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Shieldfield news and links
THE JUDGMENT
IN THE Shieldfield libel case was handed down on Tuesday 30 July 2002 at
the Royal Courts of Justice in London. At the end of a six-month trial,
Newcastle nursery nurses Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie were completely
cleared of the horrific allegations of abuse which had been made against
them and awarded the maximum of £200,000 damages
each.
In the trial, which was unique in legal history, the court
conducted one of the most thorough and detailed analyses of multiple
sexual allegations that has ever been undertaken. Having considered
each and every allegation relating to no fewer than 27 children, Mr
Justice Eady rejected them all as being without
foundation.
This was the second time that
the case had come before the courts. Eight years ago the criminal case
against Reed and Lillie had resulted in verdicts of 'not guilty'. But
the accusations had continued and in 1998 a report commissioned by
Newcastle city council claimed that they had not only sexually
abused the very young children in their care, but had also supplied them
to a paedophile ring for filmed sex sessions. On the publication of this
report Reed and Lillie went into hiding in different parts of the country,
afraid for their lives.
The investigative journalist Bob Woffinden and I had known
about the case for some time. We decided to track Reed and Lillie
down. Having pieced together the story of how the allegations against them
had emerged, we brought them to London and helped them to find lawyers who
would fight their case on a no win, no-fee
basis.
On the
day after their historic libel victory, we told their story in the
Guardian. A longer version
of our article, ‘Cleared:
the story of Shieldfield’, is available here.
The ending of the trial on
Tuesday 30 July also received extensive news coverage, including a front
page story in the Guardian by Clare Dyer and a detailed report by Joshua
Rozenberg in the Daily
Telegraph.
The next day Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie
gave a press conference in London which led to more coverage including a
piece by Clare Dyer which described some of the fears which they still
feel and their reaction to what has happened to them over the last nine years.
The Times covered the press conference by
suggesting in a headline that Dr Camille Lazaro, the paediatrician and the
centre of the case, was to face the General Medical Council. As the
article itself conveyed, a formal complaint has yet to be
made.
Natasha Walter's excellent article on Shieldfield appeared
in the Independent under the title The dangers of hysteria over child
abuse. David Batty has an interesting
piece in Guardian Society on the same day about the implications of the judgment
for local authorities and social
services departments.
A very good article in the Spectator by Barnaby Jones places the Shieldfield case alongside events at
Salem.
One of the most
ill-informed responses to the judgment so far is an article by Christian Wolmar in the Guardian on 1 August. Wolmar writes that
because those being sued relied on qualified privilege as their main
defence, the trial focused on the state of mind of the review team and not
on what actually happened - or did not happen - at Shieldfield
nursery.
Wolmar,
who did not attend the trial, and who has evidently not read the judgment,
is simply wrong on this point. The main defence put forward by the Review
Team was justification: they argued that the allegations against the
two nursery nurses were true. It was because of this that the larger part
of the trial was given over to exploring in great detail the evidence
relating to allegations made by no fewer than 27 children. It was on the
basis of this examination that Mr Justice Eady found that all the
allegations were untrue. His judgment does not simply assert the
innocence of Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie; it sings
it.
One antidote to Wolmar's account
of the trial is a brief diary piece of the same date by the highly
respected legal correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, Joshua
Rozenberg. Describing
the judgment handed down by Mr Justice Eady, as ‘one of the most crushing ever’
in a libel trial, Rozenberg writes that it shows ‘how a single judge trying a libel case can
cut through conflicting accounts to establish the truth.’
These
very points are made in a letter about Wolmar's article by
Richard Osborne of S.J.Cornish, the solicitor who represented the
nursery nurses at the libel trial . The Guardian letters page also carried a response from Professor
Laurence Lustgarten and an account of how Brian Roycroft, Newcastle's
former director of social services, had also suffered unjustly at the
hands of the report.
While the Guardian was publishing these letters, on
Saturday 3 August, the British Medical Journal carried an article
by Clare Dyer focusing on the role played by the paediatrician at the
centre of the case Dr Camille San Lazaro. It is
unfortunate, to say the least, that this article should have
perpetuated one of the misunderstandings out of which the entire
Shieldfield story grew - namely that Reed and Lillie had been
acquitted at their criminal trial 'after a judge ruled that the
children were too young to give evidence'. Something close to
this view may have been a part of the judge's view but it was only a part
(and perhaps the least important part) of a much more substantial ruling.
One of the responses to the BMJ article
attempts to make this point, but goes to the other extreme in
doing so. The other
response, from Dr Michael Innis, a pathologist from Australia, gives a
salutary warning about just the kind of mindset which created the
Shieldfield tragedy.
While the BMJ focused on the role of
Dr Lazaro and how the Review Team 'clearly fell under her spell',
Saturday's Daily
Mail devoted a two-page spread to the case. Its coverage focused on
the role of Judith Jones as a member of the Review Team and on the fact
that, as the social worker at the centre of the Nottingham satanic abuse
case in 1989, she had previously been severely criticised (along with
her colleagues) by a Joint Enquiry Team (JET) made up of police
officers and social workers.
The article in the Mail
contained much extremely valuable material concerning Jones's role in
the Nottingham case, and her extraordinary persistence in ignoring, or
somehow incorporating, evidence which clearly contradicted her preferred
version of events.
The Mail's main source was John Gwatkin, formerly
Area Director of Social Services for Newark. Gwatkin was joint chairman of
the Nottingham inquiry which investigated the claims of satanic
abuse. He knew Judith Jones, who was at that time using her married
name, Dawson, in her capacity as the leader of Team 4. This
was a group of social workers who were investigating a case of
multiple incest within an extended family in Broxtowe, Nottingham. This
apparently genuine and
disturbing case led to a number of convictions in the courts.
At a
certain point in the investigation, however, Judith Jones's team became
convinced that they had uncovered a satanic cult which practised not
only child sexual abuse but also ritual sacrifice and murder.
This fiercely held belief led eventually to a breakdown of the
working relationship between social workers and the police, who
had found no evidence of satanic involvement. The JET inquiry was
set up in the summer of 1989 in an attempt to repair this
relationship by investigating whether the claims relating to satanic
abuse were true or false.
The article went on to relay John
Gwatkin's assessment of Judith Jones, made on the basis of the knowledge
he gained during the inquiry: ‘“In
my opinion,” he said, “she
is totally unsuited to do this kind of work. As soon as we started our
inquiry, we began to feel that she was totally
ignoring any evidence that contradicted her preconceived
ideas.
“For
example, she believed a ten-year-old girl who said her stomach had been
cut open in the front room of a council house. We learned that the girl
had previously been in hospital for an appendix operation, and her surgeon
was contacted. He identified his scar and told us the girl was
otherwise
untouched.
“When
we informed Judith Dawson of this, she replied that satanists were clever
people and would cut along the same scar so that it wouldn’t be
noticed.
We
put this to the surgeon, who said it was medically impossible as scar
tissue heals poorly. But when we told her what he had said, she was
dismissive. She didn’t want to know and refused to accept it. It was quite
astonishing.”
“Even
more astonishing,” he says, “was
some months later when he read an article about satanism by her in the
New Statesman. She wrote about a girl who had described 'how she
was laid on a table and had her stomach ritually
cut open'.
“It
was as though the evidence we had presented to her never existed,” says Mr
Gwatkin . . . “It beggars belief that someone with such a closed mind
should be appointed
to sit on a panel investigating alleged child abuse at a nursery school in
Newcastle.”
‘Retired
Detective Superintendent Peter Coles, who was involved in ritual abuse
investigations in Nottingham, also remembers Judith Dawson and her team –
and a particular incident involving a child who
had, allegedly, been microwaved.
“I was slightly mischievous, and said to one of
Judith’s team that I had checked this out and it couldn’t be right –
because experts had told me if you did that, the baby’s eyes would explode
and the door of the microwave would come off.
“I
was just kidding, but before long one of the team came back and said
disclosures had now been made about babies’ eyes being taken out before
they were microwaved. These claims were pure invention.”
‘One
is surely entitled to recall these bizarre incidents,’ wrote the
Mail, ‘in
relation to the libel judge’s comments about claims of the Newcastle panel
that they “must have known to be
untrue”’
The Mail went on to relay John Gwatkin's view
that Judith Jones's career was saved because the Joint Enquiry Team
report was effectively suppressed by Nottinghamshire County Council.
(The full report has never been published and the summary
version only became generally available when it was put on the
internet in 1997 as The Broxtowe Files. Although Nottinghamshire County Council made a further
attempt to suppress this version of the report, they eventually dropped
the high court action they had taken against John Gwatkin and the three
journalists who had published it.)
As can be seen from these extracts,
the Daily Mail article which appeared on Saturday, four days
after the libel judgment, contained much material about Nottingham which
was directly and disturbingly relevant to the approach which had been
adopted by the Shieldfield Review Team almost a decade later. What the
article also illustrated, however, was how easy it is for a newspaper to
lessen or destroy the value of the information it seeks to impart by the
manner in which it presents it.
As was indicated by the intrusive
photograph chosen to illustrate it, one of the targets of
the article was Jones's relationship with her fellow-campaigner Bea
Campbell. The overall effect of the article's anti-Marxist, anti-feminist,
anti-gay and unjustifiably personal approach was to obscure the
vital infomation it sought to impart beneath layers of
unpleasant, and deeply misogynistic prejudices. Printed beneath
the bold, black headline THE WITCHFINDER, the article
itself offered a disturbing example of the witch-hunting mentality at
work.
On the same day, Saturday 3 August, a much more moderate
(though not entirely accurate) version of the entire
Shieldfield story appeared in France where Libération ran a four-page article about the case written by its London
correspondent.
The online news magazine
Spiked carried a well-aimed piece by Jennie Bristow
which focused on the Review Team,
commenting that 'while two young nursery workers can be pilloried for
nine years on the basis of false allegations, there seems to have been
remarkably little anger directed at those who brought the allegations.'
Meanwhile a report had appeared in Canada of a case which
had interesting parallels with Shieldfield. On 1 August, two days after the
Shieldfield judgment was handed down, journalist Margaret Wente filed a
story about a police officer who had lived for ten years under the shadow
of horrific allegations. These allegations had their origins in
a panic which was triggered in 1992 when parents said that
their two-year old child had been sexually assaulted at the local
babysitting service. It took ten years for John Popowich's nightmare to
end. This did not happen until last month, when he finally won
an apology from the government and a $1.3-million settlement. "The most
important part," he told Margaret Wente, "was
getting my name cleared."
On Sunday 4 August the Observer, in addition
to running a leader, carried an account of the Shieldfield case by David Rose
based on an interview
with Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie. This was accompanied by my article,
How our demons fuel witch-hunts, in which
I explored the nature of witch-hunts and attempted to place the case
in a larger historical context. (For another historical perspective
on nursery cases see my review of Jean La Fontaine's book on satanic
abuse, A global village
rumour. For information on police trawling operations in Britain,
click here.)
The Sunday Telegraph ran Bob Woffinden's account of
how Our system of justice has been
tarnished, and a news article.
It also carried a sensitive and revealing interview with Dawn and Chris by Olga
Craig under the headline
They bayed for our blood.
As well as giving interviews to the
Observer and the Sunday Telegraph, Dawn Reed and Chris
Lillie have been interviewed together on radio and television. The
interview which Dawn gave to Woman's Hour can, for the time being at least, be listened to
online.
On Tuesday 6 August, reaction to the Shieldfield story
continued in the national press. Libby
Purves’s characteristically lucid and trenchant comment piece opened
with the following paragraph:
‘If you pay council tax in Newcastle upon Tyne, you have had
an expensive week. You have paid £400,000 in libel damages over a bungled
council attempt to blacken the names of two citizens previously acquitted
in court. You have also paid about £4 million in legal costs to defend
what a judge calls a “malicious” report, and you gave four “experts”
£360,000 to write it. None of the team or those who commissioned them is
being fined, charged or in any way punished.’
The full
article, Hysteria helps no one but the real
paedophiles, repays
reading.
The following day, in a letter to the Guardian, published
under the title True cost of a libel victory, Bob Woffinden drew attention to the fact that, because of
the extraordinary circumstances of the case, Dawn Reed and Chris
Lillie will each have to meet significant legal costs from their
damages.
Also in the Guardian Rod Liddle, the editor
of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, explored the manner in which
the apparent lifting of the taboo on homosexuality seems to have gone hand
in hand with increased anxieties about paedophilia. Liddle's
article, One taboo gone, another
rears its head, cites Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie as 'people who will be able to
attest to our latest consuming paranoia'.
Meanwhile in Nursery
World, Frank Furedi, the author of Paranoid Parenting,
examined the culture of suspicion out of which the Shieldfield case (and many others) have
grown.
In the edition of Private Eye which appeared on 9
August, the lead news story provided an interesting perspective on
the case. It drew attention to the close parallels between what had
happened to Reed and Lillie and the fate of another Newcastle care worker
- Paul Gillon - who had also
suffered unjustly at the hands of Newcastle City Council and who has
also recenly been vindicated.
On Saturday 10 August the
story was taken up further afield and I was interviewed at length
about the case by Radio New Zealand. The following day the
Christchurch-based newspaper The Press published David
Rose's article which had originally appeared in the Observer.
The
main reason for the great interest shown in the story in New
Zealand is to be found in the close parallels between the Shieldfield
case and the case of Peter Ellis, a nursery worker who found himself
facing a series of bizarre allegations in 1991-2. Unlike Dawn Reed
and Chris Lillie, Ellis was actually convicted at his criminal trial and
sentenced to ten years in prison. He continued to protest his innocence in
prison, and gained strong support from many people who were
convinced that he had been the victim of a grave miscarriage of
justice.
The Ellis case remains a cause célèbre in New Zealand to this day, and it would seem that the judgment in the Shieldfield
case may have helped to persuade some doubters that Ellis is indeed
innocent as so many,
including author Lynley Hood,
have urged for so long.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, Margaret Jervis, legal
adviser to the British False Memory
Society, added her extremely well-informed
commentary in a piece which placed on record the
role played by the BFMS in the early stages of the case. After
examining some of the dangerous theories which drove the case
onwards, she makes a recommendation which deserves to be given the widest
possible circulation: 'Anyone involved in this field should read the
full judgment; not only does it endorse sound theory and practice in child
abuse investigations, but it calls for a return to the fundamental
principles of natural justice, reason and humanity.'
The
response of ACAL
One of the
most revealing responses to the Shieldfield libel judgment has come
from ACAL, the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers. This British
organisation was founded in 1997 by fomer barrister Lee Moore in order to
give support to those who allege they are victims of child sexual abuse
and to lawyers who seek to help them. Although the aims of the society
might seem to be entirely praise-worthy, there is sometimes a
reluctance on the part of its leading members even to acknowledge the
possibility that false allegations of sexual abuse are made and can
have devastating consequences for people who are entirely
innocent.
ACAL's press officer, Peter Garsden, is
a partner in the Cheshire firm of Abney Garsden Macdonald, a firm of
solicitors which specialises in seeking compensation on behalf of alleged
victims of sexual abuse. He gave his views on the outcome of the libel
trial to Jon Robins of Lawdirect, an online news service run by
the leading legal publishers
Butterworths.
One of the most
striking features of Garsden's response is that he expresses no sympathy at all for Dawn Reed and
Chris Lillie and makes no reference to their nine-year ordeal. Instead he
is said to be 'troubled' by the judgment and concerned that it may
deter experts from participating in inquiries to unearth abuse.
The
fitting rejoinder to such concerns is that of Professor Laurence
Lustgarten on the Guardian letters page in response to Christian Wolmar's similar views (see
above). Mr Justice Eady's
conclusion that the qualified privilege which would normally have
protected the four authors was destroyed by their dishonesty in
'[including] in their report a number of fundamental claims which they
must have known to be untrue' is, we are told, not one that
Garsden accepts: 'Just as you can say what you like in parliament why
should there be an exception here?'
The only reasonable inference one may draw from these words is
that Garsden believes that members of an inquiry team should be
protected by the law even if they dishonestly conceal evidence which might
point to the innocence of those accused, and even if, as in the
Shieldfield case, such dishonesty plays a part in driving completely
innocent citizens to the brink of suicide.
What is most extraordinary about the views Peter Garsden
expresses is not so much the fact that he has voiced them but that a
leading legal publisher should take them seriously and relay them to
the world.
Garsden's views on the Shieldfield case are entirely in
keeping with the evidence he gave earlier this year to the House of Commons Select
Committee during their inquiry into police trawling.
Although
those of us who campaigned to bring this inquiry into existence have
always acknowledge that sexual abuse in care homes is a real and serious
problem, Garsden is evidently unable to recognise that there are two
sides to the debate. He does concede that some witnesses may
have exaggerated or even invented allegations of abuse. But he
simultaneously makes the extraordinary claim that no one who has been
convicted as a result 'is entirely blameless'. In an even
more remarkable pronouncement he refers to those who are campaigning
against miscarriages of justice on behalf of innocent care workers as
belonging to 'the abuser lobby'.
The views Garsden has
expressed both about Shieldfield and about trawling
are also in keeping with
the general position adopted by ACAL. This organisation, whose
inaugural conference in 1999 was chaired by the journalist Christian
Wolmar, presents itself as offering help and support to victims of
child abuse. But its role is in practice rather different. It is in
effect an organisation which provides help and support to those who make
allegations of sexual abuse. In particular it supports claims
made for financial compensation. It even offers to train witnesses in the
art of giving evidence. Its general presumption appears to be that
allegations of sexual abuse are always, or almost always,
true.
This presumption is one which ACAL appears more than happy to
extend not only to retrospective allegations made against care
workers, but also to allegations of satanic ritual abuse. Indeed, as is
acknowledged on ACAL's own website, the
founder of the organisation, barrister Lee Moore, actually believes that
she is herself a victim of ritual abuse and that she
'experienced Satanic ritual abuse throughout
childhood'.
An article about Moore
which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (29 January
1999) implied that she had no memories of the twelve years during
which, from the age of three to the age of fifteeen, she had been brought
up inside what she later identified as a satanic
cult.
According to the article her life during this
period had been so traumatic that she had 'dissociated' herself from
it. It was only after she had a nervous breakdown forty years later
that she had, 'with the help of her psychiatrist, pieced
together her life of fear growing up in an organised abuse ring' where she
had been 'abused by carers, friends and acquaintances both male and
female'.
Anyone who sincerely believes that they spent twelve
years of their childhood being systematically abused inside a satanic
cult, that they repressed the memory of this abuse and only recovered
it forty years later with the help of a psychiatrist, deserves the utmost
sympathy and understanding.
What is truly disturbing, however, is
that this belief has become one of the foundation stones of a professional
organisation of lawyers which is now acting as a pressure group on behalf
of those who make allegations of abuse.
Even more disturbing
is that this organisation appears to be taken seriously not only by the
publishers Butterworths, who have on occasion offered it sponsorship, but
also by the Law Society itself.
The
response in
Newcastle
One of the most disquieting features of the
Shieldfield case has been the response of the local press and the local
media to the libel verdict. Whereas the national press gave the story
wide and at times even massive coverage, the response of the press in
Newcastle has been
muted.
In the early stages the outcome of the trial did
receive some coverage. On the day the judgment was handed down the
front page of the Evening Chronicle carried the
story on its front page under the large black headline
'INNOCENT'. Since the Evening Chronicle had
itself been sued (and had settled a few weeks into the trial
when it became clear that the case was likely to result in the vindication
of Reed and Lillie), this headline was very welcome.
Yet, after only a few days, the local papers in
Newcastle seemed increasingly to treat the story as an unwelcome intruder.
On August 9, the Evening Chronicle carried an article which made it clear that some families involved
in the case had already received compensation from Newcastle City Council.
It quoted Clare Routledge, of David Gray's solicitors in Newcastle, who
has represented 41 families whose children attended the nursery, as
saying 'The libel verdict was not unexpected. The parents are very
upset. We piloted six test cases and the council has admitted it was
negligent in the running of the nursery in those cases.' What the paper
did not record was that Newcastle City Council had reached a settlement
with some of the parents shortly before they were due to appear in the
witness box to give evidence for the Council in the libel trial.
On
the same page the paper published a statement in which the editor
acknowledged the complete vindication of Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie but
attempted to minimise its own role in disseminating the libel by pleading
ignorance of the report's unreliability. The editor's statement was
reported sympathetically in the Press Gazette which repeated the claim made by the Chronicle
that the initiative to settle the libel action had come from counsel
representing the two nursery nurses. It also claimed that the
Chronicle had settled after paying costs in the region of
£60,000. Since the true figure was £650,000, and since it was the
Chronicle itself which had first mooted the idea of a settlement,
this was a serious misrepresentation of the facts.
Thereafter
both the Evening Chronicle, and its sister paper, the
Journal, appear to have deliberately ignored what should by
rights have been the biggest local news story since the Poulson scandal of
the 1970s. Whereas, in the wake of the publication of the report in 1998,
the two papers had been strident and seemingly robust in their willingness
to harry anyone who might be deeemed responsible for the alleged
abuse, they now fell almost completely
silent.
As if
as a result of a carefully considered strategy, however, the story
was not buried completely . Instead, the Sunday Sun, a
down-market member of the same group of newspapers, went through the
motions of pursuing it. On 25 August it reported that the role of paediatrician Camille Lazaro in the
Shieldfield story was under investigation by the local health trust; it
also raised questions about Professor Richard Barker, quoting a
spokesman for the University of Northumbria, in Newcastle, as
saying 'When Professor Barker was leading that panel he was employed
by the Newcastle City Council. He was acting independently and was not in
any way representing the university.'
On 1 September in a brief
inside story headed 'Give it back', the
Sunday Sun, reported the demand made by the campaigning group
Action Against False Allegations of Abuse (AAFA) that Dr Lazaro should
return the OBE she was awarded in 1999 for 'services in the care of
sexually abused children'.
In the meantime the two main Newcastle
local papers, the Chronicle and the Journal have
preserved their virtual silence. Not only this but local television
journalists working for both BBC and Tyne Tees Television have seemingly
ignored the
story.
So far as
local coverage is concerned, it seems almost as though an iron curtain has
been hung around the north east, in an attempt to limit the damage which
might be caused to local reputations if the story was properly
followed up. The effect has been to prevent the people of Newcastle
knowing the full truth about the actions which have been performed, and
the millions of pounds which have been spent, in their name.
The
real tragedy of this response is that the lessons which are contained in a
detailed judgment on one of the most disastrous sexual abuse
investigations there has ever been, seem likely, in Newcastle especially,
to remain
unlearned.
The
judgment and Newcastle City
Council
Mr Justice Eady’s judgment is now
available online at the court service website. Because of its length it
has been divided into three parts. A link to each of these parts will be
found here:
(1)
(2)
(3).
The judge's own summary, which inevitably does not convey the
detail and power of the full judgment, is the last section of the
document. This summary, which is what Mr Justice Eady read
out in court, can also be found on the Guardian website.
A file of key extracts
from the judgment, including the reasons why the report of the
inquiry team was found to be misleading and dishonest, will
eventually appear on this site.
In a judgment
which found that Newcastle City Council had been formally correct in their
claim that the report was protected by qualified privilege, it is clearly
no coincidence that Mr Justice Eady chose to end his summary, and his long
judgment, by powerfully criticising the very public authority
he had been obliged to release from judgment on a point of
law:
'Although
parents had been calling for a public inquiry in 1994, their legal
advisers were pressing for procedures compliant with the principles of
natural justice. That was clearly right, but the Council allowed the team
to proceed as they thought fit, and natural justice seems to have fallen
by the wayside.
'I characterised these arrangements in a ruling in
February as a "shambles". That still seems to me to be an apt description.
The fault cannot be laid entirely at the door of the Review Team since
none of them was legally qualified, and I concluded at an early stage that
it was mainly the Council's fault for sanctioning an inquiry into the
commission of acts tantamount to criminal offences, with a view to the
ultimate publication of a report, but without appropriate safeguards for
the "accused". The exercise has cost a vast amount of money for the
citizens of Newcastle and I have no doubt years of unnecessary heartache
for many of those directly involved. Unhappily, the Council has only
itself to blame.'
The Council responded to these severe words
of criticism by almost immediately issuing a press release. They claimed
that Mr Justice Eady's decision to uphold their defence of qualified
privilege meant that 'he has confirmed that the
Council acted properly in publishing the Independent Review Team's
report'. They omitted to inform the people of Newcastle that the judge had
specifically said that 'the Council had allowed the team to proceed
as they thought fit, and natural justice seems to have fallen by the
wayside.' They made no mention either of his description of the
Council's arrangements with regard to the inquiry as a 'shambles', or of
his conclusion that 'the Council had only itself to blame'.
In
the note they appended to this statement the Council offered its own
version of the Shieldfield story. In this version they did not refer to
the fact that they had prejudged the issues by holding disciplinary
hearings and finding Dawn Reed and Chris Lillie guilty in advance of the
criminal trial. Nor did they mention that, on the day the not guilty
verdict was announced, their acting leader had stood on the steps of the
City Hall and reaffirmed the Council's own findings of
guilt.
The Review Team also issued a brief
statement saying that they were 'shocked and upset' at
the judge's findings on malice. They added that although they were going
to make no further statements that day, they might be able to answer
questions later in the week.
They did not do so.
The question
which now remained was whether there would be an appeal against the
judgment - and in particular of the finding of malice against the Review
Team. On 18 September 2002, two days before the deadline by which any
appeal had to be submitted, Newcastle City Council issued a press release in which
they announced that there would be no appeal as the Council could not
justify spending any more public money on the case.
In a
significant development, the Council for the first time publicly accepted
the judgment. While it did not offer an apology to its two former
employees it did make a welcome gesture in this direction by
expressing regret:
'The city council fully accepts Justice
Eady's judgment and that Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie are innocent of
all the allegations against them. The council regrets the suffering these
events have caused them.
'Our sympathies remain with all the people affected by this
case.'
As was reported in the Newcastle Journal the next morning the
Review Team also issued a statement. Significantly this statement contained no
acknowledgment of the innocence of Reed and Lillie and no expression of
regret for the suffering they had been caused.
In a sequel to the
news of the decision not to appeal, Liberal Democrat councillor Greg
Stone discovered that the Council had taken a secret decision to spend £56,000 on hiring a media consultancy to handle the
publicity surrounding the the judgment.
In an attempt to justify
this expenditure, a Council spokeswoman said: 'The council has a responsibility to
communicate the meaning of the judgment to the people of Newcastle, via
the media, as soon as possible.'
It would seem rather more likely
that the Council had employed the media consultancy in an attempt to hide
the implications of the judgment from the people of Newcastle, as far as
was reasonably possible. In particular, as noted above, the
Council had, in its original press statement, failed to make any
mention of the severe criticisms Mr Justice Eady had made
of its own conduct. Instead it had attempted to represent the
judgment as a vindication of its
actions.
In its recent statement
the Council revealed that it had commissioned its Head of Legal
Services 'to prepare a report on issues to learn from the judgment'.
The report is awaited
with interest.
Lib
dems challenge council over libel
action
The most welcome consequence of Council's decision
not to appeal against the judgment is that the 19-strong Liberal Democrat
opposition group on the City Council is now free to probe the entire
conduct of the Shieldfield investigation. On Tuesday 2 October the Lib Dem
group fired a carefully-aimed and well-prepared volley of
questions at
leader of the Council Tony Flynn. In its report the Evening Chronicle spoke of 'a stormy
public meeting' and quoted councillor John Shipley as saying 'I feel a
great sense of shame that at the time I did not realise what was going on.
We must ensure this never happens again.' Answers to the written
questions, which, like the oral answers, were deeply unsatisfactory, can
be found here.
Details of further developments will
follow.
© Richard Webster, 2002
www.richardwebster.net
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