Starmer’s Victim Britain

Sir Keir Rodney Starmer, Prime Minister

From his time as a human rights lawyer, to Director of Public Prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service, to Prime Minister, Keir Starmer has been a stickler for the letter of the law.

Starmer may not have caused the notorious dysfunction in the UK criminal justice system singlehandedly, but his decision at the CPS to begin ‘believing the victims’ definitely contributed to the end of the presumption of innocence in British courts, leading to numerous miscarriages of justice. The CCRC, set up to catch these MoJ’s, has been shown to in fact perpetuate them.

The following is a compendium of the state of various parts of the justice system, which Starmer has been so implicated in for much of the 21st century so far.

The Law Commission has muddied the meaning of ‘rape myths’

The classic is that Joe Public thinks that if women dress skimpily, they’re more likely to be raped, and The Law Commission and activists of whom the establishment are so afraid consider this to be a myth. The public, meanwhile, seem fully aware of the many reasons that an allegation of rape might be made - from face-saving, to maliciousness, to an act of non-consensual penetrative sex having actually happened. Those infernal juries then seem to find in favour of the accused, even when they’ve been exposed to daily ‘rape shock’ stories in the media for time immemorial.

Joshua Rozenberg published a Substack article in 2024/25 titled (non-verbatim): ‘The only “rape myth” is the idea there are rape myths at all.’ Is it the behaviour before the incident or the allegation that is the myth; is it the response of that dim and uneducated public; or has it become a meaningless expression due to endless twisting, extrapolation and interpretation?

The CCRC is protecting the Police and the CPS

The Criminal Cases Review Commission was set up at the end of the 1990s in response to public outcry over the cases of  The Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and other miscarriages of justice of the time. It was meant to be an independent watchdog of the Court of Appeal, ensuring that such cases didn’t happen again. Over time, however, 98% of cases are now being rejected by the CCRC due to their failure to pass its Real Possibility Test, which requires it to predict how the Appeal Court might find cases, so as to reduce workload and increase ‘efficiency’.

The CCRC has been shown to increasingly uphold decisions made by the Crown Prosecution Service and the police, however demonstrably flawed. This is contrary to the spirit of independence and fairness in British law in which it was set up.

The Subjectivity of False Allegations

In an era of ‘believe the victim’, a policy imported by former CPS Keir Starmer from the US at the start of the 2010s, criminal investigations now tend to rely on who gets their allegation in first. If the public thinks that a woman who consents to going to bed with someone after drinking is unlikely to have been the victim of a subsequent alleged rape (based on inability to consent), but the activist justice system disagrees, is the accuser wrong, is the accused, or is the justice system?

Since the year 2000, the justice system of the West has been skewed towards subjectivity, i.e. how the individual sees something, rather than what objectively happened. It is this that has led to the epidemic of false allegations in the UK and the US, and which went into media-supported overdrive over the #MeToo era of 2017-2019 - coincidentally just following the election of Donald Trump and Brexit referendum vote in the UK.

The Tyranny of Name Laws

Clare’s Law was introduced after a woman was killed by her ex-partner, who already had similar convictions unbeknownst to the new partner. The grief of her loss led to campaigning by her family to force probation and other authorities to inform new partners of former convictions. The Online Harms Act has also been called Molly’s Law, after the suicide of 14 year-old Molly Russell due to reading related material online, and her father’s subsequent campaigning about it.

Scrutiny of Lucy Letby’s convictions online inevitably ends with supporters of her convictions pleading on behalf of the dead infants’ families. Every time a family grieves a loved one, there seems to be a powerful lobby machinery to bring in increasingly repressive laws, named after the dead individual for handy media emotioneering use. The feelings of those related to the victims of crime have no place in the carrying out of law. This needs to be a cold-blooded, calm process - that’s how the lawyers are meant to operate, and it’s the only way to getting to the clear-eyed facts of a situation, however grim it may seem.

Life-altering convictions

Legal-academic feminists often say ‘false allegations are vanishingly rare’ in order to keep the gravy train of VAWG (Violence Against Women & Girls) funding and a compliant media running. This amounts to a new form of carceral feminism, which involves the steady marginalisation of heterosexual men via increasingly spurious means, operated by a power-feminism-friendly professional class.

An allegation, let alone conviction, for domestic violence, the various levels of sexual assault, stalking, upskirting, human trafficking, revenge porn, covert filming or any other New Culture Crime is life-altering, due to the new moralism piled on by the contemporary puritanism in the mainstream media. Just because some falsely accused, like Johnny Depp or Kevin Spacey, return to professional life doesn’t mean they’re not as permanently damaged by this process as anyone else.

MSM won’t grant interviews unless PMI has won appeal

Journalists appear to be taught that best practice is to either refuse or ghost people maintaining innocence unless their appeal is successful (in which case they’re not a Person Maintaining Innocence any more). The implication is that the justice system is correct, and the reasons that the PMI is approaching in the first place are bogus. In the light of miscarriages of justice such as Andy Malkinson, the Postmasters, Brian Buckle, the Birmingham Six and countless more, this is a counter-intuitive take on investigative journalism.

Journalists don’t have to support or agree with the PMI, and indeed they are expected to probe - but craven editorial policy means that this is not an option until the PMI has succeeded in a potentially years-long quest to clear their name. This is far from the open and fearless journalism of which that profession was once so proud.

The Jury Room

With the Crown Court backlog at 70K-plus, the Law Commission has proposed removing juries for some alleged offence types. This would undo a centuries-old tradition of trial by a jury of peers in the UK, and leave convictions open to ‘progressive’ moves by an already ‘captured’ judiciary.

The jury room is already a problematic place, with up to nine women (and three men) sitting on alleged sex trials at the height of #MeToo mania, then expecting them to not behave to anthropological type: following the lead of the loudest, or those who claim to have been through similar experiences themselves. Majority jury decisions mean that reasonable doubt exists, and the Malkinson and Letby trials delivered majority, not unanimous, verdicts.

Speaking up in such a situation may be vital, but since there is no necessity for jurors to explain their decisions, there is no way to know to what extent this might be the case. They might also just want to get home early to beat the traffic.

Another look at the Prince Andrew interview

At the height of the media frenzy following Jeffrey Epstein’s death in a New York cell, Prince Andrew was interviewed by Emily Maitlis for BBC2’s Newsnight. Body language experts have since said there was nothing in Andrew’s ‘performance’ that indicated he was lying about where he was on the night he was alleged to have slept with the 17 year-old then Virginia Roberts, from his inability to sweat following the Falklands War to his being at Pizza Express in Woking with family that evening.

However, the press demonised his very accepting of the interview in trying to put forward his side of events, calling him tense, nervous, unbelievable. In his naivety the Prince may have thought if he just told the truth about his friendship with Epstein, all the pressure would go away, and the heat would be off the Queen. He didn’t factor in for the fact that the BBC will do anything they can to spin a sex scandal - particularly one that impacts a royal.

And, when did it become illegal to be friends with some convicted of a sex offence anyway? Many thousands of families across the country would be even further destroyed by false or exaggerated allegations than they have already been if this dehumanising strain of pitchfork-wielding behaviour - so beloved of postmodern media - caught on in people’s immediate communities.

Malkinson was the primary victim in his case

Andy Malkinson spent 17 years in prison for an alleged violent stranger rape he didn’t commit, while Greater Manchester Police knew for the last eight years of his sentence that the DNA wasn’t his. Since Andy’s exoneration in 2023, the woman who made the allegation has often been referred to as the ‘primary victim’, when she mistakenly identified Andy in an identity parade, and was allegedly part of a nefarious local group who quietly watched the wrong man being convicted.

There was another individual under suspicion at the time of Andy’s exoneration, but nothing more was heard about him. There were also rumours of a ‘problematic’ relationship with her partner, and criminal activity, according to researchers Bob Woffinden and Felicity Stryjak. As far as has been revealed by the redoubtable police there was an attack, but no evidence of an actual rape, meaning this was an early example of ‘believe the victim’, this time for investigative expedience. 

Andy is the primary victim of a miscarriage of justice that removed two heads of the CCRC, and since his complainant has been silent about his wrongful conviction it is not unreasonable to suggest this might have been a false allegation in the first place.

Rehabilitating Men’s Rights

With the UK Equality Act 2010, it may have seemed that the 100-year march for women’s rights was at an end, but despite assassination attempts on David Lloyd George by the Suffragists and on Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanos of SCUM - the Society for Cutting Up Men - it seems not so. The last 30 of these years were taken up with a gradual feminist march through the institutions, emanating from English Literature and Gender Studies courses at every university, then getting those graduates to decision-making roles in media, politics, publishing, law and anywhere else they can.

In tandem with all this progress did the fortunes of non-wealthy or well-connected men suffer, being regularly discriminated in the family courts, facing false or spurious allegations, and being gradually marginalised in society. Social media brought Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, with their mix of old fashioned values and/or machismo, wrapped up in masculine charisma, and the multiple cancellation attempts flowed. The mellower end of men’s rights insisted these were simply equal rights in a feminised society that had gone too far in the the other direction; the power-feminists insisted Men’s Rights Activists were bent on creating a real life Handmaid’s Tale, while the divisions grew, more men committed suicide, and more women regretted not having had children.

Many of both sexes now believe that being anti-feminism is in fact being pro-women, returning agency and choice to those deemed too hasty to use the ‘victim’ card given the right incentives. There is a place beyond all this division, and the saner in society are working towards it.

Offence Hierarchy in prison (and beyond) 

In prison, and in wider society, people convicted of sexual offences are considered more contemptible than murderers - and those with convictions against children the worst of all. The convict who has robbed pensioners of their savings or sold heroin to teens are just seen as ‘mains’ cons. He who has killed a man by punching another outside a pub for talking to his girlfriend is seen as essentially the most worthy of all. Arsonists and terrorists are seen as dangerous and a bit mental, but not worthy of disgust. Most fraudsters and petty thieves are seen as people slipped up by circumstance, rather than people intentionally out to gain at others’ expense.

About one in five in prison are maintaining some degree of innocence, but this is more complicated than you’d imagine, as some don’t realise why revenge porn or selling prohibited images, for example, are crimes at all. On prohibited images, being called a paedophile by legal academics, thence by the police, for collecting images when they are freely available is baffling to many. They don’t understand why the person who actually did the act is not in prison but they are, for falling down a rabbit-hole of grim fascination - and it’s this labelling that does more harm to them than anything else.

Being Vexatious: Neurodiversity in the CJS

Many of those who don’t understand why they’re going through the criminal justice system appear to be neurodiverse, be that autism, ADHD or a myriad other behavioural differences. While it’s often said that ND people understand the difference between right and wrong, they might not so easily understand the strategic game they are required to play from the moment of allegation until eventual clearance, if that ever happens. If they say ‘Yes that boy told me he was 15 years old, what’s wrong with speaking to him online? He had autism too, and I enjoyed talking to him’, they might not realise how that can pass, by a process akin to Chinese Whispers, into a conviction for ‘grooming’.

This trusting nature can also be abused by gangs, and is prevalent in Joint Enterprise and the IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) areas, where individuals can’t be released if deemed a risk to society. The isolation they felt in the community for one reason or another will only be compounded by their time in prison, making parole boards even more risk-averse in releasing them.

John Lee Osborne and cultural context

At the end of the 2010s John Lee Osbourne of Bristol, in his 20s, was given 18 years for rape, while analysis of his trial and appeal indicates a situation of ‘malicious communications’, on both sides, would have been more appropriate. Osbourne posed as different people by text message to his ex, saying that if she didn’t have sex with him harm would come to him, as a form of ‘sexual blackmail’. Osbourne claims that the ex was fully aware of the role-play type game, but the ex’s friend who reported him, and the judge who gave him such a hefty sentence, clearly disagreed.

The language of the text communications is youth text-speak, and the allegations flying were due to the pains of various break-ups rather than real pain caused. The judge, who already had a strike for misconduct, giving a life-type sentence for what is basically the misunderstood madness of youth, is bizarre judiciary UK at its most intense.