John Hemming issues statement on 'false allegations campaign'

Photo: Charles D.P. Miller

John Hemming has posted a statement on what he calls a 'campaign of false allegations' that has been conducted against him for the past four and a half years.

He writes:

Yesterday there was a court judgment Baker v Hemming [2019] EWHC 2950 (QB) which formally confirmed that the allegations were false. Esther Baker, who had brought a libel claim against me, dropped her defence of Truth to my counter-claim and was taken by the judge as no longer trying to prove her allegations.

John, who was Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley between 2005 and 2015, recommends the account of yesterday's proceedings in the Daily Mail.

John Hemming wins libel action over false allegations of abuse

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From the Daily Telegraph:

A former MP, who was falsely accused of being part of a VIP paedophile ring, has won a rare libel action over comments made about him on social media. 

John Hemming, who was the Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley between 2005 and 2014, had been accused of being part of a group that had abused children in Staffordshire in the 1980s and 1990s. 

His accuser, Esther Baker, waived her anonymity in 2015, to make the claims, but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), later concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge him. 

Now Mr Hemming has won damages and apologies from two of Miss Baker's supporters, who posted comments online that implied the former politician was guilty.

Richard Bartholomew has more on this case.

John Hemming issues statement on false allegations of child abuse

Earlier today John Hemming, who was Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley between 2005 and 2015, published a statement on his website.

As this subject is so sensitive I am republishing the full text here.

Statement re false allegations from Esther Baker 

I am pleased that the Police have now made it clear that there has been a concerted effort to promote false criminal allegations against me and that the allegations had no substance whatsoever. 

I would like to thank Emily Cox, my children, Ayaz Iqbal (my Solicitor), my local lib dem team and many others who supported me through this dreadful experience. There are many worse things that happen to people, but this was a really bad experience. 

It is bad enough to have false allegations made about yourself to the police, but to have a concerted campaign involving your political opponents and many others in public creates an environment in which it is reasonable to be concerned about ill founded vigilante attacks on your family and yourself. Luckily there was a more substantial lobby to the contrary as well, which included many people who were themselves real survivors of abuse, which has helped. 

I am normally someone who helps other people fight injustice. Being subject to an unjust campaign of vilification is something I do not wish to repeat. 

The police themselves have handled the allegations well. However, although it was obvious from the start that the allegations were nonsense, it has taken two and a half years for this to be resolved. Identifying why that is will take time, but I believe that the system is too tolerant of false allegations. The current CPS guidelines on handling false allegations are in my view too tolerant of malicious allegations and need review. The unnecessary delay of around 2 years in resolving the issue I believe arises from procedures that are being used being flawed. 

It has been in the public domain for 2 years that the complainant changed her allegations in early 2015 from those she had made publicly previously and that she had stated publicly that she had never met a politician. 

It is worth people more generally learning a little about criminal procedure particularly that when someone is not arrested they are most likely to be innocent – even an arrest does not imply guilt. The police asked me not to put key information in my defence into the public domain, I agreed to keep that out of the public domain. That obviously made the public campaign against me harder to handle. 

This sort of situation is inevitably an attack on my family not just myself. I am still in discussion with the police about some of the criminal incidents involving my family and myself during this process. Therefore I do not wish to make further comment on those at the moment. 

It should be noted that the newspapers generally have handled the issue reasonably well. Exaro and Exaro's funder have behaved dreadfully. Sky should recognise that not only was their broadcast of the original allegations in May 2015 a complete nonsense, but also had it been based upon truthful allegations that it would have undermined a criminal investigation. The attempts to drum up additional false complainants through the use of publicity highlights a difficulty with publicising cases whilst a police investigation is going on. There are people who will make false allegations merely because someone suggests that they are looking for such allegations. 

Some members of the Labour Party, including my opponent in the last two General Elections, have invested considerable time in promoting these allegations. The promotion of the complainant as an expert in this subject area as a consequence of these allegations has caused addtional difficulties for my family. 

I am not myself aware of another situation where members and supporters of a political party have promoted such allegations in such a public manner – essentially arming the villagers with torches and pitchforks and setting off on a lynching. There were public attempts to prevent me from standing as a candidate because of allegations made maliciously by a Labour Party member backed by other members of the Labour Party. Many Labour members will find this unacceptable and it is an issue that needs consideration by the Labour leadership. 

I have asked the police to investigate this attempt to pervert the course of justice and await their response. There are, of course, many procedural options that are open to me to obtain justice for my family. I will consider those over the near future.

I shall merely add that it was not difficult for someone who followed these reports to work out that John was former Lib Dem MP in question as they gave his exact age.

Famous men behaving badly

Today the Supreme Court overturned a decision by Court of Appeal and ruled that an injunction banning the naming of a celebrity involved in an alleged extra-marital relationship should stay in place.

Over to John Hemming, the former Liberal Democrat MP:

The logical conclusion of this is that gossip about anyone with children will become a criminal offence subject to a potential penalty of 2 years' imprisonment. 

It is important to note that the injunction covers people talking in pubs, gossiping over the garden fence, or twittering on the internet. All of these could potentially see an application for committal for contempt of court. That comes with large amounts of legal costs and up to 2 years imprisonment. One would assume that it would not be assumed that this would only apply to claimants who have a large amount of money, but also everyone else.

And all this despite the fact that anyone who wants to find the identity of the celebrity, or of the married actor who slept with a prostitute and has taken out a similar injunction against the British press, can easily do so.

Delivering the court's judgment, Lord Mance did at least say:

“It is different if the story has some bearing on the performance of a public office or the correction of a misleading public impression cultivated by the person involved."

But there are those who question even that.

Over on Liberal Democrat Voice, Caron Lindsay has argued that there is "nothing of public interest in lurid headlines about SNP MPs".

I find this creeping doctrine that everything printed in a newspaper must be "in the public interest" rather sinister.

Who decides what is in the public interest? Somewhere in the shadows I detect the presence of a committee of the great and good - a retired cabinet minister, the headmistress of a leading public school, a celebrity chef and Dr Evan Harris - deciding what we should and should not be allowed to know.

At its lowest, the argument against the spread of this public interest argument is that laughing at the follies of rich and powerful has always been one of the consolations of the poor and weak.

At its highest it is that character matters immensely in politics. To many voters it is more important than the parties' detailed policy platforms, and I am not sure those voters are mistaken.

The spread of privacy law in recent years has been very much a judge-led initiative with little involvement from parliament. As John Hemmings says, it is time the politicians stepped in and set sensible limits on it.

Charles Kennedy and the Liberator Songbook

Faced with an annoyingly upbeat and united Liberal Democrat Conference, the press is doing its best to manufacture a row over references to Charles Kennedy in the Liberator Songbook.

This is sold every year to people attending the Glee Club at Conference.

A couple of experts have been phoned up and duly condemned us, including Jackie Ballard who really should know better.

The Birmingham Mail spoke to John Hemming, who gave a more sensible response:

Mr Hemming said that the songs had been written many years previously and it would be wrong to remove them from the songbook now. 

He said: “Charles wouldn’t have wanted that at all. 

“We spoke to his family and they didn’t want the songs removed either.” 

However, organisers of the event had removed lyrics to another tune, based on a Scottish folk song called the Skye Boat Song, which contained lyrics which were more offensive, Mr Hemming said.

Elsewhere the inevitable "senior Liberal Democrat" is quoted everywhere as saying the Glee Club "should have been axed years ago".

And a word of advice to the equally unnamed "Lib Dem source" who has been telling journalists that "hardly anyone goes" to the Glee Club.

That is not true, as those journalists will discover if they go along. This may keep the story running longer than it otherwise would and means they are less likely to believe you when a more serious matter comes up. So it wasn't a clever thing to say, was it?

Now read Lord Bonkers' foreword to the new Liberator Songbook.

Andrew George and Michael Moore take top two places in ballot for private members bills

The Parliament website has the results of today's ballot for private members bills. The top two places in the draw were taken by Liberal Democrat MPs: Andrew George was first and Michael Moore second.

Altogether there were five Lib Dems among the twenty names drawn. Sarah Teather was at no. 7, John Hemming at 16 and Martin Horwood at 20.

As the website says, the ballot presents an opportunity to be one of the first MPs to introduce a private members bill in this parliamentary session and may mean guaranteed debating time for the bill on a Friday sitting of the House.

John Hemming puts down EDM on Stuart Syvret case

John Hemming, the Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, has put down an early day motion on the imprisonment of Stuart Syvret.

You can read early day motion 685 on the Parliament website and you might like to encourage your MP to sign it.

Jersey blogger Stuart Syvret jailed for three months

This story appeared on the Guardian website yesterday evening, though it did not make this morning's printed edition:

Jersey's former health minister has been sentenced to three months in prison after refusing to take down articles on his blog making serious allegations against a number of people on the island. 

Stuart Syvret, described by one judge as "a thorn in the side of the [Jersey] establishment", did not attend the court hearing in the royal court in St Helier on Monday but was arrested at his home after locking himself in his flat. 

According to John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP, Syvret has been unfairly prosecuted for revealing information in the public interest, including evidence that a nurse on the island may have killed some of his patients. 

Hemming accuses the Jersey judiciary of behaving oppressively by misusing the Data Protection Act in order to silence its critics.

John Hemming gave more information on the prosecution (or persecution) of Stuart Syvret in the Commons in November 2009. Those remarks, of course, enjoyed parliamentary privilege.

Later. Listen an interview Stuart Syvret gave three weeks ago.

John Hemming on preventing child abuse scandals

An interview from last night's Channel 4 News.

John Hemming and Leah McGrath Goodman

The Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley meets the American journalist who was banned from Britain, apparently because she wanted to investigate the murkier aspects of Jersey life.

John Hemming accuses Jersey authorities of complacency over child abuse allegations

From The Big Issue in the North:

An MP has accused the government of “complacency” over child abuse allegations on Jersey. 

Birmingham Yardley MP John Hemming backs Jersey Parliament members Shona and Trevor Pitman, who want the government to “ensure good governance by investigating evidence of the breakdown of law within the island’s justice system”. 

The Jersey child abuse scandal first surfaced in 2007 when social worker Simon Bellwood was sacked after complaining that children as young as 11 were routinely locked up for 24 hours in solitary confinement at the Greenfields secure unit. International attention followed when the ensuing wider police investigation moved into Haut de la Garenne, a children’s home from 1900 to 1986.

The article ends: "Lord McNally did not respond to a request for comment."

Six of the Best 329

John Hemming MP explains why he voted against the government on secret courts (among other things) on Monday.

Remember those shameful "Keep Calm and Rape On" T-shirts on Amazon? They never existed. I Am Pete Ashton explains.

Craig Murray warms to Palmerston.

"The British continue to suspect that they lost something special, even moral, when their society graduated from an aristocratic empire to a modern democracy. Like all nostalgics, we take comfort in a past that only seems so good because so few are alive to remember it well." Tim Stanley on History Today is unimpressed by Downton Abbey.

"A growing number of pilgrims ... are lacing up boots and sneakers to walk across America. While their treks may not have the religious underpinnings of pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, Mecca, Jerusalem or the current Kumbh Mela gathering in India ... they are nevertheless acts of faith and quests for existential meaning," says Kate Murphy in the New York Times.

Aqeela's House visits... well, Market Harborough actually. She took some nice photographs and I shall go and look at the town's old post office again myself.

John Hemming "threatening to resign Lib Dem whip"

At least according to the Daily Express website he is - hence the scare quotes in my title.

Referring the failure of John's far-reaching (probably too far-reaching for its own good) private member's bill last week, the report says:

In his closing remarks at the end of that debate, Mr Hemming said: “The Government are being dangerously complacent about such issues as cover-ups, and my personal support for the Government will rest on a change of attitude by them to take such matters more seriously.” 

He confirmed last night that he was threatening to resign from the party whip.

Jersey comes to Brighton

TheJerseyWay posts two BBC Radio Jersey interviews that are worthy of attention.

The American investigative journalist Leah McGrath Goodman talks about her continuing struggle with British and Jersey authorities to be allowed to work on the island again:



And then Jersey assistant chief minister Senator Sir Philip Bailhache reveals that he is attending the Liberal Democrat Conference in Brighton.

As well as engaging in "casual discussions" he wants to meet Tom McNally, the minister responsible for the Crown dependencies, and John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP who recently raised his concerns about the governance of Jersey in the House of Commons.

In this interview he accuses John of abusing his position as an MP, so that should be an interesting meeting.

Meanwhile, if you meet Sir Philip you may want to ask him how Jersey's status as a tax haven can be squared with the Liberal Democrats' belief in fair taxation.

John Hemming raises the governance of Jersey in the Commons

On Tuesday John Hemming (Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley) used a House of Commons backbench debate to raise his concerns about the governance of Jersey:

There is a country where there are allegations that crimes by powerful people are not being investigated and prosecuted. A journalist has been refused entry to stop reporting about an issue. The chief of police has been suspended to stop him investigating crimes. Bloggers are being threatened to stop them talking about people. Decisions by the state not to prosecute cannot be challenged, nor is private prosecution allowed. 

The country is Jersey. The journalist is Leah McGrath Goodman, who is an American. The chief of police was Graham Power. 

You can read more about Leah McGrath Goodman on her own website.

John went on to suggest that a number of people had:

with the assistance of the Jersey Government, obtained a super-injunction against ex-Senator Stuart Syvret - under the Data Protection Act of all things - to prevent from him saying things about them on his blog that are true. Mr Syvret has evidence that criminal offences are being swept under the carpet, but nothing is being done.

John also alleged conflicts of interest in two recent court cases on the island.

He continued:

The end result in Jersey is that part of these events has been struck from the state’s version of Hansard, and the culture of cover-up continues. Jersey is an independent country, but the UK Government have a responsibility for ensuring good governance in Jersey. The UK is not doing its job properly.

John's whole speech is worth reading. He suggests that the secretive nature of Britain's family courts is beginning to worry overseas governments.

Thanks to Rico Sorda.

US journalist banned from Britain for investigating Jersey child abuse

Last week the Guardian ran a series of articles on the Channel Islands, covering both the lack of a proper response to allegations if child abuse on Jersey and the Barclay brothers' apparent attempt to dominate life on Sark. They featured our own Tom McNally in the role of a governor general paying a rare visit to a remote and troublesome archipelago.

Perhaps the most serious topic raise was the allegation that an American journalist has been banned from the UK and the Channel Islands because she was writing a book about child abuse on Jersey.

Leah McGrath Goodman tells the story on her own blog:

A couple years into my research, my trips to the UK were becoming frequent enough to justify my renting a flat for overnight stays and an office for my paperwork. Jersey has strict rules about outsiders renting property, so I arranged to meet with Jersey’s Customs and Immigration officials in July 2011 to make sure my accommodations passed muster. I was told they did. The first officer I met with, Jim Griffiths, told me not to worry and that as long as I did not intend to live in Jersey or take a job there – and my trips did not exceed the six-month time limit for visitors – I could proceed with my work. 

When he asked what I was researching, I was completely honest. He quickly excused himself and then returned with his superior. The two men proceeded to shout at me. I was told that I needed to get a long-term entry visa to conduct my work on the island. I asked if they had changed their minds due to the nature of my research. The two men would not answer the question and immediately escorted me out. 

A week later, I went home to the States to do other work and did not return to the UK until early September. I was on my way to speak at a bank conference in Salzburg, but had meetings in London and Jersey with other journalists. This time, the border check at Heathrow Airport asked me if I would go to a waiting area to answer additional questions about my stay. This had never happened to me before, but I was not very concerned and agreed. 

No one asked me any questions, though. Instead, a second border official took me to an empty room beneath the airport and simply locked the door behind me. I did not at any time consent to being imprisoned. My luggage, wallet, phone, bank cards and my identification were taken from me. If I’d been turned out on the street at that moment, I would have been utterly helpless to feed myself or prove who I was. There is no way to explain what this feels like until it happens to you, but until then I never realized the razor-thin line between feeling secure and feeling endangered. 

I asked the guards what was happening and I was handed a piece of paper that said, “You have been detained under paragraph 16 of Schedule 2 to the 1971 Act or arrested under paragraph 17 of Schedule 2 of that Act.” What did this mean? Was I being arrested? No one would say. I was fingerprinted and photographed. I asked the personnel watching me if I could call my solicitor or my consulate. “That’s what people always say,” one of the staffers said. I asked: What are my rights? A second staffer answered: “This is the border. You have no rights.” 

It got worse from there. For several hours, I waited for any concrete information about how long I would be trapped in a basement. The border guards repeatedly told me they needed time to go through my luggage and papers before deciding what questions to ask me. This struck me as an attempt to reverse-engineer a case against me. I demanded to return to the States unless there were grounds to keep me there. I was told by the border officials they could make things much more painful if I did not cooperate. 

At this point, I wanted to call my family to let then know where I was, but this, too, was denied. None of the officers would provide their full names and the paperwork they signed and occasionally handed me was indecipherable. Closed-circuit TV cameras were everywhere ... 

In all, I was there from 0645 GMT to 1900 GMT, 12 hours without food or sleep on the back of a redeye flight. Ultimately, I was denied entry to the UK and sent back to the U.S., the black stamp of death I’d always heard about, but never seen, punched in my passport. 

The two officers who interrogated me later that day asked very personal questions - some of them about where I lived, my exact addresses in New York and the Channel Islands, and some of them about the people who were closest to me. I was deeply reluctant to discuss my personal relationships or my addresses, as I got the feeling security and safety were not high on the UK Border Force’s priority list. Once the questions had ended, there was another hours-long wait, after which I was informed that I was being ousted. .... 

As I later found, the UK was not accusing me of doing anything wrong. My big mistake, apparently, had been to meet with the Jersey officials. According to a subject access request filed with the UK Border Agency after I’d returned home, Jersey’s officials flagged me well before I arrived at the border. 

I filed a second subject access request with Jersey itself, but received a form letter stating that information had been withheld for “the purposes of the prevention, detection or investigation of a crime; or the apprehension or prosecution of persons who have committed an offence.” I can only assume this refers to me – a journalist who, until last summer, held a clean record in the UK and a Tier-1 visa. .... 

At the border, UK officials encouraged me to file for another long-term visa but when I did, I was slapped with a two-year ban from entering the country in January. My legal team in London said they had never seen the UKBA act with such swift malice.

Thanks to John Hemming.

Six of the Best 236

Charles Bradlaugh - a great
secularist

"When Mr Osborne sat down yesterday, he had pulled off quite a political coup – winning huge cheers from both Lib Dems and Conservatives, while leaving Labour looking wrong-footed and irrelevant." David Laws writes about the Budget for the Daily Telegraph.

Greg Mulholland, Lib Dem MP for Leeds North West, has tabled a parliamentary motion calling on the government to address the awarding of unwarranted bonuses and financial rewards in the pubs industry.

A noisy demonstration frightened constituents away from an advice surgery, complains John Hemming (Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley).

Amy Goodman on TruthDig writes about the killing of Trayvon Martin.

Lawyers' Secular Society offers a history of secularism in the UK.

"Playing Martin Bashir to Amir’s Diana, Atherton’s questioning of the young bowler constituted less a searching cross-examination than a series of gentle prompts to allow Amir to tell his story in what turned out to resemble a soft-soap PR exercise designed specifically to aid in the young bowler’s rehabilitation." Leg Side Filth questions Michael Atherton's willingness to see the best in his interviewee Mohammad Amir, the Pakistani cricketer banned from the game for spot-fixing.

Beauty the kitten found alive!

Great news from the Birmingham Post:

Beauty the cat has been found alive and well, and appears to have been living happily in Sparkhill for the past year.

Not only that: she appears to have become a mother.

When a kitten herself, Beauty was at the centre of a catnapping row involving John Hemming MP, his wife and mistress. It ended in a recent court case and a suspended sentence.

Anyway, John, the Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, told the Post:

"I went to see the cat last night and indeed it was Beauty. We, however, think that she is feeding kittens at the moment so she has been returned to the lady who had kindly looked after her for a year so that we can try to track down the kittens."

And in a true feline touch:

"It seems that Beauty has been looked after by two households at the same time."

The Liberal Democrat MP who named Ryan Giggs

No, not John Hemming, at least according to the Shropshire Star.

It was the former MP - indeed former Liberal Democrat - Paul Marsden.

Privacy law is too important to be left to the judges

Some years ago I attended a day course on media law. It was taught by a former journalist who had later taken a law degree, and what a remember most from the day is his stories of the various scams he used to get up to as a young reporter. In the days when you had to phone your copy in, the ability to extract free calls from a public phone was a useful way of making those expenses go further.
But he did cover the basics of libel, parliamentary privilege and qualified privilege, and something else he said has stayed with me. It was that the judges were clearly determined to create a new tort of privacy and that we should keep an eye on how this developed through case law.

How right he was.

At the heart of the current farce over the law on privacy lies this  judicial activism. Privacy law has been developed through judgments in the courts and not through debate in Parliament or wider society.

For many on the left, who reason that the public is irredeemably conservative in its social views, this has been rather attractive. Battles they dare not fight or could not win at Westminster could be fought instead in more patrician European institutions.

Certainly, a despair of ever winning in Britain again was one of the reason for Labour's embrace of the European ideal under Neil Kinnock.

Add to this despair amongst politicians the instinctive arrogance of the legal profession and you have a powerful and toxic brew.

I am a Liberal and am instinctively in favour of free debate, whether in the press or on Twitter. I find the demand to prove a "public interest" before something can be published absurd. It is those who favour censorship who should be forced to show it is in the public interest.

Finally, we are told that blackmail is an important element in the case that has caused all the trouble. But blackmail is a serious criminal offence. If there is convincing evidence that someone has committed blackmail then he or she should be arrested and charge.

It should not be possible to raise the spectre of blackmail, gain an injunction and then leave the matter hanging in the air for ever after. You would not allow it with murder: why allow it with blackmail.

All of which is a way of saying that I fully support John Hemming's actions in the Commons today.