9 November 2012
The Prime ministerDear Sir,
I never thought much of Jimmy Saville, anyway and he may well have been an obnoxious person; but I find posthumous character assassination by allegations that can never be examined in court to be a national shame. When I discussed this matter with my son, who is a highly intelligent and informed person, he said to me “But what if he did it?” to which I replied “But what if he didn’t?”
Law
One of the essential characteristics that makes our country a good place to live is its respect for, and honest use of, the law. To destroy a person’s character when they cannot possibly defend themselves demeans us all. It is a form of nasty bullying. We will one day regret following this course whose ultimate destination cannot be easily seen but is unlikely to be a place to which we wanted to go. Good justice is one of the most important factors in maintaining a healthy society. We will pervert it at our peril.
One fundamental tenet of British law is that a man is innocent until proven guilty. We have held this truth for a couple of hundred years and it will be a sad day indeed if we abandon it. It came from a great leap forward made largely during Victorian times. I see today that an MP has had to issue a statement defending himself against a nasty allegation made in a newspaper. Surely, the law in this country requires allegations to be made to the police who then investigate and present the facts to the Crown Prosecution Service. They must then make a decision to prosecute or not. Are we to allow this well-tried, and largely successful, system to be utterly by-passed, demolished and perverted by the press whose motivation is, as with so much wrong in our society, the Bottom Line of their accounts?
But former governments must take the blame for much of this. They took us into an unwise pact with the European Union and then accepted huge swathes of law imposed upon us that effectively perverted our legal practices. Specifically the Health and Safety Laws imposed upon us essentially by potential competitors whose own industries were being destroyed by such laws so that they may attempt to even a playing field already beset by deep mire. The Health and Safety laws impose upon industry a huge and unfathomable body of demands each of which is mandatory and failure to observe every unfathomable detail is punishable by huge statutory fines and even jail. By this means the leaders of industry are required to prove their innocence on a daily basis. The imposition of this body of law has destroyed one of the first principles of law. Do not claim that you did not know. I told them exactly this when your predecessors did it. By maintaining this perverse legislation you are maintaining its destructive influence. I suggest your first act in this matter should be to repeal this perverse and destructive legislation.Paranoia
One of the very nasty consequences of this herd behaviour is that anyone who dissents, such as me, is liable to be tarred with the same brush by those who are utterly incapable of an original thought but simply latch on to the false emotions engendered by unproven allegations bandied high by a failing press corps. This has more to do with witch hunting and promotion of tatty news sheets than with justice. This is a highly dangerous process as it can obviously engender insecurity in many people who might just possibly have been in a position to have abused others; and I suggest that this includes almost the whole population.
It is hard to see who or what is driving these allegations but I worked for the local council after I retired and was ultimately appalled at the Political Correctness endemic throughout the service which worked very hard and effectively to evict any non-conforming views. The problem here was that the source of the most prevalent view was impossible to define except that it invariable supported minority groups of all kinds. The office of the Deputy Prime Minister has long ago had a copy of my book which described my own spectacular, explosive and justified exit from the service. The system is effectively fascist – that is it demands obedience.
Probably the source of this obscene scenario is the women’s liberation movement. Within my own family the women in my extended family played just as much a part in our growing and successful family business as the men. Indeed, the last one left in it is my daughter although the stress of H&S and equally inadvisable and draconian employment laws is killing her. But she made her own career as far as that is possible.
We are all victims of our environment.But women’s liberation has moved on from burning bras to demeaning men. Some of the activists clearly hate men. In individual circumstances that may be well justified: but the vast majority of men are being demeaned and smeared by association by the constant accusations of bad behaviour. I am well aware of the bad behaviour of some men, I live in a city. But there is now an equal number of very badly behaved women yet the accusations of sexual misbehaviour are invariably directed at men.
This offers an extremely dangerous future for our society. The vast majority of men are loving and caring and yet these constant innuendos cannot but undermine their own security and lead them either to withdrawal or reaction. The effects upon women who constantly see men paraded before them as criminals cannot be good for their security or healthy perceptions. In short an unhealthy paranoia is being induced in a huge part of the population. We really should seek to change this if we want a healthy society.
Solicitors
There is little doubt that the motivation of those who are making these allegations is to sue the BBC by getting sentiment on their side and attempting to shame an innocent organisation into paying substantial damages. You can also bet your bottom dollar that there are some fancy lawyers behind this who will benefit far more from this than will their clients. The law of this country is being perverted and brought into disrepute by the unpleasant actions of suing lawyers.
The lawyers will claim that their ‘clients’ are entitled to compensation but the legal and public process the clients must go through probably does more harm to them than did the nasty things they allege happened a long time ago. The way this country handles the law on these issues has changed radically in the last twenty years and not necessarily for the better.
I took from one of the finest brains ever to inhabit this planet the advice “don’t bother to examine a folly, ask only what it achieves”. What this folly achieves is to line the pockets of newspapers and lawyers. The alleged victims will get a lot of unhealthy publicity with which they are not equipped to deal and the dregs of any compensation that might be dragged from what is essentially a department of government. I am aware that HMG has tried on numerous occasions to shed the BBC but most of us do not believe it and do not even want it to be so.
Abuse
I was abused as a young man in a manner which most of these alleged victims could not begin to imagine, let alone deal with. If these alleged victims really want to do something for themselves they should seek counselling for their traumas. As one who undertook such treatment for forty two years I well know what they are going through and the last thing they need is to be dragged through a legal or media circus.
The provision of counselling services of the correct type is virtually absent within the health service and what there is seems to carry a stigma of psychotic behaviour. Perhaps we need to look for ways of providing good counselling in a sensible manner and affordable prices. I do not believe the NHS is the place to do this.
Credibility
I submit to you that it is statistically impossible for JS to have committed the alleged 300 acts of abuse and for not a single one ever to have come to light. I am a competent statistician and simply cannot believe such a 100% achievement over such a long period of time. No. It could not happen.
When I was a young man there were two men who tried to abuse me. They did not because, although I was only ten or eleven years old, they knew perfectly well that they would have got a smack in the gob had they persisted.
The abuse I eventually suffered was by a relative who killed himself and left a letter blaming me for stealing his daughter to be my wife – but that is another story.
Time TravelAll time travellers know perfectly well that they cannot interfere with time and must not try to judge what they find in the past or future by their own perceptions and conventions. We cannot judge the behaviour of people fifty years ago by mores and attitudes which did not exist at that time. I am not offering this as an excuse. I simply offer the judgement that you cannot interfere with time. You will break either time or yourself- and it is unlikely to be time that suffers.
Danger
You must be aware that paranoid mob behaviour can rapidly get out of control. A recent classic example was when a lynch mob formed in a hunt for paedophiles in Wales and burned down the house of a paediatrician. One has to wonder whether ignorance or brutality is the worse enemy here.
Yours sincerely,
Colin Walker.