Alison Saunders - a vile monster who should never have been appointed DPP

There was a degree of celebration yesterday at the defenestration of Alison Saunders, the most vile, unsuitable and disastrous DPP in living memory. The woman is a monster, driven by a bigoted ideology that has led to gross injustice and a neglect of police time spent on rapidly increasing crimes in categories other than the targets of Saunder's twisted zealotry.

As Allison Pearson writes in the Telegraph (£)

What the CPS statistics did not reveal was the embarrassing number of men brought to trial for rape on wholly inadequate evidence, and swiftly acquitted. Saunders wasted huge resources on her hobbyhorse, particularly high-profile campaigns relating to often imaginary historic sexual abuse.

Meanwhile, the crimes most people care about – burglaries, stabbings, shoplifting, public disorder - were booming. Home owners were told that they should not expect to have break-ins investigated, as the police were too busy (quizzing schoolboys who had shared photos of their genitals on Snapchat, no doubt.) At the weekend, it was confirmed that the unthinkable had come to pass: London now has a higher murder rate than New York.

and

The worst DPP in living memory, a person who politicised and poisoned the criminal justice system, seemed to regard trials as an annoying impediment to locking up the accused, causing untold misery to innocent men and their loved ones.

Good riddance to utter rubbish - but she should never have been appointed in the first place.

And not for the first time the probity of the members of the Electoral Commission has been called into doubt after four of them were caught making public anti-Brexit statements. The role of a Commissioner requires absolute public political neutrality. 

Again, perhaps not a surprise - these key quangos are still packed with Neolib ideologues spreading their poison long after their political and professional death. 

There needs to be a mass cull of all vile monsters, the placeholders, the has-beens, reptiles, dinosaurs and saboteurs still crowding our national institutions. They will hold this nation back, stuck in a state of monstrous injustice, bias, vile prejudice, establishment self interest and corruption. More than ever we need fair, balanced, open, equitable, democratic and representative appointments to these posts and these bodies. This old dross must be culled. 

Martin Selmayr: Corruption at the heart of Europe

That the EU is institutionally corrupt is not news. The organisation has been known for many years to be riddled with fraud, peculation, dishonesty, misuse of funds, nepotism and an utterly obscure, secret and bent system of chumocracy appointments. Auditors cannot close its accounts, financial records are so incriminating and so embarrassing that they are kept in locked rooms with no public access. Parliamentary expenses are no more than a thin cover for naked theft and fraud, and all this crooked, bent, corrupt filth is hidden from press and public by common consent between the Council, the Parliament and the Commission. The midden stench from the Berlaymont chokes honest breath, and each and every Eurocrat is mired in the putrescent feculence that flows from Brussels. 

So it is simply astonishing that even these slime-dwelling creatures of the eighth Malbolge should find an act so corrupt, so blatantly devoid of any shred of probity, that it evinces a protest. But such is the appointment of Martin Selmayr to the Secretary-General's job - running all 33,000 of the EU's officials. 

Politico.Eu carries the detailed story - the French are fuming because it is alleged the Germans have bribed widely to secure their man in post, a man without any senior Brussels civil service experience. It's as though Jeremy Corbyn appointed Owen Jones as Cabinet Secretary. It also appears that Selmayr was aware he'd got the job before the selection process even started. 

"(Liberation journalist) Quatremer led the charge on Monday as the midday briefing turned into a veritable uprising, with reporters demanding that Selmayr himself come to the podium to answer questions about how he got his new job, whether the vacant positions were properly advertised and if other procedures were followed according to EU regulations.

“These institutions don’t belong to you,” Quatremer snapped at (Margaritis) Schinas in response to his assertion that all questions on the matter had already been asked and answered. “They belong to the European citizens, and it is our perfect right to ask you questions, to repeat the questions as often as we want, without you giving us lessons in morality,” Quatremer said before asking yet more questions.

“You say it was legal; the rules were respected,” he told Schinas. “It doesn’t look legal to me, and as a representative of French public opinion, I tell you there’s a problem here."

Right now they're all flinging enough ordure to ensure widespread coating. Well done, chaps.   

Update 17.27
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Details of the German bribes are now beginning to leak ...

 

The stench of filth at the heart of government

Over my career I've been offered just about every reward and inducement you can imagine. As the bloke leading the contract award team and the bloke signing-off contractors claims and stage payments, and a lot of the time the bloke leading the design team as well, I am a natural target. Apart from end-of-job boozeups (at which I always contribute to the pot) I've turned them all down. One poor sod charged by his board with 'grooming' me grew desperate after I'd turned down Wimbledon, a hired superyacht, a table at the Cafe Royal and a tank driving weekend and asked me outright what it would take. "Your firm making the most advantageous bid to my principal" was my frustrating answer. I'm not a Puritan, it's just far easier to sleep at night if you're dead straight. Plus you get a reputation, and employers know they can trust you with their millions. 

I guess many of you feel fine about both taking advantage of such offers and properly representing your own side; I've been told many times that such things are just part of the mutual perks of business, just oiling the relationship. For others working in the private sector this may be true - I can only say I can't work with it. 

When of course those gifts, inducements and rewards are made to planners, government officials, elected ministers and those charged with stewardship of the public purse, I'm sure my view should prevail; there should be a zero tolerance of such things. This is not now the case. All that's required is that the recipient of such largesse declare it on a public register. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian exposes the threat to national probity of such corruption;

" ... the hospitality showered on (Westminster Council's Planning) committee’s chairman for 16 years, the amiable Robert Davis, was breathtaking. Five-hundred freebies, including 10 foreign trips, in just three years. At least 150 of these were from a who’s who list of property industry figures. Even Harvey Weinstein is on the list. Entertaining Davis was clearly a Westminster cottage industry. He can hardly have had time to down one glass of champagne before raising another.

The NHS is awash in inducements to doctors to prescribe branded medicines. Arms company boards are stuffed with generals. The banks that fund private finance initiatives keep the Whitehall doors revolving. Declarations of interest by members of the House of Lords read like a lobbyists’ congregation. It clearly pays companies to lobby. The irony is that it was David Cameron who made great play of curbing this in his Lobbying Act. It was, he said, “the next big scandal waiting to happen”. Yet the only scandal was how the act was watered down, and how Cameron’s transparency register for lobbyists was lobbied to oblivion."

Yep for the dilettante Eton-boy Cameron his chums always came first and controlling lobbying went the same way as Localism and all the rest of his early lies. If Blair is the father of fake news and unjust war, Cameron is the father of nepotism, cronyism and corruption. An honour for his hairdresser was a final finger thrust in the air at the rest of us. 

Lobbying carries the stench of filth into the heart of our democratic processes, feeding on the avarice, rapacity and vanity of weak and credulous people in public office. It leaves both the giver and taker beshitten. It must be ended. 

The evidence says we're right to distrust 'experts'

I don't need to lay out the disastrous economic, environmental and industrial consequences of the idiot official moves, urged by 'experts', to encourage a switch to diesel engines for short-hop urban journey low annual mileage private cars. Non-experts said all along this was tosh, that diesels were suitable for long-hours, hot running and continuous load - for road freight, marine, rail engines. So now we have cities so polluted that 40,000 Brits each year are dying prematurely. It's not just diesels, of course; long before changes to building regs, Ken Livingstone made his own planning changes in London that required developers of large buildings to install renewable-fuel heat systems. They all of course chose the cheapest - pellet-burners - which along with diesels are the major cause of those lethal PM10 and PM2.5 particulates. Without intervention developers would have chosen clean gas-fired systems. Even when tens of thousands of Londoners were dying prematurely from their lying and incompetence, the 'experts' threw yet another lie into the mix to save their skins. All London's pollution, they claimed, was due to some middle class people in Highgate and Islington with wood burning stoves, which they lit each Sunday from September to March. Yep. Throw some hipsters to the mob - and keep the blame away from those crooked, bent, indictable 'experts' and the credulous incompetent politicians who listen to them.

Now a bunch of criminally crooked, lying, devious 'experts' from Public Health England are being exposed for falsifying scientific evidence and distorting scientific recommendations all in order to further their own bigoted and zealous opinions and agendas. I cannot recommend too highly the esteemed Dick Puddlecoat who normally does such a sterling job exposing the lies, distortion and hypocrisy of the anti-tobacco bigots but who gave a heads-up on the PHE alcohol lies on Twitter.  

The full disgraceful exposure of those bent bastards at Public Health England is in the Health-Spectator. I commend it to you. 

Whilst our rogue MPs may be obsessed with sex toys and childish acts of Onanism, along with stealing the stationery, the real rogues are these fake 'experts' who lie, distort, omit and make up false evidence all under the cover of a supposed academic credibility. We're right to distrust them - and we have the evidence.