Of course, Musk is either willfully or woefully ignorant of many of the things he is commenting about (as are many people... and I don't think I could give you chapter and verse over who did what wrong, though you can't really blame the Starmer government for things done under a different government from a different party, by people who werent even part of that government, or indeed necessarily politics any brand of politics that's either the current government or the current opposition).
They're going after the current Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service during the time it mismanaged the prosecution of the child sex traffickers. There's a bit of nuance here, which is to say that the CPS under Keir did fumble a lot, in particular dropping the case against Jimmy Savile and one of the Rotherham grooming gangs, citing their own skepticism that the jury would believe the victims. Then the Times blew the lid on Savile and the first of the grooming gang scandals and a lot of labour politicians were directly responsible for victims not being believed and parents of victims being targeted with legal action, like Shaun Wright, who was a labour councillor and Police and Crime Commissioner.
Here is Keir talking about the legal & procedural mishandling of Rotherham after the reports finding multiple failings from councillors, police & the CPS. His comments are pretty stellar; he mentions how the resignations of a lot of authority figures are necessary, but not sufficient. He points out how the dysfunction and the culture of disbelieving victims was a systematic failure and that sacking the whole lot of heads would not be enough to stop something like this happening again. It's also worth noting his tone in the interview; he does not try to avoid responsibility, he does not try to deflect blame away from the labour party or government institutions, and he consistently remains critical of how his own govermnent department handled the process. The reforms lowering the threshold for the CPS to undertake a prosecution case against a suspected child sex trafficking case (the whole "how about we try believing alleged victims?" approach) happened under his tenure & his direction.
So the simple answer is it wasn't his fault (the whole damn system was dysfunctional and fucked up on a national scale, kinda way beyond just one man's errors). The accurate one it was his responsibility (he was in charge, the cases were dropped under his tenure). But the fair one answer would acknowledge that he never dodged responsibility, apologised and did whatever he could to fix the mess. So it's not like he's a great hero or great villain; but I think he tried to do right in a way that would leave lasting change.
At this point, Afzal remembers Starmer being willing to take difficult decisions to make sure a new case could get off the ground. “The problem was we needed to get a jury to believe one of the victims, even though at first we hadn’t,” he said.
I think Keir Starmer could do better still, starting with actually meeting the social workers the CPS ignored and disbelieved. But ultimately whether you want to judge him highly for having done right in the end or judge him low for having failed to begin with is largely just a matter of personal opinion. Personally I would've liked him more if he had recognised his errors and tried to do right before the Times made it an unavoidable issue, hard to judge if someone's really meaning what they say if they only walk when they're forced.
This is a bit in the realm of conspiracy, but if you go back in time 10 years and imagine things back then. Keir Starmer was not a bigshot politician. He was however, a chief of civil servants. The civil service has a long and illustrious reputation of making sure things do not make it to the desks of people who believe in things. Back then, Keir Starmer had the reputation for being a human rights lawyer.
Nazir Afzal, a former prosecutor at the CPS, told the Guardian: “Pretty much the first time I’ve seen him angry was when he commissioned the Levitt report. He was angry because he did not know. He wondered why the escalation process did not permit the case to be referred up to his office.”
Another person who worked closely with Starmer at the CPS at the time said: “Keir knew nothing about it. We had a lawyer with a file with Jimmy Savile written on it … The reviewing lawyer was told there were several victims but that none of them were willing to attend court, so he closed the case. The reviewing lawyer should have asked for advice.”
The investigation uncovered details of how Starmer also admitted the CPS had made mistakes over the Rochdale grooming case; how he rubber-stamped a report into undercover policing that was later shown to have significant gaps; and how he was so successful at pushing through rapid budget cuts that some believed he damaged the institution in the longer term. Some critics say he was cautious in challenging police decisions and overly concerned with avoiding controversy, with some even speculating he had half an eye on his future political career.
Several others praised Starmer’s management of the CPS and his decision-making skills, saying he went to great lengths to support colleagues who were under pressure and was willing to overhaul the organisation’s decision-making processes when they were found to be lacking.
Even back then there was speculation that he was shy of controversy to one day make a bid for PM but I think the evidence shows a stronger case that the CPS was just genuinely dysfunctional and he had no eyes over how the fuck most of the cases were being handled:
The Guardian’s investigation has uncovered the most detailed explanation yet for how Starmer’s CPS came to drop its case into Savile in 2009. Sources who spoke to the Guardian said Starmer inherited a sprawling network of prosecutors and lawyers who operated largely independently from the DPP’s office. Cases were often not referred up to senior leaders, even if decisions could have been politically sensitive.
Starmer had recognised the problems this could cause him as DPP and appointed Levitt as his principal legal adviser in 2009. He gave her a remit to monitor and advise on any case which could prove contentious, including anything which involved the reckless transmission of HIV and anything that involved granting immunity from prosecution.
Neither Starmer nor Levitt were aware of the decision taken by the prosecutor to close the Savile file in 2009, after which the CPS records were destroyed.
One person involved at the time said the prosecutor should have asked more questions about why the victims were not willing to testify and whether anything could have been done to persuade them to. However, the person added that it was unsurprising that given the evidence in front of them they decided not to take further action.
Starmer reviewed the case again in late 2012 after allegations about Savile became public. One person who worked with him at the time said he was about to close the file again when he decided instead to ask Levitt to look into it one more time.
The colleague said Starmer told them: “This case is nagging at me. I’m going to go public tomorrow and say we’ve reviewed this and I believe the decision is fine, but I want Alison to take one last look at it.”
I swear my opinion changed on Starmer 3 times just in the course of writing this. I used to regularly excoriate anyone involved in the child trafficking rings scandals way back. I also don't like Keir Starmer. But I think the evidence shows that it was his responsibility, and he took responsibility. He could do better, he could've done better, but also I think everyone should just remember that Keir Starmer wasn't prime minister back then. He was a chief of a government department. I'm not sure many could have done much better, e.g. Keir identified the lack of reporting as instrumental in allowing these failures to never escalate higher up the chain of command.
So he implements mandatory reporting. There are a lot of politicians you can blame for letting this happen but Keir? The evidence says he acted the moment he saw the fuckup, he implemented reforms to make sure the fuckup would never happen, and he never minced words about why the fuckup happened. That sounds like someone who did their job properly!
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 15211399 times)