient evidence” to continue the prosecution.
But I have read the files of evidence. That evidence describes many children being routinely – over a period of years – beaten with fists, implements and other items which were used as weapons against them. They were frequently made to eat soap. They were held down and made to drink Dettol. One child had his head smashed violently against a bunk bed frame. One of the part-time support staff witnessed “Big Al” Maguire throw a child a distance of about 7 feet across a room to impact against the wall because the child was not tidying up to Maguire’s satisfaction. Psychological and emotional cruelty and abuse were routine. Female child residents were sexually abused by Mr. Maguire.
Most of these offences were evidenced, witnessed by former victims or junior staff members – and yet the then Attorney General, Michael Birt, claims to have had “insufficient evidence” to carry through a prosecution.
The decision of Birt to not proceed with the prosecution was a straightforward Perversion of the Course of Justice.
Clearly – to have prosecuted the Maguires would have been to expose to outrage and contempt a States of Jersey department for permitting the abuse to continue for a decade – the 1980s – and to have acted unlawfully in not informing the police the instant the abuse came to the department’s attention. Further, the department would have been viewed with even greater contempt and disgust by the public when it became known that Mrs. Maguire was kept in employment by the department for some years afterwards – working in the Family Development Centre! It would also have meant exposing to contempt and disgrace a Jersey Establishment icon, Iris Le Feuvre, then President of the relevant Committee, who happily went along with the cover-up in 1990 and, moreover, wrote a quite sickening letter of “thanks” to the Maguires upon their “retirement”.
It is plain that the failure to see through the prosecution in this case represents a complete breakdown in the Rule of Law. An abandonment of justice in order to protect the “reputation” – such as it is – of the Jersey Establishment. The victims of the Maguires were denied justice.
Birt also – though this is incidental – endorsed and supported an illegal departure from due process as described in the States of Jersey Law when the Jersey Council of Ministers – fast-tracked – a dismissal meeting against me – giving me less than five days notice of the meeting date – and only supplying the ‘case’ against me less than 24 hours before the meeting. I was, incidentally, being dismissed for publicly stating that I had no confidence in Jersey’s child protection systems – this, apparently, constituting the heinous offence of – “undermining staff morale”.
But if the above-described events were not appalling enough – the habits and approach of Michael Birt remain – to this day – despicable – and truly extraordinary.
The States of Jersey Police Force made public their covert investigation into historic child abuse in November last year. They said at the time they were examining an historic range of abuse episodes, but in particular, they were examining abuse at Haute de le Garren – and the Jersey Sea Cadets.
The Sea Cadets being of particular interest as certain members of staff had been convicted of child abuse in individual cases some years ago.
The Police applied for a warrant to enter, search and remove evidence from the building. The judge they had to apply to was Michael Birt.
He rejected their application for the warrant.
The word “astonishing” doesn’t get close to describing this ruling.
Here were the police – already heavily committed to an investigation into historic child abuse; an investigation they had been conducting covertly for about a year; and here was an institution that was one of their two principle targets – and an institution which “had form” so to speak when it comes to child abuse in Jersey.
And the Deputy Bailiff, Michael Birt – second-in-command of Jersey’s judiciary – refuses to give the police a warrant.
Birt should be charged and tried for these offences. Indeed – I have made formal statements to the States of Jersey Police in this regard – as I will explain below.
William Bailhache, present Attorney General and brother of Bailiff, Philip Bailhache.
As far as the Attorney General, William Bailhache is concerned, some time ago when I was President of the then Health & Social Services Committee, I sought from him (and I still have the correspondence) the full police report and its six appendices into the child abuse scandal at Victoria College.
My reason for needing this information was that I was examining what went wrong in that case, whether the then current law was defective, how it compared to our present Children Law – and whether what we were doing today – in the light of the Bichard Report – was adequate.
It proved immensely difficult for me to obtain anything from the Attorney General. After much persuasion he eventually sent me a version of the police report – with no appendices – but the version was so redacted as to be utterly useless. Indeed, it contained far less information than that contained in the Sharp Report – which he knew I possessed already. I was not, therefore, properly able to consider this key material with a view to ascertaining what went wrong and why only one prosecution was mounted. The Attorney General’s actions in behaving in this way actively obstructed me in my lawful work under the Children (Jersey) Law 1969 and the Children (Jersey) Law 2002 in that I was not able to carry forward my investigation into improvements in child protection legislation and policies. This obstruction of the lawful duties – and clear obligations – of my then Committee for Health & Social Services, as defined in the Children (Jersey) Laws, was criminal.
But again – things get worse.
Even in the course of the last year – when issues of child protection and child abuse have been of paramount public concern in Jersey – the Attorney General, William Bailhache – has received reports from the police describing charges for child abuse offences – and he – astonishingly – has refused to prosecute – on the supposed grounds that to do so “would not be in the public interest”.
This conduct also has the appearance of being criminal, in that it may be a Perversion of the Course of Justice.
A further, insurmountable conflict – is this. It is plain that many States departments have – for very many years – been breaking various laws in respect of the care, protection and welfare of children. Obviously and inescapably so.
Therefore one of the most pressing and obvious questions is this: why has neither the Attorney General nor the Solicitor General ever correctly advised the relevant departments that their practices were unlawful? Why have no departments been prosecuted? It is plain that much – perhaps even a great deal of – the culpability for the States of Jersey engaging in decades of policies which were unlawful lays with the Attorney General and the Solicitor General or their predecessors.
Therefore, for the Attorney General and the Solicitor General to undertake any widespread prosecution of States departments would be to – effectively – put themselves on trial as well. Possibly as defendants – certainly reputationally.
This is not an even faintly credible or sustainable situation.
Francis Hamon, Commissioner in Jersey’s Royal Court and former Deputy Bailiff.
Francis Hamon was, infamously, a senior figure in the Victoria College Board of Governors during the sustained abuse episode which took pace throughout much of the 1990s.
As is described in the Sharp Report, the Principle, Jack Hydes, informed Hamon ‘during a squash game’ that he was receiving complaints of abuse. He asked Hamon what he should do about it.
Hamon advised him to do nothing, and it would all be forgotten about.
This was a further, unambiguous criminal offence – both a Perversion of the Course of Justice, and a breach of the Children (Jersey) Law 1969.
Hamon, like Hydes, Le Breton and Baker should have been prosecuted.
Instead, their friend Michael Birt failed to do so.
John Le Breton, ‘Jurat’ of Jersey’s Royal Court.
Again, as is well described and evidenced in the Sharp Report, Le Breton was Vice-Principle of Victoria College during the abuse episode. He – like other senior figures – was aware of the complaints of abuse.
Not only did he fail to take the necessary action to protect the children – after allowing things to continue for some years until the complaints became too serious to ignore – he, along with Hydes, pro-actively attempted to humiliate and intimidate two of the victims into withdrawing their complaints.
Again – Le Breton should, Like Hamon, have been prosecuted for Perverting the Course of Justice and breaching the Children (Jersey) Law 1969.
Le Breton’s position also has the effect of rendering all of the remaining 11 Jurats conflicted. None could be considered sufficiently remote and impartial in these matters. All are friends and colleagues of the Bailiff and Deputy Bailiff; friends and colleagues of the Attorney General and Solicitor General. But in particular, all are friends and colleagues of Jurat John Le Breton.
It is well established in respectable jurisprudence that people cannot be a part of a jury if they personally know any of the key actors in a case.
All of the Jurats fail this test.
Moreover, each and every one of the Jurats is drawn from the traditional ranks of the island’s Establishment. As detailed above – an Establishment that puts its own interests – the protection of its “image” and of its customary powers – over and above the pure consideration of the Rule of Law, should the Jersey oligarchy be threatened in any way.
12: Status of investigation into the above-described suspects.
In respect of the above-described potential criminal offences, I have made formal complaints to the Police Force.
I have furnished the Police with documented evidence which supports the case of criminal conduct.
Given the profound seriousness of the matters, the Police Officer leading the investigation in Jersey, Lenny Harper, commissioned two officers from a United Kingdom force to come to Jersey and take statements from me, this in order to avoid any “political” difficulties for his investigation – as certain elements in Jersey have already tried to damage and obstruct the work of the Police.
I gave two statements on successive days – one of two hours and the other of four hours duration.
I have signed both statements and confirmed to the Police that I am entirely ready to give evidence and be cross-examined under oath when matters come to Court.
Since giving the statements, Lenny Harper has confirmed to me in writing the following:
(A) I have given the statements.
(B) They were extensive.
(C) They are signed.
(D) He is in possession of those signed statements.
(E) That the complaints made are going to be rigorously investigated.
As described above, the Jersey judicial and prosecutory services would be hopelessly conflicted in any event.
But to add to that fact we must now note that the key individuals within that apparatus are – in fact – suspects – in respect of Perverting the Course of Justice and Misconduct in Public Office.
It is, of course, feasible they will be acquitted – but until such time they cannot act in any role within the administration of justice.
13: Actions sought from you.
The people I am representing – including many dozens of victims and whistle-blowers – are asking you to use your constitutional powers to secure for them – and this community – certain fundamental protections.
We appreciate the historic, constitutional position of Jersey. We certainly wish it to continue to be a self-governing jurisdiction.
But given that we are a Crown Dependency – and that the good name of the Crown is the foundation upon which the administration of justice in Jersey is built – all we ask is that those administering justice in our island, as long as they use the name of the Crown – are required to perform to a standard worthy of such association.
What we seek is, by no stretch of the imagination, ‘revolutionary’ or ‘radical’.
We seek good governance.
We seek the effective Rule of Law.
We seek the good administration of justice.
We seek an independent prosecution service – one free of conflicts and political taint.
We seek an independent judiciary – one free of conflicts and political taint.
We wish it to be recognised that in a small, self-governing jurisdiction the ‘checks and balances’ provided by the judiciary are even more important than they would be in a large nation state.
Specifically –
We ask that, as a matter of urgency, you require the Jersey prosecutory and judicial authorities to accept the fact of their insurmountable conflictedness in respect of any matter – civil or criminal – arising out of the Jersey child abuse disaster.
We ask that you – or a senior figure from the British judiciary who has no prior connection with Jersey – appoint independent prosecutors from the UK to consider and lead any prosecutions arising from this episode.
We ask that you – or a senior figure from the British judiciary – appoint judges from the UK, with no prior connection with Jersey, to hear any case – civil or criminal – which may arise from this episode.
We ask that you give serious consideration to furnishing the Jersey Courts with juries drawn from the United Kingdom to hear any trial that may require a jury.
We ask that, by taking these actions, you ensure that any prosecutions or civil actions are compatible with the United Kingdom’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights in that they constitute a ‘fair hearing before an impartial tribunal’.
These actions are essential and urgent, given the imminent nature of some of the cases. There is not, therefore, time for a protracted round of argument and negotiation with the Jersey authorities.
To ensure justice in the Jersey child protection disaster – prompt and forthright action on your part is needed.
We ask that, in the fullness of time, you require the Jersey authorities to establish a permanent separation of powers, so that this island may always rely upon an impartial and non-politicised prosecutory and judicial system.
14: Summary and Conclusions.
I apologise for the length of this report; but by way of mitigation I hope you would recognise the huge degree of suffering which has taken place in Jersey over a period of decades.
In the course of the last year, I have gradually built-up contacts with many victims, got to know them, and have heard of the awful things that have blighted their lives.
All they are seeking – and all I am seeking on their behalf – is true justice and the effective Rule of Law.
We hope to hear from you soon, and thank you for taking time to read this document.
Yours sincerely,
Senator Stuart Syvret
Former Minister for Health & Social Services States of Jersey.
THE CONFLICTED PARTICIPATION OF THE WILTSHIRE POLICE FORCE IN THE ILLEGAL SABOTAGE OF THE JERSEY CHILD-ABUSE INVESTIGATIONS.
[FIRST PUBLISHED ON 04:08:15 – UP-DATED – WITH REFERENCE TO BRITISH JUDICIAL CORRUPTION – 02:10:17]
Things can hide in plain sight.
Some things are able to do so because of disguise;
Some are able to do so because of camouflaged invisibility;
Some are able to do so because we’re distracted to look in a different direction.
Right now, the boiling question of the moment is “did former British Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath abuse children?” And what a question.
A profoundly important question, to be sure.
But is it the right question?
Is it the question which is most relevant in enabling us to gauge whether there has been a breakdown in the very rule-of-law in British society? A corporate failure by all arms of the state to properly carry out the most basic duties – such as protecting children from torture and rape, and deterring those who would commit such crimes?
The British state – the British establishment is – as history shows – one of the most resilient – perhaps the most ruthlessly survivalist – “establishment” in human history. Certainly, even in the immediate wake of 1066 – when the then English establishment had to bow to William the Conqueror when their front-man Harold lost – the “deal” was essentially a “regrettable” retrenchment of current investment-holdings; a realpolitik business deal – a kind of investor “hair-cut” faced up to by the English barons and their vassalage.
Ever since then – not least in the PR stunt – the secret deal amongst elites historically disguised as a “victory for ordinary people” – that was Magna Carta – the elite factions of the British Isles have known what side their bread was buttered. In spite of their occasional factional differences, the British elite have always known they must – ultimately – hang-together – or hang alone.
And it is that “culture” we still see so starkly at work in the continuing – and futile and bizarre – efforts to down-play the British establishment’s child-abuse atrocity.
An “establishment” largely formed by successive generations of people imbued with a sociopathicly brutal sense of entitlement does not found its longevity without utilising every conceivable and disgusting trick in the book. Knowledge is power – it’s-not-who-you-know – its-what-you-know-about-who-you-know – or, to use the more modern phrase, “having the dirt”.
So it isn’t at all difficult – is it – to understand the “utility” of vulnerable children to power – the immense “value” of that Currency-of-Concealment – it isn’t difficult to understand the political-economy of child-abuse?
Let’s not be foolish; the genuinely powerful, the cunning, the ruthless – never aspire to fame – never have done, not if their ambitions of wealth, power, tribal longevity could be secured by alternate means; safer means. Throughout history, the truly powerful have never wished to be “front-men” – kings, generals, presidents – the existence of who was always perilous, high-risk, and prone to being struck, like a lightning-conductor – but, rather to be those who have held the front-man’s leash. And to control your “front-man”, you need – you have always needed – “influence” – “leverage” – of one sort – or another. That is how power works.
Which is why, still today, even in the democratic era – perhaps especially in the democratic era – so many of our leaders, our politicians, are axiomatically unethical, unintelligent, low-calibre and inadequate? Leverage – dirt – income – every kind of “filter” – is so much more easily utilised – not least by corrupted and conflicted media-barons – in the modern age.
So when we look at those we’re supposed to regard as the most powerful in our society – prime ministers, perhaps – or senior judges – we should always ask ‘just what are the chances – the very remote, to be frank, chances – this person came to “power” – without being “owned” by – without being “indebted” to – some force, some power, or another?’
In reality, those chances are vanishingly remote. It would be today – as it has been throughout most of the history of organised society – frankly amazing if people come to power by “accident”.
So we, as a modern, educated, informed people, might wish to develop a clear understanding; knowing what we know – absorbing the lessons of history – we might want to ask ourselves, “ok, so traditionally power has been corrupted, been owned, but in our modern era, we want to see the reality of that at work; we need to see actual ‘agency’. So where do we look?”
And taking as a starting-point the present storm over whether former British Prime Minister, the late Ted Heath was a child-abuser, we can start to ask the important – the right – questions.
The first – and most important – of which is not ‘whether Heath is guilty of child-abuse’ – but, rather, ‘did the state apparatus act correctly – objectively – lawfully – in response to even the possibility that he may have been so guilty?’ And if it didn’t act objectively – act lawfully – to so much as investigate him, what state agencies made those decisions – the decisions to act unlawfully?
It is when we ask that question – and all the similar questions arising from the British child-abuse atrocity – for example, the similar questions about Savile – that we begin to defeat that which hides in plain sight. Only then do we start to ask the right questions.
I’ve been fighting a war for effective child-protection since 2006. Then, in Jersey, I was the Minister for Health & Social Services, and learnt the hard way how systems fail. I went public with my conclusion that Jersey’s entire child “protection” apparatus had failed when I answered a question in the Jersey parliament in July 2007.
But within hours of me giving that accurate, honest answer, I became subject to an illegal plot by Crown officers and senior civil servants to engineer my dismissal as Minister.
As extraordinary as this scenario may seem, we know it took place, because of a contemporaneous file-note written by the good Police Chief Graham Power QPM, who the Jersey Establishment crooks were foolish enough to attempt to suborn into their conspiracy. A key part of the Police Chief’s file-note says this: –
“BO (Bill Ogley) and the others were persistent and I was left with the clear impression that they were attempting to draw me, in my capacity as Chief of Police, into a civil service led attempt to remove a Minister from Office.”
But Police Chief Graham Power was, himself, in November 2008, subject to an wholly illegal suspension – an unambiguous criminal enterprise – a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice – involving multiple examples of ‘misconduct in public office’.
After that illegal suspension of the Jersey Police Chief was initiated by the Jersey authorities – with the full backing and endorsement of the London authorities, such as the Justice Department, the Home Office, the Crown – a UK Police Force – Wiltshire – was called-in to run what was a manifestly fake, trumped-up, corrupt “disciplinary investigation” against the good Police Chief Graham Power. In spite of taking two years, and consuming about £2 million – the Wiltshire Police “investigation” failed – failed wholly and remarkably – to find so much as one single thing – not even the smallest trivial negative conclusion they could offer-up – which had any chance at all of sticking as some kind of “disciplinary / conduct” charge in any objective, formal “hearing” against Mr Power.
So the Jersey establishment – with the help of UK authorities, and agencies such as the Wiltshire Police Force – simply ran-down-the-clock – until Mr Power’s retirement date arrived, and all “disciplinary processes” thus automatically ended.
When Police Chief Graham Power was illegally suspended in November 2008 – we were in the era of “Pre-Savile” insofar as broad public knowledge of Savile’s crimes, and similar crimes of other established child-abusers were concerned.
But back in 2008, it still seemed to the British Establishment that if they could de-rail the Jersey child-abuse investigations, they could, somehow, keep the lid down on the whole nightmare decades of state-concealed child-abuse atrocities. They were wrong, of course – just as certain factions of the British state continue to be wrong in believing parts of the cover-ups could / can be maintained.
“In-the-frame” – in that 2008 Jersey Police investigation, were individuals such as Savile and Ted Heath. Let’s be clear – that’s not to say for sure, at that time, enough evidence was known to exist, so as to file charges and secure convictions. But those two suspects – and others like them – were “in-the-frame” at that time, in the sense that both were very regular and established visitors to Jersey – and against both, rumours and allegations of child-abuse had circulated on the island for years. The strong probability is that year 2008 investigation in Jersey would – sooner or later – maybe in 2009 or maybe 2010 – have closed-in on the living Savile – closed-in on the dead but pivotal Heath. And even if the Police hadn’t, I might well have done so, working – as I was most assuredly democratically doing – on behalf of my then constituents. But I too, like Graham Power, was illegally oppressed – arrested and prosecuted in 2009 for whistle-blowing and hounded out of the Jersey parliament by the island’s openly corrupt and politicised – UK-empowered – “judicial” system.
Jersey’s “judicial” and “prosecution” system is openly – openly – corrupt, politicised and directly conflicted; so much so – it hides in-plain-sight – just as Jimmy Savile did.
Those year 2008 investigations on Jersey – by police – by politicians – into child-abuse cases and cover-ups that might have led to Savile – and might have led to Heath – were unlawfully – were illegally – sabotaged.
And – as we now know – sabotaged by a set of public authorities that already knew of the allegations against Heath – and against Savile; knew of those allegations – yet wanted them covered-up. That is public authorities such as the Wiltshire Police Force – Whitehall – The Home Office – the security services – the Justice Department.
This is what the seriousness of the allegations of child-abuse against former British Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath come down to; not the question of whether he may have ultimately been innocent – but, rather, “whether the state and its agencies secretly knew of such allegations against him – and then participated in plainly illegal conspiracies to de-rail – and then discredit – investigations which were on a path which may have lead to claims of abuse against Heath being properly investigated?”
The Wiltshire Police – following the illegal suspension of Jersey Police Chief Graham Power – became employed by the Jersey establishment to carry-out what transpired to be a fake, oppressive “disciplinary” review of Mr Power’s conduct. Yet the Wiltshire Police Force failed – failed throughout – and still, to this day – failed to declare the plain conflict of interest contaminating the Wiltshire Force; those extant conflicts of interest – such as burying abuse complaints involving Heath – and intimidating complainers – and doing “charge deals” with de facto plea bargainers who might have become so uppity as to name abusers and want them brought to trial; perhaps “name Heath as a child-abuser in court.”
So, you’re wondering if the allegations of child-abuse against Ted Heath are true – are accurate? Actually, there’s a simpler – more basic and fundamental question you can ask first: –
“in the face of such allegations, does it appear that law-enforcement and other state agencies have acted unbiasedly – have acted lawfully – in investigating such claims?”
If the answer is plainly ‘no’ – and it is no – evidencedly – in respect of the Wiltshire Police Force and that organisation’s role in sabotaging the Jersey child-abuse investigations in which the likes of Savile and Heath were ‘in-the-frame’ – then we see an established fact – hiding in plain sight; a fact which does not require proof of Heath’s guilt in order to be damning.
What we see – in-plain-sight – are the highest and most powerful law-enforcement agencies of the British state being sufficiently terrified of even the possibility that Ted Heath might have been a child-abuser- engaging in illegal conspiracies to sabotage investigations which might have shown him to be so.
In so many ways, the cover-ups – especially at such high, state level – are now more serious – far more serious – for the British state – than would have been dealing properly with the abuse allegations at the time.
And – worse yet – because of events in the secrecy-plagued, quasi-realm Crown-Dependency tax-shelter of Jersey – from at least 2006 onwards – in which we saw unaccountable Crown and British government power being unlawfully utilised to cover-up child-abuse, rape, judicial-corruption, clinical serial-killing, and other serious crimes – the British polity faces its “Watergate” moment.
That moment – when the focus must – unavoidably – fall upon larger questions; not only questions of whether “did X or Y crime occur? – and were those crimes committed by A or B powerful person?” – But, rather “_were the authorities aware_ that X or Y crime might have occurred? – and that establishment individuals A and B were credible suspects? And if so – did the relevant authorities investigate those alleged crimes – or – did they try to cover-up those alleged crimes?”
Plainly – they strove – and still strive – to cover-up such alleged crimes.
To this day.
Even to the extent – now, at the time of me updating this article on 02.10.17 – the current situation is the Jersey the police wrote the most extraordinarily ultra vires and inaccurate of letters.
In 2017 – the police refuse to comply with human rights by at least doing something as basic as take down a formal statement of criminal complaint.
That is how bad things continue to be in Crown tax-haven Jersey.
I am a witness – and complainant – to the most serious of crimes. The “police-force” in Jersey – essentially little more than a gangster-enterprise since its illegal hi-jacking in November 2008 – refuses to even take a statement from me.
Not even a statement concerning what was – almost certainly – the murder of key, public, witness – and survivor – Dannie Jarman: –
I’m pretty certain of who they got to do it – his methodology – the reason why toxicology reports at the “inquest” didn’t find anything – why he did it – how they got him to do it – and why they had to kill her.
Astoundingly – just amazingly – neither Philip Bailhache – nor William Bailhache – Bosses of the Crown-empowered de facto Jersey Camorra – both brothers with a decades-long involvement in the Blanch Pierre / Maguire child-abuse atrocity cover-up – neither of them were asked so much as one question – between them – about those crimes, by what pretended to be a child-abuse “public-inquiry” on Jersey.
Just – astounding. It was amazing – just jaw-dropping. I made a point of sitting in the public seats when both brothers were “questioned”. Undisguised – judicial corruption – in-plain-sight – in Britain – in the 21st century.
After they had both given “evidence” – with not so much as one question concerning their role in the Blanch Pierre / Maguire cover-up – I said out loud, “So – no questions to the Bailhaches about the role of Bailhache LaBesse / Applbey Global and the Maguire cover-up?”
The lawyers turned and looked at me – with understanding – and pure – pure – hate.
Just hate.
It was written on all their faces.
They knew – at that moment – that I knew – just how remarkably corrupt they were all being.
And after all Dannie had suffered – after all she had gone through – after the pain of re-visiting the abuse she endured – after being an open witness to BBC Panorama – Dannie would have been open and unrestrained – rightly – in her public condemnation of the fake, corrupt Jersey “public-inquiry”.
Its startlingly brazen failure to ask so much as one – single – question – concerning what she and the other children suffered – to the two men – the Bailhache brothers – most centrally involved in the high-level cover-up of her attackers.
And that just wouldn’t do.
Not from such a credible – core – witness. A key survivor – such as Dannie.
It would not “fit-in” with the £24 million lawyer-and-spin-doctor plan to make what went on in Jersey “appear” as though there had been a credible “public-inquiry”.
So Dannie had to die.
One of the reasons I fear for my life – in addition to the actual death-threats – is because there’s not yet been the merest indication – in any way – that any relevant person making decisions in the responsible British power-apparatus – has yet grasped the fact that “the-game’s-over”; that the culture-of-concealment has crashed & burned.
I’m a distance runner; I take it seriously, and when un-injured I run a lot, including during the night with a head-torch. About 9:20 p.m. on a dark November night – in a very remote country lane, with only fields around it – suddenly a man in a suit and trench-coat stepped out from behind a granite wall at a field entrance. He waved me down – attempted to engaged in some trivial small-talk, saying “you’re Stuart Syvret aren’t you? How are things going for you now, eh?”
But he quickly lost his patience and snarled at me, “Look! Just what do expect to get out of all this?! You’ll never beat these men! What do want!? Or do you want more of the same?!”
I looked at this maggot – this capo from the British Camorra – ordered out to stand on my routine running route to try and intimidate and terrify me – I looked real close, into his eyes, put my face close to his, and said “fuck you, you turd” and resumed running.
There is a British establishment Camorra – a Cosa Nostra – and – for a long time child-abuse – and the bargained concealment thereof – has been its weapon – its “Currency-of-Concealment”.
Ted Heath – Jimmy Savile – so many journalists – and all the rest – were its pawns.
The amazing spectacle of Jersey’s plainly fake “public-inquiry” into the island’s child-abuse cover-ups is – in-and-of-itself – another core piece of the evidence.
The supposed “public-inquiry” into concealed child-abuse on tax-haven, Crown-Dependency, secrecy realm Jersey was a fake – a fraudulent, embezzling, £24 million fake – that based itself in the offices of a conflicted law-firm, broke Human Rights laws, used centrally conflicted individuals as “evidence-gatherers”, failed to adhere to its “legislative-purpose”, had secret meetings with conflicted parties, failed to ask the obvious questions of witnesses involved in the cover-ups, refused to allow cross-examination – and intimidated and constructively-excluded core-witnesses – including me, THE core-witness from within the polity whose testimony would have been 100% on the side of child-abuse victims, survivors and whistle-blowers.
The Chair of the fake, make-believe, corrupt Jersey child-abuse “public-inquiry” was UK judge, Frances Oldham QC.
Before the “inquiry’s” report was made public, I notified the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office that I intended to make a detailed, formal complaint against her. For all of the obvious – stark – reasons.
Before I’d even submitted the actual detailed formal complaint, the JCIO e-mailed back – a cut-&-paste contemptuous dismissal, telling me – essentially – to “fuck-off”.
I was not surprised. Nor even especially disappointed. After ten years of fighting the British Establishment child-abuse cover-up – I know what to expect.
And I know what the dynamite pieces of evidence look-like.
When a national regulatory agency – one as central to the very rule-of-law – as the judicial disciplinary agency – breaks all relevant administrative-law case-law – and its own “legislative-purpose” – and its own, declared public-policies – e.g. “three months to submit complaints” – you know you’re on to something – and the tide of history is with you.
The 2008 Jersey child-abuse investigations – had they not been illegally sabotaged – might – I say might – have exposed the dead Ted Heath – thus bringing some comfort to his alleged victims – and may have exposed – and charged – the then still living Jimmy Savile, who molested certain of my then constituents.
Did the very apparatus of the British state illegally obstruct and sabotage the investigation into possible cases of high-level child-abuse?
Yes.
And it did so most starkly – undisguisably – in 2008 – in tax-haven Jersey – the secrecy realm of the British Camorra.
A liminal quasi-realm – where people like Savile – like Heath – could have preyed on their victims – outside of the UK rule-of-law.
Stuart Syvret
INCOMPETENT – BIASED – ULTRA VIRES; A CHAOTIC SHAMBLES.
CALL FOR RESIGNATION:
Formal Submission to the Committee of Inquiry;
Formal Submission to the Jersey Chief Minister Senator Ian Gorst –
By Stuart Syvret.
21th October, 2014.
The government of Jersey (the States of Jersey), after years of resistance, eventually agreed to establish a public inquiry (Committee of Inquiry) into many decades of concealed child-abuse and child-protection failure.
The resultant Committee of Inquiry (CoI) is a body which – largely through its own acts & omissions – is not now capable of delivering upon the requirements of:
- The States of Jersey enabling proposition;
- The terms-of-reference;
- Administrative-law case-law;
- Its legislative purpose;
- The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Just some of the reasons why that is so, are described below.
As the first public figure in Jersey to uncover and speak out against the systemic and endemic concealment of child-abuse which had been taking place for decades, I have a particularly strong interest in seeing the issues inquired into effectively – and particularly in seeing that right is done by the survivors of abuse, the at-risk children of today and the future, and the many whistle-blowers who courageously played a role in exposing the truth.
In addition to my primary concerns, as a key witness and directly affected person I also have personal concerns with the performance of the current CoI, and consequently concerns with my own rights.
I have had a number of serious doubts about this CoI as an entity from the moment it was established. Nevertheless, it being so established and the process started, against my better judgment I set my concerns aside, hoping to be proven wrong.
A key part of the work I have been undertaking out of the public eye has involved liaising with a number of survivors, witnesses and whistle-blowers, speaking with them about the inquiry process and doing what I could to allay their fears & persuade them to engage with the CoI and to give evidence.
Throughout that process I have had to wrestle with my conscience: ‘was it ethical of me to encourage often vulnerable people – already harmed by the betrayals of public authority – to again engage with yet another public authority which I feared was going to fail them?’ On balance – I decided to encourage survivors, witnesses, and whistle-blowers to engage.
But in the intervening months we have seen a structurally flawed CoI stumbling from error to error – mired in bias, contamination by conflicted parties, ultra vires actions, politicisation and startling incompetence – to the present day where the CoI stands in a chaotic shambles.
This CoI had been haemorrhaging confidence for months. The recent accessing by persons unknown of a profoundly sensitive 200 page draft witness statement was the final straw.
I am now calling on CoI Chair Frances Oldham QC and her two panel members – to resign with immediate effect.
In the event they the refuse to resign, I am calling on the Jersey Chief Minster Senator Ian Gorst to take the necessary steps to have this panel removed, including if necessary, asking the Jersey parliament to replace them.
Neither the Chair, nor her panel members, nor the CoI’s lawyers, Evershed, have my confidence as a centrally involved person – nor as a core witness – and nor do they have the confidence of a number of survivors, witnesses and whistle-blowers with whom I have spoken.
It will undoubtedly be true that a number of people will retain confidence in this particular CoI. But it is equally true that a number do not. And amongst that latter group are certain key witnesses – people who deserve to feel confident and secure in a process which they’re expected to go forward to, and to give evidence to – an act of deep trust.
It was the task of this CoI to take those people with it – to gain their trust; gain their trust through openness, transparency, objectivity and competence. It failed in that primary task. And now it must go.
For if this CoI, this Chair, this panel, and their spin-doctors and these lawyers choose to remain in office, as they can do with the support of the Jersey establishment – and carry on regardless and see-out their lucrative contracts – the findings and final report they produce will not be a real set of findings – a real report. How could it be, when a number of key witnesses will not now even make themselves known to this CoI, let alone give it detailed evidence? As things stand any findings or final report of this particular CoI could only ever be some shabby, incomplete, omissive simulacrum of a real inquiry.
To convey just some of the ways in which this CoI has failed, I describe below a number of examples. It is fair to say that these issues vary in seriousness. Some of them are very serious indeed – and in some instances would constitute a resigning-matter even if the particular issue was the only one of concern. For example sending profoundly sensitive 200 page draft witness-statements via ordinary mail and consequently causing a shocking security breach.
There are also certain factors which are outside of the CoI’s immediate control but which nevertheless – given the CoI’s clear “legislative purpose” to deliver a true, effective investigation into Jersey’s decades of child-protection failure – the CoI should have expressed public concern over. For example, the appointment of William Bailhache as Bailiff given his express conflicts of interest in the subject-matter of the CoI, the gross and unaccountable power he has, and the immediately harassing and intimidating affect his appointment had upon a number of witnesses – myself amongst them.
What follows are just some of the reasons why Frances Oldham QC must resign immediately and take the failed apparatus she Chairs with her.
Not following the Salmon Principles:
The six cardinal principles of fair procedure under the amended Tribunals and Inquiries Act 1921. The Salmon Principles were devised by Lord Justice Salmon, who, in 1966, chaired a Royal Commission on Tribunals of Inquiry following dissatisfaction with procedural aspects of Lord Denning’s inquiry into the Profumo affair. These principles are:
- Before any person becomes involved in an inquiry, the tribunal must be satisfied that there are circumstances which affect them and which the tribunal proposes to investigate.
- Before any person who is involved in an inquiry is called as a witness, they should be informed of any allegations made against them and the substance of the evidence in support of them.
- They should be given an adequate opportunity to prepare their case and of being assisted by legal advisers and their legal expenses should normally be met out of public funds.
- They should have the opportunity of being examined by their own solicitor or counsel and of stating their case in public at the inquiry.
- Any material witnesses they wish to call at the inquiry should, if reasonably practicable, be heard.
- They should have the opportunity of testing by cross-examination conducted by their own solicitor or counsel any evidence which may affect them.
None of those Principles are at all controversial; they represent the basic standards of fairness and justice that all public inquires in the UK have worked under for decades. The need for such principles to be employed will be self-evident to most people. They become even more important if the matter being inquired into is deeply serious, with the prospect of all kinds of witnesses being dramatically affected in one way or another by the process.
For a public authority to fail to comply with the basic principles of natural justice which underpin the Salmon Principles is also to put that public authority at variance with the legal requirements of the ECHR.
A failure to use / allow cross-examination:
Whilst all of the Salmon Principles are very important, the process of cross-examination goes beyond a need to meet basic fairness tests, and enters the realm of basic, inquisitorial competence. Even leaving aside the human rights aspect of cross-examination and instead considering only the ability of a tribunal to really dig into evidence and testimony to uncover relevant facts – the omission of cross-examination renders the effective discharge of an investigative tribunal’s task virtually impossible.
Causing a serious security breach:
As any professional operation would understand perfectly well – you handle sensitive documents with the utmost care and take all of the obvious precautions. No professional office would send documents of the sensitivity of those being handled by this CoI by ordinary mail. Registered post would be required at least, more likely delivery by a specialist security-aware delivery organisation. That a 200-page draft witness statement – from one of the core witnesses – whose knowledge is so extensive – was simply shoved into an envelope and posted – is scarcely believable. Consequently, the envelope was opened by persons unknown during transit – probably deliberately – and, we must assume, its content read and copied.
This means that all of the many dozens of people likely named & identified in the former Deputy Police Chief’s statement have now suffered serious data-breaches. What will be – in some cases – dramatically serious information concerning them – is now in all likelihood in the hands of persons unknown. Quite possibly persons of improper motivation.
Now all of those people who may speculate that they might have been named in Mr. Harper’s statement will have the right to demand of the CoI that it reveal to them what data concerning them has been so casually tossed into unauthorised hands by the CoI.
And such an incompetent handling of personal information will also make potential witnesses – those who were considering giving evidence – now deeply reluctant to do so, for fear this CoI will leak their data. Which was entirely feasibly the very motivation of the persons or forces that opened the packet and made zero attempt to disguise their actions. It is a text-book method of witness-intimidation.
In acting as it did this CoI has potentially furnished those who would intimidate its potential witnesses with the very means to do so.
This would be a resigning-matter – on its own.
Very poor – or non-existent – victim-support:
On at least two recent occasions, witnesses giving live testimony have found that process understandably extremely difficult and have broken-down in tears. On both of those occasions the CoI had no victim-support team available; not even a single specialist person.
On one of those occasions the distressed survivor was put in the hands of one of the CoI’s spin-doctors – former BBC journalist Liz MacKean.
On another occasion, another survivor who found giving evidence to be too traumatic had the good fortune that representatives of the Jersey Care Leavers Association were present, as they were able to come to her assistance and support – the CoI again having no victim-support personnel present.
On that occasion, one of Jersey’s independent journalists – a person who has been instrumental in exposing the child-abuse cover-ups – happened to be present and in addition to seeking assistance for the distressed survivor, asked three members of the CoI team – spin-doctor Liz MacKean, and Eversheds employees Angharad Shurmer and Natalie Minott – why there had been no victim-support available?
None of them could – or would – answer the question, and the independent journalist was told they “would get back to him”. To date they have not done so.
Indeed – it is far from clear if the CoI has ever employed dedicated victim-support staff – as opposed to employing directly, on occasions, at least four spin-doctors. A factor which shows where the priorities of this particular CoI lie.
Spin-doctoring – instead of objectivity:
This CoI has shown a marked propensity for PR – for spin-doctoring – for opinion-management – from the very moment it was appointed.
At the very first public meeting it held at St. Pauls Centre, Jersey – the Chair, flanked by her two panel members, read out a pre-prepared statement – and refused to answer any questions at all. The three of them then filled out of the hall through the audience like some kind of quasi-religious procession.
The Chair of the committee herself fronted some desperately cynical and transparent spin-doctoring when responding to the crises of confidence caused by the CoI’s loss of control of the data in the draft statement of the former Deputy Police Chief. That incident – the opening by persons unknown of the draft statement sent by ordinary mail – rightly enough has attracted international media attention. The response of the Chair of the CoI was not to apologise and announce an immediate change in posting policy, and launch an investigation into who opened the packet – but instead to engage in a transparently diversionary attack on an American journalist for inadvertently tweeting a photo which contained the former Deputy Chief’s address; a matter he himself regards as utterly trivial in comparison to the deeply alarming opening of his 200-page draft statement during transit in ordinary postage.
From the very outset this CoI lost faith – and deterred a number of witnesses – through the brazenly obvious spin-doctoring of the CoI’s official name, the Jersey “Care Inquiry”.
How passive – even positive – does that word ring, “care”? This is not a public inquiry into “care” – it is a public inquiry into the neglect, battery, torture, rape, sodomy and life-crushing damage inflicted upon hundreds of children – and the utter failure of the entire – the entire – Jersey polity to prevent that – in fact to pro-actively cover-up such atrocities – for decades.
This is not an inquiry into “Care” – it is an inquiry into a monstrous catalogue of child-abuse – and the gross, corporate failure which enabled that abuse.
An environment designed to be hostile:
In an example of the above points – absence of regard for witnesses – and spin-doctoring – it is strikingly notable that the room and attached facilities, in which the CoI is taking place, are inimically hostile to witnesses.
Indeed, so obviously hostile are the arrangements, it is difficult to imagine they were arrived at by accident.
For example, as opposed to the usual room-layout of an inquisitorial tribunal – in which the inquisitor – the Chair or judge – would be placed in the centre, this room has been so designed that the witnesses – many of who will be frightened, insecure, vulnerable people – people with an understandably lasting fear of, and hostility to, people in authority – are placed centre-stage – directly opposite the entrance door – and against a stark back-wall of two screens which relay their words and items of evidence.
To reach this centre-stage position the witness must come in through the same entrance as the public audience and walk immediately alongside them – then across their vision, from the audience’s right to its left – in order to access the entrance to the witness platform.
The Chair and her panel members are then visible to the witness on the witness’s left – and a serried rank of tables and computer screens – peopled with lawyers and conflicted parties – are visible to the witness on their right. Directly in front of the witnesses sits the audience – a potentially hostile group of people – perhaps including a witness’s rapists – staring straight at them.
It is also no small curiosity who the controllers – or even beneficial owners – of the building are? For it is a major modern Jersey office block, but one door down from the chambers of the expressly and directly conflicted Jersey legal syndicate, the Ogier Group – one of the many, many law firms to have played a central role in the concealment of serious crimes in Jersey such as rape, battery, corruption and child-abuse.
Those facts have not been lost on certain witnesses.
The Ogier Group has, essentially, now “captured” the policing function, the prosecution function and the judicial function in Jersey – and one of its key figures, part-time lawyer/part-time judge, Julian Clyde-Smith, has been expressly involved in matters of central relevance to the subject-matter of this inquiry.
Such an overtly hostile environment – designed as it is, and taking place in the back-rooms of the building of the conflicted Ogier Group – has caused certain witnesses – myself amongst them – to be actively intimidated and deterred from engagement and speaking frankly.
That was almost certainly the objective.
Failing to meet “Part (e)” of the States of Jersey decision:
The Jersey parliamentary proposition by which the CoI was established and empowered, included – at paragraph (e) – the following: –
(e) to agree that the proposed Chairman should be requested to recommend any final changes to the Terms of Reference for the Committee of Inquiry referred to in paragraph (b) above for approval by the Assembly, and also to set out the proposed process for conducting the Inquiry having consulted with interested parties where necessary;
In some ways paragraph (e) could be said to be a fundamentally central part of the inquiry process and its terms of reference. For of all the legislative purposes, this one in particular emphasised and rightly required engagement with the community; the re-building of trust with affected people – bringing those people into participation, as opposed to the exercise of unaccountable power which is normal in Jersey. That one key purpose was central to the task of generating trust – and bringing about the start of healing.
Instead, the Chair has ignored a key requirement of the Jersey legislature – failed to undertake the inevitably necessary refining process on the terms of reference and to seek the Assembly’s approval for them – failed to also set-out the proposed process for conducting the inquiry – and very significantly, has failed to consult with interested parties.
Consequently, this CoI has been the author of its own misfortune now that it is mired in controversy, methodological failings and an absence of trust.
The justification for that absence of trust is exemplified by an extant – and particularly relevant – example of fraudulent conduct with the terms-of-reference of another Jersey public inquiry – one inextricably central to the subject matter of this public inquiry, namely the review by Brian Napier QC into the illegal suspension of Police Chief Graham Power, Queens Police Medal. That illegal suspension having been motivated by – amongst other serious factors – a wish by conflicted parties to sabotage and discredit the historic child-abuse investigation.
On that occasion, the Jersey legislature approved terms-of-reference which included as paragraph (d) the following: –
“(d) Review all information relating to the original suspension procedure, including relevant sections of the published Affidavit from the suspended Chief Officer of Police.”
However, that important ToR was “accidentally” omitted from the ToR given to the inquisitor Brian Napier QC – and the senior civil servant responsible for that “error” is the Chief Executive to the Jersey Council of Ministers – and the very same man who was instrumental in the recruiting and briefing of this CoI.
There are only two plausible conclusions to be drawn from the astounding and unprecedented fact this CoI has been content to work with – and still work with – this expressly conflicted senior civil servant – key hostile witness – & his department (the Chief Minister’s department): either that this CoI is incompetent and its members lack even a rudimentary study of the background of the issues they are inquiring into – that they have failed to undertake “sufficient inquiry” – or that they are aware of that fatally conflicting fact concerning the Chief Executive – but simply don’t care.
One way or another, this CoI has demonstrated itself to be contemptuous of the instructions of the legislature – and contemptuous of the meaningful & co-operative public engagement which was sought.
Failing to declare interests:
In a further example of secrecy, the CoI has failed to require of its Chair and members – and its lawyers – and its spin-doctors – that they make and sign a public declaration of interests. This is a startling omission.
It is doubly startling that no corporate declaration of interest has been entered by the lawyers running the CoI, Evershed – a large, international law-firm – which deals in tax-avoidance, international clients – and – particularly – works for UK authorities directly conflicted in the Jersey child-abuse cover-up, such as the Metropolitan Police and the security services.
Moreover, Evershed has its principal UK base in the City of London, an impenetrable quasi-realm inextricably entwined with the tax-shelter that is the Crown Dependency of Jersey, the City of London Corporation thus being wholly conflicted in respect of protecting the Jersey status-quo – helping to conceal the true Potemkin-village nature of the Jersey “justice” apparatus – and concealing the island’s disgusting child-abuse history.
Not only do we live in an era of transparency and accountability – we also expect of those in positions of power and of trust that they adhere to the Nolan Principles on Standards in Public Life. That would be a sufficient enough reason to expect automatic public declarations of interest from those working for such a public body; a declaration of interest which should include membership of organisations, such as City of London Corporation guilds, Freemasonry, the Churches, and other similar such conflicted associations.
In the context of a public inquiry into decades of the most serious criminality and corruption in Jersey – an environment in which blackmail, greed, racketeering, Freemasonry, domination by legal syndicates, politicised churches, coercion and bribery are the very DNA of business and of the polity – with even a semi-ironic local moniker for this culture, “The Jersey Way” – such a failure to produce an automatic declaration of interests can only display a wilful ignorance of the subject-matter under investigation.
Failing to work to high standards of transparency, and adopting deeply restrictive protocols:
Space does not permit a full account of just how defective in so many ways are many of the protocols adopted – ex cathedra – by this CoI. Again, many of these issues would have been avoided had the CoI followed its instructions as issued by the parliament – in accordance with paragraph (e) – and undertaken proper consultation rather than going on a frolic of its own.
The many protocols the CoI has written and published are often dense, lengthy, written in legalese and thus an unattractive and complex read for a lay-audience. Many witnesses and members of the public will simply not have read them. A fact which is unfortunate given the many serious consequences and implications of the protocols.
Nevertheless, to cite a broad issue, the CoI has embraced obscurantism, opacity and secrecy to the maximal possible extent. It chose not to follow the spirit of freedom of information, and has instead stated it will cite the absolute exemption contained in the FoI Law.
It appears that this CoI – rather than being a “public inquiry – is in fact a “secret” inquiry – by having plainly based many of its protocols upon the corrupt, abusive and suppressive misapplication of the Data Protection Law in Jersey. The current Data Protection Commissioner has pursued – in collusion with the Law Officer’s Department, politicians and directly conflicted law firms such as Appleby Global (formerly Bailhache LaBesse) – a nakedly biased and anti-democratic campaign against free-speech_**, investigative journalism and effective child-protection. That oppressive course of conduct by the Jersey oligarchy has been assisted and enforced by directly conflicted “judges” – and has included the first secret trial in the British Isles – conducted against me – for trying to protect former constituents from corruption, battery,_ child-abuse_, rape and clinical murders; a catalogue of evidenced crimes, previously concealed by the Jersey authorities.**_
The Data Protection Commissioner – and the overtly politicised – and directly conflicted “prosecution” and “judicial” functions in Jersey have all played a role in the concealment of serious crimes and suppressing investigative journalism. That conduct has to be investigated by any competent and lawful public inquiry examining the decades of concealed child-abuse in the island.
Instead, this CoI has given every indication – via its self-generated protocols – and a number of suppressive and biased decisions it has made – that it is little more than an extension of and a furtherance of, the Culture-of-Concealment and the suppression of free-speech and independent journalism as carried out through the corrupted abusive misapplication of Data Protection “Laws”.
In acting in this way, the CoI is – axiomatically – a continuance of the very secrecy – the very Culture-of-Concealment – which enabled, underpinned, and led to decades of child-abuse being hidden. This approach by the CoI has lost it an incalculable amount of trust.
Failing to reply in a timely manner – or failing to reply at all – to reasoned inquiries from members of the public:
A number of people including survivors, former States members, witnesses and bloggers have written to the CoI on a number of occasions with differing questions. Often these people have been treated with contempt, their correspondence taking weeks or months to answer – but often receiving no reply at all.
It is quite remarkable that a body which has seen fit to directly employ at least four spin-doctors – at least two of who have been directly conflicted in the matters at hand – has failed to employ so much as one public support officer to always be present to respond to and assist powerless members of the public.
This conduct by the CoI is wholly unacceptable.
Requiring people to sign-up to “Interested Party Status” before the CoI will give legal representation funding to that person:
Even though I am a core witness – and the CoI has provision to provide legal representation funding – I have been refused legal funding. My human rights are engaged in a number of ways by this CoI – not least because of the ‘consequences’ which would follow for me if I were to give evidence to it. I have a right to take legal advice on those matters before I agree to engage with the CoI or sign-up to some kind of “agreement”, the implications of which I do not understand, and will not fully understand until I have been able to take legal advice. I told the CoI this in my application.
Consequently, the CoI refused to give me legal funding – in direct breach of my ECHR rights. Requiring people to sign away their rights, bind themselves, and assign those Rights guaranteed under the European Convention of Human Rights – before the person has been able to take legal advice on the implications and consequences of doing that – is a manifest absurdity.
Not recording the initial interviews:
A number of expert people have expressed most serious surprise that the CoI – in its process of undertaking lengthy initial interviews with witnesses – is not recording those interviews.
Therefore there is no verbatim record. This is an absolute breach of the basic professional standards of such investigations.
Any competent inquisitor – familiar with public investigations of this type – will confirm the policy adopted by this CoI is not best-practice.
Instead of best-practice, the CoI’s interview team have been laboriously taking short-hand notes during the initial interviews.
This is a manifestly inadequate process. The CoI’s interview team then go away – and produce what they consider to be a distillation of the oral evidence given by the witness. A draft “transcript” is then sent to the witness for checking and signing. Many witnesses – not being expert in such matters – may then unwittingly sign a draft statement that is ommisive of, or misrepresentative of, the things they actually said.
Thus in the event of any subsequent dispute arising, there is no original oral recording to return to.
It is precisely for such reasons that best-practice in light of legislation such as PACE requires multi-copy recordings to be undertaken, with copies provided to the inquisitor, the witness and involved lawyers. The necessary recording equipment is manufactured and marketed for just such purposes. For example, appended to this statement is a brochure for just such PACE-compliant 2, 3 & 4-way digital audio-recorders for evidential and disciplinary interviews. (Attached.)
The failure of the policy adopted by the CoI is further re-enforced in that many witnesses are waiting months to receive the draft “transcript” of their interview, laboriously and slowly produced from short-hand notes – and are then finding numerous omissions and mistakes in their statements when the draft is eventually returned to them for checking.
In addition to amplifying the opportunity for errors and omissions to creep into witness-statements, the methodology adopted by the CoI – instead of automatic voice-recognition technology which could be used to produce draft transcripts from the audio-recordings – is labour-intensive, expensive and extremely slow. At the rate at which the transcripts are being produced, this CoI could take years to complete its flawed work.
Not employing and using an Amicus Curiae – and woeful standards of questioning:
A very strong case could be made for a CoI of this nature to employ an amicus – an un-aligned lawyer – to raise issues, ask questions and make arguments which the CoI may benefit from in its work – even if a process of cross-examination was to take place.
In the absence of cross-examination – the failure to have an amicus present at every hearing is an omission of simply mystifying incompetence.
Already, in those public hearings which have taken place, the standard of questioning – and in particular the biased and ommisive nature of that questioning – has been startling, even to lay-people.
For example, early witnesses spoke of their experiences in Jersey’s child-“protection” apparatus during the 1940s & 50s and mentioned how, around the age of 14, they had been put out of the children’s’ homes and instead placed into a kind of servitude, or serfdom to local wealthy families. Upon reaching the age of 16 or 18 they were made to leave the house, often with nothing but a few clothes. In one case the boy in question was given a one-way boat ticket to neighbouring island of Guernsey. That testimony was a remarkable revelation – touching upon as it did a hitherto unknown and non-publicised phenomenon: what appears to have been a regular supply of unpaid household labour to wealthy local families in the form of de facto ‘slaves’ from the island’s orphanages. But yet, those revelations went by entirely unremarked by the CoI’s inquisitorial lawyer, and scarcely remarked by the panel.
In a further example, when “reading-in” certain evidence relating to a survivor from the late 1960s, a report recorded how on one occasion the boy had been taken to Accident & Emergency with “bruising to his face and a pronounced limp”. That particularly alarming passage of the evidence passed by – wholly unremarked by the CoI.
A competent amicus would have stepped in and asked the many obvious questions the CoI’s own lawyers fail to ask.
Such remarkable conduct by the CoI begins to go beyond the bounds of mere incompetence, and begins to raise questions of an altogether different kind.
Not taking evidence-in-chief in public – nor permitting witnesses to make public opening statements:
The remarkable methodological failure of this CoI to record the primary interviews with witnesses using multi-copy digital voice-recorders in compliance with best-practice has been stated above.
Another very obvious failing – if indeed it deserves the excuse of being described as “failure” given the obscure true purposes of this CoI – is the failure to invite witnesses to make an opening statement or to invite them to give opening evidence-in-chief – during the public hearings.
This practice – an obviously deliberate stratagem to close-down the scope of testimony – has the effect of massively constraining the witness – as though this were a trial in a court-room as opposed to an inquisitorial public-inquiry – to only answering narrow questions put to them by the CoI’s lawyers.
That practice amounts to a failure to meet the legislative purposes of the CoI, an ultra vires constraint upon the rights of witnesses – and an abandonment of the effectiveness of full, public inquisition of the type this CoI is supposed to enable and bring about.
That practice by this CoI would be ultra vires, an abuse of witnesses’ rights – and an abandonment of the full inquisitorial effectiveness and purposes of this public inquiry – even if an amicus were present to ask questions, develop answers and raise issues that the CoI’s lawyers failed to raise. That the CoI artificially constrains the witnesses in this way – without the lawyers of other witnesses and interested parties, or the witness’s own lawyers being present to ask questions – and no process of cross-examination permitted – is to demonstrate this particular CoI to be simply a Potemkin village; a fake – a sham. This is no real public inquiry.
The methodology of questioning the witnesses – as adopted in secret – with no public-consultation contra paragraph (e) of the legislature’s decision – and with no consultation with interested parties – and pronounced ex cathedra by this CoI is, quite frankly, so overtly corrupt it would be a stand-alone resigning matter.
No appeals system:
For a body with an extensive range of complex, self-generated ‘rules’ – and a propensity to make serious decisions and ‘rulings’ – in closed sessions – which have a direct effect on people, the absence of an appeals structure in respect of those decisions is noteworthy.
The importance of this fact should not be understated. This CoI has as its very purpose to inquire into and expose the workings of a secretive, unaccountable, over-powerful, arrogant and frequently dangerous public administration in Jersey – one which fostered and concealed decades of child-abuse. For any CoI to be trustworthy and to win public confidence, especially from the most important group, the survivors of child-abuse, that CoI would have to embrace a different culture; one of openness, accessibility and amenability. To be in the habit of making ex cathedra “rulings” – usually with zero explanation – and having no appeals-structure by which those decisions may be reviewed, is nothing less than a further example of the abuse of unaccountable power that this CoI is supposed to be investigating.
Working with directly conflicted parties – infiltration & contamination – hiding in plain sight:
This is one of the most serious failures by this CoI – and a resigning-matter on a stand-alone basis.
You have to hand it to the Jersey authorities for their sheer chutzpah – the boldness they exhibit – born of the long-developed sense of utter invulnerability. For this is a public inquiry into decades of concealed child-abuse – and at the heart of that matter is the sustained failure on the part of Jersey’s public authorities – and of a very significant number of directly and expressly conflicted senior civil servants and others.
You would imagine then – would you not – that any remotely competent public inquiry team coming into this situation would – as a first step – ensure that those who were employed or co-opted locally to assist the CoI – or who were offered up by Jersey’s public authorities to “assist” the inquiry or to “liaise” with it – were not conflicted – and most certainly were not individuals who are key hostile witnesses to the matters under inquiry; not conflicted individuals with many hard questions to answer for the roles they’ve played in the concealment of child-abuse.
Remarkably, the CoI has not taken that rudimentary step – the step of protecting itself, its powers and its functions – and its neutrality – from contamination with conflicted individuals with motivations to hide their own true role in events.
Instead, the CoI has agreed to work with a central co-ordination team as a point of data provision – assembled and offered up by a centrally conflicted public authority in Jersey, the Chief Minister’s Department. That being the same Department which houses the conflicted Chief Executive, already referred to above.
It gets worse.
The two lead individuals in this team which the CoI have agreed to work with – are both absolutely centrally involved in the subject of the inquiry, and are directly conflicted parties; two senior employees from the Health & Social Services Department – in which both of them played sustained roles in decades of child-protection failure – and the concealment of that failure.
I know that – I know it very well – as I used to be the Health & Social Services Minister and experienced first-hand the failures and obstructions of both individuals. Both are profoundly culpable.
But yet – astonishingly – here they are, on behalf of Jersey’s conflicted Chief Minister’s Department – “helping” this CoI gather the “right” evidence.
Indeed – so infiltrated is the more senior of the two individuals, he is frequently to be seen in the CoI sessions, sitting amongst the extensive facilities set aside for “Interested Parties” – laughing and joking during breaks with the CoI’s legal team and other staff.
To illustrate how toxic and contaminated this state of affairs is, consider: on Wednesday 15th October, amongst the evidence the CoI took was the infamous “letter of thanks” (copy attached) written in 1990 by the then President of the Education Committee, one Iris Le Feuvre to Jane and Alan Maguire – the two child-abusing psychopaths who ran the Blanche Pierre Group Home for the best part of a decade, during which they tortured the vulnerable children placed in their “care”.
I discovered that letter – and similar evidence – in my own researches undertaken in 2007. At that time Iris Le Feuvre was the Chair of the Jersey Child Protection Committee. Reading that letter – and other factors – led me to take the Ministerial decision to sack Le Feuvre from that post, and I wrote a detailed letter explaining the facts – outlining my criticisms – and informing her of my decision.
When I went into the Health & Social Services office to get my decision formally recorded, I met with two officers, the then Chief Executive – and the senior civil-servant who now “helps” this CoI. When I informed them of my decision and asked them to make a formal record of it, I was met with tirade of anger, fear, abuse and obstructive defiance from both men. (I later learnt that both men had been closely involved in the unlawful conspiracy to engineer my dismissal as Minister. That conspiracy is referred to in a contemporaneous file-note written by the then Police Chief Graham Power, who the corrupt civil servants attempted – and failed – to co-opt into their conspiracy. (Copy attached.)
On the occasion of the refusal to process my Ministerial decision to sack the child-abuse concealing Iris Le Feuvre from the post of Chair of the Jersey Child Protection Committee, the civil servant who now “helps” the CoI, literally went purple in the face with rage and fear and had spittle-flecks flying from the corners of his mouth as he launched into a tirade of abuse at me, shouting – accusing me of being mentally ill – I think amongst the words he used was “nutter” – accused me of being a drug-addict – and said, quite frankly he would not carry out my official Ministerial instruction.
It says something of just how fearful, obstructive and deranged the conduct was of that civil servant, that even – even – the then Attorney General, the conflicted & corrupt William Bailhache, recognised that they could not get away with simply not carrying out a lawful instruction from a Minister. So the sacking of the child-abuser-supporting Iris Le Feuvre took place in spite of corrupt attempts by these civil servants to keep her in post.
It is the key civil servant involved in this disgraceful episode – the one who screamed abuse at me and refused to discharge a lawful Ministerial decision – who has now been appointed by the Chief Minister – and, astoundingly, accepted by this CoI – as a key component in the “evidence-gathering” and collating machinery of this public inquiry – when a part of the legislative-purposes of the inquiry is to expressly investigate people like this civil servant.
On occasions when I have attended the CoI’s public hearings, I have been forced to endure the intimidating presence of this civil servant – a man who pro-actively and rabidly did all he could to obstruct the 2007 investigation into child-protection failures – man who screamed abuse at me for attempting to hold the system to account – a man who was a key participant in the illegal conspiracy to engineer my dismissal – a man who tried to prevent me from protecting my constituents – sitting in the privileged position of a state-funded “interested-party”.
Were that not sufficiently bad enough – the same man is the “point-of-contact” for this CoI within the Chief Minster’s Department – collating “evidence-gathering” for the CoI.
Plainly – it is not possible – for reasons of such contaminations and intimidating overt bias – for this CoI to lawfully engage with me.
And as I am a key witness, this CoI cannot, therefore, fulfil its legislative purpose. The Chair and panel members have no choice but to resign.
The second civil servant assigned by the Chief Minister to operate the liaison team works ordinarily in the Children’s Service – with a particular involvement in overseeing the children’s homes. Many years of service failure took place, which involved this man.
It is nothing less than astonishing that this CoI now finds itself contaminated by – even captured by – and dependent upon for certain key evidence – some of the very people who must be inquired into.
In a further example, the CoI has been “assisted” from the outset – and still works closely with – another party to the matters under inquiry – namely one of the senior Scrutiny Officers of the States of Jersey Greffe – the secretariat which supports the Jersey parliament.
This officer – so far as I am aware – has not acted in any reprehensible way himself.
But nevertheless, he is a key witness to several very important episodes. For example – the disgusting conduct of the then Social Services Scrutiny Panel which, in 2008 – in spite of the decades of concealed child-abuse having been exposed by me from July 2007 onwards – and in spite of being supplied with substantial documentary evidence – flatly refused to investigate the child-protection failures.
Further, the same Scrutiny Officer was also involved in a later Scrutiny Panel exercise – the directly relevant investigation into how false claims came to be made exaggerating the costs of Operation Rectangle, the Police investigation into historic abuse. Whilst a very good and useful report was produced on that occasion, nevertheless certain key pieces of oral evidence – provided in a formal, privileged, open public session – were withheld from publication in the transcripts. Why was that so? Why were the Panel members “advised” that those parts of the transcript could not be published? Who was involved in that “advice”?
These are questions this Scrutiny Officer might be able to answer. He is certainly a key witness. But – again – here he is – working behind the scenes – in the very heart of the CoI’s machinery
For having permitted such contaminations of its very apparatus, this is another stand-alone resigning matter.
To have permitted the process of the CoI to become contaminated with biasing factors is doubly-unforgivable – given that this CoI is led by a lawyer – is advised by a major international law-firm – and has a lawyer leading what passes for an interviewing and evidence-taking process.
Legal teaching and legal minds abound in this CoI – and are costing the public a correspondingly vast sum of money – yet some of the most rudimentary public-law case-law appears to elude all of them.
If a “public authority” which has been given the power to – the task to – make “discretionary” judgments and “discretionary decisions” – as this CoI has – that public authority must then exercise that power to make discretionary decisions in accordance with lawful standards of public administration.
Space here does not permit a full exploration of the many obvious ways in which the conduct of this CoI is plainly ultra vires. However, a brief consideration of the “contaminating factors” this CoI has unlawfully engaged with – thus rendering its process ultra vires – is necessary.
It is worth reflecting upon the fact that any “public authority” empowered to make “discretionary decisions” – is bound by the standards of lawful conduct – and that is true of all public authorities. When the public authority in question actually has a primary inquisitorial role – possesses quasi-judicial/quasi-prosecutorial status – and a consequently coercive set of enforcement powers – the absolute requirement to perform lawfully – for example to observe all standards of objectivity – is even greater.
So clear are the requisite standards, it is not even necessary – though it is absolutely correct to do so because public authorities must act in accordance with the ECHR – to cite Article 6 of the ECHR – the right to a fair hearing; it is enough to only look as far as English administrative-law case-law.
It is well-established that a body – a “public authority” exercising “discretionary power” – as this CoI is doing – must observe the basic standards of fairness, justice and impartiality. It is also the case that a public authority granted a discretionary power – may only use that power for the purposes for which it was granted. This CoI was granted its discretionary powers and duties to fairly, thoroughly and impartially investigate decades of child-protection failure and concealed child-abuse in Jersey. By failing to be able to meet that standard – by incorporating the close involvement and co-operation into the actual processes of the CoI of directly interested parties such as witnesses and potentially culpable individuals – the CoI has abandoned the proper and correct pursuit of its legislative purpose – and is instead using – abusing in reality – the “discretionary powers” granted to it for some “other” purposes. Quite just what those “purposes” may be remains to be seen. Although an informed and educated guess can be made now.
It is established law that “power is held on trust; to be used only for the purposes for which it is conferred”. Abdicating key evidence-gathering & collating functions – to directly conflicted parties – and evidencedly culpable parties in the subject under investigation at that – is to cast aside and trample into the dirt the discretionary powers conferred on the CoI and instead to let them become fettered to some other “purpose”.
Further – it is also well-established in public law that a body must not act conspicuously unfairly, nor so unfairly as to abuse its power, nor in unjustified breach of a legitimate expectation. Given that this CoI is a quasi-judicial / quasi-prosecutorial body – established for the sole core purpose of investigating the Jersey child-abuse scandals – it is breaching the legitimate expectation of basic fairness – and proper due process – to allow its workings to become contaminated with and by expressly conflicted parties.
Further – it is established in administrative law that a body must not have a direct interest in the outcome of a decision, or show actual bias, or a real possibility of bias. This body – the CoI – fails those basic standards and the basic tests through the possibility of bias in the mind of a fair-minded observer – because the body, the CoI is actually working with directly conflicted parties. It is also the case that this CoI has exhibited numerous examples of “actual bias”. Such examples of actual bias being the banning of bloggers from the press-facilities – in favour of conflicted establishment journalists who work for media organisations that can be shown – extensively – to have colluded in the concealment of decades of child-abuse in Jersey – for example, the BBC.
Further examples of actual bias include refusing to provide for me – a centrally involved core witness whose rights are engaged – the lawfully required legal representation funding – and in doing so ignoring the Salmon Principles and breaching the requirements of the ECHR. That act is further seen to exhibit gross bias in consideration of the – apparently – unlimited public resources able to be spent by the directly conflicted public authorities in Jersey – such as Police, public departments, senior civil servants etc. This is a gross misbalance of power, and non-existence of any “equality-of–arms” for whistle-blowers and victims of state-sponsored-oppression such as myself.
Apparent bias – actual bias – procedural unfairness – a failure to meet its “legislative purposes” – and a consequent abuse of its discretionary decision-making powers for some “other” – unlawful – purposes – are all starkly evidenced in the mere fact that this CoI has willingly agreed to work with expressly and directly conflicted individuals; Scrutiny Clerks who are key witnesses – and expressly, directly conflicted core witnesses – directly culpable individuals – such as the two civil-servants working through the Jersey Chief Minister’s Department as an “evidence-gathering” team on behalf of this CoI.
The position of this CoI is – thus – purely ultra vires – outside of the law – and is so, beyond remedy or salvage.
Insufficient Inquiry:
To further illustrate both the incompetence – and the actual bias – of this CoI – lest it be claimed that it and its officers “were not aware of” the conflicting factors such as the involved, culpable senior civil-servants – and the various other relevant considerations adumbrated in this statement calling for the CoI’s resignation – a “public authority” exercising “discretionary powers” is obliged by law to undertake what is described as “sufficient inquiry”.
The case-law on “sufficient inquiry” holds that “a public body has a basic duty to take reasonable steps to acquaint itself with the relevant material”. Here we have a quasi-judicial body such as this CoI, failing to take such rudimentary steps as to protect and shield its independence and neutrality from the very outset – by failing to ask itself basic questions: “are the people we might work with, co-opt into our administration – or become reliant upon for certain services, functions, information or evidence – possibly conflicted in some way?” Not asking itself such rudimentary questions, is for this CoI to fail every basic “legitimate expectation” of objectivity and “procedural fairness.”
To further illustrate the degree of insufficient inquiry – methodological dysfunction – and the systemic failure to keep members of the public fully informed, it is not, in fact, clear that this CoI is legally able to question many of the potentially key witnesses.
There is no public record of the Jersey parliament having made a decision – in accordance with Article 49 (b) of the States of Jersey Law – to disapply Article 36 (1) of the same law.
What are these Articles? What do they mean? Why are they significant? – And why are they fundamental to the inquisitorial success or failure of any public inquiry into the decades of concealed child-abuse in Jersey?
The extent of the child-protection failures – and the many associated unlawful cover-ups in Jersey, is not limited only to the mainstream “civil-service”. The subject matter – and scope for potential witnesses – spreads across the entire Jersey polity – from the executive departments – into the legislature and its secretariat – on into the prosecution function, the Law Officers Department – and, of course, into the judicial function and the judicial secretariat.
Thus the reach to potential witnesses takes in those people who were parliamentary Committee Clerks under the pre-2005 old “committee system” of government, those who are or who have been officers of the Jersey parliamentary Scrutiny function under the post-2005 Ministerial system, those who were or are officers of the States of Jersey Greffe, those who are or were officers of the prosecutorial Law Officers Department, those who were or are officers of the Judicial Greffe – and various other people.
Quite specifically – that category of people who are witnesses to various aspects of how the Jersey polity permitted, enabled, and then responded to, the exposure of decades of concealed child-abuse will include former and current Greffiers and Deputy Greffiers of the States – former and current Judicial Greffiers and Deputy Judicial Greffiers – Solicitor Generals, Attorney Generals, Deputy Bailiffs, Bailiffs and Lieutenant Governors.
Without pre-judging what testimony these categories of people may be able to provide – it is inescapably obvious that any effective inquiry into the decades of concealed child-abuse in Jersey must make reasonable efforts to explore all relevant and available witnesses.
But here arises the problem of Article 36 (1) of the States of Jersey Law, which states:
36 Evidence of proceedings not to be given without leave
(1) Subject to this Part and standing orders, no member of the States or officer of the States and no person employed to take minutes before the States or any committee or panel established under standing orders shall give evidence elsewhere – (a) in respect of the contents of such minutes or the contents of any document laid before any of those bodies; or (b) in respect of any proceedings or examinations held before any of those bodies, without the prior consent of the body concerned.
In effect, most of the categories of potential witnesses just described are expressly required to “seek leave” – permission – from the States assembly – or other bodies under whose authority the witness may have been operating. Those potential witnesses are not free agents.
There is a legislative means of overcoming some of that prior-constraint upon possible witnesses – namely Article 49 (b) of the States of Jersey Law which says: –
The States may by Regulations
(b) disapply Article 36(1) to evidence given before a committee or panel established by standing orders;
There is no public record of the States having made such a decision – disapplying by Regulations – the restrictive requirement of Article 36(1).
So it is theoretically possible for those categories of witnesses to give evidence to the CoI – but only if they received express “leave” to do so – gained permission from – the body in question. That constraint of having to “seek leave” by that category of witness could be set-aside – in a clear, blanket manner – by the States, if it invoked Article 49 (b) so as to disapply the restriction.
But do these obscure and tedious little bits of law matter to the inquisitorial purposes of a public inquiry into decades of concealed child-abuse in Jersey?
Unless a blanket permission to give evidence is delivered by the States via Article 49(b) disapplying Article 36 (1) – the obstruction of potential testimony caused is two-fold.
Firstly, those cohorts of potential witnesses are actively prevented from giving testimony – even if they are willing witnesses – without first getting permission from those who have power over them; getting permission from the very apparatus – and the very senior individuals in various bodies who have played culpable and pro-active roles in the decades of child-protection failure and child-abuse concealment.
No inquisitorial process can expect – not remotely – to get anywhere near the truth for as long as such a restriction – and such potential intimidation – lays over the heads of potential witnesses.
Secondly, there will be – and categorically are – people in those cohorts of witnesses who do not want to give evidence – who are on the side of the failed apparatus – who have friends and family members who are culpable – and who are culpable themselves in various ways. Those people have – in the existence of Article 36 (1) – a ready-made “shield” from being expected to – or being called to – give evidence. Such individuals could well pretend to wish to be co-operative, but point “apologetically” to Article 36 (1), as a “reason” why they “cannot” give evidence.
These are not trivial points.
Ultimately – at root – the reason why children were neglected, maltreated, used, battered, subjected to savage solitary-confinement regimes, damaged, molested, and raped – without remedy for decades in Jersey is because of the wholly dysfunctional – corrupted – Crown powers in Jersey and the immunities and invulnerabilities – such as that granted by Article 36 (1) – which shield those at the top of that apparatus.
That the issues raised by Article 36(1) are – indeed – deeply problematic, are confirmed by no less a body than this CoI itself. It was me who raised this issue with them via e-mail on the 9th April 2014, and Peter Jones of Evershed – on behalf of the CoI – replied on the 11th April accepting that Article 36(1) represented what was “clearly an important issue” (Correspondence attached.)
However, since that correspondence, no further response has been received from the CoI – and the restriction / shield that Article 36 (1) represents to potential witnesses remains as a serious obstacle to any inquisitorial process.
It is not possible to have trust in a body – this CoI – which consists of an army of immensely expensive lawyers – yet which has to have basic legislative obstacles brought to its attention by an ordinary member of the public.
And furthermore – acknowledging the significance of the issue – but then failing to discharge its legislative purpose by publically asking its empowering body – the States of Jersey – to make the necessary regulatory change, is likewise another example of incompetence.
Banning independent journalists from use of the press-facilities:
As any rudimentary study of the events of the years since 2007 and of the published evidence shows, the Jersey child-abuse controversies represent the first occasion, in Jersey’s 800 year history as a quasi-independent jurisdiction, on which the entrenched ruling oligarchy has lost control of public news and of public discourse. In that sense, the powerful in the island have faced the same culture-shock – the same challenge to established power – as many regimes around the world have faced – through the arrival of the world wide web and citizen’s journalism.
The traditional media in Jersey are all entirely captured by the influence and control of the local oligarchy, and that media has been – on the evidence – pro-actively collusive with Jersey’s public authorities in the concealment of the decades of child-abuse.
The history of this episode is evidenced by the contrast between the heritage media on the one hand, and Jersey’s bloggers, the only independent journalists reporting the controversy on the other. For years now, Jersey’s bloggers have steadfastly and at personal cost – pursued without reward the investigation and reporting of the child-abuse, the child-abuse cover-ups, and all of the attendant conflicts of interest and abuses of power. In undertaking this important public duty, the bloggers have gained the trust of abuse survivors, whistle-blowers and witnesses.
The bloggers are the only media to have reported the child-abuse and associated history of cover-ups in great depth – and to have evidenced the facts through the publication of interviews with those on the side of abuse-victims, and the publication of documentary evidence.
Those are the evidenced – evidenced – facts concerning the history of Jersey’s bloggers and the estimable role they have played in exposing the truth.
It is therefore nothing less than disgraceful – and a further act of unambiguous actual bias on the part of this CoI – that it should take the decision to ban those bloggers from using the inquiry’s press-facilities – in favour of the conflicted and child-abuse concealing mainstream media.
In fact – so stark and questionable is the role of the state-media in the cover-ups that certain journalists and editors are obviously key-witnesses who should be called before any effective public inquiry.
To cite an example, BBC correspondent Robert Hall occupies a most peculiar position in the history of these events.
Following my establishing of contact with UK-based BBC journalist Andrew Brown – something I had to do given the utter intransigence and collusion with the cover-ups demonstrated by the local, ‘gone-native’ BBC outfit in Jersey – several documentary programs were filmed. Following careful discussion with some survivors and their friends & supporters, I had secured their agreement to be placed in contact with the UK BBC reporters.
That process culminated in a BBC Panorama program which was fronted by Robert Hall – and which did a good job of reporting certain facts. For example, the program team succeeded in tracking-down the psychotic child-abusers Jane and Alan Maguire to a location in France, where the team confronted them and asked them questions concerning the child-abuse they committed.
But – in November 2008, the Jersey authorities embarked upon the plainly illegal suspension of Police Chief Graham Power, QPM. On that occasion the then recently appointed Deputy Chief David Warcup and one Mick Gradwell gave a press-conference – the nature of which is unique in the entire modern history of policing in the British Isles.
They publicly poured criticism upon an on-going child-abuse investigation – thus legally undermining it – and issued a number of lies, half-truths and distortions concerning the management of the investigation.
A number of clear, pressing – and deeply serious – questions were obvious at that time; questions which should have been directed at Warcup and Gradwell – and at then Chief Minster Frank Walker and then Home Affairs Minister Andrew Lewis who had undertaken the illegal suspension of the Police Chief.
For in effect, what had obviously just taken place was the political removal of an “inconvenient” Police Chief – days before Jersey’s elections which looked to go badly for the entrenched oligarchy not least because of the child-abuse cover-ups. This exercise was obviously the targeted trashing of the child-abuse investigation by conflicted politicians and their favoured senior police officers who had enabled the unlawful coup against Police Chief Graham Power.
This was quite simply – and obviously right at that moment – nothing less than an all-out assault upon the public and their rights to be protected by impartial, objective policing.
But at that time the traditional media – including surprisingly Robert Hall of the BBC (a man who’s career began in Jersey and who has strong familial connections with the island) – swallowed the Jersey oligarchy spin in its entirety – failed to ask so much as a single one of the urgently obvious questions – and instead regurgitated the propaganda unquestioned to the community in the island and the wider world.
How did that happen?
Why did the entirety of the mainstream media – including Robert Hall and the BBC – suddenly switch from rightly reporting the failures of the Jersey authorities to protect vulnerable children – to unquestioningly relaying the overt propaganda of those self-same child-abuse concealing public authorities?
It cannot but be noted that at that time – November 2008 – we were still some years away from the full revelations concerning Jimmy Savile – a regular visitor to Jersey – and the role the BBC had played in enabling Savile to pursue decades of child-abuse up and down the nation.
It is the case that the role of the Fourth Estate is well-established and recognised in Western democracies as a component-part of the checks & balances by which power is scrutinised and held to account. The media in Jersey ought to satisfy a vital role in the protection of vulnerable children. Close and meaningful scrutiny of public authorities – and fear on the part of those public authorities of having their failures and misfeasances exposed by the media – acts as a form of quality-control that the public are able to exercise over their governments and administrations. Vulnerable children actually need a challenging and fierce media to help ensure their safety.
It is for those reasons – reasons which include the plain and obvious failure of the media in Jersey – that any effective public inquiry into the decades of concealed child-abuse has to – unavoidably – scrutinise the role the local media played in enabling the child-protection failures and the cover-ups to continue for decades.
Thus it is that various current and former BBC employees – such as Robert Hall – and Liz McKean – have to be viewed as witnesses to the subject matter of any effective CoI in Jersey. McKean because of her experience of internal BBC “culture” and initial opposition she experienced to the exposing of Savile – and Robert Hall for the inexplicable volt-face he committed in November 2008.
The role of Robert Hall of the BBC is especially toxic and deeply concerning in this matter. For Hall recognises that it isn’t possible for the mainstream media to continue to peddle distortions and lies – and engage in acts of omission – if, in fact, the truth, and the full facts are being reported alongside the traditional media by citizen’s media journalists such as bloggers.
The BBC and Robert Hall have been – rightly – subject of extensive reportage and criticism by several of Jersey’s bloggers because of the role played by the BBC and Hall in supporting the Jersey establishment’s unlawful suspension of Police Chief Graham Power and the attendant propaganda campaign.
One of the more remarkable documents published on this CoI’s website is an e-mail from Robert Hall of the BBC, in which he sought for himself and the BBC, media “accreditation” (whatever that’s supposed to mean in reality). The remarkable thing about Hall’s email is that he actually suggested to this CoI that it ban bloggers from use of the press-facilities. (Copy attached.) The relevant part of Hall’s e-mail says this: –
“In closing I’d like to thank you once again for the way in which you are dealing with media interest, and close with one thought; I note from local web activity that some non-accredited interested parties are eager to gain accreditation.
Should space be as limited as you fear, I foresee difficulties on busy days if such accreditation goes beyond recognised media organisations……just my view….”
So here we have a representative of a profoundly conflicted mainstream media organisation (the BBC re Jimmy Savile & other abusers) – and a man who himself faces many serious questions over his unquestioning and unchallenging reproduction of Jersey government propaganda from November 2008. Hall suggesting to this CoI that the discussion on the websites of local bloggers and their plans to report on the CoI’s proceedings, leads him to think the bloggers should be viewed by this CoI as second-class citizens.
Sure enough – on the first occasion a blogger (myself) used the press facilities to live-report the proceedings – the CoI banned bloggers from the use of those facilities.
No credible explanation has been issued for that decision to this day.
Plainly, the CoI’s expensive spin-doctors have an amenable relationship with the mainstream media journalists present – who can be “safely” relied upon to churnalist the requisite & carefully planned “image” of the CoI and its proceedings.
The bloggers by way of contrast – are not “house-trained” – not willing to go along with the charade – will report performance failures and bias by the CoI – and are unpredictable and are out-of-control, that is, independent, and independently-minded. The stuff of spin-doctors’ worst nightmares.
Banning bloggers is a profoundly serious decision for a number of reasons. It is a dramatic example of actual bias on the part of this CoI against bloggers in general – and me as an individual. That factor is doubly-concerning in respect of the clear and evidenced role the mainstream discredited media has played in the child-abuse cover-ups – contrasted with the role bloggers have played in gaining the trust of survivors and whistle-blowers and in reporting the evidenced facts.
That being the evidenced history of the scandal from 2007 to the present day, it cannot be regarded as anything other than profoundly alarming that this CoI, with its army of spin-doctors, should choose to side with the child-abuse cover-up-concealing heritage media.
In acting in the manner it did, this CoI was also deeply offensive and discriminatory towards a disabled man – another noted blogger, Voice for Children, who has done great public service in reporting evidenced facts and conducting important interviews over the years.
The conduct in question of this CoI is also a further example of the failure to have an appeals-process in place – and the failure to answer correspondence reasonably or promptly. At least two bloggers affected by the ban sought to appeal that decision – and sought explanations. No appeal mechanism exists – and no credible explanation for the ban has been offered.
There can be no faith – no faith at all – in any public inquiry into these decades of concealed child-abuse in Jersey, if that inquiry takes the side of the collusive mainstream media – and takes sides against the bloggers, the only independent media in Jersey – and the only media to have consistently – and in-depth – reported the true facts of the systemic and endemic Jersey child-abuse disaster.
It is not to the mainstream media that vital, central witnesses have turned – for example witnesses of no-less calibre than the former Police Chief and the former Deputy Police Chief, but instead to bloggers. It is the bloggers who have secured many important interviews with different witnesses – and have published key evidence; for example I have published actual affidavits, prepared at my request by the former Police Chief and the former Deputy Police Chief.
The bloggers are trusted – trusted by high-ranking witnesses, readers, whistle-blowers, campaigners – and most importantly, the abuse-survivors.
By way of contrast, in all of Jersey’s very extensive mainstream media – print and broadcast – there is not so much as one, single, solitary journalist amongst all of them, who has taken a specialised interest in the child-abuse victims and the long and wretched history of concealed child-abuse in the island – and consistently reported those issues.
There are unpaid bloggers in Jersey who have – on their own – done more evidence-based investigative journalism in the last seven years – than all of Jersey’s heritage media have produced in the same time – combined.
Indeed, in a small but highly relevant – and very telling – example of media-failure, the response of the BBC to the issuing of a previous version of this call for the CoI’s resignation is a case-study.
BBC local radio recorded a detailed and extensive interview with me on the afternoon of Saturday 18th October. On the morning of the 21st October 2014, the BBC in Jersey reported the call for the CoI’s resignation. Most of the recorded interview was not played. What parts of it were played were not presented as a cohesive package, but instead reduce to several-sound-bite focused excerpts, which were scattered throughout the two-hour program, thus depriving the interview of form and cohesiveness. The only part of the interview of moderate length was played very late in the program – after 8:30 a.m when most of the potential audience are busy arriving at work.
However – the most noteworthy and telling part of the BBC’s coverage – was the response of this CoI to the call for resignation – and how the BBC reported that response.
In the statement I issued to the BBC many very serious – evidenced – matters of public interest and significant public importance are raised. These are serious issues – which deserve and require a serious response. Predictably this CoI refused to engage on the facts and the issues, and issued a brief, bland press-release asserting an avowed aim to “continue in office” in spite of all of the damming failures and irretrievable ultra vires this CoI is now fatally mired in. So far – so expected. At this stage any credible and serious journalism would have interrogated the response of the CoI – refused to just passively regurgitate a paragraph cobbled together by spin-doctors – and would have pressed the CoI for specific answers to very important and unavoidable issues, for example, “why has this CoI chosen – extraordinarily – not to follow the established Salmon Principles?” and “Why has this CoI not had victim-support personnel present when some witnesses have broken down in tears?” and “Why has this CoI permitted itself to become contaminated and cast its independence into oblivion by working with directly conflicted parties such as culpable senior Jersey civil servants?”
Instead of those obvious and clearly important public-interest questions being put to the CoI by the BBC in Jersey, the program merely regurgitated on behalf of the CoI a meaningless – and misleading – press-statement. Even if the CoI remained intransigent and unwilling to explain and refusing to be publically accountable for its conduct – still the attempts to question it should have been made – and then the refusals to answer public-interest questions should have been reported.
The issuing of this statement and the reporting of it by the BBC in Jersey serves as yet another example of the mainstream media in Jersey working in lock-step with conflicted and dysfunctional public authorities in the island – whilst independent journalists such as bloggers strive to get to the truth and are obstructed at every turn.
Given the capture and co-option of the BBC in Jersey by the island’s oligarchy – and the kind of de facto pro-active support for failed, dysfunctional public-authorities as exhibited by the BBC on the morning of the 21st October – it is hardly so surprising that this CoI should happily accommodate the BBC and exclude bloggers at the suggestion of BBC hacks such as Robert Hall.
This is how the concealment of child-abuse happens – this is how public authorities responsible for child-protection failures avoid public scrutiny and accountability: collusion between these authorities and the traditional media.
Ironic, then – is it not – to see that very same syndrome now being engaged in by the actual CoI which is supposed to be investigating how the decades of child-abuse were concealed.
Yes – here it is – hiding in plain sight. This CoI has become a part of the Culture-of-Concealment.
Representatives of the mainstream media – such as the BBC for example – and past & current employees such as Liz McKean (now a spin-doctor to this CoI) – and Robert Hall – are witnesses who should be called and questioned by any effective public inquiry – not given privileged treatment over and above citizen media journalists who have had to step into the vacuum where the “accredited” Fourth-Estate should have been.
The banning of bloggers – given the evidenced, historic facts of the reportage of the decades of child-abuse in Jersey and the central role played by bloggers in exposing the truth – has to be regarded as another stand-alone resigning matter.
Conclusion:
The above adumbrated failings represent just a few of this CoI’s errors and incompetence.
Several of them are so serious that – even individually – they would be automatic resigning-matters.
And there is no escaping the fact that several of the failings in question are unambiguously ultra vires; that is, these issues are not mere “questions of opinion” – some mere “political” or “personal” disagreement with certain decisions of this CoI – but rather questions of pure law.
For example, any lawful tribunal has to be objective and impartial – not only in practice, but in appearance also. This CoI has – on the evidence – appeared biased – has been actually biased – and is so far off the radar-screen of being safely independent, it has actually co-opted into its mechanisms such as “evidence-gathering”, expressly and directly conflicted parties such as the senior civil servants.
All of which means that this CoI is now – irretrievably – ultra vires. In law – it cannot now redeem itself. Its processes have been contaminated, and it can therefore never constitute a “lawful tribunal”. There is simply no way back.
This Chair, her panel members – and this Committer of Inquiry must go – and go now.
A new body must be appointed – it must come into operation and take-up the evidence and testimony left by the failed CoI and from that base assemble a genuine – effective – open – compassionate – non-contaminated – independent – competent – public inquiry.
Issued on 21st October, 2014 – by Stuart Syvret
Former Health & Social Services Minister and the first public figure in Jersey to identify and speak-out against the decades of concealed child-abuse.
Stuart Syvret
Children’s Rights campaigner
Human Rights campaigner
Independent journalist.
Andrew Lewis – Candidate for Deputy in St. Helier 3/4 District
Andrew Lewis – right – the man who lied to the Jersey parliament to help sabotage a child-abuse investigation
The Man Who Sabotaged the Rule-of-Law
By Illegally Suspending the Police Chief –
Then Lied to the Jersey Parliament about it.
“With hindsight the Chief Officer now sees these actions as those of a corrupt and malicious administration resolved to trample over every rule of fairness and justice in an effort to break the spirit and resolve of an individual who is an obstacle to their plans and intentions. It did not work.
“What they in fact achieved was to initiate a long running and divisive controversy which is alive more than three years afterwards, and which in terms of reputational damage and cost exceeds anything which they may have been seeking to avoid. Their malice is matched only by their stupidity and incompetence.”
Statement by Graham Power, Queens Police Medal, 3rd July 2012.
In some ways the candidacy of Andrew Lewis in this “election” epitomises all that is rotten – all that is oppressive and fundamentally anti-democratic and unsafe – in the Jersey body-politic every bit as much as the candidacy of Philip Bailhache.
Both men have abused power – abused power for plainly corrupt purposes, geared towards the suppression of the proper investigation of crimes such as child-abuse, the illegal suppression of political opponents, and the unlawful sabotage of, and political hi-jacking of, Police power.
Those facts are evidenced. Indeed, for example – as Voice for Children has previously reported – the evidence proves Andrew Lewis lied to the Jersey parliament: –
“The Former Home Affairs Minister [Andrew Lewis] told the island’s Parliament (in a secret session that was never meant to see the light of day) regarding his suspension of the Former Police Chief, –
“As far as the accusation you raise about the Metropolitan Police, when I saw the preliminary report I was astounded. So much so that my actions, I believe, are fully justified. If the preliminary report is that damning, Lord knows what the main report will reveal.”
That statement, From Andrew Lewis, one can only surmise, is telling the secret parliament session that this “preliminary Report” by the MET Police into the Child Abuse Investigation is a damming indictment on the investigation under Mr. Power’s control and he [Andrew Lewis] had no other choice other than to suspend Mr. Power.
But running alongside that statement we have, in the subsequent Napier Review in paragraph 101, –
“As previously has been noted, neither Mr Lewis nor Mr Ogley saw the Interim Report. Neither did they seek to see it.””
Andrew Lewis is seeking election as a Deputy in St. Helier 3/4 district. Jersey residents might wonder what Lewis is doing in St. Helier? He formerly represented his home parish, St. John, so why isn’t he seeking election there? The answer is that to stand any chance getting elected in a rural parish you have to have the backing of at least one of the two or three factions that dominate. Today, in St. John, Andrew Lewis could not garner the support of any of them. It was made plain to him that he was not wanted in his home parish, & that if he ran he’d get no support or endorsement from the traditional factions. A fact which would have seen him come a distant last in the St. John Deputorial election.
His own people see him for the shallow, self-serving and corrupt fool he is – a man who lied to Jersey’s parliament and who played a central role as a “useful idiot” in a reprehensible and disastrous episode in Jersey’s history.
But St. Helier 3/4 district – unlike St. John with its single Deputy – has four Deputies – four seats available – four simultaneous chances to dupe the public and con them into unwittingly electing a fool and a villain. Thus it is that a garbage candidate, liar, “useful idiot” and crook – Andrew Lewis – tries to sneak in unnoticed – with the assistance of Jersey’s mainstream media which has failed to report the evidenced facts concerning his reprehensible conduct.
The voters of St. Helier 3/4 district have been failed by the establishment’s media – so, yet again in Jersey, the island’s citizen media is the only place where the public can find the facts.
And it is not as though the heritage media was alone in helping Andrew Lewis to escape from scrutiny and accountability. The same protection has been given to Lewis by big-time Freemason and fellow St. John’s resident, Constable Phil Rondel – a man directly & expressly conflicted in ways that put him at odds with the public interest. Phil Rondel chaired the last St. Helier 3/4 district hustings and refused throughout the meeting to take my question even though I’m a district resident. The Freemason Phil Rondel failed to declare his conflicts of interest, closed the meeting early, and even refused requests by several candidates to take more questions.
Seeing me in the audience, Lewis & Rondel will have known perfectly well the subject of the question I intended to ask – and were thus determined that I shouldn’t do so.
This is the question I was going to ask – and it is an important question – one which is fundamental to good-governance – and which goes to the heart of the very integrity of Jersey’s parliament: –
“Assuming the candidates to be serious in their support of effective child-protection and proper, objective policing – and understanding how important those issues are to the public – how could the candidates genuinely represent the community in the States if a fellow member and Home Affairs Minister, lied to them in the Jersey parliament concerning a matter of such fundamental importance as child-protection investigations and objective policing in Jersey – as former Deputy Andrew Lewis did?”
There’s only one credible and honest answer to that question – namely that no sincere politician genuinely motivated by the public good could possibly expect to effectively represent the public in their parliament if those in senior positions lie to that parliament. No honest politician could come to reasoned & well-informed judgments on crucial matters if the Minsters are so devoid of integrity that they reply to important questions with brazen falsehoods.
That is what the candidate Andrew Lewis did – when previously elected as Deputy – and when he was, for a few weeks, Home Affairs Minister.
This is what Andrew Lewis said to the Jersey parliament in an in-camera debate in November 2008: –
“I have read an alarming report from the metropolitan police which led me to this decision in the first place. I can do no more.”
And this: –
“As far as the accusation you raise about the Metropolitan Police, when I saw the preliminary report I was astounded. So much so that my actions, I believe, are fully justified. If the preliminary report is that damning, Lord knows what the main report will reveal.”
But the truth is that Andrew Lewis had not read a “preliminary report” from the Metropolitan Police.
In fact – the so-called “Interim Met Report” – which Andrew Lewis falsely claimed to have read – didn’t even exist.
As the subsequent investigation by Brian Napier later noted: –
“”As previously has been noted, neither Mr Lewis nor Mr Ogley saw the Interim Report. Neither did they seek to see it.””
As Police Chief Graham Power noted in a 2012 statement (http://voiceforchildren.blogspot.com/2012/07/former-police-chief-speaks-on.html): –
Paragraph 7 –
“7. Lewis states that I was not “asked to resign.” All parties agree on at least one thing. That is that at the start of the meeting I was asked to “consider my position.” I leave it to others to decide what is commonly understood to be meant by this statement. Interestingly Mr Lewis states “I am not at liberty to disclose the contents of the Met Report.” According to his statement to Wiltshire Police he could hardly do so given that he claims “I never saw the Metropolitan Review Document.” (Paragraph 14.) Again, it is hard to reconcile these two statements.”
And paragraph 8 –
“In his recent statement Lewis refers to the typed notes which are alleged to be a true record of the disciplinary meeting and says “Mr Power has never corresponded with me to the effect that they did not reflect the meeting.” In a letter addressed to the Minister dated 1st December 2008 I begin “Dear Minister.” I then go on to list a number of issues. In paragraph 5 and 6 I refer to the alleged typed notes of the meeting and list areas of the notes which I consider to be untrue. On 5th December 2008 I received a reply which had been sent on the Ministers behalf. I have copies of both letters. The recent claim by Lewis that “Mr Power has never corresponded with me to the effect that they (the notes) did not reflect the meeting” is a further transparent falsehood and can be shown to be so.”
Graham Power was the best Police Chief Jersey has ever had. A man of intelligence, compassion, bravery – and impeccable integrity. How else can it have been that the decades of concealed-child-abuse we are now hearing of, from the survivors, were never investigated by any previous Police Chief or Police Force in Jersey’s history?
The unfortunate public of Jersey – lied to by the establishment – and kept in-the-dark by the Jersey establishment media – now runs the risk of having a liar & a spiv – Andrew Lewis – again in our parliament – and again a fool and an enemy of the public good and an enemy of the vulnerable – a man who epitomises inadequacy as much as Graham Power embodies integrity.
Mr Power goes on to say in his 2012 statement: –
“Having concluded my comments on the recent release by Andrew Lewis, I now offer the following thoughts:
Among all of the conflicting accounts and confusion a number of things appear to be evident. Nobody appears to dispute that important evidence, in the form of the original record of the suspension meeting was wilfully destroyed.
There is evidence that suspension documents which bore the date 12th November 2008 and which claimed to be in response to information received the previous day, were, shall we say, deficient in authenticity.
There is an apparent conflict between things said in the legally admissible statement made by Andrew Lewis and the things which he is saying now. There might be an explanation for this, although none is immediately apparent.”
In fact – as the evidence already discovered and published by Jersey citizen media blogs such as Voice for Children, Rico Sorda and here shows – the Jersey establishment were secretly planning the suspension of the Police Chief for months before November 2008.
If you are interested in the truth – in evidence – you can read it in the postings at the links below; postings in which Jersey’s citizen media journalists have defended the public-interest & reported the facts.
If you live in St. Helier 3/4 district – and you were to allow yourself to be hoodwinked into voting for the low liar and crook Andrew Lewis – not only would you be failing yourself, you would be failing the community of Jersey. It would be another sad case of the-government-you-deserve.
We must have people of calibre – and of integrity – in our parliament. Andrew Lewis possesses neither of those qualities.
Support objective policing – support vulnerable children who need protection – support the proper and impartial rule of law – begin to gain a parliament of integrity: don’t vote for Andrew Lewis.
Stuart Syvret
KEY ARTICLES BY JERSEY CITIZEN MEDIA:
http://voiceforchildren.blogspot.com/2010/09/napier-report-imminent.html
Sunday, 26 September 2010
http://ricosorda.blogspot.com/2012/01/matt-tapp-files-7-operation-tuma.html
TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2012
http://voiceforchildren.blogspot.com/2012/07/former-police-chief-speaks-on.html
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
http://ricosorda.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-transcript-of-in-camera-debate.html
SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2012
#Jsy2014 – The Government You Deserve
This is a picture of Philip Ozouf.
Philip Ozouf – the first finance & economics politician in Jersey’s modern history to have generated and presided over a budget deficit. That’s a fail, Phil.
Philip Ozouf is so utterly toxic – so Machiavellian, divisive and maddened with petty hatreds, arrogance & calculating duplicity – that his reputation goes before him. Even many of those in Jersey who don’t maintain a keen interest in local politics have a sense of the poisonous cloud which envelops him.
Those more familiar with Jersey politics know the truth even better.
The labyrinthine plottings and triangulations of Phil Ozouf – the schemings, manipulations, betrayals, brattish sense of entitlement and delusional megalomania that surrounds him and his courtiers – boils away in the corridors of power like some dark carcinoma in the heart of the Jersey polity.
But – this is Jersey. So the average stake-holder in the island – well, at least those that matter, like the wealthy, the moneyed, the land-owners, lawyers and rentiers – have cared not that Ozouf poisons all he touches and endarkens every administrative endeavour. All such things were forgivable – indeed, just fine, actually – provided he delivered on one thing. That thing was being the Safe Pair Of Hands on Jersey’s purse-strings.
Philip Ozouf had one job – and one job only: to deliver calm, reliable stability to Jersey’s taxation, economic and financial environment. The one job that mattered in particular: managing Jersey’s public finances.
He failed.
And not just a little bit.
He has failed on a sustained basis – failed year after year.
Failed so badly – he is the first ever politician in Jersey’s modern history with responsibility for public finances – to have presided over a budget deficit.
And not just a little deficit.
A £95 million deficit.
With – in truth – no sign of that going away – and no plan B.
He has been involved in managing Jersey’s public finances, in one capacity or another, during most of his time as a States member – and he has failed throughout.
He has failed from back in the days of the old Finance & Economics Committee – from back in the mid-2000s – when he was involved in producing and driving through the policies which saw Jersey surrendering most of its then taxation base – company taxation – with no real, competent idea how that would be replaced.
And in particular, getting Jersey’s taxation policies right really, really mattered from 2004, when international pressure against Jersey’s tax-shelter fiscal regime became very intense.
2004 to 2014 – and here we are – with a public-spending black-hole, a diminished tax-base, growing international pressure against off-shore finance activities, debt, creative-accounting – and a £95 million budget deficit.
Philip Ozouf stands – with this smoking wreckage at his feet. It is his deficit – his failure.
For it is not as though the various challenges – the problems, the risks, and the many diverse possible policy responses – were unforeseeable.
They were foreseen, foreseen by me and others.
We told you so.
The detailed proposition and accompanying report I reproduce below was written by me, and taken to debate in the Jersey parliament ten years ago – 2004. What I did was identify a number of the problems, issues, challenges and possible solutions, and I asked the Jersey parliament to simply undertake a detailed, evidenced, public study. Naturally, the Jersey parliament being what it is, the proposition was rejected, so the research-tasks I identified were never undertaken.
Philip Ozouf was at the forefront of opposing the report & proposition I reproduce below – and now he – and sadly, Jersey – confronts the consequences of the strategic failure to competently address economic and taxation policy.
Philip Ozouf had only, really, one task in the polity – competently managing public finances. And he didn’t even get that right.
Philip Ozouf is so toxic – such a foul source of division, suspicion, disunity & petty self-interested wars, that it will – actually – take generations to heal the conflicts and divisions he has sown in the Jersey body-politic.
Just as it will take generations to fix the catastrophic mess Philip Ozouf has made of Jersey’s public finances.
Stuart Syvret
Taxation Policies: A Transparent Inquiry
Report & Proposition written by Stuart Syvret 2004
Rejected by the Jersey parliament 2004.
PROPOSITION
THE STATES are asked to decide whether they are of opinion –
that before asking the States to consider its taxation proposals the Finance and Economics Committee be required, in co-operation with other Committees of the States and States members, to undertake a transparent enquiry into the taxation policies of the Island, and specifically –
(a) to commission and make available to all States members an independent risk assessment of the Committee’s tax proposals with particular reference, but not limited to, the likely acceptability of the proposed rate of 0% corporation tax to the European Union and the OECD over the medium and long term;
(b) in co-operation with other Committees of the States to investigate and report upon the likely social and economic impacts of the taxation proposals contained in the Finance and Economics Committee document “Facing up to the Future”, with particular reference, but not limited to, the effects upon –
(i) individuals and families across both income and wealth spectrums;
(ii) the cost of living in the Island;
(iii) the labour market and employment trends;
(iv) local businesses;
(v) population trends;
(vi) States’ income;
(vii) the provision of services by the States, and the likely future role of ‘user pays charges’;
(c) to produce and publish a strategic analysis of the risks, effects, opportunities and economic alternatives faced by the Island in a potential post-financial services industry future, such analysis to include positive strategic proposals for the community should such an outcome occur;
(d) to produce and make available to all States members a list of all reports, advisory notes and analysis produced either in whole or in part at public expense, concerning taxation and economic issues during the last 10 years;
(e) to produce and publish a plain English description of all tax planning/avoidance mechanisms and devices available under the present taxation regime, such description to include, as far as possible, an estimate of the tax foregone;
(f) to produce and publish a plain English description of all tax planning/avoidance mechanisms and devices that might be available under the proposed regime, such description to include, as far as possible, an estimate of the tax potentially foregone;
(g) to produce and publish a detailed examination of the opportunities for applying wealth taxes, including, but not limited to, capital gains tax;
(h) to produce and publish a detailed analysis of the fiscal impacts and opportunities presented by the Island’s accommodation industry, such analysis to include –
(i) a detailed consideration of the flow of public money into the accommodation industry,
(ii) a detailed description of the tax planning/avoidance mechanisms available to and furnished by the accommodation industry, such description to include, as far as possible, an estimate of the amount of tax revenue foregone in unlimited interest tax relief to activity within the accommodation industry,
(iii) a detailed examination of the opportunities for applying capital gains tax to the accommodation industry,
(iv) a detailed examination of the opportunities for applying development taxation to the accommodation industry,
(v) a detailed examination of the opportunities for applying commercial property taxes to the accommodation industry, and such examination to take into consideration potential reforms to the parish rates system,
(vi) a detailed examination of the opportunities for applying a Land Valuation Tax, and such examination to take into consideration potential reforms to the parish rates system;
(i) to produce and publish a detailed examination of the opportunities and effects of potential taxes and charges upon the labour market, such examination to include, but not be limited to –
(i) payroll taxes upon employers, taking into account potential sectoral variations,
(ii) a training levy, taking into account potential sectoral variations,
with such examination to include the potential reform of the Social Security system;
(j) to produce and publish a detailed examination of the opportunities and effects of introducing sectoral taxes, such examination to include, but not be limited to, utility taxes;
(k) to produce and publish a detailed examination of the potential opportunities and effects of environmental taxation;
(l) to produce and publish, on the basis of both existing information and information produced as a result of the above proposals, a full menu of all taxation options to facilitate informed public debate.
SENATOR S. SYVRET
REPORT
From time to time political discourse in the Island is gripped by issues that seem of great significance at the time. Occasionally the subject may be a single issue, the apparent significance of which can quickly fade. With other subjects, the issue may be of more lasting importance to the community; the process of reforming our system of government may fall into this category. Yet even that subject, consuming as it has vast amounts of political time and effort, almost pales into insignificance compared to the future of the Island’s economy.
The security and confidence people have in their lives, for their families and subsequent generations, depends upon their financial security, which in turn depends upon the economy. This is certainly reflected in public interest. Few subjects can ignite impassioned public concern as surely as matters of money.
Since the publication of the report of the Finance and Economics Committee, and the accompanying report by consultants, ‘OXERA’, I have discussed tax and spend issues with people from all parts of the community – parents, students, professionals pensioners, working people from all walks of life. What I have found most striking when speaking with people is their shared perception – admittedly expressed in different ways – that we, that is the States and the broader community, don’t fully understand the issues; we don’t really know what is happening and we’re not in a position to take a sober look at all of the possibilities facing the community. And that perception is accurate.
I have spoken to people working in the finance industry, all of whom have expressed some degree of concern at what is being proposed, sometimes for differing reasons. Virtually all of these conversations have involved people asking me what I – and my fellow States members – make of x or y possibility? What do we think of doing A versus B? What analysis has been undertaken into this or that scenario?
The shocking truth is that I, along with most other States members, am simply in a state of virtual ignorance when confronted with these types of hard questions which go to the very heart of the future of our community – its ability to survive economically.
Can it be acceptable that, when making the most significant changes to Jersey’s tax structure since the introduction of income tax in 1928, most members of our government, upon whom our community are depending to make the right choices, could not honestly begin to speak in an informed way about most of the issues raised in this proposition or the Finance and Economics Committee’s proposals? It is not acceptable.
The extensive proposition above represents an amalgam of the ideas, fears, questions and concerns put to me by Islanders over recent weeks, as well as some thoughts of my own. It will perhaps be argued that the tasks required by the proposition are extensive and perhaps therefore too demanding. It simply cannot be so. Surely much detailed work relating to the very questions posed in the proposition must have already been undertaken? How else can such a narrow set of proposals as the preferred option of the Finance and Economics Committee be so confidently espoused, if not from a position of great knowledge? If these questions and issues can occur to many people from all parts of our community, the Island’s government cannot continue without addressing them. To do so would be to willingly embrace a state of ignorance whilst making the most important decisions faced by the community for many decades. We cannot proceed on that basis. The proposition requires the Finance and Economics Committee to work on these tasks in co-operation with other States Committees and States members. Only by embracing such teamwork and co-operation can we fully address this major challenge.
I address each part of the proposition below.
(a) A RISK ANALYSIS
There is no evidence in the furnished documentation that a detailed risk analysis has been undertaken. Have representatives of Jersey sat down with representatives of the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and spoken with them? Have we put our proposed 0%/10% structure before them and asked if it is likely to satisfy them in the medium and long-term? We know from recent communications that representatives of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man have been in detailed negotiations with the E.U. Commission’s legal advisers concerning the status of Protocol 3 in the context of the proposed new European Constitution. If this type of detailed negotiation can give us long-term security as far as our present Protocol 3 rights are concerned, has there been a similar negotiating process concerning 0%/10%? If so, what was the outcome? What is the long-term prognosis? If such negotiation has not taken place, why not?
It seems essential that the European Union must accept that it meets their requirements that a Jersey company owned by a Jersey person be taxed differently from a Jersey company owned by a non-Jersey person. If the E.U. does not accept this position – then the entire scheme falls flat on its face. After all what’s really the difference between these proposals and that which prevails now, when Jersey people pay more tax on Jersey companies than non-Jersey people do?
Having spoken to people in the finance industry, the more optimistic of them imagine that the 0%/10% proposals will keep the wolves of external pressure from our door for up to 10 years. The less optimistic give it 5 years. Where is the risk analysis? There is a real risk that growing international pressure upon what are claimed to be “harmful tax practices” will eventually dramatically reduce the scope and scale of the finance sector. The Democratic candidate for President of the United States, Senator John Kerry, has publicly promised to crack down on Britain’s tax havens. The Massachusetts Senator is known to take a tough line on ‘offshore’ activities, promising to tackle the British overseas dependant territories of Bermuda and the Cayman Islands within 500 days of taking office. Whilst some may not perceive this as a particular threat – at this time – to the Crown Dependencies, the international trend is plain.
And what are we to make of the supposed “20% means 20%” rule robustly espoused by the documents in certain sections, when other sections freely accept that “20% means 20%” won’t be the deal faced by the particularly wealthy with their negotiated settlement arrangements? What are professional individuals and couples who will be dramatically hit by the proposals to make of this outcome? What risk assessment has been made of the social and labour market impacts? Will it be the case that those hit by the “20% means 20%” rule will leave the Island, or is it in fact anticipated that the rule can be avoided in order to keep those key people whose services are essential?
What of the impact of the regressive and inflationary nature of many of the proposals? Already high-street prices are generally higher than the Isle of Man, and they have a 17.5% VAT rate. Has recent research been done as to why our prices are so much higher? If not, why not? Even if it were proven that the Island’s market could in fact absorb some form of sales tax, would not its introduction have to wait until the Competition Law had been introduced and its capacity to reduce prices had been observed and proven?
Given that inflation has long been acknowledged as a significant problem in Jersey there is every likelihood that the introduction of a sales tax will have a higher inflationary impact than indicated in the reports. No attempt appears to have been made to accurately assess the cost burden upon small businesses of the introduction of a sales tax. It is important to recognise that a General Sales Tax (GST) is not the same as VAT. As a consequence it could really increase costs for local businesses. Nor does there seem to be any serious appraisal of the costs of administering this tax both by the States and by business, to determine whether a 5% rate would actually contribute serious revenue, and at what cost, to the States.
Nor has any serious attempt been made to analyse the impact of the introduction of such a tax upon the Tourism industry which has already been decimated by, amongst other factors, inflationary pressure in Jersey, making the Island an expensive destination. Given this impact, how seriously are we to take the asserted wish to broaden the economic base of the Island? This is without even considering the highly regressive nature of many of the proposals and the consequent impact upon ordinary people. This last point has to be of particular concern, given that we already face central London living costs, and it is simply impossible to guarantee that – once the psychological barrier of introducing such a tax has been overcome – we will not eventually find ourselves with a 17.5% rate, matching that of the U.K., just like the Isle of Man.
Given there are a variety of down-sides to the proposals, surely the least we must demand is a thorough risk-analysis which assesses whether the measures have any likelihood of actually working in the long-run?
(b) THE IMPACT OF THE PROPOSALS
The preferred option of the Finance and Economics Committee would clearly have a number of very significant impacts. Some of these may be obvious; others less so. Would it really be acceptable for the Island’s government to agree to the introduction of such dramatic changes in its tax policies without an analysis of the impacts and effects of such policy changes – especially as many of them will be irreversible?
Much ad-hoc analysis and comment from different quarters has already identified some of the likely impacts and effects, but we cannot rely for guidance on this most important of subjects upon fragmented, individual attempts to assess specific effects. The community of Jersey already faces central London living costs – and these are inescapable in an island environment where we cannot commute to a cheaper region. What effect will the regressive nature of these proposals have upon the less well-off in our community? Economically, how many more expensive state interventions will be required to enable ordinary working people to simply live in their Island?
The issue is clear; a variety of effects and impacts will flow from these – and in fairness, any other – significant changes to our tax structure. The Island’s government simply has no choice other than to assess and quantify as far as possible the consequences of such policy changes.
(c) AFTER THE GOLD RUSH
Whatever the future may actually hold, there is clearly a very real risk that the financial services industry could cease to be a significant part of the Island’s economy. Even some people in the industry will privately acknowledge that its days may be numbered. There are several, clearly identifiable factors that could drive ‘offshore’ to near extinction as far as Jersey is concerned.
The most well-known of these is external pressure at a national or international level. The Island has been extensively criticised in the past by authorities in other jurisdictions for allegedly facilitating money-laundering. Whilst the Island does now co-operate on this matter with other authorities, and has had in place for some time now ‘all crimes money laundering legislation’, still external criticism and pressure remains, for new reasons. Now the target is “harmful tax practices”. The OECD and the European Union have both demonstrated their hostility to what they perceive as “harmful tax competition”. A major factor in driving the 0%/10% proposals has been the need to attempt to satisfy the E.U. requirement of equal treatment of resident and non-resident entities. However, as explained previously, there is a very real possibility that the 0%/10% proposal will not placate the E.U. Indeed, it seems likely that the only reason the 0%/10% proposal could be said to ‘legally’ meet the E.U. requirement is poor drafting and lack of foresight on the part of the E.U. team who prepared their position document. Let us be clear; the objective of the government forces behind the E.U. pressure is to stop what they perceive to be a haemorrhaging of tax revenue to offshore jurisdictions. They are most unlikely to forego this objective simply because of some legalistic jiggery-pokery on the part of the Crown Dependencies.
Competition with other jurisdictions could render the whole exercise futile. We are already engaged in a race to the bottom with Guernsey and the Isle of Man. Competing against other jurisdictions on this basis is clearly a game that none of the communities can win. Where does the concept of tax competition end? How are we to know that 0% will satisfy our clients? How long before the “look through” provision seems excessive in terms of ‘operating costs’ in comparison to other jurisdictions? It can only be remarked that it is quite extraordinary and bizarre that there appears to have been no attempt by the ruling elites in any of the 3 Crown Dependencies to engage in a non-competition treaty or convention. The 0% race to the bottom can clearly have only one outcome and that is economic harm to the 3 communities, greater social hardship, a significantly greater transfer of the tax burden on to the shoulders of ordinary people – and, of course, a significant reduction in real tax-take from Island businesses, and the elites who own them due to greatly increased opportunities for tax planning. Though, naturally, this last outcome is purely co-incidental.
Another factor that must be faced is the growing international influence of anti-offshore campaigns. A number of highly respected NGOs are now openly critical of ‘offshore’ facilitated tax avoidance. For example OXFAM has produced an extensive report identifying a vast cash loss from developing countries to offshore centres. They claim that the ability of corporations and corrupt elites to use offshore to “launder profits” is contributing dramatically to the plight of the world’s poor. This pressure can only grow as it is not only an issue to developing countries. With aging populations and ever more costly social infrastructure, developed nation states are increasingly aware of the need to capture tax revenue for their own populations, especially when having to contend with an international trend to lower taxes due to the mobility of capital and globalisation. It may simply be the case that nations and blocs such as the E.U. will simply have no choice other than to shut out of the game small jurisdictions that specialise in tax avoidance. And no matter how much we may correctly protest that they’re not applying a level playing field, they are unlikely to be deflected. We can get some measure of the growing international hostility to offshore from the fact that the Democratic candidate in the U.S. Presidential elections John Kerry, has made anti-offshore commitments as part of his election platform.
When considered in this light the 0%/10% proposals look more and more like a short-term palliative measure and less and less like the required structural re-configuration of the Island’s tax structure. If there is a real risk of the 0%/10% proposals doing little more than buying us a few years’ breathing space, have we attached sufficient weight to the downside of the proposals? Have we taken a robust enough view of the possible alternatives? Especially when such alternatives may prove longer lived?
Extremely unpalatable as it may be, we simply cannot ignore a possible future without the financial services industry. What would such a loss mean to the community? What would be its impact? How would we pick up the pieces? How would we move on? Quite obviously, the foundation of the Island’s economy is the financial services sector, if that sector were to go, the resultant significant unemployment would lead to emigration and a crash in the accommodation industry, the second tier of the Island’s economy.
So what is of particular importance is the question of what we can do now – whilst the going is good – to prepare, whilst we can, for what may be an economic meltdown, and to perhaps adopt policies in the present, that will ameliorate some of the harm.
It is the purported aim of the Finance and Economics Committee to broaden the economic base of the Island. We must ask how serious an objective this is when the tax proposals seem geared entirely to the interest of wealth-holders, the finance sector and big businesses, and to be actually regressive and harmful to the concerns of small businesses and grass-roots entrepreneurship. The policies advocated by the Finance and Economics and Policy and Resources Committees would actually be counter-productive and damaging to the Island’s post ‘offshore’ opportunities and chances. Our culture, our quality of life, our heritage, our environment – the beauty of our Island, will be further damaged and eroded by these short-term ‘cash in while we can’ policies. The more our unique selling points are eroded the less likely we will be able to build a future based upon tourism, culture, arts, our environment, agriculture, international events and festivals and education. If we do not both finally arrest the damage being done to the Island, and begin to gather wealth from capital rich activities in the Island to invest in our future, we will clearly be acting against the interests of our community beyond the next decade.
Real opportunities exist for real economic diversification, if only our elites would accept it. The recently published ‘Draft Culture Strategy’, an excellent, bold and imaginative document, states at one point –
“The Finance Industry. This is suffering turbulence post 9/11 and as a result of the ending of the dot com boom. The faltering of the industry, and its subsequent rationalisation, has led to decreasing sponsorship for cultural activities. The contraction of the industry and the recognition of the over-dependence of the Island on this one sector, provides the opportunity for the development of the commercial creative industries. For the near future, these are likely to be small scale but will help to diversify the Island’s economy. They will also attract other business sectors.” (My emphasis)
Should not our policies be geared, at least in part, towards developing this kind of future for the Island? Another sector we must consider is the development of a Jersey University. Yes, at present this may seem a distant objective. It would require dramatic investment, expert strategic development and the development of St. Helier as a ‘campus town’. These developments would require an influx of staff and students, which at present may appear problematic from a population perspective – but if we find ourselves experiencing a population decline in the event of a serious contraction of the financial services sector, we may be extremely glad of such an avenue of replacement. With the attractiveness of the Island, its weather, its beaches and nightlife, Jersey could become an extremely attractive destination for a couple of thousand students to spend 3 or 4 years doing their higher education. The development of Jersey University would of course generate a significant range of other business opportunities in the Island.
(d) INFORMED DECISION-MAKING BY STATES MEMBERS
I looked around the States Chamber during a recent Sitting and asked myself ‘of the 53 members – the people whom have the responsibility of making these most vital decisions on behalf of our community, how many of us will be fully informed? How many States members will have undertaken detailed study of the research prepared at public expense by our departments? Come the day of debate, how many of us will be able to pronounce on these issues with anything approaching real authority and understanding?’ The answer to this question is terrifying.
The plain fact is that most States members have been, either by accident or design, kept out of informed involvement in the policy formulation process. Private individuals from within the finance industry have been given privileged access to the policy formulation process in a group known as FISBAG, in ways that exceed the involvement of most of the public’s elected representatives, who, by way of contrast, receive the occasional PowerPoint lecture.
I have no expertise in this field. I have limited knowledge and I have had little success in gaining unencumbered access to all of the information – despite repeated requests. Yet I get the impression that my understanding of these issues, limited though it is, exceeds that of a majority of our elected representatives. Yet I, if asked for an honest appraisal of my understanding of these subjects, would have to admit it is extremely limited. Can we rush into these decisions without making some effort to ensure we are as informed as possible? Simply, the answer is no. Frankly, a vote against these proposals is a vote for ignorance; a vote for blind paternalism and a vote for ill-informed and incompetent government.
(e) TAX PLANNING AND AVOIDANCE UNDER THE PRESENT SYSTEM
It is probably fair to say that the Island’s economy, its tax and spend policies – and the consequent impact upon the lives of people are the most important political issues the Island has faced for many decades. The present attempt to address our taxation policies represents the most significant change in Island tax law since the introduction of income tax in 1928.
Given that those of us who profess to govern the Island do not possess a party political mandate for a particular set of policies, informed public consent for major policy changes is to be greatly desired. Accepting that, the present process embarked upon by the Finance and Economics Committee is manifestly woefully inadequate. How can the community be meaningfully engaged in an informed debate concerning taxation options when most ordinary people have no or little knowledge of the variety of tax planning and avoidance devices that are available to, and commonly used by, people in different wealth brackets to avoid taxation? How many people understand whether different tax planning and avoidance opportunities are available to partners in a partnership as opposed to employees? Should we not have some quantification of how much tax has been foregone by the States over the decades through our previous – and frankly disgraceful – acceptance of the “boundless” opportunities to avoid tax available to company directors? Many of these devices may well be important to the Island’s economy. That might be so, but we must at least have an informed discussion concerning them. Simply asserting that we don’t want to look under that particular rock because the rich may leave, just won’t wash anymore. Ordinary people are leaving Jersey simply because they can’t afford to live here.
Publication of information on known current tax planning and avoidance mechanisms and devices, possible abuses of such, and a quantification of their impact is, and must be, an inescapable prerequisite of informed debate.
(f) TAX PLANNING AND AVOIDANCE UNDER THE PROPOSED SYSTEM
The furnished reports suggest that Jersey companies should be subject to 0% corporate tax rate in future. This proposal dramatically intervenes in the relationship between corporate profits and salary payments and immediately suggests that people will wish to retain profits in companies for two reasons –
1: The tax on profits will be lower than the tax on salaries paid to owners.
2: There is incentive to keep profit in the company and then sell it, heavily laden with cash, to realise an apparent capital gain which will actually represent accrued income but which will be deferred income in all but name.
OXERA and the Finance and Economics Committee imagine they have got around this problem by proposing that for companies owned by Jersey resident people the income of the company will be added to the earnings of the shareholders and will be taxed as if it is part of their income. On the face of it this seems – at best – an extremely naive proposal given the fact that the existing tax structure leaks like a colander so we need not strain very hard to imagine that any new opportunity to avoid tax will be used maximally. The opportunity these proposals create for tax “planning” seem enormous.
It is feasible that the potential tax loss from the scheme could be very dramatic. Maybe £40 million of income tax could be lost to the States a year by reason of local Jersey companies and wealthy families transferring their ownership into offshore discretionary trusts in other jurisdictions and by then using various, quite easily conceivable schemes to convert income into capital gains, which when remitted to Jersey would be tax-free. In this way the entire proposed arrangement for adding income of companies to that of their owners could be avoided.
It’s worse than that though. The self-employed are paying £40 million of tax a year according to the 2004 budget and they might see that by incorporating their businesses and going offshore using the devices available in other jurisdictions, they too could save substantial amounts of tax. This added to the possible £40 million company loss brings the total possible tax planning loss to £80 million a year. And this, I stress is on top of the £100 million a year already foregone.
Of course it can be argued that the de facto owners of these companies will need something to live on so the trusts that own the shares in what used to be their companies will now have to pay them something. Under the Jersey tax code this might mean recipients are taxable on that payment in Jersey. This is true, but only partially so. Because Jersey does not have a capital gains tax, if the trust generates a capital gain, and the distribution from the trust is structured in the form of capital, it would not be liable for tax in Jersey.
It is quite possible to envisage other scenarios. Jurisdictions which have lower, or even 0% rates of personal taxation, could suddenly find themselves doing a roaring trade in welcoming expatriates from Jersey. The erstwhile Jersey resident company-owner will be paying tax – if paying anything – in their new host jurisdiction while their company pays 0% in Jersey. It is said that only death and taxes are inescapable. Well, we seem to be defeating the tax part of that equation.
I, in common with most States members, am no expert on taxation. But we have the responsibility to make these profound decisions on behalf of our community. It would be the grossest irresponsibility to make these decisions in a state of ignorance. Before the new tax regime is agreed, we must avoid the mistakes of the past and be aware of every tax planning and avoidance device and mechanism that may be available under the new proposals.
(g) TAXING WEALTH AND CAPITAL GAINS
The Finance and Economics Committee document asserts that “A general wealth tax or capital gains tax would not be consistent with Jersey’s position as a location for international financial services, and could seriously harm Jersey’s international reputation.”. This assertion rings extremely hollow, in the light of the fact that it is accepted international practice to have a different capital gains tax regime depending upon resident or non-resident status. Thus the E.U. requirement for equal tax treatment for localised -v- non-localised clients simply would not apply. When considered in this light, a carefully structured capital tax regime could appear to be an attractive option given the current international pressure on the Island. Clients of the Island’s financial services industry could continue to receive a competitive treatment, whilst capital gains made by on-Island individuals and entities would attract the relevant tax – this being entirely consistent with international practice – though obviously this policy would be much less attractive to local business and land-owning elites. Such a policy may require some anti-avoidance legislation to capture the local tax, but probably a good deal less than the 0%/10% proposal. Indeed, in respect of capital gain made in the highly developed local accommodation industry it would probably be difficult to avoid if some changes were made to the rules governing property ownership. I personally would not favour a capital gains tax on profit made on the sale of the principle place of residence, although such a tax upon the residences of the super-rich may be a good way of ensuring they contribute more to society. But we need not go as far as capital taxing ordinary households in any event. There is quite clearly so much speculative and commercial property transaction in the Island that a capital tax on this activity may, by itself, become a highly useful component in the Island’s tax system.
I am happy to concede that, as a non-expert in these matters, there may be reasons why the suggestions above may not be so easy to apply. I can, however, be absolutely certain of this much: The glib dismissal of such an approach in 4 paragraphs, after at least 3 years’ work, simply won’t wash.
“INCOME” OR WEALTH STREAM
Could it be that the hostility to wealth and capital taxes has, in fact, more to do with local elites than the harsh fiscal reality facing the community? Let’s face it, if you happen to be in the fortunate position of having a significant wealth stream – let’s not call it ‘income’ for the avoidance of confusion – and you ask an accountant to minimise your tax burden, one of the first things they will do is engineer your affairs so that the wealth stream becomes just that – not income – but instead a capital accrual and – hey presto! No tax liability because we don’t have capital gains tax in Jersey. These types of capital accrual opportunities have, incidentally, been readily furnished by the Island’s accommodation industry over the decades.
Avoiding tax by finding ways of rolling up income into a capital gain has long been the ‘Great Game’ of tax avoidance in Jersey. There are a large number of ‘wealth-holders’ in Jersey (the wealthy immigrant 1(1)(k)s are, frankly, merely the tip of an iceberg and the pressure on 1(1)(k)s is simply to not do what the existing local rich do). The majority of these wealth-holders [company owners, landlords, significant property owners, professional classes with saved wealth] will have arranged their affairs to maximise (untaxed) capital gain and minimise (taxed) income. In the complete absence of any, even slight attempt to tax this wealth gain, any talk of the proposals of the Finance and Economics Committee being balanced or fair can be seen for the transparent nonsense that it is. Take for example the graph ‘Figure 1’ on page 6 of the Finance and Economics Committee report. The accompanying caption states: “The above chart indicates that only around 10% of household income is available to tax above a (gross) household income threshold of £80,000. As a result, tax measures that are exclusively aimed at households with high incomes do not yield particularly large amounts of tax revenue. The Committee has taken income distribution into account in formulating its preferred option.” It is important to note here the very particular use of the phrase “income available to tax”. What if we were, for the purposes of this exercise, to substitute the word “wealth”, or perhaps “capital accrual” or perhaps “wealth stream not available to tax under the present regime”? If we then considered that in fact under new measures that did bring these wealth streams into a category available to tax, aimed at households with high “wealth” or “wealth streams”, might we then get a rather different picture of possible taxation options?
There is another – altogether less palatable – yet profoundly important reason why the Island must embrace some form of wealth and capital taxes whilst it still can.
ASSET-STRIPPING THE COMMUNITY
The Island’s economy is virtually entirely dependent upon the foundation of the financial services industry. Most of the remaining successful economic activity in the Island grows from it. Without its money in the Island’s economy there would be precious few jobs, hence an exodus of people, a collapse in the property market, and a similar collapse in most other aspects of significant economic activity. Such is the level of dependency upon the financial services industry, that if its scope and scale were to be dramatically reduced in the future, or even if it were to be shut down completely, the Island would undergo complete economic meltdown.
It is to be greatly hoped that such a scenario does not occur; but if it did? What does the Island of Jersey have to show for the ‘gold-rush’ years by way of an ‘insurance policy’? A strategic reserve that would struggle to keep essential services running for one year. It has been speculated, by people with knowledge of the industry, that it may have 10 years left; at least in its present, significant form. The Island’s government must, as an insurance policy, be seeking to secure more tax income now, whilst the opportunity still exists. It has been suggested to me that businesses and individuals with capital assets in the Island, such as significant companies and/or property, will seek to, as it were, “cash their chips” in the form of capital gain generating sales of assets, now, whilst the ‘going is still good’. Indeed, it has been suggested to me that that process has already begun. If people with their finger on the pulse of business in the Island are starting to speak privately in this way, surely the time is now, that the States must introduce at least some form of capital tax. As stated earlier, it is to be hoped that such a scenario does not materialise. But should there be only comparatively few years left of “boom time”, the Island’s government has a duty to secure an appropriate tax-take from what may be a significant cashing-in on capital assets in the Island. Should the financial services industry go, the community would need a significantly larger reserve than that presently available to enable us to cushion the blow. Should the States sit back and watch a potential tax income stream pass by in a welter of private capital gain in the next decade, knowing that times may become much harder for the Island’s people?
The proposals of the Finance and Economics Committee have been described to me by one Jersey Accountant as “A smash-and-grab raid. Pure and simple. These policies have been designed to suit the local rich. The supposed capturing through personal tax on the owners, of the money lost to the 0% has got to be a joke, it’ll be so easy to avoid. And no capital gains tax? Well, there’s a surprise!”
(h) SCOPING THE ACCOMMODATION INDUSTRY
The attitude of the States to the Island’s accommodation industry has been akin to a person finding an elephant in a friend’s sitting-room but only making polite conversation about their choice of curtains. Quite obviously the foundation of our modern wealth is the financial services industry. And just as obviously, the second major area of economic activity in the Island is the accommodation industry – land ownership, rentier wealth and income, property investment and speculation, development activities, the construction industry, associated mercantile businesses, maintenance industries, property financing, conveyancing, the sale and purchase of residential accommodation, the residential rental property market, the sale and purchase of commercial accommodation, the commercial rental and leasehold property market. It is quite possible that the total economic value of activity in this sector taken as a whole over the last few decades runs to billions of pounds – and yet the Island’s government has never approached it as a distinctive taxable entity in this way, preferring to pretend that it doesn’t exist. How great might our reserves be if we had a sensible tax policy in respect of the accommodation industry? How much have we lost? Is it in fact the case that the Island has simply been used as a piece of money-making apparatus in the last few decades, with precious little regard for the community’s long-term security?
No analysis of the Island’s economy and its taxation policies can have any claim to be taken seriously if it ignores the accommodation industry – as the furnished documents virtually have. The Finance and Economics Committee document ‘Facing up to the Future’ – which Orwellianly does the opposite of that – devotes how much analysis to the accommodation industry? In just one paragraph on pages 8/9 it dismisses capital gains tax and property taxes – and that is all the attention it gets.
The OXERA report in 3 paragraphs beginning on page 16 dismisses wealth taxes such as capital gains and property taxes without further discussion. That is obviously a wholly inadequate consideration of such an important issue when the entire economy of the Island is under review.
The Island’s government is about to make the most significant changes in our taxation policies since income tax was introduced in 1928 – and the consideration given to the second largest sector of economic activity in the Island amounts to a total of 4 dismissive paragraphs. This is simply not acceptable.
This part of the proposition and its sub-paragraphs seeks to enable us to develop an understanding of the Island’s accommodation industry. Dramatic amounts of public money, principally private sector rent rebate, flow from taxpayers into the pockets of landlords. There will be other ways by which the state subsidises the industry, for example the below-cost provision of state services such as building control and planning.
The States must at last engage in a full analysis of how its taxation laws and other policies interact with the accommodation industry. At present we grant unlimited interest tax relief on all commercial borrowings. Whilst this may be common practice in other jurisdictions, certain special circumstances may apply in Jersey. For example, the state providing an artificial subsidy, which is what this provision amounts to, is inflationary, indeed highly inflationary in a market such as Jersey’s. We have recently decided to cap mortgage interest tax relief availability to home-purchasers. Yet, if you are buying to let, which is effectively engaging in a commercial venture, and which will always be inflationary in the context of Jersey’s current market – you will still have unlimited interest tax relief available upon your commercial borrowings. At the very least we should make some attempt to assess just how much potential tax take the States is forgoing through its policy of subsidising and fuelling highly inflationary property speculation.
There can be little doubt that dramatic capital gains are made by the Jersey accommodation industry. It is only by the making of such gains that prices can have reached their current levels. Furthermore due to tax planning/avoidance mechanisms it is frequently possible for the industry to accrue its wealth in the form of capital gains which we do not tax in Jersey. Have we even attempted to assess how much capital gain is made in the accommodation industry? It is likely that by not having a capital gain tax, perhaps specifically in the form of a property development or transaction tax, the States is forgoing many millions of pounds a year which we could be raising from speculative activity in the second major part of our economy, the accommodation industry. Instead, the Finance and Economics Committee would have us try and raise millions of pounds through regressive measures like GST raised upon the less well-off members of our community.
The documents furnished by the Finance and Economics Committee are blithely contemptuous in their dismissal of the concept of commercial property taxes or Land Valuation Taxes. Yet, as already pointed out, the accommodation industry is the second major sector of economic activity in the Island. The obvious great economic value of this sector must require that the Island’s government at least examine its taxation potential thoroughly. The decision of the Finance and Economics Committee to virtually ignore this possibility is simply mystifying when one considers the great difficulty in avoiding or evading such taxes, and the comparative simplicity with which they could be raised in comparison with the extreme range of anti-avoidance legislation likely to be needed to prevent the 0%/10% policy haemorrhaging potential tax-take.
(i) THE LABOUR MARKET
The Finance and Economics Committee and the Policy and Resources Committee appear to favour “growing” the economy or “expanding” the economy. This, we are told, is the answer to our problems. This is of course code for expanding the population. Essentially, business as usual. More of the same approach that has been the de facto policy of the States for the last 3 decades. If that policy has brought us to where we are now, why should it work any better in the future? The answer is of course that it won’t if we have the same labour market conditions. If – and it is a significant if – we must expand population to stimulate the economy, we must at least ensure that we take any opportunity to consider the fiscal impacts and opportunities presented by the labour market. Expanding the population has meant a greater demand for state services such as education, health and housing. A significantly increasing population has a financial cost and a significant environmental impact; traffic congestion, waste disposal and development of the countryside, to name but a few. Will we need another reservoir; another land reclamation site? The impacts of economic expansion simply through growing the population are clear to see; this has, after all been the undeclared policy of the States for some decades. If we must go down this path, we must ensure that every possible opportunity has been explored for payroll taxes, training levies, sectoral taxes and variably applying rates of social security charges. We must require this sector to internalise what are at present “externalities” – the on-costs to the Island.
If we do not take the obvious opportunity to make the labour market work for the community we will simply be repeating the failed policies of the past. Of course, simply growing the population will indeed work, as it has done hitherto, for the short-term self-interests of the Island’s business and rentier elites. A regular inflow of people means a regular supply of cheaper labour for your business; it means a regular stream of tenants for your extortionately priced lodging houses; inflation in the property market to maintain to your advantage over purchasers and tenants; a never-sated demand for new housing land, so you will continue to be able to look forward to a fat lump of capital when that farm land you own is re-zoned for housing development; and generally an increasing supply of customers for your shops, pubs and clubs. Whilst such a policy is clearly extremely beneficial in terms of short-term self-interest if you happen to be a landlord, property-owner, shop-proprietor, or local business shareholder, it has not, as presently managed, brought medium and long-term economic security for the community as a whole. What then, are we to make of the possibility of a significantly expanded population, fuelling the financial growth of local businesses – that will now pay 0% corporate tax and whose owners will be able to avail their selves of an even greater range of tax avoidance and planning opportunities? And this whilst the States must ultimately pick up the inevitable extra costs of a larger population.
Unless we make the labour market work for the Island, the prospect of a growing population under the 0%/10% regime will produce even less lasting economic security for the community than it has done to date. If simply growing the customer and labour base available to local businesses was the path to economic security, why hasn’t it worked so far? After 4 decades of this policy?
(j) SECTORAL AND UTILITY TAXES
The proposals of the Finance and Economics Committee apply, in a limited way, the concept of sectoral taxation by recommending a 10% rate of tax upon the financial services industry. Why is the concept not developed further? I have previously addressed the accommodation industry, for example. Perhaps the local motoring industry, which is extremely profitable but also imposes very significant costs upon the States, should be considered for a particular tax rate on motoring dealership franchises?
In other jurisdictions special taxes are sometimes raised from utility providers. Given that we are now beginning to see competition in some parts of the utility sector, and we may yet see privatisations, we must consider the possibilities of taxing this sector, including the possibility of ‘windfall taxes’.
(k) ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS: LOCAL AND GLOBAL
Professing a concern for the environment is extremely easy; we’re all environmentalists now. Yet in the present political climate serious consideration of environmental issues is seen as a rather quaint anachronism. Indeed, the most rigorous and extensive public consultation exercise carried out in Jersey produced the report ‘Jersey in the New Millennium: A Sustainable Future’ an extremely good report representing many months of community effort. Yet so unpalatable was this document to the customarily dominant elites in Jersey, advocating as it did less short-term cashing in, that it was immediately shelved at the very back of the cupboard. Instead we now have the comparatively paltry “Imagine Jersey” process, designed and engineered to ‘manufacture consent’ for policies that more suit the short-term interest of Island elites.
Where is our communal – and irreplaceable – asset of our environment to be found in our tax and economic policies? Virtually nowhere. We still allow companies and partnerships to include excessive and unnecessary vehicles as legitimate costs against taxation. How much sense does that make in an island of limited space and frequent urban traffic jams? Is such a policy responsible government, when our children have one of the worst rates of asthma incidence in the U.K.? Unpopular though it may be, the burdens of leadership must require us to take a hard look at the fiscal impacts and opportunities of Jersey’s manifestly excessive motoring industry.
What will be the effects of yet more, short-termist ‘go for growth’ polices upon both the urban environment, in which most of the Island’s poor live, and on the countryside, which is, regrettably, viewed by many simply as a capital asset waiting to be cashed? The policies of the last 30 years have clearly had a significant impact upon the Island’s environment. Some will claim that a good environment has a cost, and that the wealth-generating activities of the economy will bring environmental improvements. If this were a remotely credible claim we would not have to witness the disgraceful failure of the States to carry out the Island’s millennium project of creating a new Town Park in the heart of the most densely populated, deprived and poorest part of the Island.
Although this will seem an eccentric and irrelevant “externality” to some, we must also consider our impact upon the global environment. We produce more garbage per capita than New Yorkers and we have a liking for gas-guzzling cars of extremely limited value and purpose in a small island. Yet where is any sign of a meaningful carbon tax? Global climate change is a threat to us all. Indeed, some scientists predict a rapidly de-stabilising global climate in which we may see – in our lifetimes – shocking changes in weather patterns; changes that may even de-stabilise society. Should we not at least take a serious look at whether our tax policies can be considered remotely responsible in an international context, especially, as an extremely wealthy society, we are better placed to do something about our environmental impacts than the world’s poor?
(l) A FULL MENU OF OPTIONS FOR INFORMED PUBLIC DEBATE
Politicians like very much to be able to claim public support for their preferred policies. This is why the opinion management industry features so strongly in modern politics. But could we really even begin to claim public support for a particular set of tax proposals unless and until the public had access to the full menu of all taxation policy options? Nobody wants to pay more tax, yet taxation is the price we pay for living in a decent society. The Island finds itself in a situation where the reality is that we are all likely to have to pay some additional form of taxes. The community has a right to see the full range of options and be satisfied that those increasing tax burdens which may be necessary are being apportioned in a just manner.
SUMMARY
The political reaction to this proposition is of course predictable. I could write most of it now. The most obvious objection will be that the task is too large and will take too much time. This objection is easily disposed of. The Finance and Economics Committee, taken with its predecessor, have been working on the present fiscal review for at least 4 years. Prior to that, the Fiscal Review Working Group worked for some years on taxation matters. The issues and questions raised by the proposition are not novel or obscure. These are questions that have readily occurred to people who have contacted me in recent weeks, along with some of my own concerns. Surely much – if not all – of the relevant studies and data must already be available, with comparatively little remaining to be investigated? For if this is not the case, then what has actually been undertaken during the last 6 or so years? And how could Finance and Economics be quite so certain in their policy preferences if the issues raised in the last few weeks by people across the community, issues which are reflected in the proposition, remain to be addressed?
Financial and manpower statement
There will clearly be some additional financial and manpower requirements in producing the work required by the proposals. However, given the vital importance of the work, such outlay is essential. Provided that a thorough and comprehensive tax structure is put in place, the many millions of pounds produced would far outweigh any initial investment.
It should also be pointed out again that – provided successive Finance and Economics Committees have undertaken their work thoroughly – most of the studies required ought to be largely available already, perhaps simply requiring some minor expansion and up-dating.
Where is “Policing” in Jersey?
From: Stuart Syvret
To: bowron@jersey.pnn.police.uk
Chief.officer@jersey.pnn.police.uk
ChiefOfficer@jersey.pnn.police.uk
sojp@jersey.pnn.police.uk
CC: secofstate@justice.gsi.gov.uk
pcosecretariat@pco.x.gsi.gov.uk
Date: 9th September 2014 14:11
Subject: Professional Standards Complaints
Chief Officer Bowron
I am formulating a serious Professional Standards Complaint against you in your capacity as Chief Officer of the States of Jersey Police Force (SOJP).
The Complaint will also be directed against the Deputy Chief Officer of the States of Jersey Police – and its senior command structure in general.
Obviously – these matters cannot be dealt with by any systems or personnel internal to the SOJP.
Given the substance and nature of the Professional Standards Complaints – and the very significant overlap with other factors – and the ultra vires / corrupt conducts of various other public authorities and public officials in Jersey – nor can the Professional Standards Complaints be dealt with by any part of the local polity.
I would be grateful if you would provide me with a fully detailed explanation of the procedures you and the SOJP propose to use in addressing such complaints – and a fully detailed explanation as to the procedure I should adopt in making the complaints?
Thank you for your assistance.
Stuart Syvret
Former Minister for Health & Social Services
Children’s Rights & Patient Safety Campaigner
Independent Journalist
IN A POTEMKIN VILLAGE POLITY
IN A POTEMKIN VILLAGE “JURISDICTION”
The small island of Jersey is a kind of liminal quasi-jurisdiction – not part of the UK – but under British control – in a “legal” and fiscal marriage-of-convenience; a curious status-quo immensely beneficial to the British establishment at its very highest levels.
But the incapacities and corruptions of the island’s polity – the overt rot, and frank danger posed to the public by Jersey’s public administration – is no longer disguisable, and has its most high-profile manifestation in decades of concealed child-abuse.
To this very day, every part of Jersey’s public authorities – the Crown functions in particular, of policing, prosecution and judiciary – are wholly conflicted, corrupted, and pro-actively involved in concealing the concealments of those decades of the abuse of children.
But, you know, in many ways the current disastrous condition of public authority in Jersey isn’t so surprising; the island’s polity isn’t – and hasn’t ever really been – a lawful system.
It’s a Potemkin village – a sham – a fake. Mere painted cardboard, put up to disguise the toxic lawless reality behind.
It is that way – has been enabled to be that way – and is protected in being that way – by the powers in London.
Jersey is in reality run by the City of London Corporation and the associated and benefiting immensely wealthy and powerful transnational law-firms. These include the terminally conflicted Appleby Global – and Eversheds – both of which have a played a corrupt, pro-active role in the concealment of child-abuse on Jersey, so as to protect the incalculably lucrative legal-fiction that is the island’s polity.
The collection of low-grade spivs, pervert freemasons, tax-dodge-grifters, shysters in blazers and overt functional psychopaths who’ve been given licence to run the island would be swept away – in certain cases suspended, arrested, in jail on remand awaiting trial – all within 24 hours – if that was the mind of the real powers in London.
But the overt and undisguisable rank and stinking cesspit that is public-administration on Jersey suits the City of London Corporation just fine as it is.
In the main legal application to be brought against the Crown, Secretary of State for Justice and Privy Council, I write this: –
“The Jersey judicial and prosecution function is a Potemkin Village.
It is as simple as that.
With grand buildings, and fanfares, and fancy-dress, and ceremonies and stentorian posturing, the prosecution function and the judicial function – which are so overlapped and cross-contaminated in Jersey as to be indivisible in any credible sense – might, at the most fleeting of glances, give the appearance of being a real prosecution function – and a real judicial function.
They are not.
The “system” is a Potemkin village.
With a Potemkin court.
The instant you get up close to it – you see it for the painted scenery that it is. The fakery isn’t even well done. You can see the supposedly solid structures, swaying with the breeze. You go up to them – peer around the edges of the sagging cardboard and paste – and see a few silly old men and their stage-hands desperately trying to keep the painted flats propped-up with a few lengths of 2 x 4 and some bits of string – the images running & melting in the dampness – futile in the hard gale and rain of modernity.”
I was reminded of the Potemkin village nature of what passes for a polity in the Crown Dependency of Jersey when reading of the latest abusive and illegal campaign of harassment, intimidation, breaches of the Data Protection Law, and attempts to destroy careers and livelihoods engaged in by one of the Jersey oligarchy’s state-sponsored trolls.
Fellow blogger and anti-child-abuse campaigner Rico Sorda has written a series of remarkable postings which detail the many months of abuse he and his wife have suffered, which included threats to her career & health and that of her unborn child.
The postings – which include interviews with Mr Sorda – and a recording of the troll making one of his many obnoxious and threatening telephone calls – can be found here: –
http://ricosorda.blogspot.com/2014/07/jersey-cyber-stalking-part-1-our-story.html
http://ricosorda.blogspot.com/2014/08/jersey-cyber-stalker-part-2-our-story.html
http://ricosorda.blogspot.com/2014/08/jersey-cyber-stalker-part-3-our-story.html
The most remarkable thing about the postings is the detail and chronology of attempts by Rico Sorda – and his wife – to make formal criminal complaints to what passes for a policing function in Jersey – and the absolute refusal of the Jersey Police to take any protective action towards Mr & Mrs Sorda – to even investigate their complaints – to even have the courtesy to respond to e-mails.
That refusal by what passes for a Crown policing function in Jersey to investigate and protect people from crime is all the more remarkable when one considers the fact the troll – as he reveals in the telephone call – has been supplied with the private, personal income tax details of Mr Sorda by someone who has access to the public’s income tax data.
The politicised lawlessness of the Crown policing function in Jersey comes as no surprise to civil society in the island and campaigners who have sought to oppose and expose the decades of illegally concealed child-abuse.
Whilst national and international readers always find these things shocking, it is simply “The-Jersey-Way” – local, semi-ironic short-hand for the seething, fly-blown dung-heap of baksheesh, venality, freemasonry, rape, sleaze, fraud, corruption, undisguised criminality and endemic racketeering that forms the reality of life in the island beneath the cosmetics of mowed lawns, flags and ornamental cows.
Why – and how – Jersey is like this isn’t difficult to explain. Again, as I write in the main legal application against the Crown, Privy Council & Secretary of State:
“To understand what follows – it needs to be recognised that Jersey is, essentially, a feudal society; an anachronism that has survived for centuries, no matter the thin veneer of modernity. The Channel Islands were the only European territory occupied by Nazis during WWII whose indigenous power-establishments prospered and survived during – and after – those events, untroubled and unchanged. Much of the manifestly surreal dysfunction – the palpable sense of absolute power and reckless invulnerability enjoyed by the local oligarchy today – can be traced back to Crown and United Kingdom failure to hold to account and clean-up the profiteering and corrupted Jersey media, policing, prosecution and judicial functions in the immediate wake of the Nazi Occupation. To this very day – the power-structure and apparatus of Jersey is wholly analogous to a feudal “court” – in which political power, patronage, careers and law-enforcement are in the “gift” of the feudal “court”, its Barons, thanes and its “courtiers”. You are “of” the “court”, or one of its vassals – or you are an enemy of the “court” – and will be ruthlessly crushed.”
When we look at Jersey and what it is, what we observe is an actual, feudal society – with all of the inherent lawlessness – hiding in plain sight – in 21st century western Europe.
That is why a public-spirited, independent investigative journalist like Rico Sorda is not provided with the proper protections of objective policing – and his criminal abusers are encouraged and shielded. By deciding that he was going to help oppose and expose decades of concealed child-abuse, Mr. Sorda inadvertently put himself in opposition to Jersey’s feudal “court” and its decades of lawless failure to protect vulnerable children.
I’m in the same position myself, of course – having been foolish enough to think that a Social Services Minister, with express, statutory legal obligations to investigate child protection failures – should investigate child-protection failures.
I wasn’t, of course, the only senior public official with a duty to child-welfare to be oppressed for trying to carry out those duties; the same fate befell the only good Police Chief Jersey has ever had, Graham Power QPM, who made the “mistake” of believing the absolute legal requirement on the Police to enforce the law impartially, should mean just that.
Police Chief Graham Power was illegally suspended – in what will yet prove to have been a terminal act of stupidity and hubris by Jersey’s oligarchy. It seemed the “perfect solution” to them – a “stroke of genius”. The inevitable reckonings of history were bearing down upon them and decades of the routine concealments of serious crimes – not just child-abuse – were in the process of unraveling – and spilling the stinking entrails across the picture-postcard face of the Crown’s favorite tax-haven. Sex-offenders in the Crown Offices, the routine concealments of crimes in and by public sector departments, planning corruption, corporate manslaughter, battery, rape, child-rape and clinical murders; sleaze, corruption and savage, life-wrecking crimes – concealed in any case involving the well-connected, the powerful or the public-sector. The boil was about to be lanced by the first good, impartial Police Chief in Jersey’s history – so he was illegally suspended by the very corrupt apparatus whose malfeasances were being exposed.
That criminal conspiracy – the illegal suspension of Jersey’s Police Chief – remains an uninvestigated criminal enterprise.
The Jersey Police – now back under the customary private-sector control that historically always operated policing in Jersey – have refused to investigate that crime. The refusal to investigate in this case had a black-farce comic element in the desperation of the cops to wash their hands of the problem.
In order to be able to bury the burial of the criminal conspiracy against Police Chief Graham Power, the Jersey Police under the leadership of Mike Bowron – the expressly and deliberately recruited former Police Chief of the City of London Corporation – had to manoeuvre themselves into a position where they had drawn a kind of fake “line” under the complaint, and could write in their records words to the effect the complaint had been “investigated”, found to be baseless, and the complainant notified. To make that concoction of cobblers appear less incredible, they had to find a way of “disposing of the evidence” or, at least expunging all trace of it from their “official” records. But merely “destroying” the evidence – well, that’s a bit of a no-no, in this day and age. The City of London Corporation’s Bowron and his cops alighted upon the “genius solution” – of just simply sending it all back to me.
There then follows yet another farce of Beckettian blackness that has seen the Jersey Police make repeated attempts to make me come and collect the copies of the evidence from the Police Headquarters, and have me take it all away with me. Not being a total halfwit, I saw immediately why they were doing this; if the evidence were not only gone from Police HQ, but had actually been accepted back into the hands of the complainant, that would mean they could falsely rig the records with words to the effect the complainant had “accepted” the “outcome” of the “investigation”. (The Jersey oligarchy are always on the look-out for “genius”, “perfect solutions” of this kind.)
The evidence in support of the complaints of criminal conspiracy behind the suspension of Graham Power was no longer “evidence” – it was “my property” – and I had to remove it from Police Headquarters.
I am not making this up.
Here is just some of the correspondence: –
From: Percival, Jeremy
To: Stuart Syvret
Date: 2nd September 2013
Time: 14:15
Dear Mr Syvret,
I understand from our Property Officer that you have not been to collect your documents that were provided to the SOJP last year.
If you could drop into the Enquiry Desk at Police Headquarters and give them the following reference number they can return them to you…
JC/3639/12
Thank you.
Jeremy”
Here’s my reply: –
“From: Stuart Syvret
To: Percival, Jeremy
Date:6th September 2013
Time: 12:28
Dear Officer Percival
The documents you refer to are my statement of criminal complaint – and various evidential documents which support that complaint – concerning the illegal suspension of Police Chief Graham Power.
The current Chief Officer – Mike Bowron – has refused to investigate the complaint – and has refused to seek the charging and prosecution of the many evidenced criminals which the evidence and the facts identify.
Instead, the States of Jersey Police under the leadership of Mr Bowron, have sought for themselves an excuse – a “reason” – to ignore the evidenced criminal conspiracy in which the basic rights of many people in Jersey to objective, impartial policing were undermined and abused by a group of powerful, wealthy criminals – including politicians and Crown Officers – who mounted a coup against unbiased policing in Jersey.
I have been informed that the States of Jersey Police and Mr Bowron “obtained legal advice from Jersey lawyers” – which “advice” – unsurprisingly – falsely claimed that “no criminal offences were apparent”.
That “advice” is plainly incorrect, false, and a continuance of the cover-ups.
I formally require to know – who were the legal advisers in question?
Just to cite one example of the evidence – former Attorney General – now Deputy Bailiff – William Bailhache, made an wholly illegal – criminal – attempt to coerce Police Chief Graham Power into dropping an investigation into planning corruption. This fact is evidenced by no less a witness than the former Police Chief himself, who describes – in his affidavit – William Bailhache ending the communication with the words “so be it!”
I view the present actions of the States of Jersey Police Force – and of Mr Bowron – in refusing to take proper policing action in this matter, to be a furtherance – and an extension of – the self-same criminal enterprise by which Graham Power was illegally suspended.
I reject – entirely – the failure and refusal of the States of Jersey Police Force to take these matters forward.
As far as I – and others – are concerned – this remains a “live” matter – an on-going criminal enterprise – subject to a recorded criminal complaint.
Therefore, I want and expect the statement of criminal complaint – and the associated evidence – to remain on the record with the States of Jersey Police Force – until such time as the Force is under non-politicised, non-criminally collusive leadership – when the criminal complaints will then be properly investigated.
I repeat – as far as I and others are concerned – this complaint, and associated issues are not “at an end”; they remain live and out-standing.
The present conduct of the States of Jersey Police Force and of Mr Bowron will become a component in the litigation against the Privy Council, Crown and Secretary of State for Justice.
In the mean time, I await the answer to my question concerning the identity of the “legal advisers” the States of Jersey Police Force and Mr Bowron have used in providing them with the “cover” for refusing to take the proper, lawful action, by falsely “advising” that the criminal acts complained of are “not criminal”.
Thank you for your assistance.
Stuart Syvret”
Although the refusal of the Jersey Police to investigate those crimes is already deeply serious, one of the more entertaining features of the Police conduct was their refusal to tell me who their “legal” advisers were.
Detective Constable Percival responded to the above e-mail at 11:11 on 10th September 2013, asserting the following:
“I am not at liberty to disclose the name of the Police Legal Advisor.”
This was such an overtly outrageous piece of nonsense, questions were asked in the Jersey parliament of the Home Affairs Minister on the 5th November by Deputy Trevor Pitman. Here is the question – and the wretched concoction of fabrication, omissions and outright lies given in an “answer” by Jersey’s Home Affairs Minister Ian Le Marquand: –
Deputy T. Pitman:-
“Would the Minister inform members whether the Chief Officer of the States of Jersey Police, in response to allegations made to the Police by former Senator S. Syvret relating to corruption, advised Mr. Syvret that his concerns had been referred to a local legal firm and had been deemed groundless, and, if so, which legal firm was utilised and why?”
Senator I Le Marquand: –
“I am assuming that the matters to which Deputy Trevor Pitman refers relate to a complaint made by Mr. Syvret to the States of Jersey Police in May 2012. The allegations made by Mr. Syvret were not new and were both complex and numerous, totalling some 60 separate allegations. Inquiries and independent legal assessment by the Jersey law firm Carey Olsen concluded early this year when Mr. Syvret was advised in March 2013 by the Deputy Chief Officer of Police that there was no new evidence to support his assertions of criminality, the majority of matters having already been subject to earlier consideration, investigation and where appropriate, action. The independent legal assessment was sought by the police from Carey Olsen because that firm had previously been involved in advising in relation to similar complaints.”
Deputy T. Pitman: –
“I thank the Minister for that and for revealing which firm it was. Could he just clarify, was the information, the decision as it was, put across to Mr. Syvret in writing or was it verbal? Does the Minister know if that can be verified in any way?”
Senator Le Marquand:
“There was a letter written by the Deputy Chief Officer of Police and that is what I have quoted in my answer.”
The answers given by the Home Affairs Minister are the customary hotchpotch of fairy-stories, self-hypnoses, lies and glossolalia we’ve come to expect as normal in the Jersey Parliament.
Hey – maybe that’s the way Ministers feel compelled to act, these days – given the last time a States of Jersey Minister said anything honest about the decades of concealed child-abuse – he was removed from Office in an illegal coupe led by the culpable senior civil-servants and Crown Officers – and was then subjected to a Stalinist show-trial for whistle-blowing?
So – that’s how it is – within Jersey, there exists no part of the law-enforcement system – police, prosecution, or judiciary – nor any part of the legislature – that is not contaminated – and not wholly captured, politicised and corrupted – and bound, now, to a doomed conspiracy of self-protection – and on a path that only ever leads, no matter its windings, to one destination.
The evidenced – unlawful – conduct of the States of Jersey Police Force on display against Rico Sorda, and against me – and against every ordinary powerless person in Jersey who should be able to rely on the impartial protections of effective policing – is now another entry on the ledger.
There’s going to be a reckoning.
Stuart Syvret
ON THE PARLIAMENTARY RECORD AGAIN
Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming has tabled an “Early Day Motion”, or EDM, on the need to include the Crown Dependencies in the overarching UK child-abuse inquiry. This is the last day of parliament before it begins its summer recess, so this particular EDM is unlikely to gain much attention, but it still places on-the-record the key issues concerning the proper investigation of child-abuse issues in the Crown Dependencies such as Jersey.
As Jersey has sadly shown, these small quasi-self-governing enclaves simply do not have effective checks and balances, or meaningful separations of power. In Jersey, rather than each of the relevant authorities holding each-other to account, they close-ranks against the vulnerable, the weak and against the public interest in order to protected “The Jersey Way” from scrutiny and protect the ruling oligarchy from “damage to its reputation”.
When the UK parliament resumes in September, more sophisticated procedures will be used to raise these issues and campaign for the proper rule of law and real child-protection in Jersey.
Stuart
EARLY DAY MOTION – INQUIRY INTO CHILD ABUSE AND THE CROWN DEPENDENCIES
- Session: 2014-15
- Date tabled: 21.07.2014
- Primary sponsor: Hemming, John
- Sponsors:
That this House, being conscious of the numerous cases of previously concealed child abuse in which individuals have been able to use their status as public figures to deter victims and to prevent or disrupt investigations of their crimes, and being conscious that in some cases abusers, and those who have concealed abuse, have been able to use their positions in public office and the institutions of the state such as Parliament and Government to shield them and their wrongdoing from proper, lawful scrutiny, recognises that the dangers of such cover-ups occurring are even greater in small, quasi-self-governing communities than at national level, where, even though checks and balances are more extensive, child abuse and cover-ups by the well-connected have still occurred; notes that a local public inquiry in Jersey into child abuse, the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry, has not gained the confidence of all victims and witnesses; and calls on the relevant UK authorities, the Secretary of State for Justice, the Crown and the Privy Council, in exercise of their responsibilities and powers to ensure good governance, the rule of law and proper administration of justice in the Crown Dependencies, to empower the overarching UK inquiry into child abuse to include the Crown Dependencies.
http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2014-15/279
Gets Into the Parallel Universe of Jerseyland –
Where Even the Corruption –
Is Outstripped by the Stupidity.
“We now know – only by the happenstance of the recent disclosure by Google of a letter (copy attached) – that contrary to the lies of the Jersey Attorney General – and the lies of his friend the ‘7 Bedford Row’ prosecuting Advocate Stephen Baker – and the perjury of another of his friends, Data Protection Commissioner, the conflicted Emma Martins (daughter of John Nettles, BBC Bergerac actor & friend of Jimmy Savile) that in fact the Jersey oligarchy were desperately attempting to get Google to shut down my blog – the only strong, informed, and challenging journalistic forum in Jersey for victims of child-abuse, and for whistle-blowers at that time – actually get the entire URL removed from the internet – from at least November 2008 – when I was opposing child-abuse cover-ups and questioning the obviously illegal suspension of Police Chief Graham Power.”
The Above From the Application by Stuart Syvret for Legal Funding – to Jersey’s “public-inquiry” – 22nd April 2014.
“Such an interpretation would of course raise the possibility of a “Government within a Government” in which unidentified and unaccountable individuals exercise power outside the parameters of the law. If that was the case then the constitutional implications would be significant. This would be particularly true in the context of a potential impact on the independence of a part of the Criminal Justice System.”
The above from former Police Chief Graham Power – writing to the Jersey parliament Privileges & Procedures Committee in reference to the illegal suspension conducted against him – and quoted by Stuart Syvret in his application to Jersey’s “public-inquiry”, for legal funding.
“I was oppressed and suppressed in my political work – as the Police Chief was oppressed and suppressed in his policing work – by conflicted powerful people with individual and collective interests in covering-up the facts concerning their own corruptions and the breakdown in the rule of law in Jersey.
Those same people then set about oppressing and suppressing me in my journalistic work.
Those people are the ‘“ Government within a Government” in which unidentified and unaccountable individuals exercise power outside the parameters of the law.’
Those individuals are the Crown Officers: – Bailiffs, Lieutenant Governors, Deputy Bailiffs, Attorney Generals, Solicitor Generals, Magistrates, Data Protection Commissioners.
Central to the oppression, harassment, witness-tampering and suppression directed against me have been four factors:
- The corrupt abuse of the Data Protection Law by a conflicted Data Protection Commissioner;
- The corrupt, politicised abuse of prosecutory powers by directly conflicted, corrupt Attorney Generals;
- Police-state abuse & oppression carried out by a captured, corrupted, politicised policing function following the illegal suspension of Mr Power;
- Political-oppression via Stalinistic show-trials in front of corrupt, conflicted judges.”
The above From the Application by Stuart Syvret for legal funding – to Jersey’s “public-inquiry” – 22nd April 2014.
What Follows is a Commentary on The Parallel Universe – of the Land of Stupid.
When the long and wretched history of the breakdown in the rule of law in the Crown tax-shelter of Jersey comes to be written – when the festering stagnation of the polity of the island is dissected, the overt rot that gripped governance here will be seen to have had certain defining characteristics.
One of those core conditions is stupidity.
Simple stupidity. For example, the kind of stupidity that can even imagine it being possible for William Bailhache to remain in any kind of public office – let alone be promoted to “Bailiff” – without “the system” ultimately cutting its own throat. The failure of those in “the system” to see the stark fact that the man is simply finished – finished, or “the system” is – is a level of stupidity that only arises when your polity is, in truth, really nothing more than an 800 year old racketeering matrix.
I mean, you know – what follows is a quote from an actual affidavit – published – sworn testimony – from an actual Chief of Police – in which the Chief of Police is referring to the behaviour of the then Attorney General William Bailhache: –
“In any event the outcome was that we could not agree, and the exchange finished with what I took to be an angry email from the Attorney General expressing apparent frustration at my perceived failure to sufficiently oppose the criticism of his brother the Bailiff, and finishing with a phrase something like “so be it,” which I read as having a threatening tone. So far as I can recall, that was the last email I received from the Attorney General. Not long afterwards I was suspended.”
Sworn, published testimony – by an actual Chief of Police.
You can see how really stupid the Jersey oligarchy is, in that it continues to think the rest of us are stupid. These people think we’re cretins; they think we can’t read – think we can’t see; they think our cognitive abilities and curiosities go no further than having a few quid to spend down the bingo or on the dogs.
That these people just carry on – and carry on – thinking the rest of us are idiots, is there to be seen in their actions.
They think we’re idiots – because they think they can rescue themselves and their system from their swamp of corruption by performing ever more nutty acts of stupidity. And they think we’re stupid, so we won’t recognise their stupidity when we watch them heaping stupidity – upon stupidity.
Stupid – because, like, when the very credibility of your entire system of governance is thrown into doubt by the exposure of decades of concealed child-abuse – the thing you really, really need to do to restore confidence is another act of gangsterism – like oppressing the Social Services Minister for trying to protect children. And, so, when that doesn’t get the lid back down on the atrocious mess, just what you need to do is illegally suspend the Police Chief. Then – when that too proves, for some reason, to have just thrown more petrol into the flames – what you need to do is get expressly & directly conflicted judges to throw-out the Police Chief’s judicial review application. And when – for mystifying reasons – you’re faced with quite an inferno by this stage – what you need to do to rescue your edifice of governance from the flames is order a massed illegal police raid against the leading opposition member of the legislature. And when that – inexplicably – has proven only to stoke the fires – you prosecute the bastard for whistle-blowing, that’ll teach him. And when his public-interest disclosure defence not only destroys the prosecution case – but rather inconveniently shows the Jersey polity to have concealed clinical serial-murders – well, then, hey, no worries, you just deem this embarrassing defence-case “no longer admissible”. Three months into the proceedings. And you make sure you don’t have to worry about the court not agreeing with such an illegal and suppressive action because – hey – you chose and appointed the judge – and she’s already a directly conflicted party because of her involvement in the endemic failure of Jersey’s prosecution system to bring child-abusers to justice. But yet – still the flames rage higher – you’re burning – burning – the entire edifice is going up – the flames threaten you – so, what you really, really need to do now is to get some more directly conflicted judges – to stand the entire data protection law on its head – in a way that has no parallel in any democratic state – and make free-speech and investigative journalism actually illegal; criminalised not via legislation, but judge-made-law. Now, all of that could have been a problem – but you were able to bring in even more of your judges – from outside of Jersey – to give you credible cover. Who will ever notice that one of them simply read-out in court – during the anti-police child-abuse “procedural” action by what passes for a “court” in Jersey – a load of crap written by an improperly hired spin-doctor? And the bloody plebs will never see that the extraordinary conduct of the other one now contaminates the UK Supreme Court – rendering it structurally conflicted in any matter touching upon Jersey for as long as he remains in office. Well, that’s no problem, the FACAWS will ensure no case concerning Jersey corruption ever runs up through the London court system. What’s this? Still the inferno grows? Out, damn flames! This will douse the fires of modernity! A public inquiry! There! That’s what we needed! What finer fire-brigade could one call upon – other than that trusty get-out-of-jail-free-card that has so often been the “insurance-policy” of the British establishment – a public inquiry – reliably peopled with Ourchaps? What – what’s this!? The bastard wants legal representation? Tell him to fuck off!!! It’s our public inquiry and it can do whatever the fuck it pleases! Now what? What? The plebs are going on about the “Salmon Principles” now! Who taught this fucking rabble to read – oh it’s getting hot in here – so hot – the smoke – struggling to see! Somebody pass me another can of incendiary stupid – quickly! Before the fucking proles start citing the primacy of Articles 2 and 6 of the Convention – and all of the associated ECtHR case-law….!
In the parallel universe that is Jerseyland – where the criminals run the justice system – and they jail the good guys – where directly conflicted criminals try and coerce the Police Chief into not investigating them – and when he refuses to be coerced, they organise his illegal suspension – where that’s able to happen – without fear of prosecution on the part of the person doing the coercion – because the coercer was actually the Attorney General and sole prosecuting authority – where, conflicted, bent judges – can jail those who try to expose their corruption – where those who occupy the highest public offices are simply thick – a self-perpetuating claque of dopy cretins with the corporate intellectual advantage of a slime-mold – where people of intelligence – and especially of integrity – are pro-actively crushed out of “the system” – where you can stand human civil society and all it values on its head – if you have enough money and silly titles – in the realm of the Jersey oligarchy where 800 years of thoroughbred anarcho-feudal cretinism is colliding with modernity – what passes for a “public inquiry” into decades of concealed child-abuse issued some statements.
One of which – now “conveniently” disguised & buried on the “public-Inquiry” web site – was to refuse to provide me, THE core whistleblower from within the Jersey polity – any legal representation funding – de facto to refuse to provide me with legal representation – contra all requirements of settled case-law – and of Article 6 of the ECHR.
Apart from that – apart from denying legal representation to a person who is quite feasibly the key witness into the structural breakdown in the rule of law in the Jersey polity that permitted so much concealed child-abuse – the public inquiry has been busying itself – organising an “open-day” at which members of the public can take a look around the offices and room where the inquiry will hold its carefully pre-structured public-hearings.
I’ve been urged to attend. But as I said in response, “what on Earth” – or words to that effect – “for? Do they have especially nice chairs for me to test? Am I to admire the choice of wallpaper? Is the hue of carpet especially soothing? Am I to raise an appreciative artisan eyebrow at the timbered desks? Are they some marvellous blend of Douglas Fir and Indian Rosewood sculptured, as by wakened hands, a la Jim Krenov? I mean – why? Do these people not grasp that I’ve been repeatedly jailed – and will be again – for seeking to protect powerless victims of crime in Jersey? Jailed by the same collection of child-abuse concealing gangsters and bent judges that stand behind the authority of this public inquiry? I’ve seen the inside of courtrooms during the last five years probably more frequently than most of Eversheds lawyers. If these clowns think I’m ‘nervous’ – that a cosy trip to their office might allay my ‘fears’ – then they simply haven’t been paying attention.”
But, those are my circumstances; I guess it could be seen as a reasonable enough assumption that members of the public – those who’ve never been involved in quasi-judicial or judicial proceedings – potential witnesses like many of the victims of child-abuse in Jersey – might have benefited from seeing the arena.
What a pity, then, that the “open-day” consists of 2 hours on a Monday afternoon – when the vast majority of people will be working.
Still, things could be worse I guess. The public inquiry could have employed spin-doctors with a directly relevant history of working for an organisation responsible for concealing abusers who had victims in Jersey, and could thus – in certain ways – be legitimately seen as relevant witnesses themselves.
Or the London legal chambers involved in the public inquiry could be directly conflicted because they already have clients amongst expressly involved organisations.
Well, thank God nothing THAT crazy has occurred, eh!?!?!?
Anyway – you can read the Committee of Inquiry’s “ruling” – their rejection of my application for legal funding – on their web site. I publish the link below.
They lay out their “reasons” for rejecting my application in a little over two pages. It’s the predictable “lawyers-guff”, so I’ll have to explain it to you. The “reasons” issued by the public inquiry for refusing to see that I receive unconditional legal funding are – to use the technical term – complete horseshit.
Here are what are known as the “Salmon Principles” – the settled, procedural safeguards that underpin the conduct and methodologies of public inquiries. These are not controversial: –
“The Salmon Principles
1. Before any person becomes involved in an inquiry, the Tribunal must be satisfied that there are circumstances which affect him and which the Tribunal proposes to investigate.
2. Before any person who is involved in an inquiry is called as a witness, he should be informed of any allegations which are made against him and the substance of the evidence in support of them.
3. (a) He should be given an adequate opportunity of preparing his case and of being assisted by his legal advisers. (b) His legal expenses should normally be met out of public funds.
4. He should have the opportunity of being examined by his own solicitor or counsel and of stating his case in public at the inquiry.
5. Any material witness he wishes called at the inquiry should, if reasonably practicable, be heard.
6. He should have the opportunity of testing by cross-examination conducted by his own solicitor or counsel any evidence which may affect him.”
Sometimes legal questions actually don’t require lawyers. Sometimes the facts and the law are starkly plain to any person who can read.
This is such a case, which is why the “ruling” of the public inquiry – to refuse to give me unconditional legal funding – in spite of the fact this public inquiry has chosen to use a methodology – to set “protocols” – that plainly defy, and are not in compliance with, the Salmon Principles – merits no greater exposition than the description “complete horseshit”.
My human rights are engaged by these quasi-judicial proceedings.
Indeed – these proceedings could – quite easily and foreseeably – subpoena me before the Committee of Inquiry and demand that I reveal, for example, the identity of certain of my sources over the years. I will not do so.
And when I don’t do so – the Committee and its processes and powers could trigger actual contempt of court proceedings against me – which would – again – involve directly conflicted Offices and directly conflicted individuals – in jailing me – again.
For up to two years.
For two years – this time.
So, you see, I’m not being entirely unreasonable – in wanting a lawyer – when faced with a quasi-judicial body – that has the power to have me jailed for two years – jailed by directly conflicted people – again – but which is not following the settled “Salmon Principles” by which public inquires conduct themselves.
Not unreasonable – in wanting a lawyer who could then advise me on my rights – and the many serious public interest issues that could – very easily – arise should this public inquiry seek to use its dramatic coercive legal powers against me in ways designed to target the numerous witnesses, victims and whistleblowers who have informed me over the years.
Look – if you hold a public inquiry – you axiomatically give centrally involved parties legal representation.
If you’re not going to give centrally involved parties legal representation – then you don’t hold a public inquiry. End of.
What you can’t do, is hold something you purport to be a “public inquiry” – but then refuse to give involved parties legal representation.
Refuse to give them legal representation unless they assign their rights – by agreeing to some fucking “contract” that involves them in surrendering themselves – and their sources – and witnesses – and the public interest – and their liberty – again – to the mercies of an overtly conflicted collection of sleazy and despicable old men who run the 800 year-old feudal racketeering operation that is the Jersey polity and the Potemkin village that masquerades as a Crown judicial system in the island.
Stuart Syvret – 6th June 2014.
What Follows is the text of the application for legal fees & expenses funding made in accordance with human rights standards & the ‘Salmon Principles’, to the Jersey child-abuse public-inquiry by the primary whistle-blower, and key witness, former Health & Social Services Minister Stuart Syvret.
Application made by Stuart Syvret on 22nd April 2014.
Rejected by the Jersey Child-Abuse Public-Inquiry on 14th may 2014.
By rejecting Stuart Syvret’s following application for legal representation, the so-called ‘public-inquiry’ took the decision & action to constructively exclude the witness Stuart Syvret from the ‘Inquiry’s’ proceedings and to prevent him from giving evidence; this to the profound detriment of abuse survivors and other whistle-blowers.
Dear Ms Garner & Mr Jones
I write as a key witness in the public inquiry into decades of concealed child-abuse in Jersey and the attendant concealment of the systemic and endemic governance failure by the Jersey polity.
As a member of the Jersey parliament, I had political and legal responsibility for child-protection matters from November 1999 until September 2007. From 1999 I was the President of the Health & Social Services Committee. When Jersey changed its system of governance from a Committee system to a Ministerial system in November 2005, I became the Minister for Health & Social Services.
It is plain – already shown on published evidence – that decades of concealed child-abuse – and associated child-protection failure – took place in Jersey. I became the first ever Jersey politician to identify, investigate and make public these matters.
In answer to a Jersey parliamentary question asked of me on the 16th July 2007, I said this: –
“I have serious concerns, to be honest, about the whole child protection, child welfare standards of performance of Jersey, not just within my own department, Social Services and the Children’s Service, but across the board. I am aware of a number of issues, this being one of them, a number of cases, a number of incidents that lead me more and more strongly to the conclusion that we are failing badly in this area. I am probably going to be seeking to initiate a major independent review into the whole sphere of child welfare, child protection in Jersey. So if you are asking me honestly, do I believe the performance of certain senior individuals within this field and of the departments generally is acceptable, no, it is not.”
I had come to those conclusions following months of my own investigations in the face of wilful obstructions from a number of senior civil servants and the Law Officers who were “advising” them but in reality acting as a “Government within a Government”. You will see that I knew then that only an external investigation would stand any chance of addressing the child-protection failures. I went on to propose that a Committee of Inquiry should be established.
Thus it is that the work of this Committee of Inquiry begins six-and-a-half years after I had intended – in my capacity as Minister for Health & Social Services – that there should be such an Inquiry.
A draft press-release, discussed at the Jersey Council of Ministers’ meeting of the 26th July 2007, contained the following: –
“Thirdly, the Council has decided to accept the recommendation of the Health and Social Services Minister, that a Committee of Enquiry should be established. At its next meeting on 6th September, the Council will consider terms of reference for this much wider review of child protection procedures throughout the States.”
However, unbeknown to me, but known to Jersey’s Crown Law Officers, and certain other Ministers, the senior civil servants were already engaged in an illegal conspiracy to engineer my dismissal. We know that to be so, because they made an attempt to suborn the Chief of Police into their plot during a meeting on the 25th July 2007. The Police Chief Graham Power QPM left the meeting and wrote a file-note (copy attached), in which he said this: –
“BO [Bill Ogley] and the others were persistent and I was left with the clear impression that they were attempting to draw me, in my capacity as Chief of Police, into a civil service led attempt to remove a Minister from Office.”
The above illustrates very clearly two points: –
- **I am not opposed to a meaningful, serious, objective public inquiry into Jersey’s decades of child-protection failure and the attendant systemic and endemic failings of the Jersey polity. On the contrary – such an investigation was my idea – I being the first Jersey politician to have indentified and spoken-out concerning our failures to protect the vulnerable.
- I am a central witness to those issues.
In addition to the political role I played, I have also played a key and historic role in my journalistic capacity. As an independent journalist blogging at http://stuartsyvret.blogspot.com I provided – for the first time in Jersey’s history – a media outlet for the views and concerns of the island’s child-abuse victims – and evidence and testimony from many of them. I also provided – again for the first time in Jersey’s history – a media outlet that was willing and able to publish documentary – public-interest – evidence; evidence of harassment, abuse, violence, battery, rape, attempted murder, murder, the incompetence, ethical bankruptcy & cover-ups that permitted such things and widespread & endemic corruption in the Crown Dependency of Jersey.
The extensive and damming nature of the evidence I have published is such that the extant Jersey power-apparatus is exposed for being a simply lawless entity – essentially, a thinly disguised feudal “court” in which power is abused by and for the “court”, its courtiers, thanes and vassals – and against anyone who dare oppose them. If you are “of” the “court”, you can commit approved crimes with utter impunity – if you are not “of” the “court” crimes will be committed against you and you will have no remedy or protection.
That broad truth is so plain on a reading of the evidence published on my blog that the Jersey oligarchy have subjected me to political imprisonment for blogging and the “crime” of being a political dissident. When that coercion failed to make me remove evidence for their corruption, they took the step of persuading Google to take-down my entire blog.
Of course – with the assistance of international supporters – the blog has been re-established, and it can now be read here, http://freespeechoffshore.nl/stuartsyvretblog/
We now know – only by the happenstance of the recent disclosure by Google of a letter (copy attached) – that contrary to the lies of the Jersey Attorney General – and the lies of his friend the prosecuting Advocate Stephen Baker – and the perjury of Data Protection Commissioner, the conflicted Emma Martins – that in fact the Jersey oligarchy were desperately attempting to get Google to shut down my blog – actually get the entire URL removed from the internet – from at least November 2008 – when I was opposing child-abuse cover-ups and questioning the obviously illegal suspension of Police Chief Graham Power.
In the course of his battle against that plainly unlawful suspension, Mr Power wrote to the Privileges & Procedures Committee of the Jersey parliament. It is useful to quote from that letter (copy attached): –
“It may be that I have provided sufficient information to enable the Committee to consider a way forward on this issue. However, in the hope that it may be helpful, I will offer some personal thoughts and additional information which may assist.
On a straight reading of the available evidence it may occur to many people that the most likely probability is that the former Minister for Home Affairs [the then Deputy Andrew Lewis] knowingly provided an account which is distant from the truth. That may be the case, but there are other possibilities. One is that he was not the main author of the process. The known facts allow for an alternative explanation. That is, that the decision to suspend was in fact taken by others for motives of their own, and that the then Minister was brought in at the final stages to provide his signature, and thereby appear to legitimise a process which was conceived by others. Such an interpretation would of course raise the possibility of a “Government within a Government” in which unidentified and unaccountable individuals exercise power outside the parameters of the law. If that was the case then the constitutional implications would be significant. This would be particularly true in the context of a potential impact on the independence of a part of the Criminal Justice System.”
I was oppressed and suppressed in my political work – as the Police Chief was oppressed in his work – by conflicted powerful people with individual and collective interest in covering-up the facts concerning their own corruptions and the breakdown in the rule of law in Jersey.
Those same people then set about oppressing and suppressing me in my journalistic work.
Those people are the “ Government within a Government” in which unidentified and unaccountable individuals exercise power outside the parameters of the law.”
Those individuals are the Crown Officers: – Bailiffs, Lieutenant Governors, Deputy Bailiffs, Attorney Generals, Solicitor Generals, Magistrates, Data Protection Commissioners.
Central to the oppression, harassment, witness-tampering and suppression directed against me have been four factors:
- **The corrupt abuse of the Data Protection Law by a conflicted Data Protection Commissioner;
- The corrupt, politicised abuse of prosecutory powers by directly conflicted, corrupt Attorney Generals;
- Police-state abuse & oppression carried out by a captured, corrupted, politicised policing function following the illegal suspension of Mr Power;
- Political-oppression via Stalinistic show-trials in front of corrupt, conflicted judges.
That oppression has included the politicised perversion of the data protection “law” as a means of state-sponsored suppression of political opposition – illegal massed police-raids – conducted without a search-warrant following the unlawful suspension of Police Chief Graham Power – my arrest, detention in a locked, windowless police-cell for seven-and-a-half hours – the theft of vast quantities of my then constituents’ private data, the theft of my parliamentary-privileged lap-top – my prosecution on the orders of the conflicted, corrupt then Attorney General William Bailhache – coercive show-trials in front of a succession of judges axiomatically conflicted for being chosen and appointed by their friends, conflicted Bailiffs such as Philip Bailhache and Michael Birt – and a succession of on-going political imprisonments.
It is clear – and established on the evidence – that: –
- **I am the victim of a number of criminal acts associated with the improper concealment of child-abuse and the concealment of child-protection failures – and other crimes – in Jersey. Those criminal offences included – for example – conspiracies to pervert the course of justice, and of numerous examples of corruption, and of misconduct in a public office;
- I am the victim of a catalogue of past and continuing human rights abuses at the hands of a dysfunctional, plainly corrupted and structurally ultra vires Crown apparatus in Jersey.
These are exceptional circumstances.
Having now read the protocols published by the Committee of Inquiry, I am far from assured that this process signals an end to the oppression I have suffered. Instead, I have concerns that it could lead to more of the same.
Not the least amongst my concerns are the range of deeply troubling conditions that are automatically imposed upon anyone who takes up “Interested Party” status.
It seems to me that a number of serious legal issues arise, and that those conditions engage my human rights. I therefore must take independent legal advice. The Inquiry has a mechanism for funding legal representation for witnesses, but that process requires that an applicant must sign-up to Interested Party status first, before legal funding will be granted.
I am not going to sign-up to any conditions until and unless I have been able to take independent legal advice on those conditions first.
Only a fool is coerced into signing a contract, which they can only take legal advice on, after they’ve signed it.
And in addition to the conditions attached to Interested Party status, there are a number of further significant legal issues arising from the methodology and protocols adopted by the Inquiry – issues for which I need legal representation.
Paragraph 2 of the Inquiry protocol on Legal Fees says: –
Applications for an award in respect of legal fees and expenses for someone who is not an Interested Party will only be considered in exceptional circumstances.
These circumstances are exceptional – and I herby apply for legal fees and expenses funding.
I would be grateful if the Inquiry would confirm as a matter of urgency that it agrees to my request, and that it issues to me a formal notice of agreement to fund that I may then use in my negotiations with prospective legal representation.
Thank you for your assistance.
Stuart Syvret.
Attachments:
- **Police Chief Graham Power’s July 2007 file-note re conspiracy against the Health & Social Services Minister;
- **Letter disclosed by Google showing sustained attempts by Jersey oligarchy to get Stuart Syvret’s blog removed from the internet from at least November 2008;
- Police Chief Graham Power’s letter to Jersey parliament’s Privileges & Procedures Committee.
[ENDS]
The Jersey Public Inquiry Into Concealed Child-Abuse rejected the above application for legal representation funding. The text of that rejection can be read here: