Happy Birthday, Andrew. Hope you get everything we want.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Happy Birthday, Andrew. Hope you get everything we want.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
The Colour Of Spring is 40. Courtesy of the great @wyndhamwallace.bsky.social
thequietus.com/opinion-and-...
Forty years young today...
"Mark Hollis may have cast aspersions on how Talk Talk began, but this belated rush to hail latter accomplishments has bred collateral damage. The Colour Of Spring’s miraculous regeneration is its greatest casualty."
thequietus.com/opinion-and-...
Children and women can never hope to be safe from sexual predators for as long as a newspaper can run stories like these, minimising the harms of abuse. Sadly, moreover, the Telegraph is anything but an outlier, merely reflective of the establishment it instead protects.
Let it be known that this is the way things will always end - if only eventually - for all those who fail to recognise just how serious sexual abuse really is, whether by enabling it. covering it up, or minimising its significance.
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Yet another reason for Mandatory Reporting across the board. People of all political stripes may well have known about this but, for expediency’s sake, chose to say nothing.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
I mean, let's be honest. This really can't have helped.
www.bbc.com/news/uk-engl...
Kudos to @salisburycathsc for their honesty. They may not say why this is but many of us can guess.
"Moulton said Salisbury Cathedral School is reacting to a change in thinking among parents, with fewer than five per cent of its 220 pupils now boarding."
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Nick knows, and Nick's got the courage to speak up about it. I like Nick an awful lot.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026....
Sadly, as someone recently forced to take action against his own school for child abuse, I fully appreciate the enormity of the scandal. Behind Fettes, there are hundreds more scandals waiting to break about hundreds more schools with tens of thousands of victims ...
archive.is/j35Sl
“It seems inconceivable that the governors were not aware of what was going on. My abuser was sent off on a sabbatical to get psychiatric treatment for his obsession with boys."
www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/1586898...
These schools were never safe.
These schools are still unsafe.
These schools will never be safe.
It’s time to end this charade.
How many abused children will it take to convince you?
#boardtodeath
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crim...
Please be kind to any survivors of sexual abuse you might know. Every minute there's another headline reminding us of how we were manipulated, how we were silenced, how no one listened, how no one stopped it, how long it was allowed to go on and how powerful the abusers were. 💔
It's beyond credibility that members of the royal family weren't aware long ago of the depths of Andrew's Epstein links. The difference between those who abuse & those who cover up abuse is simple: one gets their rocks off, the other not. Otherwise: nowt.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
It's a good day to remind the world that the private boarding school where I was repeatedly abused during the 1980s, Horris Hill, offered a position they called "Official Visitor", granted to Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, also great nephew of the prolific child abuser, Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
“I was never culpable or complicit in his crimes," says Peter Mandelson. "Like everyone else I learned the actual truth about him after his death."
Erm... After his death? He pled guilty to state charges of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008.
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
It's beyond credibility that members of the royal family weren't aware long ago of the depths of Andrew's Epstein links. The difference between those who abuse & those who cover up abuse is simple: one gets their rocks off, the other not. Otherwise: nowt.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
Here's another sexual predator working for another British boarding school where he was able to ply children with alcohol & take pictures of them naked, which he kept for half a century. What will it take for people to recognise these places need to pay?
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Another reminder that Eton College knowingly passed on a sadistic alcoholic, their own headmaster, to another boarding school where he continued to abuse children and also protect other abusers. Such schools must now be held *properly* accountable.
news.stv.tv/east-central...
This matters. No one emerged from such institutions unscathed, and Britain is run too often by men who had all empathy beaten out of them. There as many abuse victims as there are those who depended on sacrificing human decency to survive, and it's a habit they've never shaken.
Succinct confirmation of an unspoken yet crucial truth about Britain's private boarding schools:
"They shamefully failed to protect the pupils and appear to have knowingly exposed them to teachers with a history of abusing children."
#Boardtodeath
uk.news.yahoo.com/abuse-inquir...
Chenevix-Trench has been known about for decades
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Now do EVERY SINGLE BOARDING SCHOOL in the UK (and indeed beyond).
Now do EVERY SINGLE BOARDING SCHOOL in the UK (and indeed beyond).
Story of our lives:
"Recent leaders have reflected carefully since their first response to SCAI in 2017 at which time they did not accept that there were any systemic failures. They now acknowledge there were shortcomings at Fettes in decades long past, as well as more recently."
It's all so distressingly familiar from my own experiences of coverups at Horris Hill.
"Children were sexually abused, they were physically abused, and they were emotionally abused. Members of staff sexually abused children from the 1950s until the 1980s."
www.childabuseinquiry.scot/news/scottis...
It appears @fettes-college.bsky.social had access to the incoming report about the appalling abuse its pupils suffered before victims can see it themselves. Yet again, criminals are provided with an opportunity to get ahead of the game, while victims are ignored.
www.fettes.com/news-events/...
If you're feeling hopeless, there's comfort to be found in the heartwarming story of FM Cornog a.k.a. East River Pipe and his manager / partner Barbara Powers, who've brought me some of the most heartening, heartfelt music I've ever known.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQO_...
I learned young that, when someone says you've got nothing to worry about unless you're breaking the law, , that's usually utter horseshit. I was abused as a child by my prep school Horris Hill's staff, and this taught me everything I've ever needed to know since about how authority works.