Gow goes west.

It appears that some time ago Alison Gow left Reach PLC. It would be nice to think someone at Reach found out about her ethical and moral failings, but I don't think it is possible to have sufficiently low ethics or morals to be a risk to the reputation of such a repugnant organisation.
I suppose it possible the Gow found that Reach PLC was below her high standards. That is however very very unlikely.

More likely she just found some, likely unethical, way to make more cash. I believe North Wales used to have some of the highest standards of morals in the country. They must however be in steep decline in the Snowdonia area if Gow can avoid being run out of town.

It is another date for Ged Fitzgerald.

It has been a while coming, but it looks like Ged Fitzgerald and the Operation Aloft crew will be having their day in court in September 2024. See Ex-Lancashire Council leader Geoff Driver trial date set for 2025; Three men accused in the same investigation will also stand trial next year.

It not straight forward though, in September 2024 David McElhinney, Phil Halsall, and Ged Fitzgerald, all ex Liverpool City Council staff, will be at Manchester Crown court for various charges. Then 7 months later they be back for another trial, this time with Geoff Driver.

Despite the article I'm quoting being copyright MGN, this hasn't appeared in any paper or broadcast media. It has all been hush, hush. One question is will the 2nd trial prevent reporting on the first? Where does this leave operation Aloft. Sheridan only covers Lancashire County Council, while Aloft is Liverpool City Council?

An epidemic of lack of integrity.

I've dealt with Liverpool Councillor Ron Gould, Joe Anderson and Nick Small and in order they have been rude, abusive and snide. I've dealt with MPs, mainly their staff, Louise Ellman, Jane Kennedy and Kim Johnson. They have been abusive(staff), abusive and condensing(staff). Kennedy and Johnson managed to by rude personally. All, bar Gould, have been Labour.

 

Explicitly with Ron Gould, where he simply said "We've been told all about you" then Jane Kennedy's staff member's initial greeting of "You should see a psychiatrist" before slamming the phone through Joe's "He just bullshits everything",  right through to snide and condescending Cate Murphy who is Kim Johnson's office manager. It has been fairly obvious they have heard some rumours and obviously taken them seriously.
 

If they were serious people then they would have done some investigation, perhaps given me a chance to address some of them. However, this is Liverpool, a city run by scallies. From the most junior member of the council through to the Chief Executive, specifically Ged Fitzgerald, they are endowed with a degree of entitlement, that is also found in most parts of Liverpool's establishment from lawyers like Brabners, Media a like the Echo and Merseyside Police.

 

Liverpool is a city where the great and the good are totally almost of ethics and moral behaviour. This not 100% true, but in almost every case do not come from Liverpool.

This lack of ethics might also explain some of Kim Johnson's in activity. A couple of years ago I put in a complaint to Merseyside Police and when it was rejected after 0 investigation because their GPS tracking system had recoded an officer in that location and no other attempt being taken to identify and officer in the area.

 

So an appeal was put in via the IOPC, an email was received saying wait for Merseyside Police to contact you. A contact that never came, I asked Johnson to chase this up, she got back saying that I had no complaint withe Merseyside police and that she had no power or any say in how the police ran things. She was sent a copy of the IOPC message saying a complaint had been raised by them. She did not reply.

You only have to search for her name and police to find out that she has been quite happy to use her MP status at other times.

 

The IOPC ignore requests to chase up the complaint and Merseyside Police own grossly incompetent FOI/DPA department say that it will not look up the data because the complaint ID number is an IOPC number not their own.

The parasite's new apologist.

Meet Dr Rebecca Whittington the Online Safety Chief for Reach PLC.  Her job "to support journalists across the company who receive abuse or harassment as a result of their job". 

The reality of journo abuse is that a lot of it is very similar to the abuse journos hand out, it may not be the journos that hand it out who receive it but let's remember Jeremy Clarkson is a journo, Kelvin MacKenzie is a journo, Piers Morgan is a journo formerly at Reach, the people who work at GBNews are journos. They are the big names in journo abuse. Who is there to protect the people who are their victims? 

True, most of them pick on big names, who have the budgets for therapy and security but what about further down the list where the local and regional press abuse people? I have suffered abusive phone calls from the rag that is the Echo and its then editor. I also suffered attacks on Twitter when mentioning it, from Reach's staff. Where is my support? 

Where is Helen Wilkie's support after being forced off a course by the Liverpool Echo's editor for alleged abuse on Twitter? Have those abusive tweets been produced yet? Last time I checked they hadn't! 

Where is the support for the people of Upper Pitt Street where a flat was attacked and smashed up, incurring £1000s of pounds worth of damage for the landlord to pay, because the Echo revealed that someone just convicted of sexual offences had lived there? Of course, as they'd been held on remand and were sent down for 4 years, were never going to live there again. What public interest was there in publishing this detail other than to prime the mob? 

The Echo likes a good crime story, the darker the events the better, they play well with the prurient interests of the readers and sells papers thereby making them money. What also makes money is a hagiography of murdered gangsters or the death of some petty hoodlum. Oh, they loved their mum.

Whatever gets the most clicks or sells the most papers. 

Journalists have granted themselves special privileges in society and they are cuddled up to the powerful. You or I engaging in the practices that journalists engage in, is 90% of what they call abuse when it's directed at them. 

If there is some deal where we tolerate their, for money, intrusion in people's lives, in return for them keeping a close eye on those in power and holding them accountable, then we seriously need to revise it because they stopped delivering on their side of the bargain long ago. 

The rise of media away from the likes of Reach is a threat to them, that's why Reach took Google's money to try and destroy truly local journalism.

 

I'm sure that a large focus of her job will be humanising journalists to the population, so people feel sympathy for them. It is a job Reach will only do for its staff and the most socially destructive criminals on its patch.
Of course Whittington doesn't allow people to comment on her posts, how typical of journalists. Hypocritical to the core.

Gill's snide land.

For many years I worked in Oxbridge in both halves and during that time I developed a deep deep suspicion of Oxbridge Graduates, some of them are very talented and capable, some of them are very intelligent and incapable and there are some that are just plain weird.
However the biggest single group are the self-serving it is all about them, they are indoctrinated to believe they are the cream of the cream who deserve all the success they can get no matter what they have to do to get it. This goes a long way to explain the BBC's Andy Gill, who till a few minutes ago I hadn't realised was an Oxfordman but it makes sense.
I've never knowingly communicated with Andy but he was spread some now know bollocks about me by a snapper at the Liverpool Echo and perhaps a local high-profile solicitor. The solicitor has had to retract allegations he made about made claiming it was mistaken identity, though he never explained where the info came from.
The scant information presented to him would not be enough for a person of integrity to come to any conclusion, let alone act on it, but that didn't stop Andy. It is the kind of snap judgment that a qualification from Oxbridge entitles you to make and one which you fellow Oxbridgers and Oxbridge sycophants will make sure you suffer no ill effects from making.
Andy used to give me a hard stair every time we crossed paths after the encounter outside Liverpool Crown court. This of course makes me think that together with my Oxbridgephobia he was given some other tips on how to annoy me.

MPs Staff

I've dealt with the offices of several MPs and their staff. They don't inspire confidence. The four offices varied from plain abusive through snide to just idiotic. They seem to have got the job based on a shared ideology, not their ability to interact with the public.

One of them whose personal behaviour was snide/borderline abusive was Chris Lloyd, who worked for Louise Ellman. In a court case, I was involved in had statements from Lloyd, the mild-mannered solicitor developed a loathing for Lloyd based purely on his victim statement. In the end, the CPS seems to have developed a similar opinion of Lloyd and the other staff members, leading to their removal from the case as victims.

The MP went out of their way to ensure that their statements never ended up in court, and so they could not be cross-examined in public.

Ellman was the chairperson of the Transport Select Committee. When Lloyd left Ellman's office, he secured a nice gig working for Network Rail. I wonder what Network Rail thought it was getting from someone with a Politics with Law degree in a PR position. Though perhaps the qualification wasn't the important thing. 

It seems that Lloyd is back on the campaign trail. See "Greenwich councillor Chris Lloyd misses out in the race to be Westminster candidate".

 

 

But what of the present collection, the post-2019 group? They don't seem to be an improvement. If anything, they are more uniform in their abysmal attitude. This time, though, it is streaked through with ideology. Don't expect anything from them on behalf of the working class. They only see the working class as the foot soldiers of their army. The patronising and paternalistic nature of the hard left is alive and kicking in L8.

Court news.

It seems that Ged Fitzgerald is about to get his day in court, well, actually several weeks.

He will be joined in the dock by Dr David McElhinney, Philip Halsall, Gerard Fitzgerald, and Geoff Driver. This is in connection with Lancashire County Council but the 1st 3 all have connections with Liverpool City Council as well.

The enquire is said to centre around One Connect joint venture between BT. A similar scheme, Liverpool Direct was running in Liverpool up to 2014.

Press release from Lancashire police.

The court thing happened and complete silence. 

I wrote to the approriate court and asked for a copy of the reporting retrictions and again complete silence.  I can only conclude that their are none otherwise the they would have replied say it is not possible.

To:gm-manmcadmin@justice.gov.uk

Wed, 1 Feb at 22:21

Hi,

Is it possible to get a copy of the reporting restrictions imposed at the court on the above date, in the case involving David McElhinney, Phillip Halsall, Gerard Fitzgerald and Geoff Driver?

Brabners, the SRA & Liz and Vicky.

Recently, evidence of the behaviour of Brabner's Solicitors of Liverpool came into my hands. Showing that they agreed with the police not to take a prosecution forward after their staff had made allegations to the police. The evidence was in the form of a statement made by a Merseyside Police Constable.
The allegations made by "Liz & Vicky" are vehemently denied by the accused, who was happy to go to court to defend their integrity, and who ensured everyone was aware of this. Brabner's staff backed out but still instituted; the allegations were true.
Several other strange allegations by Brabners staff, were withdrawn when it came to light, though with only the thinnest of covering the story.
When the complaint was taken to the SRA, it was ignored by Sally Atherton, who does not see police statements as evidence, seems ignorant of the basic principles of law, and is incapable of basic reasoning.
Like most UK professions, they have no external supervision with any teeth. They are there for show. They do not protect the public from the predatory actions of abusive organisations, but act only when the behaviour of a set of solicitors threatens the trust people have in solicitors and their money-making potential. If you have evidence of underhand behaviour by a solicitor that needs the SRAs help , then they will not help.
All the people involved in this, from Liz & Vicky, Mark Manley, Sharon McCarthy, Sally Atherton and others, have demonstrated snide arrogance, regardless of whether they are low-ranking trainee solicitors or high-ranking part-time judges.




 

 

Not so much Nutall as Fuck All.

Here is an email from Alan Nutall, the staff officer of Serena Kennedy, the current chief constable of Merseyside. It is now over six months old. I doubt anyone is surprised that there is no response.
 
 I did call Nuttall about this and was asked for an incident ID by a call handler. I explained I didn't have one, so the operator accused me of being obstructive by not giving it to her. She then progressively became more aggressive until I called her a bully, at which point, she hung up. How someone so dense gets a job in a vital service is almost a crime in and of itself.
 
 Nor is there a response from Kim Johnson MP, the MP for the Johnson family children. Happy to complain about the slightest possible stupidity by the met but unhappy to get involved in sorting out 25+ years for one of her unrelated constituents. Eagerly aided and abetted by fellow Momentum/Corbynite, Cate Murphy, I'm not sure what the criteria are for MPs picking their assistants but having less integrity than senior Merseyside Police officers seems to be one. This observation is from interactions with more than 1 MP's office.

Nuttall Alan <alan.nuttall@merseyside.police.uk>

Tue, 4 Jan at 14:41

As requested as I have requested, two things on your behalf:
1) finalisation communication from 2006 complaint re your home address
2) update on IOPC ref 2021/157040

I will not be undertaking any other review.

Kind regards
Alan

How did Liverpool get into this state.

Liverpool City Council is currently partially controlled by central government-appointed commissioners. However, some known crooks still hold senior positions, while Merseyside Police should be under external investigation for endemic corruption.

In London, Boris Johnson is under intense scrutiny by the press, as are the Metropolitan Police for not investigating, despite the wealth of evidence. In Liverpool, there is near silence from the local newspaper, regional media and the national press.

The press prides itself on holding the powerful to account. It thinks it deserves special privileges to allow it to do this, but now it often fails to have any impact. At a local level, the failing is even more apparent and no more so than in the Liverpool Echo, part of Reach Plc, formerly Trinity Mirror. Trinity Mirror resulted from the merger of the Mirror Group, former proprietor Robert Maxwell and Trinity International Holdings, a product of rearranging the Liverpool Echo's substantial holdings. This merger wasn't good news for Liverpool. What had once been a successful local company became a minor part. 

The merger had successfully placed the head office in Chester for several years at the first opportunity it moved to London.

In 1995 Alastair Machray joined the group as editor of the Daily Post, which was Liverpool's morning paper. In 2005, he became the editor of the Echo. Previous Liverpool Echo editors had had strong associations with the city, but Machray is a newcomer. He has no knowledge of the city beyond what he would have picked up from generic sources, both good and bad.

The local newspaper market has gone into a steep decline. The falling sales attributed to the rise of new media being the cause. Machray, whether of his own volition or under instruction from management, started making the paper relevant. He did this by firing a large portion of the local-born staff, whose views of the city were based on personal experience and leaving those remaining to peddle the myth of Liverpool.

With Machray as editor, the Echo ran ghost stories and hagiographies for dead gangsters while cultivating scouse exceptionalism. All for its end of making money. Not content with that, Machray has been keen to cosy up to any group he sees as influential, all at the expense of journalistic standards.

The Mirror group was the group of Bouncing Bob Maxwell, Telephone hacking and faked pictures. Machray has taken this Mirror group brand and happily cut and pasted its ethics into the Liverpool Echo.

Out of all this, the city gets a corrupt council and a corrupt police force while he gets an OBE. Even Thatcher and Boris did more for Liverpool than Machray ever did.

 

IOPC, the ICO & SAR

Finally, after six months of waiting, the IOPC has delivered all its data about me. The most notable thing is the amount of redacted stuff.
 
Some of the redactions are in emails that I sent!!
 
I've already sent off a copy of emails with extracted items to various lawyers regarding the claims made, as they don't tally with events or even what was said when the lawyers were involved. I'm less than 20% of the way through.
 
If there was any doubt about the IPCC & IOPC's lack of interest in tackling police corruption, they are no longer suspicions.

Journalists

There are many things that journalists do that I find unacceptable. It seems they also find them unacceptable, but only when done to them.

Can you imagine the fuss a journalist would make if you went to their homes and knocked on their door to ask them questions early in the morning or perhaps just set up camp outside?

Can you imagine the fuss a journalist would make if you called them on their home phone number, which they hadn't given you?

Can you imagine what would happen if you phoned up a newspaper and used the services of their PABX to call random numbers to get some information about the paper by talking to staff who aren't customer-facing?

I have never been doorstepped and haven't doorstepped anyone. Journos are happy to admit they doorstep people and will post videos. Their excuse is the public interest, which seems to be a valid excuse anyone could use.

I never actually called a journalist at home, but I have been called up by one from the Liverpool Echo. Who abused me by trotting out a whole collection of allegations angrily and aggressively. When the journo realised that they'd been fed lies, they apologised and explained who had fed them the nonsense. They then wrote a story of someone suffering harassment. Oh, wait, no they didn't. Instead, they became more and more uncertain and then hung up without explaining anything. The paper now denies the phone call ever happened. They claim to have searched their records for the call, but they never asked for the number I'd been on at the time. I'd changed my number several times since then.

When I worked for various companies in a technical capacity, we would often work late. Between 6:30 and 7, also at weekends, we'd quite regularly get phone calls from industry journos, who knew full well that all the marketing and PR staff had gone home. They'd spend a fair bit of time trying to get unguarded comments from staff to sell. However, the Echo regards doing this kind of research on it as beyond the pale.

Never forget, journos are in it for money, as are their employers. They think they provide a valuable service, talk truth to power, and are the fourth estate. Judging by the state of the world, they aren't very good at it. Perhaps we should ask for our money back. They haven't done much recently to earn the privileges that they have endowed themselves with.

The Liverpool Echo is a stable-mate of The Mirror, whose former editor, Piers Moron, was not just fired like Boris Johnson, for lying but faking photos. He and the Mirror, and quite likely some of its Trinity Mirror stable mates, engaged in and benefited from phone hacking. It is difficult to believe that information obtained by the Mirror that didn't warrant a national news story but would sell a few local rags didn't make its way to local editors.

Then there is the little matter of contempt of court. Contempt is a serious matter, potentially landing papers and editors with a fine. I tried to get the numbers for contempt cases faced by editors, but there is no record. When I posted the details of an Echo contempt case, journalists were happily dismissing contempt as being part of the job. Can you imagine the fuss the Echo and co would make if someone else considered criminal behaviour as just part of the job?

Alastair Machray. You are a habitual journalist who accepts contempt as an occupational hazard and presumable accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner.

 

A list arseholes.

What do Alastair MacRae, Alison Gow, Andy Gill and an anonymous Echo arsehole have in common that makes them unsuitable to be journalists?

Liverpool Commissioners

The Liverpool Commissioners seem to have gone native and have adopted the standard LCC approach of not even bothering to acknowledge emails, never mind producing substantive replies. Some clues as to their problems can be found in their email address Commissioners@liverpool.gov.uk, it is within the council's space and is just another email address.

There are no details of how to encrypt messages to protect them from prying eyes, so it is a fairly good bet that long before the addresses get a chance to read the emails, they have already been vetted by LCC staff. The staff do have form for blocking email addresses when it suits them without notifying anyone, and only hard work by exposing these blocks. Even when caught red-handed, they somehow cannot ID who instigated them.

While the Echo and its former editor Alistair McCray are knee-deep in some of the council's staff's crooked behaviour, even they found it worth publishing an article detailing the corruption. See Liverpool Council accused of snooping after "intercepting" emails between resident and councillor. The question is why did the normal servile Echo and its rather useless Thorpe publish this story; was it a shot across the bow?

There is no telling how many other people are on the council's hit list.

The lead commissioner is no stranger to not answering emails and helping to cover up corruption. The recent murder by a serving Met Police officer, using his warrant card as a tool brings into question the ability and integrity of all senior police officers connected with ensuring police standards.

FYI from https://liverpool.gov.uk/council/commissioners/about-the-commissioners/

Lead Commissioner – Mike Cunningham QPM

Mike has been involved in policing for more than 30 years, most recently as Chief Executive of the College of Policing from 2018 – 2020, the standards setting body for policing in England and Wales. Formerly one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary, inspecting forces in the north of England and Northern Ireland, and the national lead inspector for the development and implementation of inspections into police efficiency, legitimacy and leadership, and Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police.

Local Government Improvement Commissioner - Joanna Killian

Joanna has more than 30 years of experience in the public sector delivering transformational change and service improvement. Since March 2018, she has been Chief Executive of Surrey County Council. Prior to this, Joanna worked at KPMG and was also Chief Executive of Essex County Council for 9 years.

Highways Commissioner - Neil Gibson

Neil is the former Executive Director of Transport Economy and Environment for Buckinghamshire County Council, where he also acted for a time as Interim Chief Executive. Neil is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation and former President of the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport.

Regeneration Commissioner - Deborah McLaughlin

Deborah has extensive experience working in Regeneration and Housing for over 30 years across public and private sectors, including as Director of Housing at Manchester City Council, regional director for the North West at Homes England and Director of Capita’s real estate business. Deborah has also previously worked at the Audit Commission as a Best Value Inspector and auditor.

Chief and Deputy Chief of Staff

The commissioner team will be accompanied by a Chief of Staff, Chrissie Farrugia and a Deputy Chief of Staff, Ellie Smyllie. Both are civil servants appointed by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

IOPC Fig leaf.

My local MP was recently very critical of the Metropolitan Police because of the way they treated her son. This treatment seems to involve asking him for ID. When it comes to holding Merseyside Police and the IOPC to account for their treatment of other people over many years, she or at least her staff, seem far less interested in getting involved.
MPs of all persuasions want to court the Law and Order lobby or at least not get the Daily Mail on their case, and as such, they simply ignore most complaints. The same is true of Police & Crime Commissioners, when it comes to taking on the bullies, liars and thugs that inhabit police forces MPs will only get involved if the complainant already has a lot of public backing.
This MP and her staff are "of the left" loudly labelled SJW by the right. In reality like most MPs, they are preoccupied with their own interests; the top one is staying elected.
Some of her supporters like to claim we live in a police state when their protests are shut down. One, a former deputy PCC, Ann O'Byrne, tried to reestablish her credibility by getting herself removed for obstruction and then complaining about being manhandled. In reality, what she got was proportionate and the kind of things she had happily supported when a PCC. O'Bryne isn't the brightest or the most credible of councillors, but she is typical.
We don't live in a police state that would require the police to be acting on the arbitrary instructions of government ministers. What we are seeing is the police as a gang running a protection racket. The elected won't dig too deep into the Polices's internal wall of silence and coverups, and the Police & its militant wing, the Police Federation, will not stir up the Law & Order Lobby.
The Law & Order Lobby, a phrase Jane Kennedy doesn't understand, is mostly right-wing Tory voting, so it is harder to stir it up against a Tory government, which is why they get away with cutting police numbers. The Tories, of course, are fans of the short sharp shock and clip around the ear; in short, they quite like police brutality.
The far left of the Labour party is more interested in their ideology and will only talk about the police when it fits those grand overarching plans, plans, no space for sensible considered practical reform here.
The centre-left, the area I come from, is too worried by the reaction of the law and order lobby and its Daily Mail publicists to do anything; they definitely wouldn't put it in a manifesto.

 

Apauling

Imagine being a court usher and not knowing the rules about photography in  the courts. I've done a bit of photography in my time and have a good idea about them. Now in one instance a former court clerk I'd asked to explain the rules to me got them all wrong it is difficult to imagine something so dangerous. It could have been ignorance the only other alternative would be that he was trying to get me in trouble with the court and that would be apauling.

Now you see them, now you don't.

It seems the Independent Office for Police Conduct, IOPC, is just the IPCC in disguise, right down to the corrupt staff. Take Micheal Williams doesn't seem to be able to read properly, when told that contact with exIPCC members is not allowed  just stops signing emails.
No word from the big man Michael Lockwood on the actual complaint that is just ignored after trying to pass the entire thing of as an SRA.
IOPC helping improve police cover ups since 2017.

Winsford Academy, watch out watchout there is a Walsh about.

Damien Walsh, the desperately flawed ex-police officer, has gained a job as the Behaviour Manager at Winsford Academy. Damien will be taking his brand of egotistically bulling into a new sphere.

If you have a complaint about a teacher, then do not take it to Damien or let him have anything to do with investigating it. As an inspector at Merseyside Police, he spent considerable time intimidating and threatening people who made complaints.

Damien is a craven coward who will always back authority and the officers no matter how wrong they are. The mistakes they have made are irrelevant because they are the law. Often he would not even ask the nature or details of the complaint but would begin the meeting or call with threats. He has no integrity at all.

 

Ged Fitzgerald

Back in May the CEO of the Liverpool City Council was arrested the only real surprise was that the arrest was for "on suspicion of conspiring to pervert the course of justice and intimidating witnesses." did not seem to relate to his time at LCC. Who is supposed to have been intimidated has not been made clear, and Fitzemup's bail has been extended to the 22nd of August, all the while he is on fully paid bail leave, though apparently still available to Joe Anderson and other members of the Scallocracy.

In the absence of Fitzinacell the level of dodgy, possibly criminal staff at the top of LCC is being patched over by the temporary elevation of Chris Walsh and Jeanette McLaughlin, City Solicitor & Monitoring Officer. The first provides false statements to the police while the second engages in full investigations which produce no results, either to the complainant via either the complaints process or the Data Protection Act.

Fitzgerald had late in 2016 been caught out lying to the Local Government Ombudsman and the Information Commissioner, but so far that matter does not have a court date. He is less than popular with the ICO after promising statements from 3rd parties, supporting his allegations regarding a complainant, which they noted he "failed to produce".

Fitzgerald & McLaughlin are on the left.

Chris Walsh in the waistcoat.

Stop Press, August 23, 2022.

See Court News

Good deal from LCC

Are Merseyside police getting land for new HQ to cheap? See Here.