Who to believe (yet again)?

When I woke up this morning and read the newspaper front pages on the Sky website, I wondered which of them (if any) the BBC would run with. 

When I tuned into Today it became clear that they'd chosen to go with the Guardian's lead story about a grammar school performing a U-turn on ejecting its under-performing A-level students. 

(The Guardian and the BBC never seem very enamoured with grammar schools, so I wasn't surprised by that. Plus it is a bizarre story). 

Andrew Norfolk's latest scoop, the main story in today's Times, only got brief mentions in the programme's news bulletins.

This was the first full-length interview with Sarah Champion since she was compelled to quit her shadow cabinet post after telling the truth about Pakistani men being mainly responsible for the epidemic of grooming gangs which have afflicted so many towns and cities in the UK over the past couple of decades - a scandal Mr Norfolk of the Times so courageously took the lead in exposing. Ms Champion, having initially apologised for her choice of language but having subsequently received gazillions of letters of support, has now performed her very own U-turn and gone back to her starting point. She's now standing by her original statements and decrying the London-led Left's 'floppy' evasiveness on the issue.

Andrew Norfolk's piece certainly championed our Sarah, omitting her 'sucking up' to her Muslims constituents over Gaza in 2014, not to mention her inaction while the Rotherham scandal was actually happening. 

(I note in passing that the Sky News website has a fully report on this story while the BBC News website hasn't.)

That said, Today did focus on Andrew Norfolk's previous scoop.

Nick Robinson interviewed the Tower Hamlets mayor John Biggs and the self-same Andrew Norfolk over the 'white Christian girl put in the care of hijab/burka-wearing Muslim carers' story.

The Times itself has come out strongly in defence of Mr Norfolk's reporting but his enemies are still circling, swooping and pecking, and they seem to think they've got him. Are they right to do so? And was Today circling, swooping and pecking too?

Well, having had so little time to blog in recent weeks I've pretty much concentrated on this one story in recent days (to the exclusion of almost everything else), and I think that Mr Norfolk did overegg the pudding and wasn't as rigorous as he could have been with the details, and he has had to backtrack somewhat. Plus I believe he was wrong (at best) in at least one of the answers he's given to the BBC in interviews in defence of himself. 

But I also think that his critics have been employing every trick in the book to try and discredit him, and that his original (and subsequent) reporting was based on proper investigative reporting and on the views of a council insider (a whistle-blower?). Some of his points have been disputed and denied but not definitively refuted, and others (like the niqab/burka question) keep getting side-stepped.

What we have are contradictory accounts, and different events being reported, and people mixing them up and making five from two plus two (including the BBC). 

That he did also raise a genuine issue is shown by two pieces (h/t Sue) found beyond the BBC - namely at the Spectator and, again, in the Times - both of which provide a context for the Times's coverage: The same extremist imam who lost a libel case against the BBC after alleging that Andrew Neil libelled him has been caught encouraging Muslims to take children into foster care - an example of Douglas Murray calls "the end-point of diversity, where you have a different mono-culture asserting itself in the way it knows how".

It is, indeed, a fascinating story. 

How did Today do today? Well, I've read so such social media comment about it that I'm whirling like a dervish. One group raged at Nick Robinson for 'promoting Islamophobia' by even repeating the Times's claims to John Biggs. Others have claimed that Nick Robinson was deliberately trying to rubbish the story by trying to discredit Andrew Norfolk. 

Nick Robinson, replying to Mr Norfolk, insisted that the programme was being fair by inviting both him and the mayor of Tower Hamlets John Biggs onto Today to give both sides of the story, which is certainly true, and, to be fair, he gave both parties the space to say their piece. 

That said, Mr Biggs was interviewed for significantly longer than Mr Norfolk (8m 28s compared to 4m 53s for Mr Norfolk) and it was annoying that he had to tell Andrew Norfolk "we haven't got much time left". That probably came from on high though. After all, they had a two-minute final feature about a train to slot in before the pips. 

Moreover, as Sue might put it (and has done), in both interviews Nick was a little flimsy, but that's better than browbeating interviewees to death.

That said (again), as Enough noted on a previous thread, Nick & Co. seem to have lost sight of the fact that this is Britain, and see "cultures" as morally equivalent.

So there you go. It's all very complicated, isn't it?

Who to believe again?

Well, the Tower Hamlets story has got a whole lot more complicated and the question 'Who to believe?' has become even murkier. 

Andrew Norfolk, the Times journalist who bravely exposed the Rotherham grooming scandal and who first broke the Tower Hamlets story on Monday morning, is coming under severe fire and facing accusations of 'sensationalism' and 'misreporting' from various quarters, especially the left-leaning media and Muslim organisations. 

His latest update does suggest that the story is a good deal less simple than it first appeared.

The 'white Christian girl' comes from a troubled family background, involving drugs. It appears that she comes from a family with a non-practising Muslim background - though the Muslim heritage of parts of the family is (curiously) disputed. The grandmother into whose care the poor girl is now being entrusted doesn't speak perfect English either (apparently) and may take her out of the country.

Reading the court order itself doesn't resolve the question of whether the judge praised or damned (or damned with faint praise) the Times's reporting. The court order itself contains no such praise. The praise (directly) quoted in the Times itself must have been made in court or in a communication between the court and the the Times (unless we assume that Mr. Norfolk was making it up). 

Reading Martin Bashir and Callum May's BBC rebuttal of the Times's reporting last night (and then thinking about it overnight), it struck me that that they had got it wrong by mixing up the judge with the court-appointed guardian. I went to bed confused by that.

They asserted in their opening paragraph:

There were no concerns about the welfare of a Christian girl said to have been fostered by a Muslim family, a family court judge has ruled.

but several paragraphs later they wrote:

The court-appointed guardian visited the foster family and reported no problems and that the child had been well cared for.

That didn't make sense to me, and reading the court order tonight confirms that I was right to smell a rat.

It makes it clear that the family court judge herself did not rule that "there were no concerns". She had nothing whatsoever to say on that point. It was the 'court-appointed guardian' who had no concerns on that front, not the judge.

The BBC reporters (Mr. Bashir and Mr. May) obviously confused the views of the 'court-appointed guardian' with that of the 'family court judge'. 

Given that their report was full of criticism of other media outlets' reporting, this was a woeful slip on their part.

(And even the Independent offshoot iNews says the BBC got this wrong).

Andrew Norfolk

That said, Andrew Norfolk does need to answer some serious questions. 

I watched last night's Newsnight, and from the very start Newsnight took the line that the reporting of the story (by the Times and others) had been 'disappointing' (as one of its talking heads put it) and that there was 'nothing to see here'. That was much as would expect from Newsnight. It was what I'd seen on the BBC website too. The BBC was 'of one voice' on this. 

But one of Evan Davis's guests was Andrew Norfolk himself. Newsnight, however, firmly placed him in the dock.

He was asked about why he had failed to mention that "the appointed guardian had found no problems" and about whether the Times's headline and strapline were "appropriate" in suggesting that "the judge had responded to the media coverage". 

Well, we're getting ever deeper and deeper into minutiae but, re-reading all of Andrew Norfolk's reports, I agree with his defence that if anyone read the article he published yesterday they'd find that he did indeed quote the judge as saying that the media coverage was no factor in her decision. 

That said, Evan was asking about this headline and strapline:

Well, I think Mr. Norfolk's defence still holds up there. The headline didn't say what Evan implied it said. The implications of the strapline have been discussed above (in paragraph 5 of this post) and it doesn't reinforce what Evan was implying either. 

However, when Andrew Norfolk responded to Evan Davis's charge that he'd failed to mention that "the appointed guardian had found no problems" and said that he "did" reflect the child's guardian had no concerns, my careful re-reading of all of his reports found that he actually didn't reflect that in any of them. Evan, evidently taken aback, replied, " If you said the guardian had no concerns, I'm sorry. I didn't see it. I looked at the piece". Well, I have to say that I'm with Evan here. I've looked at the piece - and all the other pieces - and, as I say, I can't find any mention of that in any of them. (Can you?)

The strong whiff of deep unease I have about this is that the elephant in the room in all of the BBC's coverage of this story that I've seen - including Newsnight's coverage - has been the very elephant that provoked so much shock when the story was first reported - i.e. the fact that a Christian girl was placed by Tower Hamlets council in the care of two Muslim families where, according to the Times, the women wear niqabs or burkas, and remove Christian crosses from necklaces, and didn't let the child eat bacon, and insulted Western women's morals and Western culture.

The BBC seems to have exorcised any suggestions of Muslim extremism from their reporting (suggestions the Times took from an official Tower Hamlets report).

The whole thing has felt like a concerted effort at deflection from the BBC.

Any thoughts you might have on this would be gratefully received (as ever).

Who to believe?

Andrew Norfolk's continuing coverage in The Times of the case of the five-year-old Christian girl placed into the care of Muslims families by Tower Hamlets Council is now being strongly countered by the BBC News website. 

Since the story's initial reporting, the BBC website has posted a video headlined 'My Muslim family fostered kids from different faiths' and featured a full-length article headlined 'My Muslim family and our foster kids' - both based on the same family and both promoting a positive view of Muslim fostering of non-Muslim children. The BBC's purpose in vigorously pushing such a story isn't hard to guess.

Three new articles have been published today following yesterday's ruling that the girl should be removed from the Muslim family now caring for her and placed with her maternal grandmother instead (as reported in this morning's Times): Ruling over 'Muslim foster case' girl; Muslim foster case: The rules and the reality; and 'No concerns' with mixed faith foster case. 

The last of those articles - by Martin Bashir and Callum May - is the most remarkable in that it abruptly dismisses The Times's take on the story in its opening paragraph - a statement which to anyone who has read about the story elsewhere might sound uncannily like a 'nothing to see here' kind of statement:

There were no concerns about the welfare of a Christian girl said to have been fostered by a Muslim family, a family court judge has ruled.

And that's that as far as the ruling itself is concerned, despite it seeming to be a very limited take on the judge's ruling compared to other reports - and very different to that of Andrew Norfolk today. 

The Bashir/May article - just as the main BBC report this morning did -  then spends much of the rest of its time giving the Council's defence while focusing repeatedly of criticism of the newspaper reporting of the story. 

It reads like a rebuttal. 

According to Mr. Norfolk, however, the judge specifically praised the Times in her ruling (saying it "acted responsibly in raising 'very concerning' matters of 'legitimate public interest'), and, contrary to the BBC report, suggested that the judge did have concerns given that she said that councils should seek "culturally-matched placements" for vulnerable children:

None of those direct quotes appears in those BBC's reports.

The full court order is apparently going to be published. This is absolutely vital here as the BBC's take on what Khatun Sapnara ruled and the Times's take on what she ruled are so wildly different that one media organisation must be grossly misreporting the story, and could even end up being seriously discredited over this.

P.S. Newssniffer shows that the Bashir/May report has been edited, possibly to tone down the impression of editorialising. The first version read:

Contrary to some media reports, the family was English-speaking.

The revised version reads:

Contrary to some media reports the council claimed the foster family was English-speaking.

Further thoughts and an update

Following my earlier piece, Craig has reminded me that Amina Lone, like the majority of her co-religionists, is "actively pro-Palestinian" on Twitter. Quelle surprise, as they say. 

No matter how outspoken a moderate Muslima may be in going public with her criticism of regressive cultural practices, she will still oppose Israel and Zionism. You can take the misogyny out of a moderate but you can’t take the antisemitism out of a Muslim. Or something. 

Do look at Amina Lone’s Twitter feed for a minute.  Here she says the deselection “happened in June not because of any recent interviews”.

It just shows how misconceptions (lies?) jet round the world before the truth (whatever that is) has time to put its burka on.

Even if her deselection is genuinely nowt to do with Sarah Champion’s aborted criticism of Muslim grooming gangs, the perception that it is has been generally accepted as truthful.

The trouble is that, true or false, it has had  little impact on the Labour Party’s standing, just as all the rest of the appalling stuff that pours forth from team Corbyn is ignored or glossed over by the MSM.

Also via the same timeline, note this series of tweets about the eyebrow brigade from “uberfeminist” including several foul-mouthed and embittered tweets by Nadia Chan. I wonder why Peter Kosminsky didn't base one of his characters on Ms Chan? His drama would have gained in authenticity what it might have lost in empathy.

*******

Here’s another P.S. This one is to Craig’s Andrew Norfolk scoop.

Click on the link to the paper review with Daisy McArthur and Tim Stanley. Did you spot Daisy McArthur’s immediate response to the story? She began with a preemptive caveat, presumably to head off the politically correct protests from her friends and colleagues that she assumed would be forthcoming.

“There’s a bit of me that thinks there…well, there’s a lot of me that thinks there is more to this story than meets the eye, and I suspect this might be the beginning of a number of stories in Tower Hamlets.  

The nub of the story is that this 5 year old little girl, you can see her picture on the front page there pixellated, has been placed, has gone into foster care taken away from her mother and has been placed um with a Muslim family who don’t speak English all the time at home and obviously you can see there in the picture wears a niquab or a burka. 

Now the controversy is that people will immediately think this is pandering to you know racist views - why shouldn’t you have one ethnicity tor one religion fostering another? Of course when you come down to it, if the child can’t make herself understood or doesn’t speak the same language as this family, if the child’s not used to somebody having their face covered, I think that is a serious, serious problem.

No Daisy. The controversy is not that, and by the way, what are these racist views to which you allude, prey? Oh, you mean people who suffer from that terrible affliction, Islamophobia.

Yes, it might indeed be less controversial if families could foster within their own culture. Yes, cultural considerations might have to take a back seat when needs must, but why must we turn this particular case on its head to test our own outrage? Are we so afraid of being accused of hypocrisy? 

Do we really need to defend our outrage at this scandalous scenario by bringing up the case of, say, the UKIP family who were allegedly denied the right to foster because of their politically incorrect values?   Whataboutery like that shouldn't even be necessary.

Please, what’s wrong with a bit of inconsistency in this case? Have we all forgotten? This is Britain for heaven’s sake, not Pakibloodystan.  Oh, I forgot; it was Tower Hamlets.

Has Andrew Norfolk exposed another scandal?

Andrew Norfolk, The Times

The Times has a disturbing report today by Andrew Norfolk about Tower Hamlets council placing a five-year-old white Christian girl in the care of two Muslim households in London.

The girl apparently became "very distressed" because in one of the households they "don't speak English", removed her necklace which had a Christian cross on it, suggested she learn Arabic, refused to allow her to eat her favourite food carbonara because it contained bacon, and taught her to think that "Christmas and Easter are stupid" and that "European women are stupid and alcoholic". Her first carer wore a niqab in public. Her second carer wears the full burka in public.

(Mr. Norfolk is, of course, the reporter who did so much to expose the Rotherham grooming scandal.)

It was good to see that last night's The Papers on the BBC News Channel led with the story, though with words of caution from BBC presenter Julian Worricker about the report's "claims". He presented the council's response and added this caveat:

Just to round this particular conversation off: Allegations there at the moment. Obviously we can't verify them at this point ourselves but we put them out there because there it is on the front page of the Times and we put the council's view.

Given the obvious importance of such a story it's to be hoped that the BBC will follow it up extensively, and not just because it's on the front page of the Times. It raises all manner of necessary questions. 

Today has been covering it in their paper reviews too, with Justin Webb justly adding that Andrew Norfolk "has a very wide experience in these matters".

The BBC News website, so far, only features the story in its paper review and, unfortunately, that appears to show a decision being made by the BBC website not to give this Times report the greatest attention. The BBC's choice of featured headlines to illustrate their 'The Papers' article selects two other headlines instead:

and the article's coverage of the Times's lead story comes next to last. 

If the BBC were to run with this story it would force a national discussion on its many implications. Will the BBC choose to do so, or choose to play it down instead?

"Many Islams exist in the world - this death cult is one of them" - Andrew Norfolk

I would never normally break the Times's paywall, but this is too important an article (from a couple of days back) not to share as widely as possible (and it's one of the reasons why I'm happy to subscribe to the Times).

It comes from the reporter who did so much to expose the grooming scandal in Northern towns and cities like Rotherham, Andrew Norfolk, and it's the kind of informed reporting that I'm starting to despair will ever get much of a hearing on the BBC, despite offering an obviously relevant and highly important point of view. It should be front-and-centre in the BBC's coverage, but isn't:

At first glance, it might seem difficult to imagine two groups of Muslims with so little in common.

Build a prison. In one wing, incarcerate those who serially abuse young girls in the back streets of English towns. In another, lock up the jihadist ideologues who plot mass slaughter in the name of God.

They all claim to be Muslim but while the adulterous, alcohol-swilling lowlifes of Rotherham and Rochdale betray multiple Islamic precepts on a daily basis, their fellow inmates view themselves as soldiers of the faith in its purest form.

Most Muslims would not rush to pay a prison visit. They routinely condemn both groups as despicable criminals whose conduct has nothing to do with Islam.

For Britons whose desire is for all who live on this island to somehow find a way to muddle along together, this is a reassuring thought, so comforting that it has almost become a commonplace. In recent years, no press conference after a sex-grooming trial has been complete without a police officer’s pronouncement that the perpetrators’ ethnicity and religion was utterly irrelevant to their crimes.

Islamist terror strikes are likewise met by politicians and community leaders with statements condemning the attack while stressing the falsity of perpetrators’ claim to have acted in the name of Allah. Monday’s Manchester atrocity was no exception.

Salman Abedi’s bomb brought carnage to a concert whose audience was predominantly young teenage girls. That anyone might view innocent children as legitimate targets intensified the need to distance the act from the teaching of one of the world’s great religions.

In the prison, different attitudes prevail. If they have nothing else in common, Pakistani child-sex groomers and Isis terrorists share at least one attribute. For them, no 13-year-old non-Muslim girl is innocent. Nor is she a child.

One group fails every test of what it means to be a good Muslim; the other finds such certainty in its literalist vision of the righteous path that it condemns most fellow Muslims as apostates. They unite in their contempt for white girls. One eyes an easy outlet for cheap lust. To jihadists, as a symbol of western decadence and immorality there could be no more suitable target than a venue packed with British girls worshipping a scantily clad young American singer.

Targeting children for sex or death is doubtless abhorrent to the vast majority of British Muslims, for whom a truer reflection of Islam was the kindness of fellow believers who came to the aid of the victims and who stood, in defiance of terrorism, in solidarity with fellow Mancunians.

Who, though, gets to define what is or is not Islam, who is or is not a Muslim? Who makes the rules?

How to pray, how to wash, what to wear; there seems barely any element of the faith that is not subject to furious debate long before bigger issues — such as the meaning of jihad and when it is permissible to wage war for the sake of Allah — are confronted.

Consider patriarchal attitudes towards women, however, within different Islamic sects and nations and in different centuries, and you will find a path well trodden. In all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, girls become women — and eligible for marriage — at puberty. Women are either modest, housebound wives and mothers or Jezebel temptresses, shameless objects of sexual desire, born to lure men astray.

One need not travel far from Manchester to understand why some men, schooled in medieval theology or the conservative culture of homelands in south Asia, the Middle East or north Africa, struggle to treat western women with respect.

Near Bury, Greater Manchester, is a former sanatorium that since 1975 has been home to Britain’s leading Islamic boys’ seminary. In 2014, Ofsted hailed its production of “exemplary British citizens”. Its 21st-century perspective is instructive.

A website promoting the seminary’s teaching states that Satan uses women “as his avenue to create evil in society”. She should always remain in the home. If she must venture out, her clothing should conceal her entire body. Unless hidden from view, she will inevitably “attract men like swamps of flies are attracted to uncovered sweets”.

Befriending a non-Muslim invites corruption. To marry a Christian or Jewish woman risks the filtering of “their repulsive qualities into Muslim homes”. Singing and dancing is banned. The music industry is a Jewish-influenced means of “spreading the Satanic web”. We allow such values to be taught in 21st-century Britain.

Girls. Music. Danger. Pollution. In the early 1950s, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer who played a pivotal role in the birth of supremacist Islamist ideology, studied briefly at a college in Colorado. His verdict on western women spat contempt. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, in the expressive eyes and thirsty lips. [It] lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it.”

American dance music was for Qutb, a hero of the Muslim Brotherhood, what “savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires”. He described his visit to a church dance: “They danced to the tunes of the gramophone and the dancefloor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.”

Sexuality and freedom, in women, are to be stamped upon. An errant daughter or sister shames her entire family. Cue acid attacks and honour killings.

These are not fringe opinions. In 2013, a study of 38,000 Muslims by the Pew Research Centre found that 46 per cent of Pakistanis and 59 per cent of Bangladeshis believed it was sometimes justified for family members to kill women as a punishment for pre-marital sex or adultery.

More than 80 per cent of Muslims in Jordan, Egypt, and Pakistan said that a wife must always obey her husband. In Iraq, Morocco and Tunisia it was more than 90 per cent.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban outlawed music and the education of girls. There, child marriage flourishes as in so many Muslim nations including Iran, where women are banned from dancing and performing music on stage.

Religious laws that dictate the treatment of women in many Islamic states reached new levels of barbarity in 2014 when Islamic State seized huge swathes of Iraq and Syria and declared its own caliphate.

Its interpretation of God’s rules led to mass public beheadings and to the enslavement of more than 3,000 Yazidi girls and young women.

Rules published by Isis in December 2014 codified lawful conduct with slaves. They included a declaration that “it is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty, if she is fit for intercourse”.

For millions of Muslims worldwide who believe they follow a religion of peace, such crazed bloodlust is a monstrous perversion of Islam.

As the historian Tom Holland has noted, the truth is less comfortable. Isis argues that its killings and use of concubines is “sanctioned by the Koran and by the sayings and example of Muhammad”.

“To dismiss them as psychopaths is to ignore what is most truly terrifying about them — that their thuggery and greed coexist with a profound strain of religiosity. [Isis] propagandists present it as charged by God with restoring to the world the pristine Islam that existed back in the days of Muhammad and his immediate successors.”

Dewsbury is far from Sinjar but it was no surprise when Baroness Warsi suggested that in her West Yorkshire home town, some Pakistani men “see woman as second-class citizens and white women as third-class citizens”.

They “believe white girls are fair game”, she said. Shabir Ahmed, leader of the Rochdale grooming gang, would have agreed. The 59-year-old kebab shop worker told a 15-year-old girl that it was not wrong of him to deliver her to numerous Pakistani men for sex because in his homeland “you’re allowed to have sex with girls from the age of 11”.

Ahmed enjoyed having sex with children but worried they would make him impure. He forced girls to wash before he abused them. Afterwards he would “go home, have a shower, say two units of prayer and ask Allah for forgiveness”.

Muslim girls are saints or sinners who must be punished. Western girls are corrupt sluts. This is not an uncommon perspective in the Islamic world.

Ariana Grande, a 23-year-old singer from Florida, is a former children’s TV star whose global Dangerous Woman tour reached Manchester, 12 miles from Rochdale, on Monday. A year ago, she told Twitter critics that “expressing sexuality in art” was no more an invitation for disrespect than “wearing a short skirt is asking for assault”.

Girls the same age as those serially abused by Ahmed and his friends went to the city in their thousands to watch a mini-skirted, cat-eared woman dance and sing on stage in black thigh boots.

When it gleefully claimed responsibility for the slaughter of 22 “crusaders” by its “soldier of the caliphate”, Isis condemned the Arena event as “shameless”. It said that the bomb plot succeeded “with Allah’s grace and support”. There are many Islams in this world. This death cult is one of them.

You can’t say those things in our country

Although she sounds like a complete bitch, the way the BBC reported Andrew Norfolk’s piece about Dame Lowell Goddard in The Times (£) struck a discordant note this morning.  

“Whitehall officials close to Theresa May were accused last night of covering up allegations of misconduct, including racist remarks, made against the judge in charge of Britain’s biggest public inquiry.”

announced John Humphrys in the tone of voice one might hear between neighbours exchanging tittle-tattle over the garden fence. (Les Dawson comes to mind.)

“Home Office staff and advisers received warnings about Dame Lowell Goddard’s offensive behaviour in her role as chairwoman of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) but did not end her “catastrophic” leadership.”

Fair enough. We’ve heard quite a lot about her abrasiveness already. Here come the ‘racist remarks’:

• She said that Britain had so many paedophiles “because it has so many Asian men”; voiced shock at the size of the country’s ethnic minority population; and allegedly complained of having to travel 50 miles from London to see a white face.

Hmm. Sounds more like a statement of the bleeding obvious than actual racism to me, but in a world gawn mad, stating the bleeding obvious IS considered racism. 

It’s almost as though the powers that be (for want of a better term) are still sticking their heads in the sand to avoid reality despite those real cases of ‘covering up’ where ‘Asian’ grooming gangs were concerned.

• She flew into rages and treated staff with contempt.  (!)

• She claimed not to be part of the establishment but was overly impressed by “breeding”; judged people according to their social status; and nursed a deep reverence for the royal family.

Deep reverence for the royal family! And with that incriminating evidence, her fate was sealed.

“It is understood that the judge — who denies all the allegations against her — was eventually warned by a senior official about her frequent use of racially derogatory language. She is said to have been told that “you can’t say those things in our country”. “