BEARGER

Seven MPs leave Labour Party in protest at Jeremy Corbyn's leadership 12 minutes ago Share this with Facebook Share this with Messenger Share this with Twitter Share this with Email Share Related Topics Labour Party resignations Media captionSeven MPs resign from Labour party over Brexit and anti-Semitism Seven MPs have resigned from the Labour Party in protest at Jeremy Corbyn's approach to Brexit and anti-Semitism. They are: Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Angela Smith, Mike Gapes, Gavin Shuker and Ann Coffey. Ms Berger said Labour had become institutionally anti-Semitic and she was "embarrassed and ashamed" to stay. Mr Corbyn said he was "disappointed" the MPs had felt unable to continue working for the policies that "inspired millions" at the 2017 election. The MPs are not launching a new political party - they will sit in Parliament as the Independent Group. But Chuka Umunna said they had "taken the first step" and urged other Labour MPs - and members of other parties - to join them in "building a new politics". "Politics is broken, it doesn't have to be this way. Let's change it," he said at a launch event in central London. He said there would be "no merger" with the Liberal Democrats and the group wanted to "build a new alternative". Chris Leslie said the seven would have their first formal meeting "in a few days" time to "assign roles and responsibilities". The group has launched a website and a twitter feed. And the group rejected comparisons with the SDP - which broke away from the Labour Party in the early 1980s but eventually merged with the Liberal Party - saying it was a different era and they would not be contesting by-elections. In a founding statement, the group sets out its approach to the economy, public services and security, as well as Brexit, saying its aim was to "pursue policies that are evidence-based, rather that led by ideology".

Who knew about the abuse at St Benedict’s? The entire Catholic Church At the child sexual abuse inquiry Stephen Bleach sees the truth emerge about the school where he and other boys were harmed. And it hits him: the instinct to shield paedophiles was endemic Stephen Bleach February 17 2019, 12:01am, The Sunday Times Religion Pope Francis is the head of a worldwide church that is still in denial about clerical child abuse It looks more like a call centre than a courtroom. The low-ceilinged, windowless office space is overcrowded and overlit; it looks like the sort of nondescript workplace where insurance is sold or breakdown trucks dispatched. This is the south London home of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). Earlier this month the inquiry spent five days examining the appalling record of child abuse at Ealing Abbey, west London, and the school it ran, St Benedict’s — where I was a pupil in the 1970s. While there, I was groped and beaten by Andrew Soper, a monk. Other boys suffered much worse at his hands: in 2017 Soper was convicted of 19 counts of child abuse, including buggery. After the trial I wrote an article for this newspaper about the school, detailing six decades of violent paedophilia by at least seven monks and teachers. That article left some loose ends. Apart from the abusers and their many victims, who at the school knew what was going on? And why didn’t they report it to the police? In the IICSA’s humdrum hearing room, the answers slowly came creeping out. The hearings are not big on drama. Intentionally so: this is not a court, with theatrical cross-examinations by showboating barristers, but a dogged, bureaucratic search for the truth. There was personal testimony — including particularly harrowing recollections of abuse from one former pupil, known by the cypher RC-A8 — but much of the key evidence was contained in written witness statements, extracts from which were read out by the lawyers. Somehow the understatement made them all the more compelling. It emerged that many, many people at the school and the abbey — teachers, support staff, heads, monks, abbots — knew what was happening to me and possibly hundreds of other young boys. The abuse was able to continue undetected, decade after decade, because the secretive culture of the Catholic Church valued abusers more than children. The frightening part is that, as events at the IICSA hearings were to show, it still does. The Catholic Church is good at saying sorry for child abuse. It’s had a lot of practice. At the start of the hearings, Ruth Henke QC, speaking for the abbey and the school, offered a “sincere, unreserved and profound apology” to the abused. As the full extent of the Ealing Abbey cover-up was revealed, I began to realise just how much it had to apologise for. Harsha Mortemore, who worked in accounts and HR at St Benedict’s from 1996 to 2008, told the inquiry that she was warned by other staff not to leave her own four-year-old child in the company of two notorious paedophile monks who taught at the school. She revealed how one, David Pearce, would often take boys into his office, lock the door and cover the window with paper so nobody could see inside. When she alerted the then headmaster, Tony Dachs, she was told: “If you know what’s good for you, keep your head down and do your job.” A third monk, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told Mortemore that he “touched up” pupils because he “couldn’t deny liking little boys”. Katherine Ravenscroft, a drama teacher at St Benedict’s in the 1990s, told the IICSA that rumours of abuse were rife. She tried to raise concerns about Pearce, but “to complain meant putting your job on the line. It felt a bit like the mafia” at the school, she said. Ealing Abbey, which runs St Benedict’s, the school where boys were abusedGETTY A monk, Alban Nunn, also told the IICSA that rumours of abuse were common, and that he and two fellow monks were “very concerned about the way these complaints were being dealt with”. Suspecting Pearce of child abuse, he asked Martin Shipperlee, then the abbot, to act. Shipperlee replied: “What can I do? He is my friend.” True to his word, Shipperlee did nothing. Hardly surprising. Detective Sergeant Gareth Morgan, a police officer who investigated the first cases that began to leak out, told the IICSA: “I always had the impression that Abbot Shipperlee’s first loyalty was towards the alleged perpetrators rather than the alleged victims.” It goes on. Jeremy Harvey, a former pupil, spoke of brazen abuse in full view of whole classes of boys by another monk, Kevin Horsey, as far back as 1965. Chris Cleugh, headmaster of St Benedict’s in 2002-16, warned staff not to speak of abuse to anyone outside the school. Over hundreds of pages of testimony and statements, a picture emerged of rampant abuse and a determined effort to prevent the outside world from knowing about it. At this point, you could reasonably ask: does it really matter? Some men, most of them now old or dead, abused some boys, who are now adults. Terrible, but it’s in the past, and the church is different now. Time to move on. It does matter, because the church has become a haven for child abusers and their accomplices, from the dioceses right up to the Vatican. It fights tooth and nail to protect them, and it showed this yet again at the IICSA. To see how, we have to go back a little. In 2011, with accusations against him mounting, Soper — the rapist who groped me and abused so many other boys — skipped police bail and went into hiding. Scotland Yard launched a hunt and asked the church for help. The Archdiocese of Westminster (which was responsible for safeguarding at the abbey) provided a file on Soper in which, police said, there was “extensive, some might say excessive, redaction . . . one page was completely blanked out”. Police also asked the Vatican if it knew where Soper was. The Vatican did not reply. In fact the Vatican — or at least some people within it — had a very good idea where he was. As was revealed at the IICSA, Soper had more than €400,000 stashed away in the Vatican bank, and during the five years he was in hiding he periodically contacted the Vatican, requesting transfers to an account he had set up with a bank in Kosovo. Despite repeated requests, the Vatican did not pass this information on to the police. At one point Soper was even confident enough of Rome’s complicity to provide it with his home address in the town of Pec, Kosovo. Again, the Vatican did not inform the police. The Vatican has questions to answer, both about the Soper hunt and about the Ealing abuse generally. Last November the IICSA asked the Pope’s ambassador to Britain — the apostolic nuncio, a post currently held by Archbishop Edward Adams — a number of questions. At first he did not respond. And during the week of the Ealing hearings earlier this month it was reported that the nuncio had said he was awaiting instructions from Rome. He has been accused of hiding behind his diplomatic immunity. “They used their diplomatic status to run down the clock of the inquiry and avoid having to provide evidence,” says Richard Scorer, the specialist abuse lawyer at Slater and Gordon who is acting for seven of the Ealing abuse survivors. “It’s outrageous; it’s scandalous; it’s completely hypocritical. Pope Francis says he wants to root out child abuse, but then he effectively tries to sabotage an investigation into it.” This bears closer examination. The IICSA is a judicial inquiry that can compel British citizens to give evidence. There is no more hierarchical organisation than the Catholic Church. The flock obeys the shepherd, and the shepherd’s message is clear: obstruct investigations; shield abusers. At Ealing Abbey they’re still doing just that. The hearings revealed that the abbey is using its charitable funds to pay rent on a flat for the convicted, now released, abuser Pearce, even though he was defrocked in 2012. It has not sought approval for this from the Charity Commission. The abbey is thus in effect receiving a public subsidy to house an abuser. (It paid Pearce’s legal fees too, again from charitable funds.) The IICSA also heard that a monk who cannot be named for legal reasons, but has been accused of multiple counts of abuse, still resides at Ealing Abbey. In theory he is subject to restrictions that should prevent him from coming into contact with children. Pearce was living at the abbey and subject to restrictions when he abused one of his victims. The abbot, Shipperlee, admitted to the IICSA that in reality “there weren’t any” restrictions. “There was no restriction on his movement . . . it’s not a very good control, and it doesn’t add up.” In January 2018 Pope Francis said of a Chilean bishop accused of sheltering a notorious child abuser: “It is all slander. Is that clear?” The bishop has since resigned. In August the Pope refused to comment on a claim that he had personally helped to cover up allegations of sexual abuse against Theodore McCarrick, an American cardinal. McCarrick later resigned and the Vatican announced yesterday that he had been defrocked. The abuse and cover-up at Ealing are simply a microcosm of the abuse and cover-up worldwide: the church, for all its protestations, is still in denial. I wanted to speak to Ealing Abbey, St Benedict’s School and the Catholic Church itself about all this. After all, they deserve a chance to show that they have changed from the secretive organisations they once were. I asked Ealing Abbey for an interview. It flatly refused, but sent a prepared statement by Shipperlee, dated February 8, announcing his resignation and apologising for his “failings”. I called the nuncio. The man who picked up the phone at his official residence in Wimbledon actually laughed at me. When he’d recovered, he said: “No, no, no, absolutely not. The nuncio does not give interviews to anyone.” My old school wouldn’t talk either. Instead, St Benedict’s directed me to a press release, a rehash of the opening statement by its lawyer at the IICSA, Ruth Henke. She had argued that the school had changed and reformed. It has been subject to a number of inspections in recent years, with no serious criticisms. It is now co-educational. A new child protection policy has been implemented. The governance has changed: where before it was run by a cabal of Ealing Abbey monks, it now has a proper governing body of 15, with only three monks. Where once many monks taught at the school (even though some had no teaching qualifications), now just one teaches full-time, and he has been vetted by the Disclosure and Barring Service. And, as Henke was at pains to point out: “There is now no physical access between the monastery and the school.” That sentence is the most telling. It could well be that St Benedict’s has, finally, changed. I hope so. But if it has, it has done it not by embracing the church, but by escaping from it: by reducing the influence of the clergy, and indeed physically keeping them out. It says something when, in evidence designed to reassure a judicial inquiry it can keep children safe, a Catholic school solemnly assures the hearing that it has put up a fence to ward off monks. I am still a Christian, because the teachings of Jesus still seem to me the most inspiring blueprint for living a good life. I have found my Christian home in the Church of England, but I have friends and family who are devoted to Catholicism, and they are the kindest people I know. The problem is not them; it is their church. On Thursday Pope Francis will convene an unprecedented worldwide summit to consider child protection. The declared intention of the three-day assembly of 180 cardinals, bishops and others is to come up with a centralised, global administration to deal with allegations of abuse. Presumably the clerics who deal with abuse will be separate from the clerics at the Vatican bank who shielded Soper. But they’ll be close by — the Vatican is a small place. Perhaps the nuncio to Great Britain can drop in for a gossip when he’s nipping back to Rome to take instructions from His Holiness. In any case, if and when the new policy is implemented, any British child who is abused by a cleric can take comfort in the fact that their suffering is being considered at the very highest level of the Catholic Church. David Enright, a lawyer who acts for survivors of abuse, told me: “The issue is that child protection in England and Wales will be directed and decided in Rome. That cannot be acceptable.” And, as he pithily told the IICSA: “The Catholic Church is culturally and structurally incapable of addressing clerical abuse.” When the summit has done its work, there will no doubt be an announcement of a new regime that will finally sort out the issue once and for all. If those drafting it are stuck for wording, they could just copy some from the church’s previous promises. “There is no place in the priesthood for those who would harm the young,” said Pope John Paul II in 2002. “We will absolutely exclude paedophiles from the sacred ministry,” said Pope Benedict XVI in 2008. If you are a parent, all this boils down to one simple question: do you trust these people to take care of your child? @stephenbleach

Why would the Easdales sell at 20p to King rather than sell on open market?

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17437343.rangers-chairman-dave-king-wins-fight-to-avoid-8m-club-share-purchase-just/ RANGERS chairman Dave King has won a long battle to avoid paying out millions on a court-ordered shares offer. It has been confirmed that the mandatory offer, which could have cost him as much as £19m, just failed to get enough acceptances from shareholders to become valid. It means that those who accepted the 20p-a-share offer including former football board chairman Sandy Easdale and his family will keep their shares. Valid acceptances were received for 19m shares, or 13.07% of the club which would give Mr King's group 47.12%, 3% short of the 50% threshold to make the takeover offer successful. Shareholders had until a deadline of 1pm on Friday to make the offer - and the result of the bid was declared at 7.40pm. READ MORE: 'Damages may not be adequate remedy' if Ally McCoist and others renege on 'no sale' Rangers shares deal Mr King was obliged to make the bid by the Takeover Panel financial regulator, which ruled he, and the Three Bears group of investors had acted "in concert" to acquire more than 30% of the Ibrox club's shares when they took over the club from a group said to be allied to Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley in 2015. The offer was finally made last month after a protracted legal battle with Mr King trying to stave off pressure to buy the shares fearing the heavy financial toll it would place on him. Under Takeover Code rules Mr King and the Three Bears, made up of Hong Kong-based investment banker George Taylor, Park's Motor Group founder Douglas Park and wealthy fan George Letham, should have made a written offer to buy the shares of other shareholders at the time of the takeover having overtaken a 30% threshold. Mr King's takeover group, which currently holds a 34% stake, would have had to control over 50% of the club at the end of the court-ordered offer, for it to have been valid. A statement said: "In light of the acceptances referred to... the acceptance condition has not been satisfied. Accordingly, the offer was not capable of being declared unconditional as to acceptances at 1.00 p.m. on 25 February 2019 and therefore the offer lapsed with immediate effect." The Herald understands that the result of the bid will not result in any further action from the Takeover Panel, which was satisfied that the shares offer was eventually carried out according to the Code, including the appointment of a cash confirmer, the London-based investment bank and stockbroker, Finncap. Offer documents show that 11 shareholders including Ally McCoist and fans group Club 1872 who hold 38% of the club shares had already made undertakings not to take up the offer. It meant investors holding over 57% of the remaining shares would have had to have accepted Mr King's money for it to succeed. If Mr King's bid had been successful, while being costly, it would have given his group a tighter grip or Rangers - holding over 50% of the voting rights. The cost to Mr King, through his South Africa-based Laird Investments (Proprietary) Limited firm, of the offer was slashed to a maximum of £8m as a result of those who had already declared they will not take up the offer. It is understood that major shareholder Blue Pitch Holdings, which holds 4m shares, had joined the Easdales in intimating an intention to sell. Mr King was ordered to make an offer for the remainder of the shares in Rangers International Football Club Ltd by the Takeover Panel financial watchdog after it ruled the South Africa-based businessman had acted “in concert” the Three Bears investors group when they took control of the club. The 63-year-old businessman, had previously stated that delays with fulfilling the court order were the result of needing government approval to transfer the funds from South Africa to the UK. READ MORE: Ex-Rangers chief Sandy Easdale to end up remaining a shareholder after Dave King's £8m shares bid failure The offer came after a Court of Session contempt case in front of Lady Wolffe was paused in December after the Rangers chief said he was now “100%” committed to making the multi-million-pound offer. The King-led takeover group had always denied that they had acted 'in concert' to purchase shares in Rangers on December 31 2014 and January 2, 2015. 61 comments

That’s as poor as it could get.

Figures showing loss our gain(😉) since January 2018.

Club 1872 seeks answers from SFA over disciplinary process Dear Member Club 1872 has today written to the SFA seeking explanation for the incomprehensible decision making of their compliance officer, Clare Whyte and the judicial panels convened by them to oversee disciplinary matters in Scottish football. Supporters of all clubs have been left confused and concerned by the process of citing players for events that it is claimed have been missed by referees, despite clear video evidence to the contrary. There are also major anomalies within the appeals process for red card offences and a complete lack of transparency and consistency in decisions reached. The following questions have been directed to the SFA and we hope that they will properly address this situation before the continued actions of their compliance officer and judicial panels make a mockery of this season’s competitions. 1) How are judicial panels selected prior to appeals being heard? We understand there is a pool of around forty people to choose from but who decides which three of these forty sit on any given panel? Why is this process not transparent and why is there no explanation from the SFA on the role of the compliance officer in these selections? If the selection is not random and transparent, at least to the clubs involved in any given hearing, then why is that the case? 2) With recent decisions, the compliance officer appears to be ignoring the FIFA directive which states that citing cannot be used to correct bad refereeing. We now see instances where referees have awarded yellow cards but then appear to be encouraged to claim they have not seen incidents to allow retrospective action. When do referees submit their reports to the SFA following matches and precisely what steps are being taken to ensure that referees are not subject to any outside influence prior to submitting these reports? 3) The process of citing players after games, and the appeals process for action taken by referees on the park appears to be heavily influenced by certain media platforms and the prominence they give, or do not give, to certain incidents. Incidents have included blatant acts of diving and violent conduct which, when not highlighted by the media, have also been ignored by the compliance officer. Is trial by media an accepted part of the SFA disciplinary process and if so, what safeguards are in place to stop clubs, on whom undue focus is placed, from being unfairly penalised? Club 1872 Issued by Supporters Voice Limited, a Club 1872 company

Got this from Rangers a few minutes ago. Anyone think it’s a bit steep? Sunday 31 March sees Rangers travel to Celtic Park to contest the 3rd Old Firm Derby of the season. You can watch the match in style at Ibrox Stadium in the impressive surroundings of the Ibrox Suite. The day will begin at 11am, with a breakfast roll and pint on arrival and the build up to the game will see interviews with two Gers legends, Andy Goram and Mark Hateley. There will be pies and sausage rolls on offer at half time and a Q&A session with the ex-players. Full time will see a prize draw with a chance to win exclusive Rangers prizes. A cash bar will also be available throughout. Tickets cost £36.00 per person (inclusive of VAT)* and spaces are limited. You can book online HERE.

Not sufficient evidence to take it further. BREAKING:The Scottish FA will take no further action against Kilmarnock’s Alan Power for his challenge on Ryan Jack due to an insufficiency of evidence.

John McDonnell.

There are a lot of things to get worked up about or find bothersome, but a guys liking for eating beans ain’t one of them. Nope, the articles have not got under my skin. Not a great fan of Corbyn.

Then they must be cretins. Criticise his politics but why any adult would be interested in the fact that he eats beans or that his brother is scruffy is beyond me.

Limited availability if anyone is thinking about buying.