Before writing anything about this dreadful case, and before you read my article, it is right to pause to think first about the terrible and entirely undeserved fate of Sarah Everard, and the agony those who loved her must now be suffering.
This tragedy has led me to get into a twitter spat with people who are promoting the line that “all men are potential rapists”. It started when I took issue with a tweet by Stella Duffy (whom I know slightly).
This led to some fierce reactions by feminists, both female and male, then to some more replies by me, and then to quite a few tweets attacking me. As usual when heated debate is precipitated by a single distressing event, passion has been more in evidence than logic.
I think the difficulty lies in an ambiguity of language. The phrase “All men are potential rapists”, or Duffy’s expression “it is what any man might do”, can be taken to mean:
“You cannot tell, by appearance, which man is a rapist” – which is evidently true
or
“Every man is liable to rape” – which I would argue strongly is not true. The large majority of men would never rape, nor commit any other heinous crime.
I suspect that in some of those arguing on twitter, this is not just ambiguity, this is a deliberate conflation of the two concepts. There does seem to be a strain of radical feminist thinking which is anxious to promote the notion that every man is indeed liable to rape. That plainly is misandry – a gross prejudice, in the most literal sense, against people on the basis of their sex.
More interesting have been a number of twitter responses from women stating that they do indeed need to treat every man they might meet as a potential rapist, for their own self-protection, and adopt strategies to avoid dangerous situations. These are interesting because I think the majority of them are genuine iterations of how the writers really feel.
A large proportion of those responses come back to the fact that you cannot tell by appearance who is a rapist. It seems a stock response, judging by my twitter feed, to state that a woman would feel scared of me if she came across me or heard my footsteps while walking alone in a dark place. That is certainly true, and not only women are scared in those circumstances, though I accept they have more cause to fear.
But I am more interested in the sometimes detailed claims it is normal for women to exercise extreme caution in their every day dealings with half of the human race, when not walking in dark streets. One woman on twitter told me, for example, she had long advised her daughters against going out on one on one dates with men.
I have to say, on an every day basis that simply has not been my experience. In 45 years of adulthood, I have genuinely never picked up any sense of a woman being scared of me. In my career in professional situations I frequently had meetings with women, sometimes in my own office or even over lunch, and as a diplomat sometimes over a drink, and I genuinely have almost no recollection of ever being refused or put off, let alone in circumstances where I suspected the person was worried about my intentions. Had I suspected that, it would very definitely have worried me a lot that I gave such an impression. I have always been over-sensitive to what others think of me, to the point of vanity. I have never felt myself suspected of having potential for sexual violence.
I would very frequently offer to escort someone back to their home or hotel if there was any reason to think protection might be helpful, and was seldom if ever refused. On the purely social level, in my younger days I never had the slightest feeling of anyone being scared of me on a date, or to go with me on a date. Every date I ever had was one on one. I just cannot recognise the claims that women routinely in their daily lives treat all mean as a threat, as true in my own experience. Nor does it seem to be true of the women now close to me, in their dealings with other men.
I quite accept that those women on twitter who have told me that they distrust every man, are telling me the truth of their own experience. But I have never found most women, or indeed any women I encountered, to be like that, and I am telling you the truth of my own experience.
It genuinely concerns me that society is now in such a schizophrenic state that it is acceptable to say, in effect, that one half of the human race must never repose trust in a member of the other half of the human race. It ought to be no more acceptable to say that every man must be viewed as a potential rapist, as it thankfully is now unacceptable to label every Roma as a potential thief or black person as potentially violent. People are people.
Of course sexual violence is a terrible problem. Of course conviction rates are worryingly low. That does not mean every man is liable to rape.
That some men are a threat is plainly true. The public shock that it may be the case that a figure of public trust, such as a policeman, would be a danger is entirely understandable. That merely reinforces the truism that you cannot tell who is a potential rapist just by looking at them. But there it ends. The large majority of men are very decent people. To say otherwise is nonsense. It in no way disrespects Sarah Everard to state that she was not negligent, just extremely unlucky. The odds of any woman in the UK being abducted off the street in any given year are one in many millions. Of course women walking alone at night should rightly be cautious; men out at night should be particularly vigilant to avoid situations that may alarm women, more so than ever at present. But there is no rational cause for a general state of fear or a general demonisation of the male sex.
I have never viewed the police as particularly like to be good people in their private lives (I naturally except both my brothers here!)
This may surprise you. When I was about six years old, a fairly senior policeman who was acting as a courier for my father, was caught when a bag of illegal money burst. This had quite profound ramifications for me, not least that my father fled the country and I did not see him again for the rest of my childhood. The Rolls Royce and the Mercedes disappeared (I learnt from an uncle only recently that my father’s share of the black money alone in 1965 had been over £1,500 per day, £25,000 a day in today’s money). After my father left, the rest of my childhood was spent in rural but very real poverty. It also meant I had the great fortune to be largely brought up by my maternal grandfather, a profoundly wise and intellectual old socialist. I often wonder what Craig Murray would have been like if that bag had not burst, and I had instead been brought up as the stinking rich heir to a very dodgy gambling empire. Possibly I would have become not a very nice person.
Anyway, I realised policemen were not all great even before I understood the terrible things they can do in an official capacity. Hearing Cressida Dick’s wavering tones over the alleged policeman’s involvement in the terrible death of Sarah Everard, naturally brought to mind that she was directly in charge of the police operation that murdered Brazilian electrician Jean Charles De Menezes, for the crime of looking a bit like an Arab.
It is also worth stating that everyone, including Cressida Dick, appears to be leaping to conclusions amid a blaze of publicity that is going to make a fair trial very difficult. We don’t know the evidence, or the defence, yet.
I am, I know, out of tune with the times. The politically correct repetition of the mantras of identity politics is the only kind of politics which is mainstream acceptable now. A terrible incident like the dreadful fate of Sarah Everard must be responded to by cries of “all men are potential rapists” and a determined effort to drive deeper the wedges between the two halves of the human race.
Not to quite see it that way may even make me socially unacceptable in some circles. I shall have to be stoical about that.
For me, the great gulf in society remains between rich and poor. In rather different ways, that gap in available resources kills millions across this globe every week. You can find gender components in poverty; much more is race a crucial component; but the prime cause of poverty is inequality.
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I’ve had a similar experience online of feeling a mixture of insult and sadness from reading discussions tarring all men with the same brush for the sins of a few – and as with you these were backed up with reams and reams of tales of unpleasant advances (some beginning at a very young age) and abuses, suggesting that it may be more than a few.
Though I also can’t match these outlooks with anything I’ve experienced in real life as a man (a lot of my best friends are women, at the risk of hitting that cliche), there’s only so many unique stories from unique posters you can read before you have to consider this might actually be the common experience for a majority of women. Of course it might also be the case that these discussions draw a disproportionate amount of people who have stories to tell whilst anyone unaffected is elsewhere – much like you’d think everyone is deeply passionate about politics if you just went by the internet. Fundamentally I’ve not lived as a woman so I don’t really know. It’s also not really the kind of thing that pops up in casual conversation when I’m with female friends or workmates.
If that IS the case I can understand why women may be cautious when meeting me (as sad as that is), and all I can do it try not to take it personally and just carry on trying to treat people as fellow human beings. If everyone does that then we’ll eventually get over it.
Considering we’ve only had the internet for around twenty-five years and it’s not really been mainstream for fifteen, we might just be experiencing a temporary moral panic from all of these bottled-up experiences finally being un-corked in one big wave – creating a disproportionate sense of evil in the world. I think of the awkward and over-compensatory attempt at moral cleansing going on right now as society’s awkward puberty. Hopefully it’ll settle down and reach a sensible equilibrium once everything’s had a good chance to air. Maybe we’ll have fun again. I miss fun.
Still, it’s difficult to keep perspective if you’re being bombarded with this sort of emotive catastrophising every day. It’d be a shame if young men and women grew up with a hedgehog complex towards each other from reading disproportionate online horror stories.
On reading that last line back I realise it seems to dismiss the claims I’d otherwise suggested should be taken seriously. If I had an edit button (or better proof-reading discipline) I’d rephrase that to mean more in the sense that these negative experiences tend to be collated and shared around the internet without a balance of positive experiences – probably just on the basis that “I met a guy and had a nice time” isn’t as interesting.
Anonish
Girls and boys are being sexually exploited all the time because they are not in control of their lives. I don’t think that’s got anything to do with this group of vocal feminist women who are angry about men taking women for granted.
They are angry that society doesn’t credit them for being sensible and responsible about sex because we live in an age of appalling sex- related diseases, while their parents could more or less have sex with anybody they liked without too serious consequences.
The post war generation seriously wanted to let its hair down, but the present generation are massively constrained by STDs. The backbone of traditional moral fear of pregnancy has been broken down, and in the meantime the risk of infections has exponentially increased.
Victims of sexual abuse hide their sexuality, rather than look for ways of expressing themselves imho
“Considering we’ve only had the internet for around twenty-five years and it’s not really been mainstream for fifteen, we might just be experiencing a temporary moral panic from all of these bottled-up experiences finally being un-corked in one big wave – creating a disproportionate sense of evil in the world.”
That’s a very interesting thought.
Now that you have pointed it out, it seems as if it ought to have been obvious, so I’m ashamed to admit that it had never occurred to me.
It’s not cool to write like this before a body is known to have been identified.
I wrote a discussion post on this case but it seems to have been stopped by a mod. [ Mod: There’s nothing from you in the deletion list or the spam list, so it seems the server didn’t receive it, for whatever reason. ] (Also I was mistaken to think the arrested cop hadn’t been named.) Anyway it’s now on-topic for this thread. Suffice to say that many people go missing in Britain. It’s true that they tend to be e.g. “graduates” of children’s “care” homes, or people who are homeless, or both, far more often than they are “successful young marketing professionals”, but it’s still interesting that government figures as senior as Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have both made statements in this case before a body is known to have been identified and before a person has even been charged, let alone brought before a court. Well, we know a police officer from the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command, Wayne Couzens, has been arrested. Makes you wonder whether this is another “Madeleine McCann” type of case. Maybe Clarence Mitchell will get involved in the “comms” soon.
Note that both Sarah Everard and her boyfriend Josh Lowth have been involved with doing marketing for pharmaceutical companies and in Lowth’s case also for a “private investment” company or whatever the current euphemism is for money laundering.
Another point is the portrayal in the media of Brixton as an area to which many “young professionals” have moved. Whenever you hear that kind of propaganda there are always property interests involved (no newspaper says such-and-such an area is up-and-coming for today’s modern livers, etc., unless they get paid for it), but what also strikes me is that in this particular case there is also a subtext that is pushing “regeneration”, or “class cleansing” – and in this case, ethnic cleansing. Brixton – for young professionals. Yeah, right. This ties in very well with how eckshpurts in the media have been talking about pockets of vaccine sceptics in “our diverse communities” etc.
Also…the equivalent of £25K per day! That’s £9M per year. We talking about the heir of William Lever, slave plantations an’ all, or what?
Couzens has background in the Civil Nuclear Constabulary… and was thinking of moving into “hospitality” (i.e. gangsterism). He worked at the nuclear power station in Dungeness.
In the discussion post I asked which specific embassies or other places or people the arrested cop had recently been working with. And the answer is…the US embassy. He left the US embassy 90 minutes before Sarah Everard was last seen alive.
His wife is a “scientist”. She is from the Ukraine.
Pharmaceuticals? Nuclear? Other “defence”? Take your pick.
Apparently she works for an “engineering company”. That could mean anything.
She has been arrested too.
There is patently obviously much more to this case than just a male thug murdering a woman. Never mind what all the retards on Twitter are interested in.
Ashford BTW is a stomping ground for some very heavy gangsters. I mean gangsters are big everywhere but Ashford is a place where some big “faces” have their private estates.
Got to love how you start from the assumption of sinister conspiracy and then seek supporting evidence rather than the other way around N_. You may well be right, there may well be more to this? I dunno? Tonight’s report of Mr.Couzens’ head injury sustained while in custody seems to add to the strangeness.
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Unrelated :
Someone was pointing out how this is the first day in a long time that the pandemic hasn’t led BBC’s Politics Live. A day in which Denmark, Norway and Iceland have temporarily suspended the rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. Italy and Austria, meanwhile, have stopped using certain batches of the drug as a precautionary measure. The Royals led the BBC news at six, the guardian have downplayed it all day. Again it might not be anything , but these kinds of omissions/suppression techniques damage public confidence too.
N_
I think you’re probably right that this story is not as it seems. A couple of episodes of the BBC’s thriller Body Guard demonstrates how a policeman CAN be framed by the security services IF they ask too many questions. There is a revolving door between ex military and political security. Not every policeman’s CV is boring and ordinary.
One would think your good sense tells you to stay out of such discussions because ‘mansplaining’ is inherently hazardous
Some men may learn a lot from watching “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman“.
(Don’t worry – it only goes on for about 2 minutes, not 10 hours. Worth watching.)
Interesting, they call it ‘verbal harassment’. The only moment in the video, that might make me feel uncomfortable if I were in her place, is the man following by for several minutes without talking to her – that is scary, because of his unclear intention.
Afternoon, Craig. Yes indeed. To a woman, especially one on her own in a given situation, any man might be the one you don’t want to meet on a dark night. I have several male friends that I would happily be in a solo situation alone with, because I trust them and feel confident they would help me. If I am in a group of people I have not met before, or often, then I am much more guarded. They have not earned my trust yet – therefore I do not trust them. I was first ‘approached’ by a strange man on my way to church, aged about 10. The fall out from that, with visits to my home by the police etc (I say here he didn’t lay a finger on me, just talked about sex – I didn’t even realise I was ‘being approached’) that I never mentioned any of the others that followed in the coming years. The men, often middle aged, who would say obscene things to me as they walked past me when I was 14; the young man who flashed me and a girl friend at a bus stop; the guy who chased me up a road after flashing me and I had to jump on to a bus with no fare to get away. I explained to the driver and he told me to sit down, had a good look round and then drove me to the stop nearest my home for free. I had been working at a riding stables all day. I assure you, it was not what I was wearing… There are a multitude of ‘good guys’ out there. That driver was one. There are a multitude of men out there who feel that it’s their right to cop a feel, to intimidate, to just get a laugh out of scaring a woman, to get sex if they buy a meal or a drink. Unfortunately they don’t wear a badge so we know which is which. There can be very few women who have managed to get through childhood and young adulthood without meeting and interacting with, a predator, to one degree or another. No Craig, not every man would. But until we know you, how can we tell? BTW I know you. You are a friend. But I’m not giving my name because my experience is not unusual. I was never physically attacked. But I have to say, for a year or so in my mid teens, the abuse was such that I could not bear to be on my own in a room with a man, any man, even my lovely father, who would have ripped the head off any of these guys had they had the balls to do it in front of him. Women grow up traumatised. We learn how to deal with it. But don’t tell us that we should feel ok about trusting anyone just because most men wouldn’t. Because a hell of a lot of them would.
Hello Craig. Brought up in a family of 5 girls 1 boy. My father taught us all we were equal beings. We girls weren’t born to serve men.
I really feel for men out there. They are tarred with the same brush by the evil actions of a few bad apples.
In my own personal life I have been fortunate to have had very good male friends. They respected me as I did them. I’m not really a feminist as I don’t feel I have to prove who I am. We women & men are equal. You get good & bad people in both sexes
I’ve experienced a couple of situations, fortunately for my actions I wasn’t harmed in any way. Once was in Australia, it was daytime & I was returning home from work. I took a shortcut over a grass area & across a railway line. I notice there was a blonde headed guy crossing the grass area diagonally in my direction. When I crossed the railway line I had to go up a rise in the pathway. I felt uncomfortable with this person so close that I let him go up in front of me. When I got to the top “Where I could see my house” He grabbed me, pinned my arms to my sides & put a hand over my mouth. Big mistake!
I fought him off & almost beat him, but he ran away. I called the police, he was never found.
Another time was in New Zealand. Again I was walking home in the daylight. This car with a male was sitting outside a primary school where children in bathing suits were going into the changing rooms. When I passed the car, I noticed it following me, I crossed the road & went into the shop & bought an Ice block in the hope I had put him off. He had done a U turn & was now on the side of the road I was on.
I mentally took his number plate & as I was only a few meters from home kept repeating it in my head till I walked in the door.
I rushed past my father, didn’t speak to him till I had written down the registration number. I told my parents what had happened & we went straight to the police station with the car registration number. That person was identified.
So you see It doesn’t matter what country you are living in there’s good & bad people living there. In both these instances I had a bad feeling/ intuition that things weren’t right & I was prepared mentally for a negative outcome. This all happened 45 & 50 years ago.
Do I trust men? Of -course I do. Strangers I’m wary of if I’m alone. The men I have known in my life are/were all good people.
“Hopes dashed to the floor, like shattered teenage dreams; boys living next door are never what they seem. A walk in the park can become a bad dream: people are staring and following me. … Don’t come any closer, I don’t wanna feel. You’re breathing, you’re touching, but nothing’s for free. I never want this to happen to me …”
These lines are from the 1984 number 3 hit, “Robert De Niro’s Waiting”. The lyrics refer to a young woman so disillusioned with ordinary men who turn out to have a one-track mind and unwelcome attention from strangers in the park, that she escapes into a romantic movie star fantasy with Bob De Niro as the hero who makes her feel loved and secure. The band, who wrote the song, said they had to tone down the original lyrics which were more explicitly about date rape.
While the country mourns Sarah Everard, the Government are busy passing legislation to allow police officers to rape, torture and murder during covert operations with total impunity. With full support of Labour centrists and their media.
There’s at least three problems with this allegation against HMG, judging by a BBC report.
(a) The law will require MI5 officers and others to show the crime is “necessary and proportionate”.
(b) The legislation stresses agencies must not breach the Human Rights Act, which requires the government to protect life.
(c) A senior judge, will report on how the power is used.
No doubt the police had good reasons for arresting Wayne Couzens, but I am puzzled as to what motives he could have had. A good job and family and reputation in the community, and he had only finished work that evening. The logical thing would have been for him to want to go home and relax, not prowl the streets attacking people. Puzzling.
Wrong. Repeated amendments that sought to ensure at least some constraints — such as prohibiting the authorisation of rape, torture or murder, or restricting the use of children and the vulnerable as assets authorized to commit crimes — have all been defeated.
Those amendments were attached by the House of Lords and by Tory MP David Davis. All were defeated in the Commons with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer demanding abstention by those Labour MPs who did not already fully support the unamended legislation..
No other country gives official sanction to its police to commit such acts, so maybe Couzens felt he had been given the green light.
That David Davis seems to have an independent streak.
I am beginning to believe that Starmer is a more cynical traitor than Blair
Took your time.
Still in the latest version of the Act.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2021/4/section/1/enacted
The amendments mentioned specific crimes. The Bill didn’t want to mention specific crimes by name (without approving them) because that might compromise agents.
If Couzens did it, he is a serious criminal, no ifs or buts, and any talk about feeling he was permitted is nonsense. But why he would want to at all, under his particular circumstances, is still a mystery to me – though I don’t doubt that the police had good reasons for arresting him.
OTOH There are news reporteds that the suspect had been accused of exposing himself at a take-away in South London days before, and had he been arrested then, tragedy might have been averted. Better leave it to the courts now.
“Safeguards”….
Liarbour isn’t centrist, it is far right, same as the Tories (Officials).
There is no conceivable difference between the current Labour Party and Tory party, or SNP for that matter, the political class are drunk on power. Don’t worry won’t stay like this for long.
It’ll get worse.
Craig, I think this ties into your recent piece about GPs refusing to treat patients without ID checks. We are being encouraged to distrust each other, with isolation and political powerlessness the result.
the real problem is that our justice system and calcified judges do not sent rapists to prison, we are descending into a cesspit and soon we will not even be allowed to demonstrate non violently, if the latest catch all env. protesters bill gets support from the usual apologists in parliament/liars competition hall.
Probably most women could list a litany of abusive incidents from strange males during their lives. I’ll only put three.
1) late teens, nightclub, just got a britvic orange when complete stranger grabbed and twisted a boob. Sticky oj thrown straight in his face, to his objections. What’s notable though is that three decades later this stranger – who I didn’t recognise – came up to me and *apologised* for the incident, saying it had taught him a lesson.
2) London, 1992, walking back to the Union Jack Club, followed by three 6′ plus young white military men, making extremely discomfiting comments. Slight guy, much shorter, rasta, started walking with me making small talk until I got back. Forever grateful. Had things gone sideways he would have been at serious risk too.
3) 2000. New build flat, 30′ party wall. Neighbour was sawing and sawing and sawing all day long. Told myself not to be annoyed, figure out what he might be working on. Wasn’t bedroom, living room or kitchen so I assumed it must be a vanity unit in the bathroom. Happened to leave our adjacent front doors later at exactly the same time. He was loaded with densely wrapped, rounded rubbish bags. How odd I thought – neither were there any ‘edges’ from discarded bits of wood. Yes, he’s doing time for murdering and dismembering the young woman he abducted.
Thank you for sharing this. As a man I had been blissfully unaware of just how commonplace it is for all types of attacks and abuse until I was much older and the father of a daughter.
Far too often men feel that statements like Duffy’s are a personal slight on them. They forget all the fears and perceptions of women are based on very real experiences and whilst they might not have done anything, other men certainly have. Trying to ‘correct’ a woman telling us (males) what her perception of males in this world is is rather like white people trying to correct a black person’s view of racism. As an aside I feel I had also been blissfully unaware of the extent of racism (both here and the US) until last year and the George Floyd murder, when time and energy was actually focused on the many unprovoked racist attacks that are faced daily. I don’t feel attacked because black people are speaking out on oppression from white people, I can see the difference between my behaviour and that of racist oppressors. Sadly too many men and white people (I am both) are too fragile to see the difference.
You’re clearly a role model in many ways but your BS detector needs a tweak.
If one person can judge people because of a perception, we all can. I prefer the presumption of innocence.
Anne + O’Nimmus
I once saw my next door neighbour bagging up something in the back yard with his wife, and I had the same thought as you. He was a most unreasonable , avaricious and short-tempered man. But many years later I saw my wife preparing bags of halal sheep meat for the family as charity. So I realised I had been wrong. It still took a long time for me to wipe my first impressions clean.
This comment will in all likelyhood go down by a lead balloon. However for a woman to consider all men as rapists, to me, illustrates a great lack of self awareness.
Some men see any woman as desireable, some men have an ‘ Any port in a storm ‘ attitude when in certain states of mind but I would suggest that the majority are goverened by many other factors such as marriage and all that this state between two people implies .
No doubt there are many other reasons and/ or social restraints.
The most basic in my experience is that they simply do not find the particular woman attractive, at all.
It may be conjectured that much of this fear is irrational as in reality, they are not the sexual sirens they like to believe themselves to be.
I disagree with you, not about whether most men are rapists but on criticising Duffy’s remarks. She is talking about a woman’s perception, not the facts of the matter. Perception, when you are in a position of fear, of powerlessness is very different from the facts, were all women constantly aware of who was a rapist and who wasn’t then there would be no need for women to be walking home in fear. Likewise it’s not for any man to correct a woman on what her perceptions or feelings are – he can only take note and hope that he personally is not responsible for making this worse. You obviously couldn’t be aware of whether a woman who, for example, was walking ahead of you down a dark alleyway was feeling fearful of you ‘following her’ Most people try not to show how they feel, even when fearful, lest it make matters somehow even worse.
It’s almost like white people explaining how racism feels to someone who is black. You simply aren’t in a position to judge. Unfortunately you are making the same mistake that many of us make, that is to say you are feeling that Duffy’s observation on women’s general perception is perceived by you as a criticism of your personal behaviour – it isn’t.
However, we should have these conversations. How else are we all supposed to know how any of us feel about the issues and improve conditions for those either in fear or those who have already suffered abuse. This isn’t about a right and a wrong point of view, it’s about understanding why people think and feel as they do.
Well spotted.
I don’t use Twitter much (I used it briefly in 2011, and then I didn’t use it at all for about a decade, but I’ve been dipping my toes in recently, mainly to follow Craig and another author I respect), so I had only seen Stella Duffy’s tweet through the lens of Craig’s reply.
Craig’s article is lucid and reasonable, and I agreed with his view completely, but now that I have read your comment, I see Stella Duffy’s tweet in a new light. (I’m quite relieved, because what little I knew of Stella Duffy I liked.)
Not that this action solves anything but someone has injured him.
‘A Met police officer arrested after the disappearance of Sarah Everard was taken to hospital with a head injury he suffered while in custody.
The officer is being questioned on suspicion of murder and kidnap after human remains were found in the search for Ms Everard.’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56331950
More likely for him to have injured himself. Most men would come to this conclusion.
I suppose its every woman’s right to view men outside the gate as potential rapists, even though the majority of men that they’ll encounter in a day have no intentions of raping them. I can’t decide whether society is becoming overly politically correct because its being pushed in that direction or women are really in such danger outside the gate that the need for this mentality actually exists.
This is very unhelpful. There used to be a mantra “all men are rapists” back in the day in NZ, and whenever my friend issued it I reacted saying “you have known me for years and know bloody well I’m not and never will be a rapist”.
However, if you’re a lone woman at night with a group of strange men closing in, the shorthand trigger “all men are rapists” will be useful and may well save you. Once safely home with a glass of red, you would expand it to “it’s quite possible that all strong strangers are a risk, and strong men could be rapists and if there is no time to find out the truth then I must be cautious”. Craig Murray has said that a lot of the discussion comes down to different understandings of the semantics involved.
Anyone who has written computer code knows that one of the main questions you must keep asking yourself is “what could possibly go wrong”, and if you apply this in the situation outlined in my first sentence then you should indeed get the short answer “all men are rapists”.
As a man (despite my name) who drove mini-cabs once upon a time, I often had a group of women share a cab home at night – when it came time for the last one to be left alone with me, the others would commonly ask a pre-arranged question “sure you don’t want to stay with us tonight”, which seems to me to be entirely sensible.
We all suffer in this life, and women suffer more than men. We all need to kinder to each other, but we also need to have strong defences against those who would harm us.
“We all suffer in this life, and women suffer more than men”
I certainly don’t agree that women per se, suffer more than men, surely circumstances play a part in who suffers where and when.
Is it true more men commit suicide ?
Yes. I’ve done it twice. 🙂
I too drove minicabs once upon a time, pre-Uber, and pre-mobile phones. I’m male, strong and healthy. The firm was based in Islington, a lively mixed residential area not far from the centre of London. I tended to work evening shifts and many of the pickups were from pubs, with clients going home or to another pub. I knew all the pubs round there. I was used to clients that had been drinking – our controller asked the barmen who generally phoned in for the rides to warn him or us of any likely difficulties. One night I was sent to a pub to pick up a single woman and take her to another pub. No problem, it wasn’t a long ride. However when we got to the destination she didn’t want to get out of the car, just refused. Missing the fare wasn’t a problem, occasionally we had a non-payer, but the tips from the payers made up for that. I didn’t know who was expecting her in the pub we were stopped outside so there wasn’t much point going in and asking. I couldn’t use force or threats to try to get her out, so I didn’t waste time, just drove her back to the pub she had started from, went in and asked the barman to come out and collect her, which he did, with apologies. End of story. Could have turned out badly, tho.
I find it hard to articulate how angry your post made me. Until you have walked a mile in the frightened, desperate shoes of a woman like Sarah Everard, hoping against hope to make it home alive, it simply is not for you to decide where this debate ends. Every woman I know – literally – has a story: of being followed, being ‘chatted up’ by an insistent drunk, carrying house keys in sweaty palms, changing from going-out shoes into trainers as the train pulls into your station, asking another woman to chum them to the end of the street. If you couldn’t detect any fear from other women when with you, you simply weren’t aware of the assessments they were making, the mental calculations or the calls they made afterwards. ‘Home now.’
Those men in your comments (and it seems to be largely men) who have taken umbrage at dastardly feminists attempting to ‘tar all men with the same brush’ (lovely phrase) need to understand that the current situation for the huge majority of women of all ages, all sexualities, trans or cis, is that their freedoms are curtailed. We don’t go for a run when it’s dark. We take taxis instead of walking across the Meadows. We memorise houses that are safe on our route home. We carry our keys in our hands knowing that they’re unlikely to save us if we were attacked. So when you say it’s an over-reaction to seek to impose a curfew on men, perhaps acknowledge that there is a curfew on half the population. Just not your half.
Being ‘interested’ in women’s statements of how they feel is not an opportunity to be clever. It is an opportunity to be horrified.
Stating that men are at risk of attack statistically more often than women. And? An even stronger argument for the curfew which currently exists to apply to men. It is, by and large, men doing the attacking.
I do not seek to demonise men. The men I know and love are decent, caring and concerned right now. They are staying silent for the most part, letting women’s voices be heard, not seeking, yet again, to dominate the conversation, to explain where women are going wrong, to police the tone of the debate, to dictate where it ends.
Deciding that the argument is motivated by a desire to be politically correct, driven by harridans, man-hating feminists…no. It is ordinary women – wives, daughters, sisters, mothers.
Not all men. But every woman.
It is a terrible thing that happened to Sarah Everard, and I hope the person who did is locked up for a long time, however its not just women that are beaten and killed by men, in Scotland over the past few days I’ve read of at least three men murdered by other men, is their loss of life any less of a tragedy to their families, its a societal thing where a person any person could be assaulted or murdered for that matter.
I haven’t checked the figures, but I’ll bet there’s been far more men assaulted and murdered each year by other men.
RoS
You may or may not be correct regarding the statistics of violence against men, however from Womens Aid, one women in Scotland is murdered every three days.
No idea about rape or ‘mere’ assault.
All I’ll say is on the day the news outlets were all over Ms Everard story, complete with talking heads on Sky News, Channel 4 news and one MP reading the names of all women killed over the past year, it struck me as massively ironic, that on the same day, the Scottish Government passed the Hate Crime Bill having chosen to exclude sex as an aggravator.
Not a great look for ‘it’s all about the women’ Nicola Sturgeon.
Your statistics are way out. Total annual murders in Scotland are around 60 a year, 75% of the victims are male. Around 15 women a year are murder victims so that is about one every 22 days not one every 3 days. Total murder frequency for both sexes together is about one every 6 days.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/homicide-scotland-2018-19/
88% of the perpetrators are men. Rather than asking women to observe a curfew (as many women do, and as the police advised women in the area where Sarah Everard disappeared) it makes more logical sense to ask men to observe a curfew. And while we all know that will never happen – we do, after all, live in a patriarchy where even the (majority of) men who do not recognise themselves as threats to women benefit from a culture which privileges their rights above those of women – the suggestion has provoked discussion as well as outrage, so that some men are recognising the unacceptability of the current situation and allying themselves with women rather than trying to dismiss their arguments as silliness, illogical or, whisper it, feminist.
Can’t add anything to your statement 1974janeen but wholeheartedly agree. Craig, many thanks for sharing your thoughts and I hope you will consider the responses of women. You cannot know that every women you have met has been at ease. I’ve been ‘escorted’ by men who may have thought they were being polite or chivalrous however I would be terrified or at best, annoyed. Women and girls learn to submit to avoid confrontation or aggression.
“A woman….” You haven’t walked through Mansfield town centre twice a week in the 1970s, when the pits were still open, dressed in an Air Cadet uniform have you?
A minefield that you should tread carefully in.
In my experience (good and bad) you barely know anyone, ever, unless you are really lucky.
You can’t tell a wife-beating husband, you can’t tell a psychopathic woman, you can’t tell a groper, you can’t tell a bunny-boiler, you can’t tell a sexual predator and you can’t tell who married for love or money – until they reveal themselves.
So for any woman to say she is permanently on her guard, of course she is. Men too, I fear.
In the modern world, most people are strangers. Even the ones you have known for 20 years. That’s just the way it is.
I count my blessings.
I’m not convinced this is a case of one man acting on his own, grabbing a woman off the street and murdering her.
The “indecent exposure” thing that is being put out sounds like a nudge to get people to think along those lines.
Ms Everard’s boyfriend Josh Lowth (on the phone to her shortly before she was last seen) seems to be the organiser of the Global Drug Delivery and Formulation summits, including the one that’s scheduled for next week. Here is a blurb for the 2019 one:
“The second week of March is a key date in the delivery and formulation event calendar. This is when the good and the great of Europe’s pharmaceutical development community gather in Berlin, Germany, for the DDF Summit – a high-level scientific event for industry and academia.” (Emphasis added.)
(Next week’s summit will be “virtual” though.)
The question is whether anyone in London who qualifies for protection from the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command (maybe diplomat-businessman types from say the Gulf or wherever) is also connected with that “summit” or the with world of top-level pharmaceutical deals.
If the answer is “yes”, then you may have a connection between victim and killer which is NOT reducible to “killer abducted woman chosen at random and murdered her” – i.e. this is absolutely nothing like “what might happen to any woman”, even if nobody is going to get sacked as an MSM columnist for saying that it’s just like that.
So correct me if I’m wrong, currently as it stands these people are saying that all men are potential rapists BUT AT THE SAME TIME self IDing Transwomen can share natal women and girls safe spaces because to accuse a self IDing transwomen of being a potential sex offender is now a hate crime?
Seriously!
years ago i was held hostage & raped by a female friend. i’d known her for @ least 10/12 yrs. i knew she was a lesbian, it didn’t matter, i’d also been aware that over the years several of our other close female friends suddenly dropped out of our circle with no real explanation, it was the 70s, people came & went. shrug. my friend had a cottage on a nearby island, i was invited to visit for the weekend. once on the next ferry came 24hrs later. i was captive. when i resisted & said NO…she persisted, i recall saying…’i’ve never had a guy refuse to stop when i say NO’ & that simply fuelled her anger. when i finally escaped & made it home I called our local rape centre & was told—one in seven calls are women upon women. i was shocked. the dunedin studies have proven women are as inclined to aggressive behaviour as are men…simply we women aren’t as strong so it’s not usually as damaging.
Bravely said, and succinct and interesting too.
Once again totally spot on, Craig. Though I suppose that makes me an old out of touch male who is also not in tune with the times.
All we know at the moment is that a woman is dead and a policeman has been charged with her murder. Until we know more any discussion derived from the case involves irrelevancies and hypotheses.
Exactly! I am surprised that Craig was so easily trapped. Usually he sees the direction of travel. Time to revisit Salmond and Assange is on the neocon agenda. AFAIK, don’t think anyone has been charged with murder, so far.
Very true.
I don’t know if women are more worried than in the past. Ones I know are robust. I don’t know to what extent statements on social media reflect changes in actual perceptions. I am conscious that police report a marked increase in unanticipated heavy armed violence of a far worse sort than they routinely encountered 10 years ago. One’s own direct experiences are often too few to form a reliable view. No bad experiences and we wonder what the fuss is. One bad experience and we think hell is unleashed. Turn to social media and there is a wall of sound bites but no data. The sooner we get out of lockdown and interact with a wider group of friends relatives colleagues and strangers the more reliable our perceptions.
What do the statistics say?
I don’t know, but I’d imagine with the ubiquitous nature of CCTV (the UK is one of the most surveilled country in the world and London the highest per capita ratio of CCTV to population with 67.5 cameras per 1,000 people – the highest in the world); plus highly sensitive DNA forensics, thus the chance of being a victim of some repeat offender is now fleetingly small compared to as recently the 1970s, 1980s even early 1990s, when cases went unsolved and offenders uncaught.
It could be another case of abduction crimes being at an all time low, while the fear of being a victim of such crime at an all time high. As with terrorism – the fear of which is certainly stoked by the press.
Countries in the world – typo
Me too. CCTV like DNA samples but then a neighbour’s burglary was solved by the police which wouldn’t have happened in the past. Sometimes you read a council has switched off its cameras as part of a negotiation with the police to pay more. That makes me doubt the risk of terrorism which is why they were supposed to be installed in the first place.
Sometimes I think some of us (me) walk around seeing things in a positive light but blind to all sorts of crap going on around us. When I reflect on things women have told me I have to accept they seem to generally get to experience more scary events than myself. Date rape, harassment and assault. But they don’t seem to be cowering. Perhaps the regularity of these experiences is why women might tend to exchange data about behaviour feelings and relationships (aka as gossip) more – because it helps them evaluate real day to day physical risk to safety as opposed to assessing sports, stock and gambling statistics. Sorry if I have drifted off into unacceptable stereotyping.
I am not commenting on the terrible death of Sarah Everard just to say I wish her family well.
I’m conflicted on CCTV, I’d see it as a privacy issue and it certainly the exponential increase raises questions about the rapid loss of civil liberties in the UK. On which, just today further restrictions announced on the right to gather and protest peacefully in England.
That said, where I live, someone was damaging vehicles and vans in the early hours (including my own). And a near neighbour’s extensive, expensive 24/7 CCTV setup caught the individual.
“There does seem to be a strain of radical feminist thinking which is anxious to promote the notion that every man is indeed liable to rape.”
This is the sexual volcano defence; fatuity has strange bedfellows.
Sweden has Feminist Initiative – a political party, their results speak for themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_Initiative_(Sweden)
Swedish Riksdag elections
2014 : 194,719 votes
2019 : 27,717 votes
And that’s under PR, so no excuses. All evidence from there, suggests neither male or female voters like political outfits that try to segregate society. Flirting with misandry is to flirt with electoral disaster.
I’ve heard that Nicola Sturgeon’s office contacted the Alex Salmond Investigation Team from Police Scotland to see if there was any way to pin this murder on Alex Salmond, even though he was 600 miles away at the time …..
Count Jimmy Riddle
That reminds me of The Gulag Archipelago, where Solzhenitsyn describes some scientists eating thousands of years old frozen fish, ” with relish “.
Giyane. I hope Jullian is taking this time in his own Gulag to write his own Belmarsh Archipelago.
Wikikettle
Talk about playing to the gallery of woke feminists. What kind of woman “” relishes “” stitching up her old friend and political mentor, using the inbuilt weaknesses of the Scottish devolved parliament and a bent beak to do it ?
How old was the relish?
I used to wander home in various states of sobriety from a friends house across the city at all times of night and was always acutely aware of my surroundings and listening out for heavy footsteps approaching. But then I’m just a man and disposable.
Have a check how many of the evil women attacking you also excused the revolting Caroline Flack for battering her sleeping boyfriend half to death. “Be kind,” remember and never point out that 50% of the victims of domestic abuse are male. 1 man is slaughtered by his female partner every 9 days and an unknown number are driven to suicide because they see no escape in the world of Meeeetwo and womenneverlie(tm).
Frankie Boyle made a very prophetic comment, not a joke for some cheap laughs in my opinion, but a comment on the practice of female circumcision. The debate was raging on the talk shows and the media about how barbaric it was and the islamophobes were running with it, as in the case of burkas, which we all wear now. His “joke” which was banned I think, was on the lines of how many female circumcisions had we indirectly been responsible for by bombing women in our wars of liberation in Arab countries. Wars that the Blair Babes supported and the glamorous female news casters convincingly cast as justifiable, never once mentioning the names of the thousands of women thus blow to smithereens.
Wayne Couzens was taken to St George’s hospital in Tooting suffering with a head injury he sustained while in custody at Wandsworth police station. Maybe he fell down the stairs? Or they had to take the microchip out? Or perhaps he has got an unusually “thin skull”, as was said about Blair Peach? But according to the Heil, the police “made a mandatory referral to the IOPC after Couzens was rushed to hospital for treatment after he sustained a head injury while in a cell alone.” “A statement added the suspect was being monitored by CCTV at the time, and had received immediate first aid after being found unconscious.” By what time do they have to charge him or release him? Isn’t the default 24 hours with a provision for applying for 96 hours for an alleged crime as serious as murder? He was arrested on Tuesday night.
A big “zero points” to all scribblers who have assumed that the criminal and victim didn’t know each other or have some kind of personal connection anyway.
Article is as usual true and factual but misses a crucial point.
In my entire life I have never met two people the same, everyone is an individual and different.
And among women there are vulnerable types, and most men recognise them. Most men react with tenderness, some do not.
I have worked among men all my life – long periods with Africans, Yemeni’s, Iranians and more and plenty white boys offshore in the North Sea and around the world, and there is definitely a class of male that recognises female vulnerability and sees it as their “IN” …..
The more vulnerable the higher the risk because the risk is a sliding scale as well. What is Rape ? is it a violent attack ? or can it also be coercing a vulnerable girl to say yes because she is scared of the nastiness that will follow ?
I actually do believe women should see all men as potential dangers until they prove themselves to be otherwise. In your case, and my own I believe – you never had to face this because your entire demeanor probably put them at ease before you even noticed.
There are plenty of ‘no-go’ areas after dark, certainly in most cities, and that applies whether you’re male or female.
I’d be wary to the likelihood of being mugged at knifepoint walking through Clapham Common after dark. That isn’t a commentary on her wisdom, far from it, the poor woman is seemingly deceased, more a commentary on the well-known risks and sensible practice.
It is potentially very dangerous for a man to alone with a female, both in a work or social context. Ask AS.
I had to watch the video of Baroness Jones’ comment that she was proposing a 6pm curfew to see if it was light hearted. It wasn’t. Polemic it might be, but having had a year of national 24 hour curfew (save for a few months in the summer) its beggars belief that a politician could say something so stupid and so blatantly discriminatory. There are those who point to the apparent reoccurring interest in Green agendas amongst authoritarian or fascist groups throughout the twentieth century. I have sort of discounted that and considered it to be just a lazy way of attacking climate change, but hearing a Green politician, ennobled into the Lords spending parliamentary time calling for all men not to be allowed out after 6pm…. Have people gone nuts or something.
Not surprised that Jordan Peterson is attracting a lot of attention and success on this subject. Lots of men don’t know if being masculine, providing, protecting and generally following the Grand Ligitimating Narrative of being a Knight in Shining Armour rescuing the beautiful princess from her ugly sisters and danger and and keeping the cave safe from wild animals is worth it.
This may well have nothing to do with sex crime.
Wayne Couzens may even be OK with women in general. All right, he probably isn’t, given that he’s not only a cop but also ex-army, but I mean he may not have been interested in Sarah Everard as a sex object. I’m suggesting that that wasn’t what this “job” was all about.
Perhaps she was abducted to put pressure on her boyfriend (Big Pharma links) or father (weapons sector links).
The story about him exposing himself in a restaurant sounds like BS, even more so now the witness-intimidating “Independent Police Conduct Authority” have got hold of it.
As for the warrant card, there may be video or witness evidence of him showing something to her that he held in his hand while he was driving, and the authorities want to say it was a warrant card rather than a state-issued firearm.
I wonder whether Jennifer Jones aka “Baroness Jones” knows of the Wild Man Fischer song “Jennifer Jones”…
What she said is a mixture of a) distraction (by pushing the assumption that this is a sex crime case) and b) playing to the general ramping up of the idea that the answer to this or that is a total lockdown or a curfew or some other “strong state” “shock” action.
She also smells like MI6.
(From her Wikipedia page): “brief periods of time abroad in Lesotho and Seychelles”…”worked as a financial controller in London”…got an MA in Archaeology at UCL as a mature student, then spent “approximately 10 years as an archaeologist in the Middle East” (nice work if you can get it, with just a master’s degree) … “before embarking on a career in politics…”…member of the London police authority…wrote report on “food security” in London…failed a couple of times to win a Commons seat…helped the Steinerite cultist nutters of “Extinction Rebellion”…ends up in the House of Lords…
And all of this, let’s emphasise this, before a dead body has even been identified, and before anyone has been charged with murder…
If it was a “job”, as it almost certainly was, then it’s got nothing to do with the risks that women face of being sex-attacked or otherwise harassed or molested or terrorised as they walk along the street…whether they are working class women or women who are in any other class…any more than the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia has anything to do with that.
At the risk of (even more) hyperbole, I have to say that even in a world already seemingly gone stark, staring mad, that curfew proposal is the single maddest thing I have ever read in my life.
If I may offer perspective – the problem here, Craig, is that you’re in perhaps top 5% of the society. An ambassador of major country is not your average person. You mostly interact with rich, polite people, and project that experience on yourself. If that was average person, you’d be very much right. But it’s not – and the women you’re describing have experienced bottom 50% of human society, not the high classes.
Of course they will have different opinion that you do – because they never mingled with consuls and ministers. While I don’t think you mean ill, your post kind of resembles the shock of white people in USA have: “what do you mean my black/latino neighbors warn their kids about talking to police? they are always kind and polite to me!”. Maybe, just maybe, an old, elite man just has wrong perspective to judge experiences of young, poorer women?
Bottom 50% of Society! That tells us a lot about you. Craig is not old or from the Elite. Wrong again.
No, the fact you never interacted with working and lower class of people and you think they don’t exist (are you Starmer fan or a tory by any chance?) says a lot about YOU. Yes, I know a lot of people pretend they don’t exist these days but this is not Daily Mail comment section, we discuss facts here.
And if you think an ambassador isn’t squarely in high class (or at worst, high middle) elite you’re delusional and/or have no life experience outside your tiny bubble. Try going out sometime?
There are different things going on here, I think.
As a woman, I’m lucky enough not to recognise a lot of other woman’s horror stories. I grew up with a lovely father and no abuse in my life. I’ve always been confident (perhaps overly so) to travel alone, go to pubs alone, chat with men and have even got into some incredibly stupid situations with strange men, yet escaped unscathed. I recognise I have been very lucky in that, so far.
I have many male friends who I love and not one of them – I’m sure – would ever rape anyone. So the idea “all men are potential rapists” isn’t something I think much about. Men are just folk I hang out with, and in many ways prefer hanging out with to women.
That said, any woman would have to be daft not to be aware of the threats, in a way a man will likely never understand. Because if we end up in after dark, in a quiet space with a man following us, we are in danger. If we pick the wrong man to walk away from a crown with, into a secluded space, we are in danger. If we end up sitting next to a creep on a bus or plane, we will be aware of his leg deliberately touching ours and what his hands are doing. We will at at some point have the pleasure of seeing some guy’s dick unsolicited and if we’re very unlucky he’ll be engaged in some act with it. These are just things that happen all the time to women, and that’s before you start on the stalkers (I’ve had 3 so far), the men who won’t leave you alone in pubs or clubs, the aggression if you dare not talk to him, the drunken groups of guys egging each other on, the men who get off on scaring women (many of those types are the ones desperate to push their way into female toilets and changing rooms).
So yes, most men are decent guys and I’m rarely scared of any men I know or meet – certainly not ones I meet through work or socialising. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an undercurrent there of fear and just general irritation. There are horrible women out there and horrible men. Thankfully they’re in a minority. But there is also toxic behaviour and otherwise decent people can be sucked into that, especially when drunk and in groups. With women that behaviour is mostly annoying; with men it’s a real threat to women’s safety.
And for those women who’ve been less lucky in life than me. I can well understand that fear could be all consuming and life destroying.
A number of newspapers are reporting that the police are investigating whether she was lured into the car by the use of a police warrant card. (Here is the report in the Daily Mirror, for example.) Note that they have to put it like that, because saying “whether Wayne Couzens used his warrant card” would be prejudicial.
It’s a really strange thing to say. How on earth can they “investigate” that possibility (other than by asking Couzens) unless they have audio, video, or a witness?
And of course if a policeman does shows his warrant card to get somebody to do something, then he’s on duty.
Sounds to me that the whole point of this story about the possible use of a warrant card is to steer people away from the idea that either the attacker knew his victim personally or they had an acquaintance or business matter in common. It could easily be that Couzens was protecting someone due to be at the pharmaceuticals “summit” Lowth was (and possibly still is) organising. Here is the event’s programme. See if you can find someone with diplomatic or foreign government or British parliamentary connections. (And even if one can’t be found on that list, government agencies are obviously interested in such conferences and like to attend them, and Couzens could also have been moonlighting, providing “protection” on the private – or “private” – market.) One talk will be by BioNTech vice-president Heinrich Haas on “Delivery Technologies for mRNA Nanotherapeutics”. Another talk will be by Luis Santons of AstraZaneca on “Using Gene Therapy approaches to address Global Pandemics”. Bayer, Merck, Sanofi, Genentech, Glaxo SmithKline, BASF, Sandoz, Novartis, and Imperial College will also be represented there.
One theme will be “device development”:
“How Will the Future Look for Next Generation Devices?”
“* New materials
* Improved human factor engineering
*Connectivity and integration into wider healthcare system”
THIS is the conference that the disappeared woman’s boyfriend has been organising for NEXT WEEK.
Then she may have got into a car with an “armed protection” cop who had just come from the US EMBASSY.
Then she DISAPPEARED, and she may well have been MURDERED.
It may now be becoming clear why Boris Johnson and Priti Patel got their hands on this so early.
Much more can be added even at this early stage.
1. If you’re doing a coverup, you want the “Independent Office for Police Conduct” helping you as soon as possible by intimidating real witnesses. That’s what they did when Jean-Charles de Menezes was murdered. When one witness told them she had seen the cops pump a large number of bullets into him in the tube carriage, they told her “No you didn’t”.
2. Apparently Couzens has spent years learning Ukrainian. That’s what his mother-in-law Nina Sukhoreba told the Torygraph from Kirovohrad.
3. The Heil reports that “Scotland Yard are also said to be investigating whether he used the current Covid-19 lockdown rules to stop the missing woman as she walked home to Brixton from her friend’s home in Clapham, south-west London on March 3.” What is he supposed to have said? “I reckon you sat on a park bench last week with members of more than 2 households closer to you than 3.7 metres and therefore please can you get into my car, because that’s a breach of the Tier 4.3 lockdown restriction?”
4. They also report that “investigators were yesterday searching through electronic devices and social media messages to determine whether Couzens and Miss Everard were known to each other“…and…
5. “Police who arrested Couzens are understood to have taken a memory card as part of their investigation.” What did he put on that? A text file saying “I don’t half feel like abducting a woman chosen at random next week?”
6. As I suspected, he is ex-army.
7. Is his family gangster-related??
8. “It was previously revealed Miss Everard spent a quarter of an hour on the phone making plans to see her boyfriend Josh Lowth the following day, before her mobile was either switched off or ran out of battery.” Oh what a coincidence. Sounds like a professional job then.
9. Has the “friend” whose house she was at been named yet?
10. Her father is a professor of electronics BTW. For five years (2007-12) he was a BAE Systems/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Professor. His interests lie in microwave and optical communications. The BAE/RA research was into “Low Phase Noise Signal Generation”. How many more “defence”, weapons technology, nuclear, and Big Pharma links will we now get on top of the ones we’ve got already? Did someone grab her to influence her dad?
Is my memory playing tricks, or was it also you who spotted a possible pharma connection to Dominic Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle to (ahem) get his eyes tested?
It is indeed playing tricks.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/05/why-barnard-castle/
No, it isn’t.
Of course I am well aware that Craig posted that article; but thank you for reminding me of its date: Sunday 24 May 2020.
I don’t know at what time of day Craig’s article was posted, but the first comment on it was posted at 22:30, which was 1 hour and 8 minutes after N_ posted this comment on the immediately preceding blog entry:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/05/authoritarianism-is-shoddy/comment-page-5/#comment-943241
“Listen up. It puzzled me for weeks why the media kept going on about Dominic Cummings running down Downing Street on 27 March. Now we know. The interesting point wasn’t that a man ran down the road; it was where the man was going.
Now the media keep alleging he made a trip to Barnard Castle on 12 April. Those who aren’t familiar with that part of England may think it’s a castle and that he went there for a picnic with his wife and son. Well it is a castle, but it is also a town, located about 20-25 miles away from Durham. AND GUESS WHAT’S THERE….
…a huge plant owned by Glaxo Smith Kline, the pharmaceutical multinational that is currently trying to develop (and sell) an extremely lucrative Covid-19 vaccine. At least 1000 people are employed there. The company is the biggest employer in the region. […]”
My memory tells me that Craig’s article appeared some time after that comment, and the timestamps on the comments appear to confirm that my recollection is accurate.
I stand corrected!
Its still the case that in most murders the assailant is known to the victim, hence the very good clear up rate for the offence.
Given Couzens job, its likely he would have been subject to ongoing assessment of his mental health, we cant have armed coppers going doolally can we ?
So its entirely likely that there’s more to the murder than its being some random act of violence. Time will tell, but I’d not be at all surprised to see the old eternal triangle being revealed in due course.