PoppyMeze

Wednesday 9 November 2016

Jeremy Bamber: Non Disclosure

After Jeremy Bamber’s failed appeal in 2001/2 judges ruled that Essex Police must provide Jeremy's legal team with certain evidence relating to his trial and conviction but which was not made available to his defence and of which the jury had not had sight .  Essex Police have continued to refuse to comply fully with the Court Orders and they have never been enforced.

In 2011 Jeremy Bamber’s campaign team unexpectedly came into possession of eighty boxes of evidence relating to the case.

On receipt of these boxes it was discovered that they contained literally thousands of pieces of undisclosed evidence.  Jeremy’s next appeal application was going to be in 2012 so it was impossible to review all of these documents and submit them to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in time for that.

Over the intervening years the campaign team have read, scanned and saved these documents on a database.  Of extreme significance is that these boxes of evidence, over eighty in all, have HOLMES references which is a police database and refer to other documents which it is strongly believed will support Jeremy’s innocence but which have been removed from these files.  Some boxes are empty and according to referencing, twenty boxes are missing.  Previously, in 1996, despite a Court Order to the contrary, Special Branch authorised the destruction of the evidence found at the scene; these included Sheila Caffell's clothing amongst other items.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission, set up to investigate miscarriages of justice have the power to order Essex Police to comply with the Court Order but refuse to act further.

Jeremy Bamber is not asking to view everything, which is not permitted under Common Law anyway.  He his asking for specific items relating to the Court Orders. One example: there are several HOLMES references to Detective Kenneally’s report in which he concludes that all evidence points to Sheila Caffel shooting the family then herself but his actual report has been removed from the file.  The files include reports from social workers concerned about Sheila’s violence towards her twins as well as statements and names of foster carers with whom the twins had been placed previously.  Jeremy had told police that on the evening of the tragedies his parents had been discussing with Sheila the possibility of the twins spending further time with foster carers.  Police denied being in possession of any evidence supporting this.

Further reference to Sheila's health may be seen in her handwritten document which reads as a suicide letter and is believed to have been found by police on the 7/8 August 1985 on the table in her bedroom at White House Farm.  A reference for it was entered in the exhibits list but the officer who seized it later failed to include any reference to it in his statement.  The letter then re-emerged and was documented as having been given to DCI ‘Taff’ Jones who strongly believed in Jeremy’s innocence but he was removed from his post and later died, bizarrely, after a fall from a step-ladder in his home.  Under the supervision of another senior officer the letter appears to have been filed away as ‘illegible’.

In addition, a more recent discovery taken from the Stokenchurch Enquiry carried out in 2002 reveals that at 06.09, whilst Jeremy was standing over two hundred hundred yards away from White House Farm in the company of several of the seventy three Police and Firearms Officers surrounding the house, a PC Milbank who was monitoring the line from inside the house, received a 999 call, after which ambulances were requested.  Other documents show that around half an hour previously police officers were in conversation with a person inside the house.  This document also states that PC Milbank was monitoring the line at the time of the murdersThere is no evidence of PC Milbank making a statement and even his existence was withheld from the defence.  I am informed that PC Milbank has since been contacted by a journalist and confirms that he did receive the 999 call at that time.


The facts contained above must have be known by successive governments as a government minister had to review all case documents when placing them under PII before trial and at each appeal. One has to wonder what motivated a member of parliament to collude with non-disclosure in this way and in this particular case..  It is in the interest of justice for all that any cover-up and corruption be exposed. 




Friday 28 October 2016

Jeremy's Blog October 2016

Friday, 28 October 2016

On The 30th Anniversary of Jeremy's Conviction at Chelmsford Crown Court

On the anniversary of my wrongful conviction the memories of my time on remand stay in my mind. Something which I have been thinking about a lot recently is the fact that while I was held on remand I was able to read through much of the very limited 'disclosed' documentation on my case. If you’re charged with a crime you’ll need to read the charge sheet and indictment, your own statement or transcripts of interviews for signing, all statements against you and forensic reports both for and against your innocence. This material might be quite extensive and require many hours of reading. Forensic and legal documents often contain technical language, which can be difficult to follow without specialist knowledge or a dictionary. I was fortunate enough to be able to do this but for many people charged with criminal offences it’s not an option because they cannot read and write. 

In today’s society there’s always help available for people with disabilities such as partial vision or hearing difficulties and similarly if you can’t read or write you should be able to ask for someone to read it to you. The problem is that the vast majority of people charged with crimes who are not literate will not tell anyone about it. This means that the situation arises where many people have no idea of the detailed charges against them and this places greater difficulty on formulating a defence strategy. The bigger issue of course is that some people go through police interviews facing often very serious charges, and end up tried and convicted without really knowing the many factors of how this came about. Imagine not knowing the reasons why you were convicted, maybe wrongly, of serious crimes and imprisoned for even the shortest period or as long as whole life sentence. 

This can also have impact on the victims of crime because admission of guilt by the perpetrator often helps victims to understand what happened to their loved one. Many of the accused won't understand the nature of the evidence against them and will not make confessions, where as if they had been able to read they might have done. Confessions also help the prisoner to rehabilitate and work towards better prison conditions and long-term objectives of building a new life on release.

During my time in Full Sutton prison I took a course, which enabled me to be capable of teaching people to read and write. It was called a ‘Peer Support Qualification’, and once achieved allowed me to be a classroom assistant in jail. My role was to help those guys who most others had given up hope on. One of those I helped was a guy with Tourette’s syndrome. He had a lot of involuntary physical ticks and verbal outbursts. He had clearly struggled with every aspect of his life until this point plus his personal hygiene was not the best but I saw through that and we got on okay. I managed to get him to learn the basics and above all to find some confidence in himself, which he had been sadly lacking before. Learning to read and write to a reasonable standard can often only take a few months and makes all the difference to prisoners who need to use cost effective methods to keep in touch with family and friends and read their legal mail.

Why is it that a justice system completely reliant upon written documents to create the case against someone, can proceed with a prosecution even though the defendant cannot read a word of any of the witness statements put before them? It is only in recent times that the government has realised quite a substantial amount of prisoners struggle with being able to read and write. In the last ten years or so every inmate gets tested to see if they can read and write, prior to that it was possible to simply conceal that fact from the prison authorities and everyone else around them. Guys simply had a range of good excuses at the ready for not being able to read. A classic was and is: “I haven’t got my glasses with me”, or: “My glasses are broken.” There is no come back on that.

Some prisoners have learnt where to put numbers or ticks on the forms they have to fill in for their canteen orders or meal choices, so even friends don’t notice. But since the system realised that reading and writing ability was a problem for prisoners, proper testing has been done where there are no excuses for why they can’t do the test. Accordingly the authorities have discovered that between 40% and 60% of prisoners cannot read or write to entry level one, the expected level for children under the age of 11. That is simply shocking and it’s not just that schooling has failed these men, or that prison education might have failed them, it’s that they have been prosecuted and jailed, probably many times and yet they’ve not been able to read the prosecution’s case against them and they could well be imprisoned in the first place because they were unable to gain employment owing to the fact that they can't read and write. 

With the huge cuts in legal aid, and prisoners not admitting to their solicitor that they can’t write or read the witness statements, people simply wait until trial and listen to what people say about them in Court and react to that but by then it’s a bit late. Moreover, I’m told thatthose who serve on a jury are not required to prove that they can read or write well enough to be able to understand legal documents and witness statements either.

My personal experience of those who struggle to read and write is that you’d never know from how they looked or how they spoke or how they conducted themselves. Their conversation is varied and interesting and there really aren’t any outward signs indicating they can’t read and write unless they tell you. But to think that probably 50% of those people who are prosecuted for the most serious crimes cannot read or write to entry level one standard is quite simply scandalous. How can they have had a fair trial? Maybe they received some help but not enough.

Being able to read and write should be one of the basic human rights, every citizen should have. Prisoners should never be prosecuted until they are literate – hold them on remand and teach them how to read and write, and hold the prosecution until they can. It’s simple, some will simply delay but the prison system has ways to encourage compliance and then the country has a chance of another 50% of prosecutions being fair. Alternatives could be providing audio transcripts of all material but this doesn’t solve the long-term problem of illiterate prisoners hoping for rehabilitation and release. 



Jeremy

Sunday 23 October 2016

Jeremy Bamber has been unjustly incarcerated for thirty years, we correspond and he telephones me.


To briefly place into context. 

Prior to 2007 any evidence that was gathered as part of any police enquiry into a serious crime was placed under automatic Public Interest Immunity (PII) so that a defendant had no access to them.

After Jeremy Bamber’s failed appeal in 2001/2 the judge ruled that Essex Police must provide Jeremy's legal team with certain evidence relating to his trial and conviction but which was not presented at court and which the jury had not had sight of.  Essex Police have continued to refuse to comply with the Court Order and it has never been enforced.

In 2011 Jeremy Bamber’s campaign team founder was contacted and asked if she would like the boxes of files relating to the case as the law had changed and previously undisclosed evidence could now be reviewed.  Jeremy’s next appeal was going to be in 2012 and it was impossible to review all of these documents and submit them to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in time for that, and he lost his appeal.

On receipt of these boxes it was discovered that they contained thousands of pieces of undisclosed evidence. 

Over the past five years the Campaign team have read, scanned and saved these documents on a database.  
Of extreme significance is that these boxes of evidence, over eighty in all, have HOLMES references, which is a computerised police database and refer to other documents which it is strongly believed will support Jeremy’s innocence but many of which have been removed from these files.  Some boxes are empty and twenty boxes are missing.  Also in 1996, despite a Court Order to the contrary, Special Branch authorised the destruction of the evidence found at the scene; this included Sheila’s clothing amongst other items.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission, set up to investigate miscarriages of justice have the power to order Essex Police to comply with the Court Order but refuse to do so.

Jeremy Bamber is not asking to view everything, which is not permitted under Common Law anyway.  He his asking for specific and significant items relating to the Court Orders. One example: there are several HOLMES references to Detective Kenneally’s report in which he concludes that all evidence points to Sheila Caffel shooting the family then herself, but his actual report has been removed from the file.  Also in these files is evidence and reports from social workers concerned about Sheila’s violence towards her twins as well as statements and names of foster carers with whom the twins had been placed previously.

Had the jury known about this evidence it is highly likely they would have provided a different verdict.

It is in the interest of justice for all that any cover-up and corruption be exposed.  Essex Police are not above the law, so why are they permitted to ignore Court Orders?  




Wednesday 28 September 2016

Jeremy Bamber: 'New evidence proves unfair trial'
 Attrib: http://www.channel4.com/news/jeremy-bamber-new-evidence-will-set-me-free

Exclusive: Jeremy Bamber, who was sentenced to life in 1986 for the murder of five of his family members, has claimed that previously-unseen police photographs prove he was not given a fair trial.
Jeremy Bamber
Bamber, 50, has always protested his innocence, claiming that his sister Sheila, who had paranoid schizophrenia, used a rifle to kill her adoptive parents, Nevill and June, and her six-year-old twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas, before shooting herself in the remote Essex farmhouse. The Bamber murder case is one of the most notorious criminal cases in modern British history. Bamber’s legal team plan to set out a series of apparent inconsistencies in the case presented to the original trial court: 

• Photographs which his lawyers allege show that the gun was moved
• One police officer described having no memory of the gun being at the crime scene
• Inconsistencies in the blood-spatter evidence
• X-rays revealing bullets which were presented whole at trial had broken up on impact
Bamber's legal team claim that photos of Sheila, known as Bambi - which show the murder weapon, a rifle, positioned in different places on her body - point to evidence-tampering and are therefore incompatible with the prosecution's case. They add that the inconsistencies the photographs depict appear to be supported by the records of police officers who attended the scene of the crime. One detective raised concerns after seeing the pictures, describing having no recollection of seeing the rifle at all when he was at the scene.
The White House Farm murders
The White House Farm murders became among the most infamous multiple murders of a generation, because they bore all the hallmarks of a detective crime novel: a brutal massacre behind locked doors, a mentally-unstable model with a fanatical religious streak, a suave and conniving son, and his jilted lover who informed on him to police a month later. When police arrived at the scene, they thought the killings pointed to a murder/suicide, but three days later, one of Bamber’s cousins found a silencer in a box in the gun cupboard and presented it to police.
The silencer had a speck of blood on it, which a scientist concluded had come from Sheila, although doubts have since been raised about the authenticity of the tests. Police claimed that it would not have been possible for Sheila to shoot herself and then return the silencer to the cupboard.
About a month after the murders, Bamber broke up with his girlfriend, Julie Mugford, after she discovered that he had had sex with her best friend.
Miss Mugford went to police the next day and told officers that Jeremy had been planning the murders for some time and called her on the night of the killings, saying: "Tonight’s the night."
The trial
At Bamber's trial - at Chelmsford Crown Court in October 1986 - he was convicted on a 10-2 majority verdict. The jury was asked to decide whether he had murdered his family to inherit an estate worth around £500,000 (£1m in today’s money) or whether schizophrenic Sheila Caffell carried out the massacre after her parents suggested that her children should be taken into foster care.
The jury decided Sheila could not have killed her family before turning the gun on herself, and that it was Bamber who committed the crimes and re-staged the scene to appear like a murder/suicide.
But Channel 4 News has seen for the first time a series of police pictures showing a .22 Anschutz semi-automatic rifle, the murder weapon, seemingly resting in different positions on Sheila’s body and also placed around the bedroom where she was found dead. Bamber’s legal team argue that because the trial jury convicted him on grounds that he had re-staged the crime scene, these photos prove he was not given a fair trial. 
They claim that, at the least, the pictures cast doubt on part of the prosecution case and appear to expose significant inconsistencies in the evidence from 7 August 1985.
Main bedroom/staircase
The rifle rests above and below Sheila's neckline in different close-up images. In wide shots of the room, the gun appears propped up against a window and is then missing in another. Essex police officers told the trial jury that the gun on her body was not moved in the aftermath of the crime and only made safe at 11.10am.
But Bamber's defence team argues that all of the police pictures photographed in the room were taken at least 50 minutes before then. A blown-up image of one of the pictures of the master bedroom of the farmhouse, in which the bodies of June and Sheila were found, shows a clock on the bedside table reading 10.20am, indicating that the gun could have been moved during the photographing sessions: almost an hour before police testified it had been.
'No recollection of gun'
Various logs of different police officers at the scene suggest incongruous accounts of the positioning of Sheila's body and also where the gun lay in relation to her. One police officer raised concerns that, after viewing the photos, Sheila's body was in a different position from when he saw her, before 8.45am.
"Photo of Sheila not in same position as when I saw it," his notes reads. "Head too close to bedside table. Not sure about angle of head but something not right. No recollection of gun. Was level with her waist 12-18in away."
Another officer, on first inspecting the room at 9.30am, half an hour before the photographer arrived in the room, noted: "Daughter with .22 rifle by her right side."
Dr Herbert Leon MacDonell, director of the New-York based Laboratory for Forensic Science, studied the photographs for the defence team and concluded that the pattern of blood spatter suggested movement of the body.
Dr MacDonell, who testified in the OJ Simpson murder case and was involved in the investigations into the assassinations of US Senator Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, told Channel 4 News: "From the bloodstain patterns the victim's arms must have been moved.
"Bloodstains on the floor showed that other objects were also moved. I concluded that it had to have been murder because of the two shots under her chin. (But) Some time later I learned that the pathologists concluded that she could have fired both shots so I now believe it could have been suicide as well."
Peter Sutherst, a photographic expert, adviser to crime scene officers, and on the UK register of expert witnesses, examined around 400 of the previously-undisclosed negatives.
He told Channel 4 News: "Based on knowledge of how roll films are put together with frame numbers in sequence, the pictures of Sheila with the rifle on her were taken early on in the photographing process.
"(The officer) started in the kitchen first, then to the bedroom Sheila was found in and then to several other rooms afterwards.
"I think those pictures were taken between 10.20 and 10.45. It is extremely unlikely they were taken after that."
Mr Sutherst added that scores of negatives from the film roll remained undisclosed.
Hurd: 'Errors were made'
In 1989, the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd ordered a tightening of procedures for police investigations following the murders. He said that the operation had been riddled with errors.
"First, the senior investigating officer (DCI 'Taff' Jones), having assessed the scene of the crime and considered the information provided by Jeremy Bamber, wrongly concluded that Sheila Caffell had taken her own life and shooting her parents and twin sons," he said.
"In consequence of this error of judgement, he did not follow normal procedures of potential murder cases, and was reluctant to take account of information which challenged his original assessment.
"Secondly, there was inadequate supervision of the senior investigating officer to ensure that existing force practices were observed and that the inquiries took account of the information coming to light."
Catalogue of new evidence
The discovery of the photographs is the latest in a catalogue of around 100,000 pages Bamber has accessed from his prison cell in Full Sutton, Yorkshire, via the Freedom of Information Act and the Data Protection Act.
He and his legal team – headed by lawyer Barry Woods – have also uncovered the following evidence which they hope could overturn his conviction:
• The pictures of Sheila’s body also show wet blood flowing from Sheila’s wounds, according to the defence. Bamber’s team say that experts have told them that because the blood had not coagulated at the time of photographing at 10.30am, she could have been killed no earlier than 7am. Bamber had been with police officers since about 3am.
Bullet
• An X-Ray of Sheila's neck, which shows one bullet fragmented into 14 pieces and a second bullet intact in her brain. However, police showed the court two unbroken bullets at the trial.
Police log
• Police logs showing some of the officers who first arrived at the farmhouse reporting that there were two bodies, a male and a female, dead in the kitchen, while they were in the presence of Bamber. The final report stated that only the male body - that of Bamber's father Nevill - was found in the kitchen, with the other bodies in four upstairs rooms. Bamber's supporters argue that the female body was Sheila’s, and she had gone upstairs to kill herself between the time of the log entry and some time after police entered the house, several hours later.
• Another police log in which an officer reports that officers were in conversation with someone inside the farmhouse upon their arrival.
Phone log
• Two "lost" police logs, which Bamber’s defence team claim show that Nevill called police at 3.26am saying his daughter had "gone berserk" and "got hold of one of my guns". The record is almost identical to another phone log timed at 3.36am in which Bamber made from his home in Goldhanger, three-and-a-half miles away from the farm.
• Mr Sutherst has also found that scratch marks the prosecution said had been caused by Bamber – in a tussle between him and his father - on the night of the killingsmight have actually been made a month later. After scrutinising photographs taken on the day of the murders, he found no indication of the scratch marks, said to have been made by the silencer. Mr Sutherst then found that the photograph of the scratches used in Bamber's trial was taken on 10 September, over a month after the murders.
Forensic officers established that Sheila could not have shot herself and return the silencer to the cupboard.Mr Sutherst told Channel 4 News: "There is no doubt that marks made by the silencer, which were visible a month later, were not present on the day of the killings. In the photos taken on the day of the crimes, I could see no scratches and no residue of paint which invariably would have been there if scratches were made."
Awaiting CCRC verdict
Bamber submitted his findings to the Criminal Cases Reviews Commission (CCRC) last year and is awaiting a decision that has been set for 31 January to see whether his case will be referred to the Court of Appeal. The CCRC would only make a referral if it determines that there is a "real possibility" the conviction will not be upheld. This means it must second-guess what the appeal courts may make of a referral.
Its governing statute is: "(The CCRC) do not consider innocence or guilt, but whether there is new evidence or argument that may cast doubt on the safety of an original decision."
Bamber has previously had two appeals quashed, in 1989 and 2002.
At the last hearing, Lord Justice Kay told the court: "We have concluded that there was no conduct on the part of the police or the prosecution which would have adversely affected the jury's verdict."
However, none of the new evidence was available to Bamber then: his legal team were handed the photographs of Sheila's body in only 2004.
Bamber was sentenced to serve no less than 25 years at the 1986 trial, but in 1992, the then Home Secretary Michael Howard changed the sentence to a whole life tariff.
He lost an appeal against the decision in 2009 and is currently awaiting a verdict on an appeal against the life-meaning-life tariff from the European Court of Human Rights.
Bamber’s legal team say that if the CCRC refers Bamber's case and appeal judges are convinced by the new documents, photographs and experts' analysis, their client, who has been in jail for 25 years, could have suffered one of the greatest miscarriages in the history of the British legal system.


Thursday 30 June 2016

EU Labour Leave Shock June 2016

My observation is that the Leave result would not have come as such a shock if Labour had been listening to its grass-roots supporters
I had been attempting to tell every Remain Labour party member and/or supporter, who will listen, that the presumption that Labour supporters will vote Remain, is just that. My experience 'on the doorstep', as well as those to whom I speak around town when walking my whippets and in meetings with clients and groups over Essex, is that the majority of grass-roots Labour wanted out of the EU. Even some who have never previously voted and had viewed voting as a pointless exercise because, 'they're all the same', said they were actually registering to vote in order to vote Leave. They were angry, felt unheard and wanted to at least have a voice. Rightly or wrongly - theirs was a protest vote. When I attended a Labour women's event earlier this year and prior the vote, I attempted to discuss this alternate referendum view with the speaker, an MP based in the Midlands. She wasn't interested in discussing a position that was not Remain - her manner was closed and condescending.
A day before the referendum, I was contacted by telephone by a youthful sounding female. As I am a Labour Party member she was asking for a donation. I tried to engage her in the EU topic. There was an intake of breath when I told her that many socialists do not feel heard by Labour and will vote 'out' and that I sympathise with that view. She patronisingly suggested that I read up a bit more on the topic.
I was not passionate about the EU referendum, one way or another, it has little effect on my personal situation plus I saw it as a political tactic; it is the people I see struggling that I want to support; those who've been forced to take a reduction in wages. Skilled trades downgraded and given to unqualified, inexperienced workers who will take a cut in their pay, has meant that qualified teaching staff, building industry foremen and site managers with years of experience are now scrapping around for work with a decent wage. even registered nursing posts are being reduced to Care-Worker grades. I cannot say to what extent these repercussions of EU membership have been proliferated by plutocratic governments but what I can say and what I do know is that regardless of the government of the day, and in my experience, is that at one time, in England, a school leaver, if they wanted it and worked for it, could have secure employment on a decent wage and were able to plan for the future.
A typical example; I was raised on a council estate in Dagenham, built between the wars. We were surrounded by cornfields, when Dagenham was in rural Essex and not as it is now, Outer London and as such is felt as a loss of identity. My parents had moved from the Holloway Road in London, having been allocated the house in 1939.
In 1957, my elder sister aged twenty-one, having left school at aged fifteen, (she won a scholarship aged eleven but family finances meant she couldn't take it) was working in a typing pool at Chelmsford County Hall. Her fiancĂ© had just completed his National Service and was working as a Tally Clerk at the East India Docks. They were married and had a mortgage by the time they were twenty-six.  They planned their family and when six months pregnant with their first child, she was obliged to retire from her job, receiving a lump sum of £200 which constituted Maternity Pay according to legislation then. She remained at home until her children were considered old enough for her to take up employment again. Nowadays, many a twenty-six year old cannot afford to leave home, let alone make a life for him/herself and start a family. I don't know whether joining the EU exacerbated that situation but we need to be questioning why, in 2016, when on one hand we have had massive progress in technology, the sciences, advances in medicine, the unravelling of DNA and its value to forensics; basically, in every field, yet have taken such retrograde steps socioeconomically. No political party apparently wants to address that crucial fact, how that situation came about and why they let it continue; well, they all say they'll make changes but once they get in 'power' as they like to call it, they do nowt.  And yet still 'the few' get richer and 'the many' get poorer. I believe this to be no accident and intentionally contrived.
Mine was a basic Primary School then Secondary School education though I was an  intelligent, even gifted, child; always a straight 'A' student, but it was only the children from the more prosperous families (with hindsight) who were selected by the school's headmaster and given extra tuition in preparation for the Eleven Plus examination with its opportunity of a grammar school education.
Upon leaving school in the 1960s we seemed to have so many opportunities, whether in skilled/unskilled office or shop work and I was offered several jobs; secretarial and in science labs as I'd achieved 98% in that exam but fashion was my 'thing' so I applied for and was accepted by C&A in Oxford Street, London and undertook a window-dressing apprenticeship. In addition I was offered and accepted a Saturday job working for the Oxford University Press.
Even in the 1970s 'one man's wage' was still sufficient to maintain his family comfortably. I continued my education whilst rearing my sons. Study and academic achievement was the bread-of-life to me, I devoured it. Subsequently qualifying and working in a variety of areas including Further Education Teaching, Integrative Therapy plus mental health roles within Social Services and the National Health Service, eventually setting up my private counselling practise.
Regarding the referendum I had waxed and waned on how to vote but did vote Leave, in order to support the people who are frustrated at being dismissed, or even, as I heard on the BBC, accused of being uneducated, politically ignorant or even racist because they have an opinion based on their experience.
I do not necessarily concur with all I hear, however immigration, from the EU and elsewhere is a genuine issue for some people. A member of staff at my local GP surgery told me that they are inundated with patients over and above their official list, some of whom who cannot converse adequately in English and due to tradition or culture frequently arrive at appointments with virtually all their family members in tow, which clearly takes up more of staff time.
(2017 All GP surgeries in my area are now closed to new patients leaving people to make their way to a surgery in another town, eight miles away.
2018 I have since been informed that this surgery is now closed to new patients, I don't know where people are being directed to.)
Some schools now have classes of fifty children. In Boston, Lincolnshire, statistics show that one-in-seven of the population was not born in the UK and locals feel they have lost their identity; that phrase again. Some children there are starting school unable to speak English; parents and teaching staff are concerned as to the effect this has on other children within the learning environment. People should not be vilified for stating such things, these are facts; appreciated by any parent - anywhere. It is not 'racism' but expressing such concerns is frequently labelled as such.
In Chelmsford, Essex, a woman who trained as a State Registered Nurse in the 1960s said on local radio, that she believes that if National Health Service (NHS) training had continued at that excellent standard and with the financial support, including accommodation, as in the days when nursing was viewed as a valued and respected vocation, then more men and women may have entered the profession and we wouldn't need to look to EU  immigration to fill the posts; plus we had an excellent input of medical staff from the Commonwealth, which we have now deserted; to our cost.
I tend to agree with her.
Lincolnshire, with its one time thriving fishing industry, now has only a handful of vessels. A trawler skipper tells me that he blames EU regulations for the severe restrictions on fishing rights so much so that he is no longer able to earn a 'decent living'; another said,  'Going out to sea was once a pleasure now it seems pointless.' Upon driving through farmland in The Dengie in Essex, thirteen miles, I passed eight large Leave placards, not one Remain.
When my children were small and I was studying, I, with other mums, took seasonal work, pea picking, apple/pear picking and Brussels sprout trimming, often with our children round our feet.  It was 'pin-money', never intended to be a living wage. It infuriates me when it is implied that British workers are lazy and will not do 'menial work'. Field-work is also an excellent form of income for students, my sons did it but it was never viewed as a secure occupation, it was seasonal work. You couldn't get a mortgage or raise a family on your pea-picking money but it helped; one friend was doing it so that she could contribute towards her daughter's private schooling!
Jeremy Corbyn is likely the last remnant of true Socialist Labour Party leaders.  He also values human life, believes there are solutions to conflict that do not involve war and annihilation, he does not ridicule members of the opposite bench during Prime Minister’s Questions, unlike the vitriolic Tory Leader but the Establishment obviously do not want this new kind of politics. Corbyn was always known as a Euro sceptic but for the Parliamentary Labour Party to blame and hound him because of the referendum result is not only vindictive and dishonest as it was obviously always the plan of certain members of his party to bring him down. At a time when the nation needs support and direction, the Labour Party is flapping around like a head-less chicken and doing its reputation no good whatsoever. If there were an election tomorrow Labour would lose, hands down. The Labour coup is an embarrassment and confirmation, if needed, of the immaturity and unsuitability for office, of several of its members.

Friday 10 June 2016

Jeremy Bamber: Extracts from DI Wilkinson's statement

Attrib: http://www.jeremy-bamber.co.uk/
'With the aid of these maps I measured the distance, using a pedometer, from White House Farm to 9 Head Street, Goldhanger, via the farm track and sea wall.  This route measured 6,978 metres and at a brisk walk took 70 minutes to complete.  I subsequently cycled this route in 35 minutes.

I then measured the distance, using a pedometer, from 9 Head Street, Goldhanger to Brook House Farm track at its junction with Maldon Road via Church Street and the B1026.  This route measured 2895 metres and at a brisk walk took 28 minutes to complete.  I subsequently cycled this route in 10 minutes.

I then measured the distance, using a pedometer, from Brook House Farm Track at its junction with Maldon Road to White House Farm via B1026 and B1023.  This route measured 3290 metres and at a brisk walk took 30 minutes to complete.  I subsequently cycled this route in 12 minutes.

I then measured the distance, with a pedometer, from White House Farm to Maldon Road via Brook House Farm track.  This route measured 1629 metres and at a brisk walk took 17 minutes to complete.  This track is well maintained, clearly defined, and easily negotiable by foot, cycle or motor vehicle.  I subsequently cycled this route in 6 minutes.

There are footpaths marked on the Ordnance Survey map which seem to link White House Farm and Goldhanger in a direct manner via Joyces Farm and Lauriston Farm.  However I have attempted to negotiate these footpaths but without success.  The paths go directly across ploughed fields or
cultivated crops or peter out on the banks of small streams and irrigation canals.


In my opinion the shortest practicable route between White House Farm and Goldhanger without using main roads is via the sea wall. However, the shortest and quickest practicable route between White House Farm and Goldhanger by foot, cycle or motor vehicle is by using Brook House Farm track and the B1026.  This route is 1661 metres less than going through Tolleshunt D'Arcy.'