The guns are really out for Ruth Kelly at the moment. We’re into the second week of a scandal that threatens her job as Education Minister with plenty of people and papers awaiting the claiming of her scalp.
Here’s the big spread in today’s (well yesterday’s now) Observer detailing her week and the developments.
But it’s not quite as cut and dried as the story is currently being painted. First of all, I should make clear my disgust for paedophiles, and those who frequent websites that show such images. I’m not trying to defend anyone here.
But the first case, highlighted in The Observer last weekend, based around the East Anglian teacher Paul Reeve, is not quite as clear cut as it’s being presented. And Kelly may actually have been correct in letting him continue teaching. I have no knowledge of the specific case, just the fact that Operation Ore is not quite as cut and dried as it’s presented.
Operation Ore was based around the credit cards logged for certain transactions from a company that ran many pornographic sites. Last year PC Pro magazine published a significant article by journalist Duncan Campbell, explaining that many of the people listed had actually used other adult services owned by the parent company and would not have even known about the child pornography that was traded by the company at a certain stage. Pornography, whatever you might think of it, is not the same as paedophilia. A lot of it is perfectly legal last time I checked.
However everybody who’d bought something on one of those websites was labelled a paedophile by the police, yet proof was always going to be hard to come by, hence the “stark choice” faced by Reeves and others: go to court and protest your innocence or be put on a register.
Declining to go to court does not make Reeves guilty. I couldn’t say why he didn’t, but I’d guess that the social stigma that’d be immediately attached to his name being widely published in a climate where “paediatricians” are mistaken for “paedophiles” doesn’t make it too surprising.
Teachers subscribing to pornographic websites might not be an edifying thought, but I’m guessing quite a few teachers, like many others in society, have bought other pornographic material – maybe they’ve viewed it via the auspices of Rupert Murdoch’s satellite system. (I’d be curious to see what the Daily Express’s coverage has been like!)
With a lack of proof, surely it’s entirely reasonable that he should have been allowed to teach – ‘innocent until proven guilty’ still being the way the law works in this country. The problem is that people don’t understand the full problems behind Ore, and despite a story in The Sunday Times, it’s widely seen as beyond reproach.
The quote in The Observer’s article “‘You could not access those websites by accident. It was not a website you could stumble into,’ said one person familiar with Ore” is misleading in the extreme then.
Now, I don’t doubt that Ruth Kelly’s department hasn’t made mistakes, and Kelly isn’t widely liked (I don’t especially like her myself). Although I do hope the approbium she faces isn’t anything to do with her being a member of Opus Dei – far too many people seem to believe everything they read in that *novel* (I don’t especially like Opus Dei either, but have no problem with her being a member).
Blood sports are banned in this country now, but I think the press pack is well and truly out for Kelly’s blood now and like the hounds, when they’ve got a sniff of it, their blood boils and they lose themselves in the excitement of the chase and the prospect of the kill, irrespective of whether it’s really going to help lower the fox population (I might be stretching this metaphor a bit far, because I certainly don’t think of Kelly as a “fox”).
Of course, there do seem to have been other offenders who’ve slipped through the net, and not from Operation Ore, so there is a real problem here. But is it quite as large as it’s being painted?
I’ll be curious to read if any other papers pick up on this aspect of the story. Maybe I’ve missed something, but it’s a brave paper, however liberal at heart, that takes a anything aside from the obvious point of view when it comes to suspected paedophiles.
Is it time for the return of the sorely missed Rough Justice? Or perhaps a Panorama on the issue?