Just a Thought

by Les May

UNLIKE many Labour supporters in Rochdale, I found it difficult to get too excited about whether Richard Farnell did or did not know of the unsavoury goings on at Knowl View School in the early 1990s.

Having spent a good deal of time in unpicking the facts from the fantasy in Simon Danczuk’s book ‘Smile for the Camera’, I concluded that whether he knew or not would have made not the slightest difference to the outcome.   I saw no evidence of a ‘cover up’ by officers of Rochdale Council and felt that they had acted appropriately in a very difficult situation.  This is what I told the Police when I was interviewed as part of Operation Clifton.

I had a second reason for my lack of excitement.  Much of the public discourse failed to distinguish carefully between what the solicitors had to say both in, and especially outside the Inquiry and its official findings.   Just because a solicitor says something does not make it true however often it is repeated.

Had Farnell not stepped down as Leader of the Council in December 2017 the way that Councillor ‘Two Votes’ Rana was dealt with might have been different.   Although this councillor admitted committing two electoral offences the present Leader did not seem to think it was necessary to ask for his resignation from the council, though it should be said that an honourable man would have realised that this was the correct course of action without being asked.

After all Farnell ‘has form’ on dealing with councillors who do not come up to scratch.  Although Danczuk praised his help in the book and he loyally stuck with Danczuk long after the latter had passed his ‘sell by’ date.  it is reported that he had a quiet word with Danczuk’s wife when she proved to be less assiduous in her role as a Councillor than she should have been.

**********

 

Midsummer Murders & Knowl View School

by Les May

THE TV land of Midsummer is a fictional place of pretty villages and dark deeds. People who always like to grab the moral high ground may complain there aren’t enough non-white faces, but no-one can complain that the stories are not intricate with a wealth of suspects.

Blood Will Out, which was episode 4 of season 2, involved an ex-military landowner, a bunch of Travellers led by another ex-military man who obviously had a grudge against the landowner who in turn was determined to drive the Travellers from the village and a man, who had in the past exchanged wives with the landowner.   His daughter had followed her mother.  When the landowner is found dead from the blast of a shotgun Barnaby and Troy have the task of sorting through the list of suspects.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0214950/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_i74

We finally discover that it was landowner’s step daughter who had pulled the trigger. Her motive, she was being abused. But there was a twist in the tail. Barnaby assumed, as you probably did, that it was sexual abuse.  It wasn’t.  The victim got his way in the family by beating her with a leather belt.   He tried to do it once too often and got shot.

After the publication of the book Smile for the Camera by Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker.  in April 2014 I devoted much of the next two and a half years to untangling the truth and falsehoods in stories about Cyril Smith that this pair were telling.   My basic concern was that they were conflating two separate issues.   Smith’s antics at Cambridge House hostel in the early 1960s with the goings on at Knowl View school in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Solid evidence of Smith’s antics at Cambridge House was published in 1979 in Rochdale's Alternative Paper (RAP) when Smith was very much alive and able to sue if RAP got it wrong.  He never did.  The unsavoury events at Knowl View were sexual activity between the boys, some of it coercive.

These were detailed in a report to Education and Social Service officers, the ‘Shepherd report’ and confirmed in the ‘Mellor report’. The significant contents of the former were later published in an article which appeared in the Independent on Sunday in September 1995.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R3A7XZP51EW0A6/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1849548757

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2015/10/nv-review-of-smile-for-camera.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2015/10/our-long-running-crique-of-smile-for.html

https://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2016/10/old-news-from-knowl-view.html

https://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2016/10/dodger-danczuk-doesnt-deliver.html

https://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2016/10/tonightm-danczuk-in-lions-den.html

Danczuk and Baker muddied the waters about what really happened at Knowl View.   As a result any subsequent ‘evidence’ from individuals is tainted.  They did it by conflating two separate issues, Cyril Smith’s antics at Cambridge House and the reports about what went on at Knowl View. Long before their book was published we had TV documentaries based on Danczuk’s unsubstantiated claims about Smith’s involvement at Knowl View, claims which were not made in the Independent on Sunday in September 1995, though in both cases the source seems to have been the same.   Without throwing in the Knowl View connection they had only the stories that we already knew about Smith’s antics at Cambridge House when he was a member of the Labour party.  This story, regurgitated from the May 1979 edition of RAP, would not have filled a book and without a book there would have been no lucrative contract.

We are seeing this same conflation again. It is happening in the local press where lazy journalists, who cannot be bothered to sort the fact from the fiction simply recycle the same old stuff ad nauseum, Cambridge House, Knowl View, Cyril Smith equals a story to fill a corner of the paper.

And it is happening again with a local parents group which are managing to conflate Cambridge House, the grooming and sexual abuse of girls by a group of asian men, and the unsavoury events at Knowl View.

https://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-curse-of-gesture-politics.html

Danczuk’s book muddied the waters about Knowl View. Has this led us into making the same mistake as Barnaby made in the Midsummer Murders drama? Have we been led along the path of assuming that any abuse by adults at Knowl View was sexual in nature?

I am prompted to ask this because of a story which was passed to me by two people I have known well for many years. It was recounted to them by the mother of a boy who had been a pupil at Knowl View.

He had run away from the school and made his way home.   She telephoned the school and said she would take him back in a little while.  Before she could do this two burly men appeared at her door. When she opened it her son ran upstairs. The men said they had come to take her son back.  One man went upstairs. The boy screamed.   When she looked her son was being held by his legs and dragged down the stairs.   She complained to the school.  Nothing was done about it.

If this story is true and if it is typical of what was going on at the school, then this is the real scandal of what happened at Knowl View, not some vague innuendo about Cyril Smith being involved in sexual abuse at the school.  We will never know whether events like this were commonplace, or even if they happened, unless men now in their later thirties are willing to break their silence. If they feel they want justice it will be too late when the perpetrators are dead.

***********

Same Old Danczuk!

by Les May

A week ago in an article for Northern Voices, I wrote:

‘OSTENSIBLY Simon Danczuk’s 2014 book ‘Smile for the Camera’ is about the sexual peccadillos of his predecessor Cyril Smith. But a careful reading shows that the intent was to so closely associate Smith’s antics with the Liberal-Democrats that the party became permanently unelectable in Rochdale so securing a safe Labour seat for Danczuk for as long as he wanted it.’

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/the-benefits-of-20-20-hindsight.html

A recently ‘leaked’ letter from Danczuk to the Chairwoman of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) tends to confirm my view.  Danczuk wrote:

‘Finally, I would like to point out that both local and national Liberal Democrat activists/representatives would have been even more aware of many of the issues regarding Cyril Smith though your inquiry appears, so far, to have been quite limited in regard to investigating such matters.  I was wholly convinced that key Liberal figures were well aware of Cyril Smith’s abuse but chose to do nothing. Perhaps this is something that deserves more attention.’

This is typical Danczuk.  As with his assertions in the same letter regarding whether Richard Farnell knew about the unsavoury goings on at Knowl View it represents only Danczuk’s opinion.  Just when did his conversations with Farnell about abuse at Knowl View take place?  Were they after November 2012?   If they were then should we not ask whether Danczuk only found out about Knowl View after he was contacted by someone who had been hawking around his story about a ‘cover up’ for years and had suddenly discovered someone to believe him?   As always he offers us no facts only vague generalisations implying that Farnell knew about Knowl View when what was actually commonly spoken of was Cyril Smith’s antics at Cambridge House.

I find Danczuk claim that he ‘thoroughly examined what went on at Knowl View as part of my research for the book’ difficult to take seriously, because the book is full of assertions made without evidence and when asked in October 2016 to provide real evidence he could not do so.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/

As for his attempts to smear Jim Dobbin with, ‘Relatively new to this town, I found these attempts to cover-up abuse very strange.  I was puzzled as to why local politicians like Jim [Dobbin], but also others, had not raised concerns when they had the power to do so.   At an appropriate time, I did put on record the abuse that Cyril and others committed.’  I find them beneath contempt because Danczuk’s idea of ‘an appropriate time’ was two years after Cyril Smith died, 33 years after his behaviour had been reported in Rochdale’s Alternative Paper (RAP) and a year after Danczuk had applauded enthusiastically at the unveiling of a Blue Plaque to him in 2011.  As for ‘the others’ we are still waiting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5iL2dDSyl0

If asked to choose between believing Richard Farnell’s version of what he knew about Knowl View and believing what Simon Danczuk’s says he knew, I’d believe Farnell every time.

If you want to know why follow the links below.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/operation-clifton-further-discredits.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/nv-review-of-smile-for-camera.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/our-long-running-crique-of-smile-for.html

The Benefits of 20-20 Hindsight

by Les May

OSTENSIBLY Simon Danczuk’s 2014 book ‘Smile for the Camera’ is about the sexual peccadillos of his predecessor Cyril Smith.  But a careful reading shows that the intent was to so closely associate Smith’s antics with the Liberal-Democrats that the party became permanently unelectable in Rochdale so securing a safe Labour seat for Danczuk for as long as he wanted it.

It is something of an irony that the major casualty from the fall out from all the hares that Danczuk set running in the book is Richard Farnell, until recently Leader of Rochdale Council and a supporter of Danczuk long after the latter had reached his ‘sell by date’ as an MP.

Perhaps fearing that it will suffer in the May elections from the bad publicity the Labour party has suspended Farnell after the report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse said he had lied to the Inquiry.

It should however be pointed out that the report is quite liberal in its criticism of quite a number of the people trying to make decisions about how to deal with what was happening at Knowl View in the years around 1990.  Paul Rowen, who followed Farnell as Leader of the Council after May 1992, Ian Davey, Director of Social Services and Diana Cavanagh, Director of Education, are all criticised to varying degrees, which makes it all the more surprising that at one point the report refers to ‘some of Rochdale Council’s beleaguered officers’.

Twenty-twenty hindsight is wonderful thing especially when viewing events from a distance of a quarter of a century or more.  The sheer volume of detail presented in the Report of the Investigation makes it appear unlikely that any one person could have grasped the complexity of the issues at the time.

No doubt we shall be told ‘lessons will be learned’ and we shall hear even more of the new mantra of ‘safeguarding’, which seems to be a codeword for taking even more children into care when the money might be better spent on supporting their parents in their own home. Some of the children taken into care after the Middleton Satanic Abuse panic ended up at Knowl View for a time.

******

Danczuk: Exit stage Right

by Les May

SO the ‘Danczuk Saga’ has finally come to an end. In just two years he has managed to convert a 12,400 majority in 2015 into a total vote of just 883. Clearly people vote for the party not the man because Labour’s Tony Lloyd has a majority of more than 14,000.  What went wrong for Danczuk?

I have been chronicling Danczuk antics on the Northern Voices blog since he published his book about Cyril Smith, ‘Smile for the Camera’, in April 2014.  But the Danczuk story goes back much further than that. In fact I could push it back to 1992 which is when I believe Danczuk found out about Cyril’s spanking of young men at Cambridge House hostel after reading the story published in a copy of the May 1979 edition of the Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP) which is archived in Rochdale Reference Library.  It is a reasonable assumption that he would have come across copies of RAP whilst undertaking sociological research about the town.

In November 2006, the Labour magazine Tribune published the results of an investigation into what it called ‘allegations of irregularities, which point to a concerted effort to oust non-Blairites from standing’ which it said ‘raise serious questions over whether the choice of prospective MPs is being conducted in a free and fair manner.’  And who was one of those prospective MPs?  Surprise, surprise, it was none other than Simon Danczuk!

This is what Tribune went on to say about the shenanigans:  The selection for the Rochdale constituency, due end on January 22, has been described by one NEC member as "a debacle".  Before the selection began, a regional officer was accused of assisting Simon Danzcuk by allowing his company Vision 21 to conduct a survey of the attitudes of Rochdale members.  The shortlisting meeting was halted when a vote of no confidence was passed in the selection process.  Several branch nomination meetings had to be re-held after irregularities were discovered.  At the reconvened shortlisting meeting, an all-male shortlist of eight was agreed, despite this being contrary to party rules. All members were issued with a postal ballot, after it was discovered that the original postal votes had been opened prematurely.

(The www link which carried the Tribune article is now dead. If you wish to check it out for yourself I will send you a copy I downloaded earlier this year if you contact an NV editor.)

Then there was the strange story ‘Would-be MP victim of death threats’

which appeared in the Lancashire Telegraph in January 2007.  The would be MP was Simon Danczuk who was of course the source for the story. Caveat emptor!

http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/1116230.wouldbe_mp_victim_of_death_threats/

Or how about the story which appeared on Rochdale Online in May 2008, ‘Danczuk linked to developer threatening legal action against Council!’  The link was via the company Vision 21 set up by Danczuk with Anna McNamara and Ruth Turner, founders of the Big Issue in the North magazine for the homeless.  It is surely just coincidence that the name Ruth Turner figures prominently in the Tribune article and she went on to work in Blair’s office. http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news/8581/danczuk-linked-to-developer-threatening-legal-action-against-council

Now at this point Simon isn’t an MP. But there’s more to come before we get to the election in May 2010.  There’s the little matter of the Spanish Holiday which went wrong.  That’s the first one in 2006 not the second one in 2016 which went even more wrong.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/will-labour-suspend-mr-damczuk.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3157459/Disturbing-questions-Simon-Danczuk-crusades-against-abuse.html

What all these stories amount to is that nothing to do with the public image of Simon Danczuk is straightforward.  The RAP story about Smith from 1979 was about the abuse of power and was based on affidavits by the young men concerned. (I know this is true, I have copies.)  The really interesting question is why the media ignored it back then.

The Danczuk version in the book involves Smith the repeatedly offending sexual predator, the Security Services protecting him, a false story about Northamptonshire police stopping him and finding a boot load of child porn, then letting him free after a ‘phone call to London’, tries to implicate him in the murky happenings at Knowl View special school because he was a Governor, and has a supposed ‘whistleblower’ who saw absolutely nothing and whose story when published in 1995 made no mention of Smith.

What amazes me is that so many people were taken in by this book.  All you have to do to spot the problem is to note the absence of sources in the bibliography then ask Danczuk how many men he interviewed who claim to have been assaulted by Smith.   I have tried on several occasions and he has never replied.  So as an editor of N.V. I drew my own conclusions

Once Danczuk had set his hares running, the police were duty bound to investigate.   If you add up the cost of all the police investigations which resulted from Danczuk’s claims it runs into the millions of pounds.  And when the police found insufficient evidence for the CPS to prosecute, according to Danczuk it was their fault!  But that does not excuse Leicestershire police discussing aspects of the investigation into Greville Janner with Danczuk.  Aspects which later appeared in a national newspaper. (See Appendix).

Since the last day of December 2015, Danczuk has been the political equivalent of ‘dead meat’.  The proximate cause of his undoing was the so called ‘sexting’ incident involving a 17 years old ‘financial dominatrix’.   From then on it was a bad year for him. But as I said earlier nothing is straightforward with Danczuk and his own antics ensured that things went from bad to worse.

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/simon-danczuks-snare-of-self-delusion.html

We may not have heard the last of Simon.  I don’t think that a decision has yet been made on whether the overpayment of £11,000 in accommodation expenses for the two of his children constituted fraud.

Now that Rochdale is bidding adieu to Mr D. what sort of reputation will he leave behind?  With the best will in the world I find it difficult to see him as anything other than a man who milked his position as an MP for his own ends and who even in adversity never missed an opportunity to line his own pockets.  All perfectly legally of course.  But that does not take away the smell.

Appendix

25 August 2015

Chief Constable

Leicestershire Police
Force Headquarters
St Johns
Enderby
Leicester.
LE19 2BX

Dear Sir,

I refer to statements made by Simon Danczuk MP in the House of Commons on 23 June 2015 and recorded in Hansard Column 214WH.  I have extracted below the portion of his statement which I believe raises matters of concern about the actions of your force.

Quotation starts:

'I know the police are furious about this, and rightly so.  Anyone who has heard the accusations would be similarly outraged.  I have met Leicestershire police and discussed the allegations in some detail: children being violated, raped and tortured, some in the very building in which we now sit.  The official charges are: 14 indecent assaults on a male under 16 between 1969 and 1988; two indecent assaults between ’84 and ’88; four counts of buggery of a male under 16 between ’72 and ’87; and two counts of buggery between 1977 and 1988.  My office has spoken to a number of the alleged victims and heard their stories.'

Quotation ends.

Taken at its face value this suggests that Leicestershire police discussed with a third party, who though an MP, does not represent a constituency within the Leicestershire police area, matters of a confidential nature relating to a police investigation.  I draw attention to the fact that Mr Danczuk specifically used the word 'discussed' suggesting that information was passed to him by the police service rather than that he was simply questioned about information which he might hold which was relevant to the police investigation.  The detailed information regarding the nature of the charges in the remainder of the statement suggests that this interpretation is correct.

Even if it is considered appropriate to discuss these matters with Mr Danczuk the question arises as to why he was apparently not instructed that these matters were confidential.  Mr Danczuk's choice of words in the first two sentences of the above extract could leave the impression that by not instructing him that the matter was confidential the police service was attempting to use an extra-judicial method to bring pressure to bear upon the Director of Public Prosecutions. I stress that I am not making such an allegation.

The apparent failure to instruct Mr Danczuk that the discussions were confidential extends to an article in the Sun newspaper of 24 June 2015 headed 'Lord Janner "Raped kids in Parliament" claims Labour MP Simon Danczuk', and in which the matters discussed with him by Leicestershire police were repeated. As Mr Danczuk had made his claims under Parliamentary privilege he gave himself, and the Sun, protection against being sued for libel.

On 24 July 2015 Mr Danczuk received a payment of £10,000 from the owners of the Sun for an article he had contributed to.  He declined to say which article the cash related to.

If this payment does relate to the Sun article I believe it raises further questions about the wisdom of discussing material relating to the Janner case with Mr Danczuk without instructing him that the matter was confidential.

I am arranging for a copy of this letter to be sent to the Home Office because I think the concerns raised are applicable to similar discussions between other police forces and MPs who may use parliamentary privilege to make the discussions public.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Les May

Official Opening of 'Simon Danczuk Toilet Block'

 

 Picture of toilet block dedicated to Rochdale MP, Simon Danczuk

A charity has named a toilet block in Gambia after MP Simon Danczuk in a tongue-in-cheek swipe following a row over donations.

London-based Sohm Schools Support dubbed the facilities the 'Simon Danczuk Toilet Block' as part of their programme to improve two schools in a tiny village.

Charity founder and trustee John Walker had initially vowed to name a more prestigious school building in Sohm after the Labour MP for Rochdale.

It came after they met in 2012 to discuss background information for Mr Danczuk's book 'Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith'.

But the 69-year-old claims he never got a charity donation in response for his help - and chose to name the school's toilet after the MP following the disagreement.

Mr Walker, who lives in London, said:

'I never had any financial interest in Simon's book but I would have appreciated a charitable donation as recognition for my work.

 'I told Simon if he put a couple of grand our way I would be happy to name a building after him.

'But I never received a donation from him – so, given the way I felt about it, I thought that toilet block would be appropriate instead.

'It's great that these toilets are up and running and very much appreciated by the students and you can see it on their delighted faces - they are flushed with pride. 

 'It's a hard squeeze getting money to help these schools but Mr Danczuk's small deposit was a movement in the right direction.

'One of the students told me that when they go to the toilet they now ask if they can "go to the Danczuk".'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4245200/Charity-names-TOILET-block-Gambia-Simon-Danczuk.html#ixzz4ZMG0u8iQ
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

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Self-styled ‘Selfie Queen’ or Publicity Seeker?

by Les May

I live in Rochdale.  It’s not difficult to find people eager to give you their opinion about our very own self-styled ‘Selfie Queen’, Karen Danczuk formerly Karen Burke.  Older people, and especially older ladies, tend to be less than impressed by her past enthusiasm for flaunting her cleavage.  Those of a political bent use words like ‘deluded’ when talking about her pretensions to becoming an MP and point to her not altogether successful spell as a local councillor when she gained a reputation for being less than assiduous in attending to some of her duties.

But never have I come across anyone, nor do I expect to, who would suggest that vandalising her car, or indeed any of her property, is acceptable behaviour.

You do not have to be one of her Twitter followers to empathise with Karen over the problem of damage to her car. But that does not preclude us from taking a closer look at this story.

http:  //www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4257178/Vandals-target-Karen-Danczuk-s-car-trial.html

She is quoted as saying:
'Since trial I've had five attacks on car (slashed tyres, diesel, nails, paintwork) I'm sure its coincidence but remember, I travel with two boys.'

'These attacks are either linked to the trial or a sheer coincidence. They are clearly targeted at me for whatever reason and I can only speculate. 
'But these incidents are another example of why victims are too scared to come forward.  I want to remind these people that I travel with two young boys and it is putting their lives in danger as well as my own life.' 

Now no one can object to the last of these four statements.  It is manifestly true. But when I read the first three I began to wonder if we were not seeing here the beginnings of a narrative into which every subsequent happening could be fitted.   
Why mention ‘the trial’?  
Why mention a link to ‘the trial’?
Why write ‘these incidents are another example of why victims are too scared to come forward’?

I have seen this tactic adopted before.  It is what I complained about in 2014 in my Amazon review of her ex-husband’s now discredited book ‘Smile for the Camera’ where I wrote ‘The writing style adopted is to let the narrative drive the evidence not the evidence drive the narrative.’ 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3A7XZP51EW0A6
 
The problems which arise when this approach to story telling is adopted are highlighted by the fact that when Northamptonshire police investigated one of the stories in ex-husband Simon’s book it was found to have no basis in fact.

A good story was enough to get it a place in the book because it fitted into the narrative the authors had constructed for Cyril Smith.

Adam Simmonds, Northamptonshire Police and Crime Commissioner, ended up asking for an apology from Danczuk and said ‘Everything in that book's got to be evidence-led and -based, otherwise you are alerting people to the wrong information.’  

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-33716982

Until such time as the police arrest someone, he or she is convicted of damaging Karen’s car and shown to have done it because they were disgruntled about the outcome of ‘the trial’ I see no reason to fall in line with Karen’s narrative.

It’s not the first time she has tried to construct a narrative which suits the image of herself she is keen to project. She tried to pull off the same trick in January when on ‘Good Morning Britain’ the story was that her ‘prolific use of social media is 100% linked to being abused as a child’. Evidence for this? None! Just a bit of wishful thinking.

http://www.itv.com/news/2017-01-03/karen-danczuk-my-selfies-were-100-linked-to-being-abused/

And how about the two year old story from February 2015, ‘Selfie-mad councillor Karen Danczuk is auctioning herself off this Valentine's day’?  What’s her excuse, sorry explanation, for this bit of self publicity? Or the story of a similar vintage which informs us that on first meeting her Harriet Harman told her 'You're too pretty to be interested in politics and should be in Girls Aloud' 

http://www.itv.com/news/granada/update/2015-02-11/a-valentines-date-with-danczuk/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2950535/Harriet-Harman-told-Labour-MP-s-wife-Karen-Danczuk-pretty-interested-politics-Girls-Aloud.html

Karen’s attempts to construct a narrative to project a particular image of herself will not doubt continue.   But we don’t have to buy into it.  The findings of the court stand because they have been tested under our adversarial system of justice.  What Karen is quoted as saying in the media and what she posts on Twitter have not, so we are free to believe as much or as little as we like.

She seems to me not to have ‘waived her right to anonymity’, but to have massacred it.  A figure of about £20,000 was mentioned in court for a newspaper story from 2015 almost two years before the verdict. It was no doubt coincidence that this story came out at much the same time as the ‘Valentine dinner’ and the Harman story.  Whether the spate of post trial media stories have been a ‘nice little earner’ I don’t know, but I cannot help having noticed how often the images which accompany them are attributed to agencies which are not unknown to the Danczuk duo.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/39912/i-was-raped-age-6-by-a-family-friend/

If Karen has any serious pretensions to a career in politics she will stop trying to be famous and aiming to be a celebrity, drop her smart phone in the canal and get a proper job.
I’m not holding my breath.

Knowl View: No Charges, No Case, No Cover-up

by Brian Bamford

SIMON Danczuk, the MP for Rochdale, often sounds like a gramophone record in which the needle is stuck.  When faced with the bad news that, after the expenditure of almost three-quarter's of a million pounds on Operation Clifton, there is no case to support charges against anyone for the alleged cover-up of a child sex-abuse scandal at Knowl View school up Bamford in Rochdale, Mr. Danczuk does what he always does and blames the investigators for doing a bad job.
True to form Danczuk has declared:  'I am not at all surprised at the outcome of Operation Clifton, as it has been a shambles from start to finish.' 
Then Danczuk hints at yet another cover-up, saying:  'They've wasted a lot of public money trying to protect their reputation and this doesn't help anyone.'
It seems that this whole investigation which has cost so much public money has turned out to be a castle built on the sand of the book published by Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker called 'Smile for the Camera', in which the authors extrapolated in an imaginative way about claims that there had been widespread abuse at Knowl View by Cyril Smith and others, and a cover-up.
The report on Operation Clifton, which we on Northern Voices' participated, has now been written, and will eventually be incorporated into the national overarching inquiry into child sexual abuse.  This is not expected be published in full for the best part of decade.

Dodger Danczuk Doesn't Deliver!

by Les May

Last night, as predicted Simon Danczuk didn't deliver his evidence of historic child abuse to the meeting of the Greater Manchester Police Federation at the Renaissance Hotel as requested by Chief Inspector Ian Hanson chairman of the Joint Branch Board of the GMP Police Federation.  Instead Tony Lloyd, the Manchester Police and Crime Commissioner, turned up to explain to the serving police officers present what was going on as the disgraced Rochdale MP, Simon Danczuk, indulges himself in attacking the police for failing to dig-up enough evidence to satisfy the Crown Prosecution Service.  Below Les May questions Simon Danczuk's tactics in attacking the police. (Editor)

THE response by Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk to Chief Inspector Hanson’s challenge to him

'.... I will publicly call him out to deliver the firm evidence that he bases his criticism of GMP on to my office by 12 noon on Monday - and I will personally deliver it to the IPCC.’

at https://twitter.com/hashtag/knowlView?src=hash  and at http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/danczuk-ducks-out-of-debate.html  was entirely predictable.   

He is trying to use the same tactic which was so successful when he appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee in July 2014, when instead of being questioned about his book ‘Smile for the Camera’  he managed to get the spotlight shifted onto Leon Brittan.  Now he wants to shift the spotlight from his inability to provide the evidence asked for, onto debating what he calls the ‘poor policing around Rochdale’. 

This is just a smoke screen to hide the fact that he does not have any evidence to back up his claims about Knowl View.  He knows perfectly well that Chief Inspector Hanson is speaking for the GMP members of the Police Federation who he feels have been very unfairly criticised by Danczuk.  Chief Inspector Hanson is not, and does not represent himself as, speaking for GMP.   

To put it bluntly Danczuk’s claims:

‘Everyone knows that child abuse took place on a frightening scale at Knowl View’ and ‘We've seen shocking reports documenting this...’ are bunkum.  ‘Everyone knows...’, isn’t evidence and Danczuk continually repeating it does not make it evidence. 

And no, we have not seen ‘shocking reports’ because the two reports which might throw some light on what was happening at Knowl View, the 1991 report of Philip Shepherd and the 1992 report of Valerie Mellor, have not been published by Rochdale Council and it shows no inclination to let us see them for ourselves.   

I have seen a copy of the Shepherd report and whilst it is certainly ‘shocking’, what it refers to is sexual activity between the boys at the school and to some boys who were visited Rochdale town centre accompanied by care staff, ‘cottaging’ at the Smith Street toilets.   

In other words what it reveals is poor supervision by some care staff.  Whether the responsibility for this being allowed to happen should lie with the care staff involved. the headteacher, the governors or the Director of Education is a subject for discussion after the reports have been published in full.   

As to what Danczuk means by his comment, ‘...ensure the public understand how the police reach decisions regarding serious crimes like child abuse’, I do not understand unless he is trying to blame Chief Inspector Hanson’s colleagues for the decision that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute anyone, which was in fact taken by the CPS.   

I hope that Chief Inspector Hanson and his GMP colleagues in the Police Federation will keep the pressure on Danczuk to produce the ‘very specific information that backs up his comments’, not let him shift the debate onto things which suit his agenda of getting himself back in the limelight and will publicise as widely as possible his inability or unwillingness to ‘put his money where his mouth is.

If Danczuk wants to do something useful he could try putting pressure on his friends in Rochdale Council to publish the Shepherd and Mellor reports.  Until these have been published he should refrain from making any more inflammatory comments about Knowl View.