Might potentially save a number of kids from abuse. And please notice he was saying, it wasn't just Jimmy Savile but a whole bunch of them.Here's another way the Sex Pistols could get in a LOT of trouble.. what if John Lydon pressed on with his claims about Jimmy Saville.
In OTL it was a comment made in an interview that was edited out at the time, and lacking in specifics - but what if he splashes it to all who'll listen - and in more detail than OTL?
Might potentially save a number of kids from abuse. And please notice he was saying, it wasn't just Jimmy Savile but a whole bunch of them.
Maybe, maybe if John Lydon caught a moonbeam and saw what rumor, place, time period the police would be most likely to look into. And it helps to go to the police not just by yourself, but maybe with someone else who has seen the same victim both before and after? ? Even though this might be a pretty definite poker read for you, in trying to put it into words and tell someone else, might seem pretty vague.
Outside chance Lydon or some other public figure who's heard enough similar stories might be able to do some good.Yeah, the inkling that Lydon knew about a range of figures (not just Saville) opens the possibility that he could've "called out" the industry (and big organisations) rather than just one perpetrator.
Frankly, if it was just Saville being accused, the BBC management could have just cut him loose and considered it the end of the story. However, I feel in that case victims (or a bitter Saville himself, wanting to take down others with him) may blow the whistle on wider abuses and coverups. A domino effect of sorts.
AND, the controversy would push their sales through the roof.
Oh, please. In the US, leading and not-even-so-leading Communists were jailed for advocacy and teaching of Marxism-Leninism. Orwell wasn't proposing to jail the people on his list or even to bar them from all government employment. He simply said he thought them unsuitable for the Information Research Department, whose job after all was largely anti-Communist propaganda. Given Fuchs, Burgess, Maclean, Alan Nunn May, Bruno Pontecorvo, etc., the surprise is not that there were some anti-Communist excesses in the UK but that there were so few, especially compared with the US. Sir Waldron Smithers' proposals to establish an Un-British Activities Committee similar to HUAC got nowhere: AHC: British McCarthyism
Indeed, a number of people blacklisted from the entertainment industry in the US moved to the UK and found work there. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/nov/22/1
and I think this same article says while they were doing all this to interfere with and keep an eye on leftists, (?) MI5 I think it was, had but a single person looking into rightist organizations ? ? Apparently, so.Hobsbwam had his mail opened; and was denied, under official pressure, university positions; had MI6 follow him to South America when he was lecturing for the Rockefeller Foundation, after they had failed to get the tour cancelled altogether. The article also mentions that MI5 commited burglaries(presumbaly against left-wingers) in the 1950s, and seems to imply that Hobsbawm himself was targetted.
America, unfortunately, is a nation of rabid maniacs.The charge, had any been brought, would have been sedition, not treason.
The chances of any such charge being brought are significantly less than zero. Not. A. Fucking. Chance.
We are British, not a nation of rabid maniacs.
and I think this same article says while they were doing all this to interfere with and keep an eye on leftists, (?) MI5 I think it was, had but a single person looking into rightist organizations ? ? Apparently, so.
America, unfortunately, is a nation of rabid maniacs.
No, the article says this is not the case. Even in the '30s the British intelligence community seemed to view Nazis as at least intelligence allies, and 'communists' as the main enemies.Well, I assume they had more looking into them in the 1930's and World War II. In the 1950's, with Nazi Germany gone, . . .
So, in April 1933, the British Intelligence services seemed to view fascists as rather allies in a sense, with communists (expansively defined) as the main enemy.Stuck on the Flypaper, London Review of Books, Frances Stonor Saunders, April 9, 2015.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n07/frances-stonorsaunders/stuck-on-the-flypaper
" . . . ‘Arrests upon arrests,’ Joseph Goebbels noted with satisfaction. ‘Now the Red pest is being thoroughly rooted out.’ By April [1933], 25,000 communists were in ‘protective custody’. Dachau, the first official concentration camp, was set up to hold them. . . "
" . . . The week Hobsbawm left Berlin [April 1933], Guy Liddell, MI5’s German-speaking deputy head of counter-espionage, arrived from London. . . assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief . . . "
" . . . Liddell and Foley were introduced to Rudolf Diels, head of Abteilung 1A, who explained urbanely that it was his intention to exterminate communism in its widest sense. By this he meant not only the Communist Party and its subordinate bodies but also left-wing pacifist organisations. It was immediately clear to Liddell that there was ‘certainly a good deal of “third degree” work going on’ and that ‘Jews, communists and even social democrats’ were being ‘submitted to every kind of outrage’. Swallowing his distaste (he witnessed a man being dragged into the building while ‘protesting loudly that he had never had anything to do with politics’), Liddell settled down with Foley, in a room placed at their disposal, to examine the files of Abteilung 1A, . . . "
" . . . Of particular interest to Liddell were documents belonging to the KPD and the front organisations of the Comintern, looted by SA men ‘who just threw [them] into lorries and then dumped them in disorder in some large rooms’. ‘If placed virtually at our disposal,’ Liddell noted, ‘[these records] will be of great assistance in establishing how the Comintern’s work in Western Europe and the Colonies is being organised.’ . . . "
" . . . Liddell left Berlin on 9 April (after a congenial dinner with Ribbentrop the previous evening), satisfied that a crucial liaison had been established. In their present mood, the German authorities ‘were extremely ready to help us in any way they can’ – after all, were they not tied to the British by the same enterprise of saving Europe from the menace of Bolshevism? Any normal restrictions on the ‘free interchange of information’ (what is now called ‘intelligence sharing’) had been pushed aside, and Liddell was confident that if ‘constant personal contact [were] maintained’, the relationship would persist after the current ‘rather hysterical atmosphere of sentiment and brutality dies down’. . . "
The majority of those citizens I've met from either coast seem okay
This was April 1933.Stuck on the Flypaper, London Review of Books, Frances Stonor Saunders, April 9, 2015.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n07/frances-stonorsaunders/stuck-on-the-flypaper
" . . . Guy Liddell, MI5’s German-speaking deputy head of counter-espionage, . . . assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief . . . "
This was April 1933.
On the question of British intelligence's working relationship with the Nazis. . .
Speaking as a U.S. citizen, in the deepest days of the Great Depression, meaning 1933, I'd say there was about a one out of three chance of some kind of coup. And within this one-third chance, I'd say there was about a 70% chance of it being a rightist coup and only 30% of leftist coup. So, only focusing on communists and ignoring fascists was stupid.
Persons more familiar with the UK can draw their own conclusions.