Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,281]

On 03/07/2024 at 10:23, Vesper said:

“Don’t F-cking Leave”: How Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists Trap Their Followers in the Movement Forever

In an excerpt of her new book Black Pill, CNN correspondent Elle Reeve wades through the organizational muck of the far right—which consists of the “suits” and “boots”—and reveals the personal pitfalls of being famous among all the worst people.

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/how-neo-nazis-white-supremacists-trap-their-followers

 

 

There’s a lot of debate over what to call the loosely connected group of people working to make America more racist: white supremacists, white nationalists, white power advocates, professional racists, neo-Nazis, the alt right, the dissident right. None of these terms are perfect, and many originated in racist slogans coined decades ago.

I prefer “nazis”—lowercase, like a generic drug, to cover all their ideologies, and to distinguish them from Germans in the 1930s and ’40s and skinheads in the ’90s. What they want is more white power. What they are defending is white male supremacy.

What those inside it call it is “the movement.” All of them. The ones who resent it, the ones who think they’re above it, the ones who quit. They speak of it as though it is a sentient blob. Another word for it might be “cult.”

“The movement is angry with me,” Richard Spencer, its most infamous leader, told me after my interview with him aired on television. “The movement’s been propelled by insecurity,” said Matt Parrott, who’d been part of it since 2008 and was one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. His longtime collaborator, Matthew Heimbach, began a backstory with the disclaimer, “If movement lore is to be believed…,” Jeff Schoep, who ran a neo-Nazi group for almost three decades, answered most of my questions with the preface, “When I was in the movement…” They talk about their “movement friends” and their “non-movement friends,” if they have any. There are movement parties and movement funerals.

You can dabble in racism, hang out on racist websites, read fascist literature, and later come back to the normal world, but when you use your real name in the movement you have passed the point of no return. You can quit, but you can’t leave. No one will forget what you’ve done. The movement takes away your friends and gives you new ones, but they don’t really like you, and they’ll turn on you the moment you become a liability, or “cringe,” an embarrassment. After the movement ruins you, it will laugh at you. You deserve it. You were never really good enough, but the movement had fun while it lasted, You, of course, did not.

At the center of the movement is a group of old men. The old men provide the money—but there is never enough money to do much of anything, and the old men are always pushing the young men to find a new source. When the wealthy inventor Walter Kistler developed an interest in race science in his later years, one of his aides told me a significant part of his job was to stand between Kistler and the grifters who wanted to extract money from him. “He was like a childlike genius—brilliant, but naïve, easily manipulable,” the aide said. “We were basically all policemen…because Walter’s checkbook would be in his pocket and whoever walked in, he said, ‘Okay, here is a check.’”

The old men offer validation. They have overlapping clubs and conferences, and when a young man gets an invitation, it’s a sign he has promise. One of those old men was Bill Regnery, whose uncle founded an important conservative book publisher that bore his name, and whose grandfather was a member of the America First Committee, created to keep the U.S. out of World War II. Regnery did not have much of his own mainstream success. He’d been pushed out of his family’s textile business in the 1980s and removed from the board of the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute in the 2000s. But within the movement, he was elite. In 2015, Regnery emailed friends in the movement that he was “flabbergasted” that mass murderer Dylann Roof’s manifesto showed so much intelligence: “Based on Roof’s essay he is the kind of youth we could have invited to a meeting.”

The meeting would have been with the Charles Martel Society (CMS), one of the old men’s clubs. Members are not supposed to talk about CMS publicly. When, in March 2017, a BuzzFeed reporter asked if CMS was a secret society, members debated over email whether they should say “It is not a secret society,” or if saying it wasn’t a secret society made it seem even more like a secret society. Regnery settled on “The Charles Martel Society is a private but not secret organization.” However, when the story was published a few months later, member Kevin MacDonald was quoted saying, “It’s a secret society.”

“CMS is, in many ways, the heart,” Matt Heimbach said. There were other elite movement organizations—American Renaissance, VDARE, the H. L. Mencken Club, etc.—each with a different message, whether that’s more focus on immigration, or race science, or a racism that’s friendlier to Jews. “All the different fronts have a specific purpose to bring in slightly different groups of people. But at the heart of it, it’s all, like, the same thirty dudes.”

Richard Spencer calls these old men vampires. “They see something that is alive, and they want to go suck its blood. And then the second they don’t think it’s alive, or it’s objectively dead, they want to move on to something else,” Spencer said. Regnery was Spencer’s chief vampire, and backed him for a decade. When Regnery died in the summer of 2021, Spencer did not go to the funeral.

The old men cultivate young men to be public faces for the movement. They give them just enough praise to get them hooked and working for more. One younger leader asked to speak off the record to avoid sparking “movement drama,” before comparing the way the movement saw him to the way it saw Nathan Damigo. Damigo had spent four years in prison for assaulting an Arab cabdriver, but he was square-jawed, fit, and wore preppy clothes. With some nurturing from CMS, he founded a white power frat called Identity Evropa. “It will irritate me to my death that I’ve done nothing wrong, done everything right,” the leader told me, “and yet, this guy—who literally attacked an immigrant worker, and is a shitty person—is considered ‘good optics’ that we should aspire to emulate and follow, and I’m ‘bad optics.’” The movement is divided by social class: “boots vs. suits.” The suits thought the boots—meaning neo-Nazis, skinheads, klansmen, neo-Confederates, and the like—made the suits look bad.

The old men do not always pick winners. “I don’t think anyone should be able to move up in power—or in relative popularity, or however you want to describe where I am right now—nearly as fast as I did, because that’s very dangerous,” Elliot Kline, then the head of Identity Evropa, told me in 2017. He said the movement needed to develop a stronger immune system to protect against unreliable people with sketchy backgrounds. A few months after our conversation, Kline was revealed to have been lying about his military record—he’d never served in the Iraq War. He then disappeared from the scene. A few years after that, he didn’t bother to show up to a federal civil trial in which he was a defendant. But his ex-girlfriend did show up for her deposition. She said under oath that Kline boasted he was building a militia for Spencer, but that after the fascist revolution, he said Spencer would be the first against the wall.

A major subject of movement gossip is who might be gay. This is not new; when Hitler ordered the execution of hundreds of Nazi brownshirts in 1934 in the “Night of the Long Knives,” one official justification was that their leaders were homosexual. Within the modern American white power movement, the sexual rumors mostly pose a reputational threat, not a physical one. Once, in a period of intense scrutiny, a white nationalist called me to complain that some people in the movement were calling him gay, and he wasn’t gay, they were gay. He claimed there was even a gay nazi house where they did gay nazi stuff, and said I should report on it. Years later, two other leaders urged me to expose the “pink mafia”—or “the fancy boy, let’s-invite-a-bunch-of-twinks-to-hang-out and-talk-about-racism crew”—and its rumored house. In frustration, I told them I couldn’t just print a headline saying, “There’s a Big Gay Nazi House”—I needed to see documentary evidence and talk to people with firsthand experience. That would be hard, one said, because there’s still a big stigma around sexual harassment: “That’s a really fucking emasculating shitty topic.”

Within the movement, I am a meme. I am the most famous to the worst people. When I started reporting on the far right, I was younger, more naïve. I had a public Instagram. They found a photo I’d posted of myself at a child’s birthday party, captioned, “me among my people, at a bar mitzvah.” My friends understood it was a jokey reference to a ten-thousand-word article I’d written about teenagers with a meme empire—“my people” meaning teens—but the internet nazis took it as a sincere expression of Jewish identity. They began sending me antisemitic insults through every digital avenue they could find; that I should die in an oven was a popular one. But I’m not Jewish. I didn’t know many Jews as a kid. The messages were vile, but they didn’t trigger memories of playground bullying or a grandparent’s story of a more bigoted time. It was like having thousands of people scream at me for being from Arizona.

As my reporting continued, however, they noticed something about me that is undeniably, measurably true: my eyes are large and very far apart. This fact does not register with average people, though an optician once shouted it when I walked into his store. The distance between my pupils is sixty-seven millimeters, wider than nearly 95 percent of females. But having big, wide-set eyes was not something I felt insecure about. Had they never heard of Kate Moss? It was like they were dunking on me for having long and luscious hair. Thanks? They said it was a sign I had fetal alcohol syndrome.

They made comics of me, GIFs of me, supercut videos of me. They researched my family and relationships; they posted my number in their group chats and drunk-dialed me on holiday weekends. Someone emailed a drawing of me naked with a gun to my head. I used to tell myself I’d quit when it got really bad, but in hindsight I know that it was really bad for a while.

I learned to be on high alert when recognized in public by a white male under forty. The few who were alt-right couldn’t help themselves: they’d reference a 4chan meme to make sure I knew who they really were. It could happen anywhere: at a mainstream conservative conference, in the TSA line at the airport, at the Guggenheim. At a happy hour for fans of manosphere tweeter Mike Cernovich, a young guy told me he was in an Identity Evropa group chat, and then tried to take my picture, which I bullied him out of doing. He told me to say hi to my ex. I reminded him he knew very well I was going home to my Jewish boyfriend. For months, false rumors swirled within the movement that my boyfriend, Jeremy Greenfield, and I were engaged. Then, a day after we did get engaged while traveling in Tokyo, a white nationalist called with urgent news.

At the end of our conversation, he asked, “You’re not really gonna marry that guy, are you?” I felt trapped: deny my true love or make the first person I told of our engagement a nazi? After a few seconds I found an escape by stating the obvious: it was none of his business.

The ones who took the most interest in me were part of a wave of young people brought into white nationalism by the internet. They called themselves the alt-right, and they changed the movement. The leaders lost control of the cult. Now the cult controls the leader. The internet is the enforcer. To “counter signal” is to criticize the political objectives of someone to your right within the movement. It is not acceptable. To “cuck” is to bend to criticism from outside the movement—the term comes from “cuckold,” as in a married man who lets another man have sex with his wife. This is also not acceptable. In essence, to argue that “race war now” is not a good idea is to countersignal. To argue that “race war now” is a fine objective but that visible swastikas might be a turnoff to the general public and slow the growth of the movement is to be an “optics cuck.” To join the movement is to be chained to the most violent extremes of it.

The power is in mass anonymity. The racist hive mind collects a catalog of all leaders’ worst moments. Break with current internet doctrine, and you’ll be flooded with photos of that time you looked fat, or reminded of that time your best friend slept with your wife. The young leaders resent the old men, but they fear their own followers.

The movement will get you punched, sued, jailed, divorced, bankrupted. But it will never let you go. Matt Heimbach had a round face with thick black hair and eyebrows, and he was always grinning, but underneath it was a seething anger. “My biggest advice to people in the movement is like, Don’t fucking leave, because there’s no point,” Heimbach said. “If you’re already in, your life is fucked.” It will leave you with no one to confide in but the journalists who’ve exposed what you’ve done.

Heimbach had been blackpilled, trapped in a nihilistic hopelessness that the only thing to look forward to was to watch the world burn. I reminded him that quitting the movement might provide some benefits that he hadn’t considered. When white nationalists kill people, they tend to kill each other. I said quitting would reduce his risk of being one of those killed.

“I’ve had a lot of loaded guns pulled on me over the years—a lot of fucking loaded guns,” Heimbach said. “Not a one of them has shot me yet.”

I said if I could choose between having a loaded gun pointed at me and not having a loaded gun pointed at me, I would choose not having a loaded gun pointed at me.

“If you’ve already got a death wish…,” he said, and didn’t finish the sentence. “I’ve been sitting around here, tapping my foot, waiting for martyrdom for the past goddamn decade, and no one’s been brave enough to do it.”

 

---

Adapted from BLACK PILL: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics by Elle Reeve. Copyright © 2024 by Elle Reeve. To be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC.

The nazi scum deserve to be kicked.
The Greek ones cannot do these things, enslave people and keep them by force etc.
They are chicken with three combs and long feathers.
But they have rich backers as I have explained.

[cosmicway 1,281]

About Biden.
If the dems ditch him now it's kind of an admission of guilt.
He may be unfit, it's true.
In Greece Karamanlis and Papandreou who were both legends were visibly unfit in their old age in the nineties. Looks like a similar situation.
But if this is true about Biden it did n't happen the day of the debate. It's from the beginning, or let's say from 2021.
So it's a Scylla and Charybde situation.
The likely replacement seems to be Californian Gavin Newsom and also Michelle is very popular.
Michelle is not a housewife. She has postgrad degrees like Barack and at one time she was his company supervisor (it's where they met). But unlike Hillary she has never been involved with politics seriously.
It's perplexing and it gives Trump points he does not deserve.
Trump is twice the idiot but he is a fast talker (in pidgin English).

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,804]

2 hours ago, cosmicway said:

About Biden.
If the dems ditch him now it's kind of an admission of guilt.
He may be unfit, it's true.
In Greece Karamanlis and Papandreou who were both legends were visibly unfit in their old age in the nineties. Looks like a similar situation.
But if this is true about Biden it did n't happen the day of the debate. It's from the beginning, or let's say from 2021.
So it's a Scylla and Charybde situation.
The likely replacement seems to be Californian Gavin Newsom and also Michelle is very popular.
Michelle is not a housewife. She has postgrad degrees like Barack and at one time she was his company supervisor (it's where they met). But unlike Hillary she has never been involved with politics seriously.
It's perplexing and it gives Trump points he does not deserve.
Trump is twice the idiot but he is a fast talker (in pidgin English).

Michelle and Barack met when she was his mentor when he interned at Sidley & Austin which is a big Law firm. She is very popular and one of the most impressive people in modern history IMO, but she's no politician. Shes the ultimate king maker though because without her Barack doesnt get anywhere near where he got.

 

Gavin, barring him murdering a prostitute in a Los Angeles ghetto, is the nominee in 2028. He'd be a fool to throw away a sure thing for a rushed campaign now. Also Biden is adamant about not stepping down this cycle. 

[cosmicway 1,281]

56 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

Michelle and Barack met when she was his mentor when he interned at Sidley & Austin which is a big Law firm. She is very popular and one of the most impressive people in modern history IMO, but she's no politician. Shes the ultimate king maker though because without her Barack doesnt get anywhere near where he got.

 

Gavin, barring him murdering a prostitute in a Los Angeles ghetto, is the nominee in 2028. He'd be a fool to throw away a sure thing for a rushed campaign now. Also Biden is adamant about not stepping down this cycle. 

Not a politician ?
What does it take to be a politician ?

[YorkshireBlue 2,941]

15 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Not a politician ?
What does it take to be a politician ?

You need to be a lying bullshitting snakey horrible cunt, but you have to excel at all not just one.

[Fulham Broadway 16,520]

1 hour ago, YorkshireBlue said:

You need to be a lying bullshitting snakey horrible cunt, but you have to excel at all not just one.

Tony Benn nailed it

''All politicians need to be-asked five questions: "What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?''

Tony Benn

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,804]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

Not a politician ?
What does it take to be a politician ?

Someone who seeks public office, which she hasnt. She also hated when Barack was doing it so much that if he didnt get that last senate bid they probably would have divorced.

[Vesper 27,769]

9 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Today you should ideally vote Lib Dem.
The Tories are an abomination from the Hammer film studios and I speak as one who is more conservative than liberal.
Labour are a spent force, with marxist daydreamers and the red wall pulling the strings.
Vote Lib Dem, Plaid Cymru if you are in Wales, SNP if you are in Scotland.

Fuck the Lib Dems

they were the ones who first kicked off Brexit talk in the 2000s

 

and the fuckers propped up Cameron and his austerity regime for years

 

from 2019:

 

The Lib Dems are deeply stained by austerity. Don’t trust them

With a new leader the party is enjoying a resurgence, but its support for the Tories in coalition can’t be forgotten so easily

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/23/lib-dems-stained-austerity-trust-tories

The Liberal Democrats are back, or so we’re told, with Jo Swinson’s leadership victory being pitched as the rebirth of the party. The unique conditions of Brexit have given the Lib Dems not only a reason to exist but the opportunity to detoxify their brand after their fatal coalition with the Conservatives, and to cast themselves as a reforming, progressive party in troubled times.

And yet remarkably little has changed since the days when Nick Clegg stood laughing in the Downing Street rose garden next to David Cameron as he signed Britain up to years of sweeping public spending cuts. When asked throughout this summer’s leadership campaign, Swinson (and her opponent, Ed Davey) consistently defended her party’s role in austerity measures. In an interview with Channel 4 News, Swinson said she had no regrets about the coalition, stating it was the right move “to get our country back on track”. This is despite the fact it has been shown that austerity shrunk the British economy by £100bn, and has even been linked to 130,000 preventable deaths. Swinson acknowledged “there were policies we let through [in coalition] that we shouldn’t have done”, naming the bedroom tax, but remained unrepentant on a whole host of others.

Instead, Swinson repeatedly claims credit for the Lib Dems being a moderating influence on the Tories. They may well have helped to rein in the Conservatives on some things (the party is said to have forced George Osborne to temporarily shelve child tax credit cuts) but this fundamentally misses the point: the Lib Dems weren’t coerced into the partnership, they voluntarily chose it, and as such were a reason every Tory cut that was passed was possible.

This isn’t about holding grudges or some sort of ideological purity. Political parties naturally evolve depending on the political times, and progress in policy positions should be credited. It was four years ago this week that the Labour party adopted its abysmal abstention strategy for key “welfare reform”, but the party has since wrestled internally to have the strong anti-austerity message it holds today, winning back support in the process.

The same cannot be said for the Lib Dems. This is a party that as recently as last year spoke of sacrificing some of the poorest people in society to benefit sanctions in exchange for a 5p tax on plastic bags while in coalition. Nor are their MPs against forming a pact with the Tories again, with Swinson simply ruling out joining forces with Boris Johnson or any Brexiteer.

Swinson, for her part, could hardly be called a fully progressive figure. As employment minister, she reversed workers’ rights by introducing charges of up to £1,200 for the privilege of attending an employment tribunal (a move later ruled unlawful by the supreme court) and even considered cutting the minimum wage, all at a time when workers faced an unprecedented squeeze.

There is a sense in some circles that disabled people and working-class families should “get over it”; that those who can’t summon optimism for the revived Lib Dems are too tribal, irrational, or stuck in the past. But this insultingly dismisses the scale of suffering austerity has caused – typically by commentators who have never experienced the pain themselves – and recasts it as a historical slight. Go to your closed local Sure Start centre or try to get your elderly mother a social care package and this all seems ever-present news.

Similarly, it’s often inferred that compared with Brexit, cuts to services are insignificant. The danger of no-deal Brexit is real and this will hit the poorest hardest. But the idea that this is enough to revive the Lib Dems – and that all else should somehow be forgotten – is a symptom of a political discourse that too often suggests nothing but Brexit matters. Some voters may find it easier to switch back to the Lib Dems, but large numbers of disabled and low-income families will find it considerably harder to trust them ever again. If you’re queueing in your wheelchair at a food bank because the coalition took your disability benefits, it’s unlikely you’ll be tempted to the yellow fold, even by the promise of a second EU referendum.

Besides, the two issues are linked. While credit should be given to the party leading the charge against Brexit, there is irony in the Lib Dem position. After all, savage cuts to services and living standards helped create the conditions for the leave vote in the first place. Indeed, it feels a bit rich to see a party that helped heap austerity on to struggling families now leading concern for the country over Brexit. For many disabled and poor people, years of Lib Dem-enabled cuts mean hardship is already here. Austerity has harmed millions of people in Britain, and continues to wreck lives. It is not too much to ask that the politicians who administered it learn lessons before their rehabilitation begins. As it stands, the rebirthed Lib Dems are still deeply stained.

 

 

[Vesper 27,769]

[Vesper 27,769]

 

based off of exit polls

Edited Thursday at 22:08 by Vesper

[YorkshireBlue 2,941]

14 minutes ago, Vesper said:

 

based off of exit polls

If labour get in I might have to go abroad, imagine living in a country ran by the guy who defended Jimmy savile.

Edited Thursday at 22:22 by YorkshireBlue

[Fulham Broadway 16,520]

14 minutes ago, YorkshireBlue said:

If labour get in I might have to go abroad, imagine living in a country ran by the guy who defended Jimmy savile.

That was said by the Bullingdon boy, Alexander de Pfeffel Boris Johnson - it was fact checked by various organisations and proved Johnson was lying. He must have been, his lips were moving.

[YorkshireBlue 2,941]

11 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

That was said by the Bullingdon boy, Alexander de Pfeffel Boris Johnson - it was fact checked by various organisations and proved Johnson was lying. He must have been, his lips were moving.

He was head of the CPS when they decided not to prosecute Jimmy, that's enough for me.

[Fulham Broadway 16,520]

2 minutes ago, YorkshireBlue said:

He was head of the CPS when they decided not to prosecute Jimmy, that's enough for me.

BBC Reality Check has examined Boris Johnson's claim that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile when he was director of public prosecutions (DPP) and has found no evidence that Sir Keir was never involved at any point in the decision not to charge Savile.

-One politician close to Savile, spending every New Years eve with him was Thatcher - old FA Cup head Charles was very matey with him as well

[Vesper 27,769]

10 minutes ago, YorkshireBlue said:

He was head of the CPS when they decided not to prosecute Jimmy, that's enough for me.

you are pushing BoJo bollocks

Keir Starmer was not told about dropping of Jimmy Savile case, say sources

Labour leader was unaware a prosecutor had closed case in 2009 despite being head of CPS, it has emerged

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/21/keir-starmer-not-told-about-dropping-of-jimmy-savile-case-say-sources-dpp-labour

 

Keir Starmer was not informed when an investigator at the Crown Prosecution Service decided to drop a case against Jimmy Savile, sources have told the Guardian, despite the fact he led the institution at the time.

The Labour leader was unaware that a prosecutor had closed the case into the notorious child sexual abuser in 2009, nearly a year after he took over as director of public prosecutions (DPP).

He later reviewed the case in 2012 and came very close to rubber-stamping the original decision not to prosecute, before deciding at the last minute to commission his chief legal adviser, Alison Levitt, to conduct a formal inquiry.

The controversy continues to dog Starmer more than a decade later, with the former prime minister Boris Johnson having accused him of “failing to prosecute” Savile and victims criticising the Labour leader’s lack of action in the case.

Conservative officials are poring over Starmer’s record as a human rights lawyer and DPP for material to use against Labour in a general election campaign. This week the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph have reported on cases fought by Starmer as a lawyer, one involving trying to stop a pet alsatian being put down and another in which he argued successfully for the early release of an arsonist.

However, it is arguably the Savile case that is most likely to capture the public attention, and about which the Guardian can now reveal the full details.

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.”

A spokesperson for Starmer declined to comment on individual cases. However, they said: “Keir Starmer made it his mission as director of public prosecutions to ensure that victims of crime received justice and that criminals were brought to book for their crimes. He is rightly proud of his record.”

The Guardian has been through Starmer’s record as DPP, reviewing individual cases, reading official reports and speaking to about a dozen current and former colleagues. The findings shed light both on the attacks he might face in the heat of an election campaign and on how he might approach being prime minister should Labour win next year’s election.

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.

The most telling episode, both in terms of Starmer’s approach to leading large institutions and the political attacks that were to follow, was the controversy over the decision to close the Savile case in 2009.

It first came into the public spotlight when Boris Johnson, the then prime minister, accused the Labour leader of “failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile”. Johnson’s comments provoked anger on the Labour benches and were cited by his policy chief, Munira Mirza, as the reason for her subsequent resignation.

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.”

Levitt then conducted a full inquiry into the case in which she found that not only had the CPS made mistakes in the Savile case but that is was likely to have mistakenly dropped many similar sexual assault complaints. In response the CPS changed its guidance on how prosecutors should deal with accusations of sexual abuse – changes that were to have a lasting effect on how serious cases were dealt with.

The controversy also had a lasting effect on Starmer. Those close to him say it helped formulate his views on how closely he needed to monitor such a large and decentralised organisation – a style of leadership that allies and critics say he has brought with him to the Labour party.

One person who has worked with him said: “If you think Keir is a control freak now, that has its roots in the Savile case and his early days in the CPS. That’s when he realised how hard he needed to work to ensure consistency across a large organisation.”

[Vesper 27,769]

41 minutes ago, YorkshireBlue said:

If labour get in I might have to go abroad, imagine living in a country ran by the guy who defended Jimmy savile.

bye bye then

leaving based on a falsehood, there is winning life strategy

🤪

[Vesper 27,769]

Kylian Mbappé laments ‘catastrophic’ French election vote for National Rally

• French striker says runoff vote is ‘urgent situation’
• ‘We can’t let France fall into the hands of these people’

https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/jul/04/kylian-mbappe-laments-catastrophic-french-election-first-round-vote-national-rally

 

Kylian Mbappé has branded the first-round results of France’s snap parliamentary election “catastrophic”, urging voters to turn out in force and fend off the threat of a National Rally-controlled government when polls open for the runoff vote on Sunday.

In the latest of several interventions by members of the France national football team, the influential captain Mbappé warned that the country must take its chance to ensure the far right, anti-immigration party is unable to seize power in what has become a tumultuous political battle.

“It’s an urgent situation,” he said when asked for his thoughts on a parlous state of affairs that saw National Rally win 33% of the popular vote in last weekend’s first round. “We cannot let our country fall into the hands of these people. It is pressing. We saw the results, it’s catastrophic. We really hope it’s going to change: that everyone is going to rally together, go and vote, and vote for the correct party.”

Mbappé emphasised the importance of voting “now, more than ever”. France’s players are currently in Germany for the European Championship but they have maintained close attention on events back home and, unlike their English counterparts, a number of them have felt comfortable commenting on political matters.

Speaking on Monday after their victory over Belgium, the defender Jules Koundé said he was “disappointed” with the level of support for a party that “seek to take away our freedom and take away the fact that we live together”. He stated that previous non-voters must be persuaded to the ballot box in order to ensure the extreme right do not gain an absolute majority.

Before the tournament began, the forwards Marcus Thuram and Ousmane Dembélé both made similar exhortations to those eligible to vote. Mbappé joined them, saying at the time that he is “against extreme views and against ideas that divide people”.

Those comments were criticised by, among others, the National Rally leader Jordan Bardella. Mbappé, who recently signed for the Champions League winners Real Madrid, is France’s star player and a figure whose voice holds considerable weight among the country’s youth.

France face Portugal in a quarter-final on Friday and it means Mbappé, who will again play in a mask after breaking his nose in the group stage, will face a former Real Madrid forward in Cristiano Ronaldo. It is widely held that this could be the moment Mbappé, who is 25, takes the baton of greatness from the 39-year-old Portugal legend. “He is one of a kind,” Mbappé said. “He has shaped football, inspired generations, scored goals. I can only sing his praises.”

[cosmicway 1,281]

Will Starmer return the Elginians at least ?