I could not resist a few comments about the Southport murders

02 04 25    Jeremy Bamber and the White House murders are back in critical spotlight !

Commenting on national news stories at the present is rather more straightforward than it usually is, in that there are several distinct and prominent threads dominating the international news which more or less all relate directly to the election of a new labour government in the UK.

A salient first observation is that this government's majority is highly illusory in nature, perhaps more so than any majority that has ever appeared in "the mother of all parliaments." I believe there is enormous scope for hazard, misunderstanding and disorder in the manner in which a party that has captured only one third of the votes cast has captured two thirds of the representation in the legislature, have commented many times that our so called democracy is tragically out of date with its fptp voting system, and that such discrepancies will inevitably have serious repercussions with regard to the long term decline of public confidence in national institutions at home and abroad. Whilst it is interesting that politicians arguably get caught out by their own illusions in being the target as well as the source of a lot of effective and misleading social and political propaganda, I believe the furore over the labour government's withdrawal of the winter heating allowance might signify some admission that Westminster might have to take the PR issue more seriously in the near future. What is of the remark that before long there will be as many pensioners as working people and one relevant observation has to be, that conventional logic tends to suggest that voters are not realistically going to endlessly vote themselves improving benefits or allowances without some helpful intervening circumstance such as general economic growth, improving scientific development and/or production techniques.

This article by Tim Burrows for the Guardian in May of '23 paints an eerily discordant note on the Chancellors growth optimism in detailing a less than thoroughly responsible history of waste management in the region. I do not imagine that anyone really doubts the desirability of confronting the environmental issue whilst government seems paralysed to act in the face of demands for reduced immigration. This article by Frankie Elliot for the Mail on Feb 6th this year highlights both the scale of the problem and the lack of effective regulation in relating the recent dumping of 30 000 tons of building waste in the ancient Kentish beauty spot where Sarah Everard's body was found.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this complete ignorance of democratic principle in electing a government that is supposedly a democracy is the extent to which labour grandees seem oblivious to this general disaffection though this is perhaps not quite entirely unacknowledged by front bench ministers. Perhaps the most outstanding example is that of the Health Minister Wes Streeting who has had little hesitation in oft repeating his view that the NHS is in a broken state. Such a remark does of course entail much in the way of qualification and description for it to be meaningful in that it really necessitates a broad understanding of and societal consensus around what the Health Service should be according to various differing parties and what it actually is in reality. Notwithstanding these things we do at least have a new government with some kind of a brief to modernise the role and functioning of the state as the 21st century continues to unwind into the goggling addle pated minds of voters and citizens with endless real and legitimate concerns. It seems however that detailed debate on the domestic agenda, even the squealing of the nation's farmers at inheritance tax plans, is going to take second place whilst eastern conflicts and a new Potus insist on monopolising so much media attention.

The notion of modernising local government specifically poses an interesting challenge for the nation's professionals and public servants in particular.

I am personally very concerned that preconceptions about democracy and the rule of law are already far too illusory in nature, and that creating mega councils may find local councillors even more removed from the communities of which they are supposedly representative. One example of this sort of accepted pretence of democracy being the single major force in managing the lives of the population which demonstrates quite well this rhetorical illusion is in respect of the murder of Billy McNicholl on Chantry estate in recent months which I believe is still under investigation. I recognise him as very much a Chantry resident of about my age from the newspaper articles about his death, and what is relevantly of the remark that having lived in several different corners of the town by the time I was twenty two I arguably recognise most people of about my age in the Town. The point is to say that some Tory County Councillor by the name of Nadia Cenci who happens to represent Chantry on the County Council has had the remark published that Billy was a much loved resident of the estate published several times in the EADT and I do not believe she has the faintest idea what sort of person he was or was not. Saying that it is generally more appropriate for a town/borough councilor to make such comment really betokens the remark I definitely had noticed whilst still in my teens that councillors, even labour councillors, do not really take that much interest in their electorate. For instance I have never once heard of a labour councillor actually living in any of the poorer working class wards in the town. The observation tends to reinforce the remark that our pseudo-democracy is something arranged from above and that political representation is not something that spontaneously arises from dialogue in local communities which in theory it is supposed to. What is in further commenting on the current political landscape, very much of the remark that Reform UK's electoral success is not a genuinely spontaneous reaction to the anomie and ineffectuality of the major parties but rather a calculating attempt by certain kinds of erstwhile Tory extremists and American financiers to play on ignorance and populism for their own ends in seeking to define future political narratives: the same seems to be true of the German AfD of whom it is also widely reported that they have been bankrolled by the Muskrat.

This story by Anna Orwin Algeo and Iain Overton for the Byeline Times on 28 02 25 investigates the manner in which taxpayers' funds are being routed via private arms contracts to Reform UK. This article by Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Secretary General of Civicus, a global alliance of civil society organisations for the Guardian on 06 03 25 provides a lot of meaningful and useful information about the larger political and economic context to these domestic developments. This article by Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield for the Guardian also on 06 03 25 provides further detail in investigating the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, a set of private courts which had been opposed by President Biden in which companies can sue countries for billions. Such a putative perspective on international economic realities in which nation states are pawns of capitalist investors rather than vica versa, may lie behind such sentiments as are expressed by Caroline Lucas in another Guardian article of 29 01 25 which bemoans the labour government's disinterest in traditional social justice issues in respect of the undermining of the right to peaceful protest.

As far as the state of the nation goes in a more purely national perspective I am minded to recall the unnervingly down to earth view I had acquired by the age of seventeen that there was something suspiciously sinister about the manner in which meaningless democracy is peddled as an explanation for everything. This is all too well substantiated by such factual articles as William Ralston's Guardian article of 04 03 25 about a toxic fire which has been burning in east London for years which has been arguably affecting the health of the nearby community for which nobody can be held responsible. It is a devastating indictment of local democracy and the legal system by any reckoning. One person who owned the land recently and was imprisoned for installing a cannabis farm had evaded a legal compulsion to clean up the land by dissolving his company and transferring ownership to himself.

Mentioning the fact in a legal context tends to prompt some mention of Sirin Kale's Guardian article of 20 02 25 about a rogue letting agency or agencies operating with a similar sort of impunity from legal censure by the same device of hiding behind the facade of a limited company also strongly tends to substantiate the assertion our criminal justice system is in a state of crisis. Alex South's 20 02 25 article on the state of the Prison Service also tends to raise questions about some perceived lack of a traditional progressivist ideology in the thinking of the labour government.

This was arguably a significant element in the context of the trial of PC Martyn Blake for the alleged murder of Chris Kaba in September 2022 in that a new labour government was faced with some general expectation of a more progressivist interpretation of events especially in respect of the usual chorus of disapproval from civil rights groups. I did not find much of the reporting of that case very clear in terms of the actions that took place, and what one might happen to think of the allegation itself really entailed some precise consideration of legal definitions which was neither very forthcoming. The police did behave petulantly with colleagues walking out and threatening to make problems and the only impression I did get for sure was that a lot of the individuals involved felt that the system was failing in that I expect many jurors did want to find fault with an all too arguably gratuitous shooting but surrendered to pressure to not cross the line of actually convicting for murder.

Speculation about the event tends to centre on a sort of subliminal argument about the direction policing is going to take, in that it obviously costs a lot of money to try such matters, and it is too convenient to ignore questions about the future of the criminal justice system. The burden of proof in such cases has to be high but so does the burden of responsibility on police officers. I have to admit I did not understand why it was that an unnecessary killshot on an unarmed person was rejected as murder since that is how murder is defined in the UK. From what I saw of the shot, I suppose it did look as if Mr Kaba had rolled into the path of the bullet but I did not see that PC Blake needed to open fire. Sammy Gecsoyler's Guardian article of 03 03 25 detailing a similar incident also from 2022 in which a man who had been waving a lighter about on Chelsea Bridge was tasered three times before falling to his death in the Thames does nothing to dispel the suspicion that British police are getting a bit trigger happy here and there, perhaps partly as a result of the impact of US interest.

02 04 25

Jeremy Bamber's murder convictions are again undergoing critical examination. Scott Jones and Glen Owen recount in a Mail article of 29 03 25 referencing a less recent New Yorker article by an investigative reporter, that a retired CID Officer erstwhile of the Essex Constabulary corroborates that a significant amount of evidence was withheld or tampered with, which I always thought was fairly obvious from the amount of conflicting claims the case generated though I did not quite grasp the extent to which that was unquestionably the case. I have always been fascinated by the case as I suppose have many, since it has all the ingredients of a intriguing whodunnit in an isolated rural farmhouse with huge inheritances at stake, where only one of two incredibly unlikely stories is correct in precise detail, but my own interest is somewhat more than generally incidental, in that I tend to believe that June Bamber in particular was far from unlikely to have been acquainted with perhaps several of my father's aunts and uncles as he had at least about half a dozen in Colchester, particularly his paternal Aunt Queenie who was nearest in age to his father who was also a firstborn child. Since she, was like June Bamber a lifelong committed Anglican it is rather unlikely that they were not to some extent acquainted within the same diocese. It is furthermore the case that my own severe problems with the legal establishment had blown up some six months before the unfortunate deaths at Whitehouse farm and I would nearly end up stabbed to death in downtown Ipswich some 15 months later. They were fairly harsh times for me, I had been abandoned by all my father's relatives as far as any helpful concern might have existed, and the pictures of Sheila Caffel seem like some taunting reminder of a caring world that had been snatched away from me.

There is not much question that whatever else might be true it is a fact that Jeremy was in 1985 all too arguably a rather spoiled and unappealing character who had among other things, according to the recent BBC drama wherein he was played by Freddie Fox, had the family dog put down because it was annoying him, which would intensely annoy many including myself. Like many with family connections to money he had clearly sensed that the Thatcher regime was abandoning attempts to legislate for economic inequality and morality and had significantly resigned itself to the fact of greed being an uncontrollable fact of life. There may be some relatively innocent explanation for this tampering referenced by the whilstleblower in that it had first appeared as an open and shut case that would not require meticulous record keeping as it initially appeared unquestionable that Sheila, Jeremy's adoptive sister had killed the family and then herself. There are various fairly damning circumstantial facts that subsequently pointed at Jeremy such as the conveniently broken window lock he supposedly used and perhaps foremostly that Sheila was too small to have killed herself with an attached silencer, but I suppose the fact remains that being a spoiled and unappealing reptile is not in itself a crime, and the silencer evidence is now by any reckoning in at least some very serious question. One would have to have a spare decade to go over all the material the case has generated but one tends to imagine that the whistleblower must have some concern that Jeremy might be innocent for him or her to have spoken out in such terms: he or she whilst stopping short of an explicit statement about anyone's guilt, does say that the crime scene has no integrity, so neither does the investigation, nor the case against Jeremy Bamber. Whilst the remark is not about guilt or innocence but rather the proper procedure for determining it, one tends to imagine that an experienced cop would not make such a remark without meaning to raise the question, and the information as to how much he or she might or might not have been paid for a simply saleable feature remains unknown.

The last remark I left about the Bamber case was to the effect that such police tactics tend to weaken public faith in the integrity of policepersons and that even if Jeremy is guilty they should not have tampered with the evidence to make it seem so, since this might be likely to have had a disastrous impact on other investigations where public confidence is very key to their progression. It is interestingly the case that despite an arguably quite hostile judge and an elaborate character assassination headed by the jilted girlfriend Julie Mugford whom would I believe be excused a smuggling rap for testifying, that two jurors were unconvinced. It seems reasonable to add that if the official verdict is correct that there really should have been little or no demur about the official story in such a case once it and Jeremy had been exposed to the public, the media and twelve jurors at quite some length. It seems logical to suggest that the whole thing should have been seen to have been exposed in terms of psychological appraisal as it were, and that no real doubt should have existed if the guilty Jeremy theory had really been exposed as a blatant horror. The fact that two jurors refused to concur with the police story despite everything that was quoted as fact at the time does tend to suggest that the jury did not quite see this as such a case of unquestionable culpability which the police want the public to believe; the recent quashing of the conviction of Andrew Malkinson for a very violent rape after 17 years in jail despite it being known for most of that time new evidence would have acquitted him, tends unfortunately to suggest that police can be simply uncaring about guilt or innocence and are often more interested in their jobs and pensions than the quality of justice.

In looking at the context of the quashing of all the guilty verdicts of supposed perpetrators of Republican bombing outrages throughout the years of the Irish Troubles having led to the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission necessarily signifying an unfortunate fallibility on the part of the judicial system, it has to be admitted it is clearly capable of committing enormities, that it is not good enough at confessing its mistakes, and that the Judge was unquestionably very favourable to the prosecution in his summing up at the Bamber trial.

If he is innocent, besides the fact that Mugford must have lied which does seem perhaps improbable under the particular circumstance of the case having attracted so much detailed investigation, there must also be some very strange input floating around between the members of the near family who had a clear inheritance motive for their insistence the real story was that Jeremy had killed the family and then staged the scene to make it appear his sister had done it and then killed herself: to which proposition one detective had swiftly concurred. Either story is as I say incomprehensibly unlikely but one of them must be the precise truth, and that is not unlikely to be clearly visible from some angle or other even now after forty years. Police were under an enormous amount of pressure to resolve this case as the victims were a WW2 fighter pilot magistrate and his popular respected churchgoing wife, a troubled young woman their adopted daughter and her two children, in a gruesome scene involving repeated headshots during the discharge of more than twenty rifle rounds: many of those involved had apparently some trouble coping with this. Jeremy as the only member of the immediate family left alive had attracted immediate opprobrium for an unlikeable manner and wanton lifestyle in his assumption of its very significant estate and a contrary story was brewed up at the significant instigation of hard up members of the wider family whom as far as I know do remain unanimous in their acclamation of his culpability. I also acquired the impression that they had rather sought to obfuscate that Sheila's history was really quite troubled, and that it was in fact a reasonable statement that she had learned to use firearms such as the 22 rifle used for rabbiting that Jeremy claims to have left unsecured in the farmhouse, she would surely have been familiar with it, the mother June Bamber had also had mental health issues but Sheila's was really quite serious in that it did include religious delusions to the extent of imagining her children evil.

One cannot help but feel that just for the sake of argument in putting the hypothesis of Jeremy's innocence under examination, that should it be the correct explanation for the tragic events of that August evening the wider family must be likely to know so in some instinctive sense. That is to say if he is innocent it must be easier to appraise by an examination of their conversation than from other perspectives. They would have to be making several certain fairly unmistakeable comments adding up to something like it being his fault anyway because he did not secure the rifle, perhaps likely knew what Sheila might be capable of, might even have left the rifle conveniently to hand with some deliberateness, and why should anyone care about someone so spoiled and worthless being permanently locked up. Notwithstanding that I do not really know an immense amount about psychology or psychiatry I am the very last person who would treat psychiatrists as other than theorising sensationalists but, I do consider there was much in the way of an attempt to belittle the serious nature of Sheila's mental health issues undertaken and that on the balance of known possibilities and probabilities, the story that Sheila went mad with the rifle seems less unlikely than that Jeremy plotted an appalling murder spree on the family, as for example he made no attempt to pacify or conciliate the wider family as many might consider a culpable person would, they were immediately in conflict with him over the estate and household goods and he, seems to have made no obvious attempt to evade or deflect their supposedly reasonable suspicions. The theory that he planned and executed these horrific killings in an almost entirely unheard of sort of cold calculating scheme involving the murder of the couple who had rescued him from being an unwanted baby surely in general seems the more unlikely story. Notwithstanding that forensic science was a much more rudimentary matter in the eighties than it is now such a person would surely have also known that there must be the most enormous risk of leaving incriminating evidence behind in the fabrication of a fictional interpretation of the scene of a mass murder in which he would be the only alternative suspect. Any competent calculating mind would surely have reasoned that a single misplaced detail would have been utterly disastrous. It also seems reasonably commonsensical that any person capable of or inclined toward such a calculated and unspeakable act, would surely have betrayed some tendency toward aberrant behaviour whilst being expensively educated and socialised but Jeremy's history does not really mark him out as anything much more than a fairly typical example of young sociable bourgeoisie recently liberated from much informal constraint by the Thatcher government with a misdemeanour or two against his name.