Monday, 3 July 2017

Rotherham & Derby sexual exploitation case - facts surrounding this and the implications for immigration in the UK

Taken from ABC of Immigration by Simon Sherbrooke available from The Memoir Club memoirclub@msn.com 01914192288 Price £20

Monday is the 3 year anniversary of Jay report into Rotherham that exposed the scale of child sexual exploitation

Is immigration to blame?

The author has dedicated his book as follows: 

This book is dedicated to the betrayed and to the girls of Derby, Blackpool, Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford et cetera.

A selection of comments received. Be the first to review the book buy yours from The Memoir Club. 
Jennifer Coram The people who looked the other way should be made to pay, for their part of this terrible betrayal

Carol Forrester Never watched anything so awful this could have been stopped years ago by every department including the police this is were political correctness has gone mad goodness knows what would the response been if it was an Asian girl

Barry Gater Disgrace
Pauline Welch The people who knew this was happening and looked the other way should be charged with dereliction of duty and jailed 

Betty Craig They were following the guidelines of the anti-islamophobia police.
Maureen Lonergan Disgusting
Teresa Taylor The trouble is this PC rubbish that prevents people telling the truth for fear of being branded as racist!

Mandy Hughes Every one who looked the other way need to serve jail time and the abusers need to be stripped of all their asessts and then deported if they were not born here.
Maggie Pears Those monsters come from all walks of life and those who know about it and don't do out about it are just as bad as them it doesn't matter if they are white black yellow red or pink men or woman these ppl are evil and need to be locked away for the safety of children

Wendy Paxton And I hate to add that I blame Thatcher for being more interested in how much money folk from the ex colonies were bringing in than Who they were! I was living in a community that was mostly of Pakistani origins at the time 
Ann Sivitter I always said the Asian taxi drivers in Rotherham were a law unto themselves. They parked where they liked ignored the rules everyone else had to obey. I had a taxi once and the driver was asking about my house and if I was married, 
Diane Hickey  remind me to find this and watch it xx
Philip Moorhouse All government departments, the police, everyone, were indoctrinated and brainwashed with totally ridiculous and over the top DIVERSITY training , I remember going into the library of a public service to find a man in African national dress 
David Watts I believe this is only a tip of the iceberg and is still going on
Paul Ellis You can be sure it's going on in most towns and cities but too much paperwork and over stretched police force need bobbies walking the streets of these ghettos it's a case of wake up Britain !!!
Jean Rio Alderson Poor people don't matter in this country. The authorities knew what was going on and turned a blind eye. 
Someone should be held to account.

Sheila Froom So pleased its. All come out in the open. The young girls should Sui and then the people should be brought. To. Justice. And sacked. While the paedophiles Deported.
Jeni Hatton Part of the problem is a mindset which forgets that there is an age of consent (16) and that it isn't legally possible for a person under that age to give consent. The assumption that these girls were feral lolitas left this out of the equation. Even if they hadn't been traumatised the crime should still have been investigated.
Kevin Cooney This needs to be exposed to the whole world . Utterly shocking , the British Government & Police sat back & done nothing & it's I believe still going on ?
Raymond Pitt Get away with it
Phillip Dougan We are not being listened to.
Sheila Elsworth They were the criminals but the British justice system let them get away with it for years. The police knew about this for years and did nothing. They are also guilty
Brenda Kjolsen It makes my blood boil how the powers that be tried to hush this all up. It's PC gone to the extreme and it's still going on NOW. Young girl gang raped by refugees in Sunderland. DNA from at least 2 of them found and it's all hushed up. Why?
Robert Hopkins But the BNP were right all the time !
John Alfred Thomas Begent the people concerned must be bought to book
Lisa Shelley The scum never got long enough prison sentences!!
Peter Hillary All in the name of P.C.
Joanie Stores Powell Bloody disgrace that the powers that be covered this up
Patricia Preston These animals think its ok to have sex with young white girls as they think they are trash, lock them up for good.
Alan Holmes Heads must role for this

ROTHERHAM
The Rotherham grooming case5 shows the dangers of confusing criminality with culture.
If you are a parent then there are some things that scare you more than others. Someone else hurting your children is pretty high up that list.

The details emerging from Rotherham over the last few months about the systematic abuse of young girls are truly the stuff of parental nightmare. But it’s all made worse because it now seems that for over ten years those charged with protecting children and young girls failed. In fact, worst of all, they decided to look the other way!

They made a choice; protect children in the face of overwhelming evidence of sexual abuse and cruelty or worry more about some misconceived notion of ‘cultural sensitivities’; as if there is any culture where rape is acceptable.
They chose the latter.

It is important to say that The Times has led the way in exposing both the abuse and the cover-up. And some of the details that they have uncovered from confidential reports are some of the most shocking that you can imagine. The documents revealed by The Times give details of events over the years for which no one was prosecuted such as:

·         fifty-four Rotherham children were linked to sexual exploitation by three brothers from one British Pakistani family, 18 identifying one brother as their “boyfriend” and several allegedly made pregnant by him;
 ·         a 14-year-old girl from a loving, supportive family was allegedly held in a flat and forced to perform sex acts on five men, four of them Pakistani, plus a 32-year-old Iraqi Kurd. She gave a filmed police interview and identified her abusers;
·         one girl, 15, spent days in hospital after a broken bottle was allegedly forced inside her by two young British Pakistani men in a park, causing her to bleed extensively;
·         a 13-year-old girl was found at 3am with disrupted clothing in a house with a large group of Asian men who had fed her vodka. A neighbour reported the girl’s screams. Police arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly but did not question the men.

But the police and local authorities knew – and did nothing!
As The Times says:
“A 2010 confidential report by the police intelligence bureau warning that thousands of such crimes were committed in the county each year.
It contains explosive details about the men responsible for the most serious, co-ordinated abuse. ‘Possibly the most shocking threat is the existence of substantial and organised offender networks that groom and exploit victims on a worrying scale,’ the report says.
‘Practitioners throughout the force state that there is a problem with networks of Asian offenders both locally and nationally. This was particularly stressed in Sheffield, and even more so in Rotherham where there appears to be a significant problem with networks of Asian males exploiting young white females. ‘Such groups are said to have trafficked South Yorkshire child victims’ to many other cities including Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford and Dover”.
But nothing was done; why? Well, in 2010 the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board produced another report. The board is made up of senior representatives from local schools, social services, voluntary sector and the police. Now remember that no one has been prosecuted but enough was clearly known and there were enough concerns for a report to be commissioned into what had been going on, in fact is still going on. They helpfully noted that the crimes (presumably they meant alleged) had:
“cultural characteristics … which are locally sensitive in terms of diversity.”
And for the avoidance of doubt as to where priorities lay:

“There are sensitivities of ethnicity with potential to endanger the harmony of community relationships. Great care will be taken in drafting … this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham’s qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided.
       
in May 2012, under newspaper headlines such as Men who helped themselves to easy meat and Why did no one listen to teenage victims of sex gang?7, it was reported that Shabir Ahmed,8.1 Mohammed Amin,8.2 Abdul Aziz,8.3 Adil Khan,8.4 Kabeer Hassan,8.5 Abdul Qayyum,8.6 Abdul Rauf,8.7 Mohammed Sajid,8.8 and Hamid Safi,8.9 had been convicted of one or more of rape, arranging and/or inciting child prostitution, allowing premises to be used therefor, sexual activity with a child and trafficking;
     
in 2012, from Telford or thereabouts, Ahdel Ali and his brother Mubarek, Tanveer Ahmed, Mohammed Ali Sultan, Mohammed Islam Choudrey and Mohammed Younis were convicted of one or more of sexual activity with a child, controlling child prostitution, inciting child prostitution, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, meeting a child after sexual grooming, and trafficking a child within the UK for sexual exploitation;

in 2012, from Keighley and Halifax, Bilal Hussain and Shazad Rehman were convicted of raping two girls and assaulting others. Their modus operandi was to drug and then rape young girls after cruising the streets looking for ‘fresh meat’: one victim, a fourteen-year-old, said, ‘The choice was either have sex with both or get beaten up’;

in May 2012, Azad Miah from Bangladesh, of The Spice of India in Carlisle, was jailed for fifteen years having been found guilty on ten of eighteen charges – paying for the sexual services of a child, child prostitution and keeping a brothel (mainly ‘staffed’ by teenagers. A twelve-year-old had complained to the police three times about Miah before giving up, as nothing was done). Three years later Azad’s brother, Ata, of The Indigo in Carlisle, was jailed for a year for harassment: according to one of Azad’s victims, Ata had pulled up in his car beside the victim, saying he was ‘keeping an eye on her’ as she had ‘put the boss away’;
 in February 2013, Hamza Ali, Surin Uddin and Mohamed Sheikh were convicted of taking a thirteen-year-old from a bus stop in London to a house in Ipswich where she was treated ‘like a piece of meat’ for four days;

in May 2013, Bassan and Mohammed Karrar, Akthar and Anjum Dogar, Kamar Jamil, Zeesham Ahmed and Assad Hussain collected, between the seven of them, nineteen convictions for rape; ten convictions for conspiracy to rape; five convictions for rape of a child under thirteen; four convictions for conspiracy to rape a child under thirteen; eight convictions for arranging or facilitating prostitution; five convictions for trafficking for sexual exploitation; four convictions for sexual activity with a child; and one conviction for each of conspiracy to commit a sexual assault of a child, sexual assault of a child under thirteen by penetration, using an instrument to procure a miscarriage and supplying a class-A drug. This was the result of Operation Bullfinch.
Nearly two years later, Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Board (OSCB) issued its 114-page (plus appendices) Serious Case Review in to Child Sexual Exploitation in Oxfordshire: from the experiences of Children A, B, C, D, E, and F. Part of its paragraph 2.6 is:
Adding cases where there was some certainty to those where there was a formal conviction of offences against them, there are grounds for believing that over the last 15 years around 370 girls may have been exploited in the ways covered by this SCR.
And three entire paragraphs of that Review are:
1.29 Terminology around ethnicity: The perpetrators in this case were predominately of Pakistani heritage. (Five were of Pakistani and one of North African heritage and the other said he was born in Saudi Arabia.) In this report the word ‘Asian’9 is used more than ‘Pakistani’. This is not to hide any specific ethnic origin, but because this was the description mainly used by the victims10 and in agency case records. It is believed that when the term ‘Asian’ was used it did often refer to those of Pakistani heritage, but ‘Asian’ seems to be the word used in common professional parlance.
1.30 The victims were white British girls.
4.25 Community relations: With the known perpetrators of group CSE [child sexual exploitation] being significantly of Pakistani heritage, there is considerable work to build relationships with these communities (and others), increase their understanding of CSE and help build a preventative approach. Some examples:
o    The Children’s Society runs 12-week induction programmes for young unaccompanied asylum seekers, on which CSC [child sexual contact] and the Police provide input on CSE and age of consent issues.
o    The City Council is appointing a Pakistani Father Support project worker, and has developed a new mentoring programme to prevent CSE amongst at risk BME/South Asian males.
o    The Superintendent in charge of the Oxford Police (who also chairs the OSCB CSE subgroup) meets Mosque leaders every two months, with for example discussions on CSE warning signs. In 2015 it is planned to extend this to include the City and County Councils.
o    The Superintendent also has a bi-monthly Independent Advisory Group which includes all faiths. CSE is always on the agenda, and the Group is briefed for example on disruption operations.
o    Police officers attend the Mosque Friday Prayers weekly.
o    The OSCB’s revised CSE strategy will have a major new section on community engagement.
o    The Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) has led work with the Oxfordshire Mosques and their linked Madrassas on safeguarding children and has worked to ensure safeguarding arrangements are in place including DBS checks, basic training and a safeguarding policy.
o    Seven faith leaders attended a top-level briefing on CSE progress in September 2014.
o    In October 2014 Muslim representatives attended a CSC/TVP meeting, discussing trafficking and CSE with other religious leaders.
o    A meeting was held in February 2015 between Police, City and County representatives and the OSCB Chair with Muslim community leaders.
      
in August 2013, Aabidali Mubarak Ali, Rakib Iacub, Hamza Imitiazali, Chandresh Mistry, Bharat Modhwadia and Wajud Usman, all of Leicester – five Muslim and one Hindu – pleaded guilty to offences against a sixteen-year-old girl;
      
in September 2013, Naeem Ahmed, Nabeel Ahmed and Hassan Raza were sentenced in Snaresbrook Crown Court to fourteen, eight and two years respectively for rape and/or sexual assault of an eighteen-year-old. During a seven-week trial, six girls gave evidence about the three men. The initial arrest was pursuant to investigations into the suspected abuse of two girls in the care of Essex County Council;
     
in November 2013, Rochdale came up again: Manchester Crown Court jailed Rufiq Abubaken a Kurd; Abdul Huk and Roheez Khan, both of Pakistani heritage; and Chola Chansa and Freddie Kendakumana, both from the Congo, for sexual activity with an underage girl (the jury failed to reach a verdict as to Mohammed Ali and Asrar Haider);

 in March 2014, the furore over the trial of Abid Miskeen, aged thirty-two, of Bradford, was not over what he had done (he had had intercourse with a girl who was then aged fourteen) but that his victim was kept in custody overnight to ensure she gave evidence. The trial was delayed for a few hours; the girl went outside for a smoke and disappeared. The judge issued a warrant for her and three other witnesses. She was kept in a police station overnight and for four hours the next day. The jury took less than two hours to return a unanimous guilty verdict. Miskeen was sentenced to the maximum possible, namely seven years. Miskeen, father of two, made the girl pregnant. He had a string of previous convictions including robbery, assault and dangerous driving. In 2012, he was given a community order for punching his partner and was in breach of that order when he had intercourse with the girl;
     
in April 2014, Nazakat Mahmood, Ghulfaraz Nawaz, Haroon Rauf and Omar Sharif – three of Chesham and one of Amersham – were convicted of sexual activity with a girl who at the time was fourteen;

in July 2014, Mohammed Sadiq of Leeds was convicted of sexual assault on a child a third of his age. His counsel, Zia Chaudry, in mitigation, told the court that he continued to deny the offences. He was sentenced to five years (with three years extended licence);

in July 2014, Matab Ali, Umber Farooq and Anees Hanif of Burton-upon-Trent were sentenced to five and a half years for sexually abusing a girl when she was between thirteen and fifteen, with Junaid Ali also being jailed for attempted rape, and Ameer Arshad for blackmail;

 in August 2014, there was published Professor Jay’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham 1997–2013:

No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013.11.1
By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims 11.2

in November 2014, Birmingham City Council obtained an order that ten men should not approach in public places ‘any female under 18’ with whom they were not personally associated, the names of six to be identified namely Omar Ahmed, Shah Alam, Mohammed Amjan, Sajid Hussain, Mohammed Javed and Naseem Khan; 

in February 2015 there was published Report of Inspection of Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council by Louise Casey: this was at the instigation of the government pursuant to the findings of the Jay Report

 in March 2015, ten men of Blackley, Burnley, Ilkeston, Prestwich, Rochdale and various prisons were charged with one or more of rape, conspiracy to rape, sexual activity with a child, aiding and abetting rape, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, between 2005 and 2013, at a time when the eight victims were aged between thirteen and twenty-three. Assistant Chief Constable Ian Wiggett said,

This investigation is one of a number of cases which comes under the umbrella of Operation Doublet, which is the continued investigation into Child Sexual Exploitation that arose following the 2011 investigation into CSE in Rochdale … So far 65 people have been arrested as part of Operation Doublet.
      
in July 2015, Asif Hussain, Mohammed Imran, Arshad Jani, Akbari Khan, Taimoor Khan and Vikram Singh (four of Aylesbury and one of each of Milton Keynes and Bradford) were convicted of sexual activity with two girls of twelve or thirteen. Between the six of them, they were jailed for a total of eight-two years. The prosecutor told the jury:

The scale of it is, you may agree, horrifying. [One of the girls] estimated that she had sex with about 60 men – six zero – almost all Asian.
(The trial was also of five other men: four were found not guilty and the jury could not decide on the eleventh.)
   
in August 2015, Bilal Ahmed, Dilon Rasul (who came here from Iran in 2009) and Hassan Ali were convicted of offences relating to two teenage girls and a teenage boy living in care homes in Rochdale; Jubair Rahman had already pleaded guilty to child abduction;

in February 2016, Arshid Hussain and his brothers Basharat and Bannaras, all of Rotherham, were convicted (and in the third case at the eleventh hour admitted) between them of multiple counts of rape, indecent assault, buggery, child abduction and false imprisonment against eleven children, and their uncle Qurban Ali of conspiracy to rape. The evidence of one girl, thirteen at the time, included:

There was a graveyard. When it was dark I’d be taken there by Pakistani men. They were all a lot older than me. It got to the point where it was a different man nearly every day. A Pakistani man would go with you a couple of times and then pass you on to his friends. It was as though once they’d used you and had sex with you they didn’t want to know.

DERBY


Derby is where men from Mirpur (in Kashmir and see M is for Mirpur) groomed, abused and raped teenage girls.
At the culmination of Operation Retriever, through 2010, there were three split trials. The men described as the ringleaders – Abid Mohammed Saddique and Mohammed Romaan Liaquat – pleaded guilty to at least one of charges of rape, false imprisonment, sexual assault, sexual activity with a child, perverting the course of justice and aiding and abetting rape, and were both given indefinite prison sentences. Others convicted of at least one of such crimes included Farooq Ahmed, Akshay Kumar, Faisal Mehmood (subsequently deported to Pakistan), Mohammed Imran Rehman and Liaquat’s brother, Nawed Liaquat.1
Derby turned out not to be a one-off or the first. If no one else had known of this Asian threat, decades before, the police did. Mick Gradwell, a former detective superintendent, observed:
When I joined in 1979 one of my first tasks was to police around a Blackburn nightclub where one of the issues was Asian men cruising around in BMWs and Mercs trying to pick up young drunken girls.
But this Asian behaviour was not confronted, immigration continued and
·         in 2003, Charlene Downes disappeared, and Paige Rivers in 2007. In 2012, a kebab shop in Blackpool was refused a hot food licence;2
·         in August 2008, the police attended the Balti House in Heywood, Rochdale, and arrested a fifteen-year-old, who came to be referred to as Girl A, on suspicion of causing criminal damage: she was attempting to smash up the place. The reason for this, she told police, was that she had been repeatedly plied with vodka and then raped. As a result, Kabeer Hassan and Defendant X were arrested but, despite the latter’s DNA being found on Girl A’s underwear, no prosecution followed.3 A new Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, Nazir Afzal, re-examined the file and, in December 2010, Defendant X and Kabeer Hassan were re-arrested, with nine others to follow;
·         on Saturday, 28 November 2009, Amar Hussain and Shamrez Rashid took two girls, then aged sixteen and fifteen, from Telford to a hostel in Birmingham, where they were joined by Amer Islam Choudhrey, Jahbar Rafiq and Adel Saleem. To the five men, ‘It was Eid. We treated [the girls] as our guests. OK so they gave us [sex] but we were buying them food and drink.’ Between them, the five men were convicted of rape, attempted rape, attempted sexual assault and child abduction;
·         in 2010, Mohammed Ditta and Mirza Baig, both of Manchester, in their thirties and married, were jailed indefinitely for plying three fifteen-year-olds with vodka, ecstasy and cocaine and then sexually assaulting them;
·         in 2010, Adil Hussain, Moshin Khan, Zafran Ramzan, Umar Razaq and (his cousin) Razwan Razaq, (all) of Rotherham, were jailed for grooming, in 2008, girls who at the time were aged twelve and thirteen, and in one case of raping a sixteen-year-old;


Moving from criminals from Asia to those from Africa, in November 2014, there could be reported the trial in Bristol that ended in June with the conviction of Liban Abdi, Abdulahi Aden, Mustafa Deria, Mustafa Farah, Arafar Osman, Idleh Osman and Said Zakaria (aged between twenty and twenty-two). That publication was on the conviction of Zakaria on further charges plus Jusuf Abdizirak, Abdirashid Abdulahi, Mohamed Dahir, Mohamed Jumale, Omar Jumale and Sakariah Sheik (aged between twenty and twenty-four). (Apart from drug dealing) the thirteen men abused, raped and trafficked teenage girls. Apparently seven of the thirteen are British citizens but all are of Somali ethnicity: Muna Abdi of the Bristol Somali Forum said, ‘I am hoping people will look at this as a crime and not just a crime for the Somali community. The community is deeply shocked and shaken.’

Tuesday, 6 June 2017

A B C of Immigration by Simon Sherbrooke




ISBN: 9781841045979  Price: £20.00 available from The Memoir Club memoirclub@msn.com or tel 0191 4192288

Introduction

I perceive that the explanation for this book having taken so long and that it has grown so much include the following factors. First of all and despite the conclusion of the House of Lords’ Select Committee on Economic Affairs in 2008 and David Cameron’s representation in 2010 the amount of immigration has continued or even increased.
Secondly investigation into an item produces leads so that, for example, that committee’s report led back to the evidence it received.
Thirdly the sources listed in the book and in the bibliography were mainly unknown to me in 2010: in other words, when one investigates one finds “there is so much more out there”.
Fourthly as time went on, there were (or came to my notice) further examples of the original point plus the publication of reports such as by Peter Clarke (as the result of the publication of the so called Trojan Horse letter) and by Professor Jay (as the extent of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham began to come out, which report was followed by Louise Casey’s) and the Serious Case Review into CSE in Oxfordshire from the experiences of Children A, B, C, D, E and F plus judicial decisions such as BAPIO v Royal College of General Practitioners and the General Medical Council in 2014 and as to the Tower Hamlets mayoralty election of that year.
I don’t think the book’s contents have been cherry-picked and that is shown by the following. In January 2015 there was a small item in a newspaper, that twenty years before receipt of the Trojan Horse letter, the Department for Education had received warnings of Islamist infiltration of schools in Birmingham. An internet search showed that the Department’s Permanent Secretary, Chris Wormald, had conducted an investigation the result of which was his Review into possible warnings to DfE relating to extremism in Birmingham schools.
He found six instances where concerns were raised with the Department. The first had been in 1994 when the headteachers of three schools in Birmingham had written to the Department expressing concerns about Hizb ut-Tahir [the Party of Liberation which seeks a caliphate and by one description first converts, secondly establishes a network of secret cells and thirdly tries to achieve its aims by infiltration]. Additionally that year there had been a letter from Revd. John Ray who after 25 years as principal of a school in Srinagar, Kashmir had, for 10 years (to 1991) been chair of the governors of Golden Hillock School: the result had been a meeting, in Westminster, with the Minister of State for Education.
Those alerts had got nowhere because the Department ‘lacked inquisitiveness’ and the policy at the time was for delegation from central to local government.
(But as to the latter reason) Peter Clarke (of the Clarke Report) concluded ‘senior officers of (Birmingham City Council) were aware of practices subsequently referred to in the Trojan Horse letter as early as 2012, and discussions on this issue took place between officers and elected members in May 2013’ and yet eight weeks after receipt (in late 2013) of the Trojan Horse letter the 'focus of the Council was very much on the potential community cohesion impact...'.

Several quotes from the book

In a short time swarms of the aforesaid nations came over into the island, and the foreigners began to increase so much, that they became a source of terror to the natives who had invited them.
The Venerable Bede, as to the 5th century

One day, millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere to go to the northern hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it; and they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.
Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Algeria to the United Nations General Assembly in 1974

Their commitment to a British education was implicit in their decision to become British citizens. Maintenance and transmission of the mother culture has nothing to do with the English secular school. If they want their children to absorb the culture of Pakistan, India or the Caribbean, then that is an entirely private decision to be implemented by the immigrant family and community, out of school.
Raymond Honeyford. Headmaster of Drummond Middle School, Bradford 1980/84


The idea that their children might be integrated into our kafir society was anathema to them, and they saw the school to which they were legally obliged to send their children as a thing to be either subverted or destroyed.
Roger Scruton following Honeyford's death in 2014


Black and Asian people should not be forced to accept British values or to adopt a British identity.
Kenan Malik 2007

No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013. By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’.
The report by Professor Jay
                                                                                                               
 I just can’t believe that where local authorities can whistle up plentiful supplies of eager and energetic baristas and beanpickers from central Europe, this has no effect on local wage rates. I do think that if Marx and Engels were with us today they would be telling us immigrants are the new reserve army of labour in Britain.
Ferdinand Mount 2013

Get a white chair and a white desk and put the white kid in a white corner with a white teacher and keep him away from the others. If that fails, get rid of the white kid. It's what the community wants you to do. 
Muslim parent at Anderton Park School, Birmingham: part of the evidence secured by the Clarke Report of 2014 as to the so called Trojan Horse letter. 

Monday, 10 October 2016

Victoria Wood - Comedy Genius - her life and work by Chris Foote Wood







Victoria Wood Comedy Genius - her life and work by Chris Foote Wood is published by The Memoir Club at £12 + £2.75 P & P. Copies can be ordered via amazon
Copies are available from Lynn Davidson memoirclub@msn.com  mob 0755 2086888





Author- Chris Foote Wood


‘Britain’s funniest woman’ - hugely popular stand-up comedian who paved the way for other women comics; multi-BAFTA award-winner; singer-songwriter, playwright, actor, producer, director and inspired scriptwriter who gave many of her best lines to her fellow actors. Stories behind

Wood and Walters
Victoria Wood As Seen On TV
Acorn Antiques’ ‘dinnerladies
Pat and Margaret’ Housewife, 49’ ‘Eric and Ernie
That Day We Sang An Audience With…
The Ballad of Barry and Freda (Let’s Do It!)

How an overweight, lonely and unhappy girl overcame early difficulties to build a hugely successful career, cut short by her early death at 62. How Victoria Wood became a true
‘National Treasure’ with her own unique brand of humour.

Victoria’s story told in depth by her brother Chris
A fascinating account: new material includes extracts from her father’s daily Journal, family stories and original cartoons by ‘Rog’

Our great consolation is the legacy Victoria left us: forty years of hugely entertaining comedy, song and drama which we can still enjoy. I hope this book reminds you of your particular favourites, as well as telling you things you might not have known about my famous sister.


REVIEWS 

Hi Chris I’ve just read the book that you’ve written about your sister Victoria Wood. It was absolutely fantastic, thank you for sharing your thoughts and memories on such a wonderful, talented lady your sister was!                                                                                                                               ELLIOTT





There were 13 years between Victoria Wood and her only brother, and it's pretty obvious that he didn't really know her - in fact toward the end of the book he admits as much. There isn't much here that's original - few personal anecdotes, nothing like that, but what this book does is to collect together all that is known about her in the public domain, and remind us of some of her best and funniest moments, and peculiarly British sense of humour. ("Mrs Gupta's a really nice woman - she comes from somewhere far away that has a funny name - Kidderminster.") Victoria was a very private person, so there are no real surprises, but you have to hand it to Mr Foote-Wood for having put this together and having pledged to donate all the royalties to charities associated with his sister. She was indeed a comedy genius, much admired, shockingly gone too soon, but her legacy will doubtless endure.



Chris Foote Wood should be congratulated heartily for writing the biography of his sister so soon after hearing the sad news of her death in April 2016.  She was just sixty-two and in this unique piece of writing her admiring brother mirrors the star's total dedication to her art.  He completed this 'warts and all' 250 page, beautifully illustrated, plainly told, story in less than two months and his youngest sister would have been quietly proud of her brother's abilities.  Away from her stage productions, Victoria was a very private person and, like her two elder sisters, did not take kindly to publicity - especially if it was negative.  Amongst a thousand other tiny gems of information, the author tells us that she did not read 'reviews' of her shows, be they good, bad or indifferent.  But let us be clear on this.  If, in thirty years time some historian of Comedy Genius did not have this volume to consult, they would be screaming: ‘Do you mean to say that Victoria Wood had an older brother who was a trained journalist, who, at 75 had all his abilities and faculties and did not even attempt to record something of her life?  Shame on him.’  But no one can ever say that.  With that grit, passion, determination, dedication, commitment of any one of the family, Chris has buckled down and completed the task that no one else could have achieved.


As an avid reader, I have consumed some magnificent biographies in my seventy-five years.  But I specially recall reading of one of my heroes, one of the great orators of the 20th Century, as he lay dying from throat cancer at the tender age of sixty.  He had received many requests to tell his story but did not have the strength to do it himself.  Unable to speak, he beckoned to his son and requested that he write the story: ‘But’, wrote the dying father on a bit of paper, ‘tell it warts and all.’  Chris has done that for his sister and the world of literature will be forever grateful.  Mind you, if you are looking for a literary classic you will be terribly disappointed.  CFW does not claim to be an Evelyn Waugh or James Boswell, still less a more modern Ian Kershaw or even Sheila Hancock.  With the dedication of their father or mother which formed the basis of Victoria's work rate, Foote Wood has told it as it is and, I believe, as Victoria would have wanted it told.  So in addition to factual shows on stage and screen, we have miniscule details of a comedian's struggles and dilemmas.  250 pages of it!  With pictures t'boot!  And clearly readable.  Congratulations to writer and publisher: in a world of instant news they have stepped up to the plate and delivered. 
Revd Dr Alan Powers

Monday, November 28, 2016 www.lep.co.uk Lancashire Evening Post 

Entertainer Victoria Wood loved Lancashire and settled in the county after finding fame. Her brother Chris Foote-Wood has written a new book about his sister’s life and times and offers a fascinating insight into her years in the Red Rose county.

‘A national treasure – but to me she was my sister’ 

Living in Morecambe was a crucial time for my youngest sister Victoria Wood.

Living with her partner, the magician Geoffrey Durham, later her husband, Victoria began to develop the unique comedy style that brought her huge success.

Geoffrey played his part by advising, encouraging and teaching Vic card tricks. In an early self-promoted show “Tickling My Ivories”, Vic offered “an evening of singing, talking, sketches, standing up, sitting down again and possible one card trick. All inquiries to 12 Oxford Street, Morecambe”.

In 1977 Geoff, as the “Spanish” magician The Great Soprendo, played the Silver Jubilee Victorian Music Hall on Morecambe’s Central Pier, put on by the Dukes’ Theatre three times a week, June 20 to September 3. Vic and Geoff decided to stay in Morecambe and rented the first-floor flat in Oxford Street, overlooking the bus station, at £13 a week.

At the time that was the only work they had between them. As things improved, they moved to a better flat overlooking the sea, and then to their own home with an orchard in Silverdale across Morecambe Bay. When Vic and Geoff first became a couple living in a Morecambe flat, our mum Nellie Wood was a bit worried and sent our dad Stanley to check up on them.

As Stan told it, he went up the fire escape and found the back door unlocked. It was early on a Saturday morning, and he crept inside to find two figures fast asleep on the floor in two separate sleeping bags. Eventually one stirred. “Are you all right, love?” said one. “I’m all right, are you all right?” came the reply. “Yes, I’m all right” was the rejoinder, and with that, both went back to sleep. Without announcing his presence, Stan crept out. He reported back to Nellie that there was nothing to worry about: “they’re just like an old married couple”, he said.

After four years together, Geoffrey eventually persuaded Vic to marry him. They had planned to marry in Morecambe on February 29, 1980 so their wedding anniversaries would be only every four years, but the local register office only issued death certificates. So they married in Lancaster on March 1. No family was present: Vic informed our parents by postcard later that month.

The Morecambe flat, packed with books, was a hive of creativity. Vic wrote her first play “Talent” there, writing longhand all day with Geoff typing it up at night. Victoria’s long-term friend and collaborator Julie Walters rehearsed there on Vic’s follow-up play “Nearly a Happy Ending.” It is widely believed that the inspiration for Vic’s best-known comedy sketch “Two Soups” came from her regular visits to Lubin’s café in Morecambe.

Looking for a family home, the Durhams moved to Silverdale. This was a happy time for Vic and Geoff and their two children Grace (born 1988) and Henry (born 1992). While still pursuing their careers, Vic and Geoff spent as much time as possible with the children. As they both had to be in London a lot, they made the decision to move to the capital. They set up home in Highgate, where Victoria sadly died in April this year.


Living in London, primarily because of her career, Victoria never became a ‘luvvie.’ Brought up in Bury and spending those crucial early years of her career in Morecambe. Vic was always the Lancashire Lass.’ She never forgot her roots, and she remained the same down-to earth, unfussy, unspoiled sister I had the privilege of knowing, loving and admiring throughout her remarkable life and hugely successful career. As well as being a top comedy writer and performer, Vic also showed her talent as a dramatic actor. She won a best actress Bafta in the TV film ‘Housewife, 49’, and memorably played Eric Morecambe’s mother Sadie Bartholomew in ‘Eric and Ernie.’ The success of the Eric Morecambe statue in Morecambe inspired me to sponsor a similar statue of Victoria in our home town of Bury. 

REVIEW - DAILY MAIL Saturday 8 October
Stanley Wood was a handsome ex-naval officer whose diverse gifts as a scriptwriter, author, producer and pianist foreshadowed his youngest daughter Victoria’s supreme talents as an entertainer.

He also had a northerner’s predisposition towards bluntness. A caustic entry in his journal for September 7, 1969 records, ‘V (Victoria) fatter than ever and has more spots. For breakfast Vicky had toast thickly spread with jam and two pieces? Then lunch 30 minutes later. I calculate she watches the telly for eight hours.’

He also comments unfavourably on an early boyfriend of Victoria’s and observes that any children they have will be like ‘balloons.’

Should such censorious private musings about the 16-year-old Victoria Wood, who went on to become one of the nation’s best loved and most garlanded comedians — embracing singing, song writing and acting with equal deftness — and who died six months ago, ever have been made public? Should we be privy to her father’s barbed remarks about her teenage over-eating; her insular, sedentary lifestyle; her over-weight boyfriends?

The eldest of Victoria’s three siblings, her only brother Chris Foote Wood, 75, has this week defended his decision to publish excerpts from their father’s private diaries in a soon-to-be published book, Victoria Wood Comedy Genius: Her Life And Work.

He has written a biography which offers extraordinary insights into the bizarre upbringing of his famous sister, who died aged 62, from cancer; a woman who guarded her personal privacy so closely that only a tiny coterie of her immediate family — Chris was not among them — even knew she was ill.

Chris, a journalist, broadcaster, author and former politician, says: ‘I’ve been castigated for saying Victoria was an unhappy teenager, that she spent her time in her room eating; that she got overweight and depressed. But I’m just repeating what she’s said publicly herself. She said in an interview for Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2007 that she was overweight and miserable in her teens.’

Actually, Victoria went further, revealing the depth of her desolation and isolation when she was at the fee-paying Bury Grammar School for Girls: ‘I went under. I was a mess, a misfit. I didn’t have any friends, let alone try to be funny. I didn’t do any work, didn’t have clean clothes and didn’t wash.

‘If I didn’t have any money, I’d steal from people and if I hadn’t done my homework I’d steal someone else’s. I was envious of all the groups: the horsey group, the girls who went out with boys, the clever ones. Looking back, I feel really sorry for that little girl.’ Chris comments that father Stanley did not confine his scathing remarks to Victoria: ‘My father wrote cruel things about all four of his children; also amusing and kind comments. He made fun of us all.
‘I hope Victoria’s story will inspire other young people who might feel lonely and unhappy as she did, to make a success of their lives.

‘She left the most fantastic legacy of work and the tragedy is, she had so much more to give. I’m one of her biggest fans.’

Indeed, Victoria Wood left a dazzling comic bequest to the nation. She still holds the record for the most sell-out shows for a solo performer.

She also combined this prodigious creative output with motherhood, and was married for 20 years to Geoffrey Durham, the magician The Great Soprendo, with whom she had two children, Henry, 23 and Grace, 27, whose privacy she strenuously guarded. 

Responding to criticism that he has disregarded their feelings, Chris says: ‘It’s totally untrue. I wrote twice to them, said I’d been asked to write a book and offered them the chance to be involved. I asked them to get in touch if they had any concerns. They didn’t respond.

‘I’ve been asked: “Did you get permission?” But when was a law passed decreeing you had to have permission to write about your sister?’

He’s also keen to point out that he is not doing it for the money: all proceeds will be donated to ‘charities close to Victoria’s heart’, although he hasn’t decided which ones yet.

It cannot be denied that the insight Chris gives into the eccentric upbringing of the Wood family is tantalising. Stan and Nellie Wood had four children: Chris, born in 1940, Penelope, who arrived five years later, Rosalind, born in 1950, and Victoria, born in 1953.

Because of the relatively large age gaps between them, the children became self-contained and self-reliant. ‘We weren’t a convivial family who gathered together for evenings in the sitting room. We all retreated to our own bedrooms,’ says Chris. Chris, 13 years older than Victoria, only spent five years living with her in the family home before he left for university.

He insists that there was a sharp disparity between Victoria’s down-to-earth northern girl image and her affluent middle class upbringing.

‘She was very conscious of the “Victoria Wood Brand”, which was that of a working-class girl — which she never was,’ he says.
‘By the time she was four our parents could afford to live in a very big house in the country, overlooking a golf course and the Irwell Valley near Bury.

‘Victoria used to refer to it as a bungalow, which strictly speaking it was. But it had been a convalescent holiday home for 24 boys and eight staff. Each of us had our own huge bedroom, father had a study and dressing room; mother had her sewing room. There was a vast entrance hall, big enough to hold a dance in, with a baby grand piano in it, and later Victoria had her own piano in her bedroom.’ 

It seems, too, that while Victoria lacked pretension, her mother Nellie — a complex and difficult character — was, according to Chris, a remorseless social climber who made strenuous efforts to cut off from her roots in working-class Manchester.

Nellie — bright and frustrated by the constraints of motherhood — was one of eight children born to a father invalided in the First World War and a mother who worked in a cotton mill. Nellie had left school at 14 to work in a steel works.
That she resumed her studies aged 49, and gained a BA and a Masters degree before beginning a new career as a lecturer in English literature, is well documented.

Only her immediate family, however, knew about the multifarious complexities of her ‘dark character,’ says Chris.
‘Nellie had been a vivacious, outgoing woman in the younger days, and when she met my father Stan it was a love match,’ he says.

‘But in later life she became a recluse. She turned her back on the world. And she was a very hard mother. She never showed us any affection; certainly never cuddled us, praised us or told us she loved us. She became grim, morose.
His diary records that in 1950, three years before Victoria was born, he received £100 in one month for a sales bonus alone, and almost £700 for a radio play. (The national average wage at the time was £400 a year.)Meanwhile, Stan was supplementing his healthy income as an insurance underwriter by writing radio plays and songs, and producing stage musicals.



‘Often she’d only speak to me through my father. She’d say: “Tell the boy this . . .” when I was standing right by her. I’d call it mental cruelty.

‘When we were small I remember her rubbing our faces so hard with a flannel she nearly scoured the skin off them.’
Nellie also dissociated herself from her working-class family, to the astonishing extent that she pretended to Chris that his maternal grandmother was dead when she was still very much alive.

He recalls: ‘One day when I was 14 — Vic was still a baby — I got my bike out to cycle over to my granny’s. Mum said: “You can’t go. She’s dead.”

‘I asked when she’d died and mother said: “Three weeks since.” Then I asked why I hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral, and she said dismissively she didn’t think I’d want to. I never saw my granny again even though I later learned she lived for another eight years.’

Chris finds it hard to fathom why his mother so brutally truncated his relationship with his grandmother — and in so doing, also severed links with his many cousins, aunts and uncles still living in Manchester.

The kindest interpretation he has is this: ‘When I was 13, at about the same time as Victoria was born, I’d caught tuberculosis (TB) — a disease associated with overcrowding and poverty — from one of my cousins. I can only assume she was worried I’d go back and get ill again, and bring the infection home. But our mother’s behaviour certainly wasn’t natural.’

He remembers, however, that his mother’s public face was a gregarious one. Nellie pursued a path of upward mobility, joining the Ladies’ Circle and Costume Society.

‘She’d decided her own family were beneath her socially and she started to mix with prosperous middle-class women,’ he remembers.

He wrote scripts for the actor and broadcaster Wilfred Pickles and later for Coronation Street. By the time Victoria was born they were a prosperous family.

‘As a small child she had blue eyes and mass of golden curls,’ says Chris. ‘She was a lovely baby; always smiling and she grew into a cheeky toddler who made us laugh.’

It was from Stan, of course, that the prodigiously talented Victoria inherited her love of theatre, comedy and performance.
Touchingly, her father’s diary also records her first joke: a seven-year-old Victoria was listening as her dad told her a story about the Three Musketeers, when she asked: ‘Were they deaf? You just said they “must get ears”!’
Nellie and Stan were polar opposites. ‘Nellie was very severe,’ says Chris. ‘Like Victoria, she waged a lifelong battle against her weight and although she cooked for us all when I was a child, she used to pass food through a hatch into the dining room and never ate with us.

‘Stan was tall, good looking and an outrageous flirt.

‘I believe he was monogamous, but he was a terrific ladies’ man. He played the piano for the Ladies’ Circle and when they were considering putting on a Costume Through The Ages show, he suggested, “Why don’t you do underwear?” They agreed and he orchestrated it for them.’

It was Stan who gave Victoria her first piano lessons teaching her to play Polly Wolly Doodle on their baby grand by marking the names of the notes on the keys. Much later her brilliant comic songs, played at a white grand piano, became her hallmark; her homage to suburban lust, Let’s Do It, earning its rightful place among comedy classics. That her parents were each, in their own way, exceptional is undisputed and it is evident that she inherited traits from both. But while she has only hinted at the darkness of her childhood — the solitary meals eaten in her room; the addiction to sugar; the diet pills she took from the age of 12 — her brother confirms it.

Nellie, he says, was prey to arbitrary, black moods. She developed an antipathy to her only son — according to Chris, it was never explained why — and when he left home to go to Newcastle University aged 18, she severed links with him completely, refusing ever to speak to him again.

Indeed, she remained alienated from him for the ensuing 40 years until her death, aged 81, in 2000.
According to Chris, Nellie also tried to ban him from his father’s funeral in 1993. But it was Victoria’s then husband, Geoffrey, who stepped in.

‘He told Nellie: “Not only will Chris be there, but he will also help carry the coffin and read during the service”, which I did,’ he says, adding, ‘Geoffrey has been a very good friend to me, the very best of brothers-in-law.’
The conundrum of Nellie’s unkindness has never been resolved.

‘My sisters all said to me: “We don’t know why she was like she was”,’ Chris says now. ‘They encouraged me to go into therapy, because of the way she treated me — she didn’t disown her daughters, of course, only me. But I didn’t see a psychiatrist.’

Instead, his catharsis was to write a book about his mother ten years ago. Called Nellie’s Book, it drew on her journals and memoranda as source material – and through it, he says he learned ‘to love and admire her’.

Chris, a widower whose second wife Frances Foote died three years ago from cancer, clearly also admires his famous sibling. The sitting room of his modest terrace house in Darlington, County Durham, is cluttered with memorabilia: photos of Victoria are interspersed with those of his late wife.

Despite her busy and hugely successful career, Victoria always found time to meet her brother once or twice a year – the four siblings would gather at Christmas or New Year – and Chris would regularly go to see her shows.

‘We used to play parlour games at Christmas and Vic was always incredibly competitive,’ he recalls. ‘She had to win. And when her children were on the same side as her, they’d wipe the floor with everyone.’

It was the same talent, tenacity and determination that had always burned in Victoria.

Far from finding fault with his overweight, awkward, youngest daughter, one entry in Stanley’s journals shows just how proud he was of her.


New Victoria Wood biography - publication postponed
Family was told about it in June

The publication of a new, in-depth biography of comedian Victoria Wood by her brother Chris has been postponed for a month while the text is revised.

Originally planned for the end of this month, the new publication date is November 25th. This follows criticism of the book Victoria Wood Comedy Genius - her life and work (*) which describes the teenage Victoria as “fat and unhappy”.

The hugely talented, multi-Bafta award winning comic, writer, actor, singer-songwriter, producer and director died in April this year aged 62.

Author Chris Foote Wood said: “I have discussed this with my publisher at the Memoir Club and we both agree that I have given too much emphasis to Victoria’s early problems with her weight. I am revising the book to ensure that this aspect of her life is reduced and put in its proper context. However:

“I cannot and will not leave it out altogether as it is an essential part of Victoria’s story. She wanted the public to know about her early problems with her weight, and she spoke of them at length in some very candid press interviews.

“I am a huge fan of Victoria. I admire her all the more for overcoming her early problems to build her hugely successful career. She also had many disappointments at the start of her career, and it was years before she finally made her breakthrough. She succeeded against the odds through her force of character and sheer determination.

“I make no apology for writing this book. It tells Victoria’s story, her full story, from unpromising beginnings to national treasure. It cannot be a ‘betrayal’ to tell the full, true story, especially as Vic herself has made public her early problems.

“And I must put the record straight. To say the rest of our family did not know about my book is totally untrue. Back in May and June, I wrote to my two remaining sisters, and both of Vic’s children, telling them of my intention to write a biography of Victoria, and asking them if they had any concerns to let me know. None of them responded. In other words, they left me to it.

“It has now been announced that Victoria’s children, Grace and Henry Durham, have authorised another biography of their mother, written by a ghost writer, to be published next year. This is fine by me: the more books about Victoria, the better. I hope both of our books do well”.

Foote Wood - who added the name Foote when he married his late wife Frances Foote in 1977 - includes extracts from his father’s diaries, his own reminiscences as well as many from Victoria’s fellow actors, directors and other professionals. Chris has agreed to donate all his royalties from the book to charities supported by Victoria.

Chris Foote Wood has also set up a Crowdfunding appeal to pay for a life-size, lifelike statue of Victoria in her home town of Bury, where a site has been agreed. Bury Council is supporting the scheme and will maintain the statue once erected. Donate via www.tinyurl.com/letsdoitforvictoria

(*) Victoria Wood Comedy Genius - her life and work by Chris Foote Wood is published by The Memoir Club at £12. It will be available through bookshops and Amazon etc. Advance copies can be ordered via email memoirclub@msn.com or telephone 0191 419 2288.



For further comment and book signing events contact the Author: Chris Foote Wood (Northern Writers/Three Kings Productions) “Prestbury” 30 Brook Terrace Darlington Co. Durham DL3 6PJ Tel: 01325 483 660 Mob: 07984 060615 Email: footewood@btconnect.com web: www.writersinc.biz