Speaker of the house making a statement later this afternoon on yesterday’s incident.
I’m not sure where you get that idea from. The ones who do support him do so because they think he’s a vote winner. When you’ve got two thirds of the public who think he should resign , then that’s clearly no longer the case.
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Is Johnson going to try and hide behind pedantry here? The fact is that Savile wasn’t prosecuted. The fact is that Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions (2008-2013) at the time that several reports were made to at least two police forces, 3 years before Savile died. The fact is that the CPS held no record of the case as it had wrongly destroyed the file in 2010.
So technically Starmer did fail to prosecute Savile. The entire CPS failed to prosecute him.
But surely a big part of that is that there simply wasn’t a case to prosecute? The CPS can’t operate a vigilante system of justice where they go around banging up nonces with no cases.
With Savile there were next to no victims willing to go forward and the police forces hardly investigated.
Not saying their weren’t failings at the CPS - which Starmer himself acknowledged and corrected.
No. It was the knuckle draggers who otherwise would have just been standing in the corner looking at the wall. I’ve read links with Washington and that’s blatant nonsense. BJ did not ask for this, he made an accusation.
Not impossible that this was a paid stunt. Would be a good one too. Stranger things and all that. More likely to just be utter morons though. Not so sure www.rentaburk.com exists yet. Yet.
As we’ve seen over the last few years, MPs and government figures need to be careful with their public statements. BJ might not have meant for Starmer to get accosted. The problem is that he doesn’t give a fuck.
We saw this when he was Foreign Sec and ended up causing a British nation to be imprisoned in Iran. He opened his gob, said something untrue and there were consequences. Just not for him.
Yes it is. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re suggesting this might have been a false flag style stunt. That’s absurd.
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It’s deeply unlikely.
But not impossible.
I don’t know the details, just saw the footage. Were they waiting for him (how did they know where he’d be?) Or did he walk through a right-wing nutcase demo?
The Westminster system, like the US Congressional system, is far more dependent on norms to actually operate than most people understand. Johnson is crossing over into becoming one of those figures who does lasting damage to the institutions themselves.
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To the point where it’s not worth bringing up, really.
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There definitely was a case to prosecute. The issue was that the police and CPS failed to build the case that was there if only they hadn’t been so inert and inept. It actually baffles me how the various forces failed to look beyond their own jurisdictions or how the CPS failed to join the dots (although if they destroy the files then I guess that’s one reason).
For the record - I do not attribute any blame to Starmer for the fact that nobody prosecuted Savile. He is responsible for the wider systemic failings of the CPS that contributed to this failure but not in personally taking the decision to take no further action.
Heavens forbid somebody should think outside the box. Off to see what actually happened……
That fact he’s still in his job? It’s been a non-stop train wreck for a month and yet they haven’t come up with 54 letters of no confidence.
I’ve seen the footage and it’s not comfortable. No democratically elected politician should be harangued and threatened like that.
Strangely, the thing I took away most from the footage is just how short Starmer is. Johnson’s shorter than you’d expect too, I think?
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
For someone who’s so keen on the idea of personal responsibility, you’re very quick to absolve your favoured people from it…
You must have missed me asking for BJ to be clapped in irons / the stocks.
Why would he have been more responsible for these failings as opposed to his predecessors? I’m not really very familiar with the details of the case nor the timelines…
In any case, I think the very fact that it’s being debated suggests that it achieved its goal…
There is a very long list of failure in the system that helped to enable Jimmy Savile. The more nefarious part is the help and access he received from the highest institutions and echelons to do what he did. The longer it went on, the bigger it got, the more impossible it was to just dismiss him (wrongly I might add) as your kooky old uncle that was a bit of a strange one, but bless, he did a lot for charity…
What happened was evil, and it should have been stopped long before.
Starmer? Maybe he could have, should have done more, it’s hard to say. But we are now many years after the ugly fact, and what Johnson did crossed a line. It was worse than cheap political point scoring. There were many causes that led to Savile, many failings… and to single out Starmer, in such a way as to smear him and incite an angry mob, is wrong.
Johnson is trashing the norms of politics. It has always been a dirty business, but at its best there has also been collegiate respect for one’s colleagues. Johnson seems determined to plumb Trumpian depths, and everyone loses when that is allowed.
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