Those of you who are not Brazilian probably do not know Branco Mello. He is the bassist and vocalist for the rock band Titãs, who formed in 1980 and went on to have a string of hits, many with hard hitting lyrics of a country which would only end its dictatorship in 1984.
Branco Mello
It was quite amazing for both Maria and I to meet Branco Mello who was in the same restaurant as us, a local one just round the corner from where we live. Not only has Maria helped teach me Portuguese through the lyrics of Titãs, many of the songs are powerful and great to interpret.
I have already written an article which includes some Titãs lyrics - Where are all the t-shirts written in Portuguese? In this article, I wrote about the problems I was having finding any kind of t-shirt in Brazil written in Portuguese. On of their songs goes “Um idiota em inglês É bem melhor do que eu e vocês” (An idiot in English is better than you or me). This often seems to ring true where anything from Europe or the US is valued far higher than anything intelligent or cultural in Brazil.
I told Branco about this, and he told us that in fact they sell band t-shirts with some of their lyrics on. I had a look and this is true. So this was a very wonderful kind of closure to a circle. A blog of mine inspired by Branco Mello ends with meeting the same chap who tells me that their band is indeed a source of t-shirts written in Portuguese. Wonderful : )
It is with very mixed emotions that I write this blog. So many things have made an impression on me these last few weeks in Brazil, not always great things and I was holding off from writing anything, since I was still searching for a positive angle to view them.
Here are just a few.
There has been a huge corruption trial in Brazil these last few months. Many senators have been convicted of fraud on a massive scale, and their prison sentences have been years not months. But after just one or two days many are free, and in one instance on of those convicted invited journalists to his party where he celebrated with a bath of champagne.
In another incident we watched on the news, someone in a local government position commandeered the one ambulance from their small town, and told the ambulance driver to drive many hundreds of miles to Brasilia to collect their luggage which had been left there. How many people were affected who needed that ambulance. Nothing as far as I know will have happened to the person who took the ambulance.
In another tragic news item, in the city of São Luis an extraordinarily huge amount of brand new educational materials, books, uniforms, computers, sports equipment and clothing, furniture and even cars and school busses were found to have been abandoned and left to rot in a warehouse.
Material escolar e uniformes são abandonados em São Luis (MA)
If you click on the picture above it will take you to the clip from Globo News Em Pauta, who reported this on the evening news programme. Although you may not be able to follow the dialogue, you will soon see in pictures all of these vital resources which never reached the school children.
If you continually watch the news over here, you soon come to realise that this is the daily reality for Brazilians. Although corruption is a way of life here, and not just at the very top of Brazilian political society, nothing prepares you for the utter shock and horror of what happened this weekend, when a fire broke out in a night club in Santa Maria, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, when more than 230 young people between the ages of 16 and 30 died. At the time of writing around 80 more are in a critical medical condition in hospital.
It is still too early to have a definite account of what happened, but what is clear is that the fire began when the band playing on stage set off some pyrotechnics. These appear to have set the sound proofing foam on the ceiling alight, causing a fire to spread rapidly. Many of the victims died from the toxic fumes from this foam. Problems were exacerbated due to there only being one fire exit. Witnesses have claimed that fire extinguishers did not work, and the security guards initially did not let people out, believing their cause to leave to be a fight inside the club.
Photo: g1.globo.com
It was interesting to read the comments of many newspaper readers in the UK. The vast majority wanted to communicate and share their thoughts and prayers with the families in Brazil, they themselves expressing their own shock and disbelief. Many others asked a range of questions as to how this could happen, and here are some typical observations, taken from a report by The Daily Mail.:
I thought lessons were or should’ve been learnt from the Station nightclub fire in the US in 2003. RIP.
How did the club get a fire certificate were was the health and safety two thousnd people in a club with one fire exit and a group letting off fireworks on the stage
Who in their right mind would set off fireworks in a closed space like this?
What has happened to the Health & Safety Regs in Brazil then? These will have to change before the Olympics of 2016. Absolutely no excuse for the authorities to have such poor fire regulations in such a busy place as a nightclub.
Terrible news, RIP poor people. The Authorities need to review the licences of all similar Public establishments to make sure fire safety measures and escape provision is up to standards.
Before I continue, I should also say that the Daily Mail from where these comments came from also published a video of the dead bodies on the street outside the club. At least many people complained that this was insensitive and should be removed from their site.
If there is any common link between this tragedy and the events I first discussed in this article, it is a lack of both education and human values and ethics. Apparently Brazil has some of the most advanced and sophisticated health and safety regulations in the world, but this may come as a surprise to those who wonder if there are in fact none. Having regulations is one thing, but in a country where corruption is so rife, when there is an inspection, it is easy to pay off the inspector who will report no violations. Brazil as an emerging economy is now discovering that a chronic lack of investment in education is coming back to haunt it.
Most Brazilians ask themselves where does there tax money go, since in many public areas investment is nowhere to be seen. If you look at public health in Brazil, private insurance is a must. So Brazilians pay tax for a health service which is not adequate, and then private health insurance for those who can afford it. But doctors in Brazil often do not make huge amounts of money from patients with insurance, and so will book appointments months away. So even if you pay for private insurance, it may turn out to be useless and you have pay that doctor again to be seen immediately.
It is interesting what people notice when in a foreign country. My wife Maria and I were back in Scotland over Christmas, and she noticed two signs. One was on a quiet country road, and it said “Tree cutting”. A few hundred metres up by the side of the road a man was cutting a hedge, and the sign was to warn drivers of his parked car and potential loose foliage on the road. Another sign was at a classical music concert in Dumfries. It read “This performance contains a loud sound representing the firing of a gun.” It was to warn people in advance. To be honest in reality it was more of a pop than a bang, but someone had gone to the trouble to warning people just in case.
That chap cutting trees went to the expense of producing his sign. This kind of thinking is extremely rare in Brazil, and as we can guess in the case of the night club owners, investing in fire equipment such as lit exits, sprinklers and a fire officer probably did not enter their minds. [It has been reported that both a) all precautions were in place and b) that their certificate of safety was out of date by months.]
It is interesting to watch road behaviour in Brazil, a country where the annual total of deaths is around 32,000 or 33,000 out of a population of 190 million. It is common to see cars tailgate other cars at high speed, while the car in front refuses to move out of their way. I have discussed the psychology of road behaviour and psychology of risk or otherwise here in terms of ego and social hierarchy, but I guess I have no proof of my hypotheses as to the root cause of this behaviour, partly of which of course does go back to education.
Another related incident refers to the tragic death of a 14 year girl at an amusement park called Hopi Hari in the state of São Paulo. It is like the British Alton Towers. In this instance there was a ride called the Eiffel Tower, where you are taken up to the top of a tower in a seat, and this then drops vertically downwards. In this needless accident, those running the park already knew that one of the harnesses on one of the seats was broken, but in this instance they simply forgot to tell the girl not to sit in that particular seat. A couple of weeks after this incident thrill seeking families returned to the park with no thought of any continued risk to themselves, and the owners and managers were neither arrested nor convicted nor fined. (Reference Morte no Hopi Hari ocorreu por ‘série de falhas’, diz diretor do parque).
I wrote the above this morning. Over lunch I have been wondering whether or not to publish it, as I do not want to be seen to be criticising Brazil, especially in this tragic time. I am trying to find a way to help educate the outside world about Brazil in a way in which the English press rarely seem to be able to, in order to find a positive way through. As I write I have just found a highly critical article in the Financial Times.
For a country climbing the global economic league table and preparing to showcase its progress with the World Cup and the Olympic Games, the list of errors and failures that led to Saturday night’s fire make the worst kind of advertisement.
There are idiots all over the world and it is hard to legislate against them. Until Saturday, Brazil hadn’t had a tragedy on this scale for more than half a century.
The final sentence of this article is one I would wish to highlight.
If the horrific events of the weekend result in more stringent application of its regulations, Brazil will have made more progress.
This is very easy to write, but incredibly hard to actually solve. Anyone can write that Brazil should toughen up on its regulations, but as I have written above, the vast majority of senators do not appear to care one iota for the Brazilian people. In fact, those who have been convicted and are in prison know they will soon be free. As we speak they are organising their election campaigns from inside prison. Yes, this is correct. In Brazil, a spell in prison for serious convictions is not barrier to a return to politics at the highest level. This is the climate within those amazing Brazilians who do give a damn about their country are trying to operate.
Is there anything us Brits can do to help? Let’s look at our Prime Minister David Cameron’s latest visit.
Photo Credit: The Independent
When Cameron came to Brazil last September, he popped in to open a new JCB factory in São Paulo. JCB is owned by Cameron’s good friend Sir Anthony Bamford who happened to donate £2 million to the Conservative Party via his firm. Sir Bamford, The Independent reported, is also “said to be in line for a peerage on the next House of Lords list.” (Reference IoS exclusive: Cameron in crony row over Brazil factory).
Also during his trip to Brazil, Cameron met with President Dilma, and took with him “executives from six defence companies, including BAE Systems, as part of his delegation, to encourage sales of British military equipment.” The UK is brilliant at selling weapons to various countries, and it does not really matter if they are brutal dictatorships or not. (Just for the sake of clarity I am not calling Brazil a dictatorship, I am referring to the many other countries we Brits love to sell weapons to without any thought for human rights or the value of human lives).
If you look at what Cameron said in Brazil, it was clear he was only interested in money, and not the people of Brazil, nor the complex problems faced here. And he is not a shining example of corrupt-free politics. I still do not know quite what to make of Dilma, but on being criticised by the British journal The Economist she said that she was elected by the Brazilian people and these are who will influence here and not a foreign magazine. (Reference Dilma diz que não vai demitir o ministro Guido Mantega).
As with many things, Brazil comes in for a huge amount of criticism. Given that we brits are so excellent at our own PR, especially in terms of general superiority and claiming the moral high-ground in life, it is perhaps not too big a surprise that Brazil in general has a huge self-esteem issue, and this manifests in all aspects of life here, in sport, education, business, culture, you name it. I think now it is time for a massive dose of super-optimism, but before we start to see how to make inroads to Brazil’s own “wicked problems” we will stop for a short tune.
I still remember Maria suggesting I listen to this tune some time back. Obviously it may or may not be your cup of tea, but my reaction went along the lines of “Oh my god, what the heck is this and why haven’t I heard it before?” The song was released in 1968 and heralded the musical and cultural movement called Tropicália, from which this track takes its name. To met it still sounds fresh and not dated at all.
It seems that I am not alone in my reaction on discovering this rich mine of music from Brazil. In Beyond Ipanema, a recent documentary on the US’s recent love for Brazilian music, David Byrne, one of the major collaborator on the Red Hot and Rio series of compilations made the same point. He discovered Tom Zé, another highly experimental artist from the 1960s (but who is still active today) and said it was like being in some kind of parallel universe, where what was developing in the US scene at that time had already happened in Brazil. He also said he asked his Brazilian friends living in the US why they didn’t put Tom Zé albums on, and their answer to Byrne was telling. They answered “Why would we?” Their answer implied that they were embarrassed by Brazilian music and could not see how it could possibly be of interest to an American audience. This is sad.
In the documentary Byrne says that he asked another friend “Is it only Brazilians who know about this? How could this be?” Much of the answer very much lies in the fact that many of these musicians were either in prison or being hounded by the dictatorship, and dictatorship who killed many young Brazilians, and who were funded and supported by the US government at the time.
Maria has strong feelings about Brazil and how she feels for many years it was ostracised from the rest of the world. This is understandable, and people of my age had no education about Brazil at all at school. Things are changing slowly, especially as many people point out due to Brazil hosting both the World Cup in 2014 and Olympics in 2016. The Mutantes, another key band in the Tropicália scene asked themselves why all of a sudden in 2006 they were becoming popular in the US. Gilberto Gil answers that it is because that Tropicália raises questions and interest in politics and social issues, and perhaps with Tropicália being ahead of its time and the opening up of Brazil, perhaps the time is now for Brazil to do one of the things it does best, export its very amazing, rich and diverse culture.
So where next then for Brazil?
In this article I have tried to show how although Brazil has many many social problems, it does no good foreigners criticising Brazil with no knowledge of the culture or history here, since solutions which may work at home are very unlikely to succeed over here. Brazil really is emerging on to the world stage, but it really is a paradoxical and enigmatic country.
In many instances consumer boycotts have proved extremely successful in the UK, for example readers telling advertisers of The News of the World newspaper that they would avoid their products if they continued to advertise. In this instance the newspaper had to close, following national disgust at their actions. But here in Brazil there is no tradition of collective protest, it simply is not in the national psyche. Any of us who do suggest this as a course of action have to know where the starting point is, and which suggestions are likely to work and which will not.
An additional aspect of the national psyche here seems to me that while many Brazilians are proud of their country, the political class simply have no shame whatsoever. None. While those who love Brazil care greatly about outside criticism, this too is unlikely to be a major source of motivation to change, despite two major global events happening here soon.
For those of you who are interested I think reading Tropical Truth by Caetano Veloso, A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb, and the novel Spilt Milk by Chico Buarque will provide a crash course and fast track to understanding the musical culture, politics and social culture of Brazil.
Part of my reason for mentioning the documentary Beyond Ipanema is that I am currently watching a serialisation of it in Brazil, and it got me quite excited. Given Brazil’s chronic crisis in education, we need to look to our musicians, artists and writers to reach the population all our governments refuse or are unwilling to. It’s going to be a group effort. Those guys in their champagne baths and those who are planning their electorial campaigns from their luxury prison cells, they are the ones making decisions about the Amazon, they are the ones who you are entrusting yourself to when you visit this country, for sporting events, tourism or business. If we can just turn down the dial of criticism slightly, and maybe crank up the volume on education, collaboration and transition, maybe finding the one that goes to eleven, collectively I think we can make things better, and party till the cows come home.
Last night at least 232 young adults died in a fire which broke out in a night club in the town of Santa Marina, in the very south of Brazil. The fire started when the band which was playing there set off pyrotechnics, which quickly set the club ablaze. With no fire exits, many died from the toxic fumes and others were trampled on.
My heart goes out to all the families and friends who have lost their loved ones. And my heart also goes to the emergency teams and all those who took part in the desperate attempt to rescue victims.
Photo: g1.globo.com
President Dilma came back from a summit in Chile to comfort victims of the tragedy. It has been heartbreaking to watch the news here, seeing the scenes from last night, and the terrible experiences of families desperate for news.
The tragedy has been reported in the UK, and I have also been reading the wide ranging comments from readers. It is clear to me that many do not understand the complexities of how this could happen, and I would like to correct some of what I see as incorrect conclusions.
I don’t think now is the time though. I am here in Brazil and I absolutely feel that collectively we can improve Brazil, we can have a positive impact together in making things better. That post will wait for another day. Until then I think all we can do is support all those affected, and when the time is right, start to take positive action that something like this may never happen again.
I am delighted to announce that The City Fix Brasil, an excellent blog of which I am occasional contributor has won first prize in the category of Sustainability in a major competition run by Top Blog in Brazil.
The City Fix Brasil team
This is a great achievement and thoroughly deserved recognition for the superb work and effort that goes in to the blog, produced by EMBARQ Brazil, who help government departments and companies develop and implement sustainable solutions relating to transport and mobility in cities.
For English speakers, there is also the sister site The City Fix which is an online resource for sustainable transport news, research and “best practice” solutions from around the world. There were of course many other excellent blogs in this category, and you can see a list of them with links here.
I am delighted today to announce that I am now a member of BCI – Biomimicry for Creative Innovation. The philosophy of BCI is “Business inspired by nature”. It is a network of creative innovators, professional change agents, biologists and design professionals who work in creative collaboration with each other and its clients to apply ecological thinking for radical transformation.
For the past year I have been teaching business students about Nature’s design principles. These are summarised in the BCI diagram above showing how nature has evolved a set of ‘principles’ that allow organisms to follow these rules, live sustainably, and survive times of radical upheaval. Successful organisms in nature are resilient, optimising, adaptive, systems-based, values-based, and life-supporting.
In my last post I wrote about the fact that overall, Brazil appears to have a self-esteem issue. This often seems to express itself in the media, with far more attention given to say musicians and bands from the US and UK than is given to Brazilian artists. Some famous Brazilians, such as the model Gisele only become famous in Brazil after becoming famous elsewhere, in other countries. Then they are valued.
Arthur Zanetti wins a gold medal for Brazil in London
Also in my last article, I showed a really sad example of a video using the words of Professor Ronaldo Pacheco who passionately argued against those Brazilians who are always criticising their own athletes for not doing well, while not acknowledging the fact that there are many social problems and a lack of investments in pretty much all sports apart from football. This article seems to have gone down well with my Brazilian readers who understood what I was trying to achieve with it.
Maria teaching at Escola Municipal Carmela
But in this article I wanted to point to one great example in Brazil, where children aged 12 are being taught explicitly about self-esteem. My wife Maria this weekend was in Belo Horizonte, where she attends a course on education and human values. Although this is designed to teach educationalists about how to give school children a sense of values, Maria is applying many of the lessons in business and industry as well, since human values are at the heart of developing a sustainable/resilient organisation.
Maria Auxiliadora
In this class, Maria and her colleague Maria Izabel read a short story which allowed the children to discuss their own reactions and feelings. Also, they all sang together the song O Sol by Milton Nascimento, a wonderful song where he sings “Hey fear, I’m no longer listening to you. You don’t do anything for me.”
Two pupils taking part in lessons on human values
These lessons reminded me of the very wonderful documentary I saw recently about a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo who are learning lessons about compassion from teacher Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs them to by getting them to write their true inner feelings in a letter which are then read aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates.
It was amazing how moved the children were after Maria and Maria Izabel’s class, and they all asked if they could come back the next day. This is just one example of many I am sure that are currently happening here in Brazil and many other countries too, but which are not receiving much publicity at all.
Education is also needed of course for people in business. In our technological and interconnected world, we have data, we have information and we have knowledge. But we are still lacking in wisdom, and this now is what the world so badly needs. Much of this wisdom I feel can come by allowing yourself to be taught directly by nature, and I will cover this in my next blog.
My background is in mobile telecoms and mobile internet, and therefore it’s interesting to me looking at what is happening this month in the Brazilian mobile telecoms market. The national regulator, Anatel, has placed a ban on three of the four operators from selling any new SIM cards (i.e. new phone contracts or services) until problems relating to the quality of service and coverage have been resolved. It appears to me that this is unprecedented action in a country so rife in corruption, where the customer certainly pretty much always comes last, and where legal processes can be measured in decades rather than months or years, so that it is easy for companies to totally abuse customers knowing that they have no practical or ethical way of redress.
The result of this action is that operator TIM has been banned from selling new SIMs in 26 states, Claro in 5 and Oi! in 3. Vivo has not been affected from this ban, but as a customer myself believe you me they are not much better. Anatel are also concerned that these problems will negatively impact on the image of Brazil during the World Cup in 2014, and hence they are doing all they can to work on the problem now.
One way in which UK mobile operators are responding to the challenges of network coverage is to actually co-operate, rather than compete. Last month the FT reported on the impact of a new venture between Vodafone and Telefónica, in the run up to the roll-out of 4G networks:
Vodafone and Spain’s Telefónica, which operates the O2 mobile service in the UK, will share their cell towers, masts, radio equipment and local transmission kit in a 50/50 joint venture aimed at improving user coverage and accelerating the development of new fourth-generation (4G) mobile services. The agreement could reduce the companies’ UK mobile network costs by 25 per cent, producing combined savings of more than £1bn by 2015, said Emeka Obiodu, a telecoms analyst at Ovum.
At this moment in time in Brazil, I am not sure that any one in any of the networks has this concept of co-operation with competition. It’s interesting as when I first started working at BT Cellnet (now called O2, a part of Telefónica), you could only send a text message from one phone to another phone on the same network. But when cross-networking texting became available, texting just exploded, especially among young people.
Also, another great example of co-operation/competition comes from VISA. In the 1960s, the North American credit card industry was on the point of collapse, chaotic, unregulated and out of control. Dee Hock, then a 38 year old banking executive was tasked with looking for an innovative solution, and it was Hock, who heavily influenced by his studies of complexity in nature, developed what he would call a chaordic business model.
In this model, there is both chaos and order in the system as a whole. Too much control and you fall into totalitarianism and dictatorship, with no creativity, but too much chaos and the system collapses due to being unsustainable and not resilient. Creativity arises from the space where there is just the right amount of chaos and just the right amount of order. In business this can be taken as competition and co-operation, and we are seeing this more and more now in the UK mobile industry, with other European mobile companies eyeing the situation closely.
The VISA system consists of thousands of members, all of whom compete with innovative solutions for customers, but all of whom are members too of VISA, allowing customers from other banks to use their own systems. Hock revolutionised the American credit card landscape, and in two years out of the ashes came what we now know as VISA, one of the largest and most successful companies in the world.
So where now for Brazil? I will be monitoring this situation closely over the coming weeks to see how the mobile networks progress. I always mention the notion of mental models and the importance of new ways of thinking in business strategy. Customers, including my own wife who is currently without service despite TIM promising that her new phone would work this week have been badly affected and who knows how long this chaos will last for.
But as we say, every cloud has a silver lining, and for once Brazil has a regulator with teeth (unlike the senators in the governmental department for ethics who are being tried for corruption), and I see this as possible turning point where for once, customers come first, and Brazil can really start to improve in an area that impacts so heavily on the competitiveness, sustainability and resilience of its national economy.
An unnamed former Bryn Estyn resident said he saw Morrison, MP for Chester between 1974 and 1992, visit the home several times in the 1980s and take boys away in his car.
The claim is not implausible. Why? Because it was common knowledge in Westminster circles that Morrison had an unhealthy interest in boys.
Edwina Currie — a junior health minister in the Thatcher government — spelled it out, in black and white, in her diaries which were published in 2002.
‘One appointment in the recent reshuffle,’ she wrote, ‘has attracted a lot of gossip and could be very dangerous: Peter Morrison has become the PM’s PPS [Parliamentary Private Secretary].
‘Now he’s what they call a “noted pederast”, with a liking for young boys. He admitted as much . . . when he became deputy chairman of the party but added: “However, I’m very discreet” — and he must be!’
‘She [Thatcher] either knows and is taking a chance, or doesn’t; either way, it’s a really dumb move. It scares me, as all the Press know, and as we get closer to the election, someone is going to make trouble very close to her indeed.’
Where are Scotland’s Bravehearts?
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In general, Scottish people seem to have a good reputation around the world, including our football fans when they travel abroad. It’s interesting as I am told that Brazilians see the Scots as the Brazilians of Europe. Foreign people love our customs, our whiskey, our stunning scenery and our celtic history. And our kilts.
I am sort of Scottish, but more British really. I was born and grew up in Scotland, and I am back living in Scotland where my parents now live. I love Scotland the country, and I adore the British Isles, to me these are magical and mystical lands.
But I am someone who has no monarchy, and I do not recognise those who are knighted by Elizabeth Windsor. For while people around the world think of knights still in terms of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and while these myths and legends still ring true in the hearts of many of us here, the truth is somewhat different. Us Brits love to knight people for failure, the bankers, the senior civil servants who covered up for others’ mistakes, others’ disasters. If you pay thousands to our politicians, you get a knighthood, and if you like nothing more than to make millions selling weapons of mass destruction to despots and brutal dictators who host our overseas military bases, then you too will surely be knighted by the queen.
In the 1990s Belgium faced a huge paedophile scandal, to the great shame of the people of Belgium. In this scandal, many people were implicated, politicians, television celebrities, but there was little justice for the victims of this abuse. The Guardian reported in 2002:
So what an earth, you may well ask, is going on? The victims’ parents think they have an answer – a cover-up and many Belgians agree with them. Dutroux was not acting alone, they say, but was part of a wider paedophile ring which included policemen and senior members of the establishment. Why else would there be such a delay in going to trial?
I remember reading about this scandal at the time, and I remember one aspect in particularly which was the great shame of the Belgium people, and how the vast majority of them do not want to speak about this period in their recent history. How could so many people witness these events and do nothing to protect the most vulnerable children in their society?
And now we are seeing the very same pattern of events in Scotland, in Aberdeen, in a case which has only just come to my attention, although it too started in the late 1990s.
Hollie and her mother Anne
The case is a little complex, but this in essence is what happened.
In the 1990s, Hollie Greig, then a young girl, was systematically abused by her father. Later, her father would come to share Hollie with a gang of paedophiles in Aberdeen, a city in the north of Scotland. In 2000, after 14 years of terrible abuse, Hollie eventually told her mother. Hollie was able to name those people abusing her. Formal statements were made to Grampian Police, providing all the horrifying details and the names of the abusers. They included a senior Scottish Sheriff, a policeman, social workers, a nurse, a solicitor, an accountant, a fire officer, married couples and others.
These are people whose very jobs are to protect the citizens of Scotland, people whose job is to attest and jail those who are a threat to our children, the weak and vulnerable.
Why I am I writing about this in 2012? Well the Scottish legal system, the head of who is Elish Angiolini, the Scottish Lord Advocate, in charge of all criminal prosecutions appear to have done all they can to stifle this case, to prevent any just for Hollie and her mother. Her mother, far from being helped by the police, was sectioned in a mental institution shortly after first going to the police to alert them to these hideous crimes.
A campaign was set up to fight for justice for Hollie, and the BBC’s investigative report, Mark Daly, approached the campaign team to make a documentary about the case. Journalists from the BBC investigative series Panorama came to interview Hollie and others who were involved, but shortly afterwards the journalists were told that if they proceeded with this project they would get the sack, never to work again. They have never revealed who gave them these orders.
In another shocking chapter, Robert David Greig, brother of Hollie`s mother Anne, died mysteriously in an alleged car fire in 1997. Hollie had confided in her mother in 2000 that he had walked into a room while Hollie’s father had been abusing her. UK Column, a British magazine which as been covering this case reported that:
Despite extreme inconsistencies in witness statements and circumstances, no inquest took place and the cause of death was officially due to smoke inhalation. The Post Mortem stated that Robert has suffered considerable damage to his skull, two broken ribs and a broken sternum. Informal professional medical opinion so far is of the view that Robert had been severely beaten, had alcohol forced down his throat and then thrown into the burning vehicle.
Child Rapists Protected By The State, Mike Robinson, UK Column, 2nd February, 2010
The campaign team have of course notified many senior politicians in Scotland about this case, including Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister. Silence. The British press, apart from occasional stories in the local newspaper, have remained silent.
Hollie and her mother were forced to flee to England as a result of these events. Can you imagine, this is the state of Scotland today.
In England, they received help from Robert Green, who took to campaigning on their behalf. Despite speaking at the house of Commons, neither Alex Salmond nor any Scottish Nationalist Party MPS showed any interest in meeting him. Robert Green noted on his blog:
Two English MPs, Andrew George and David Ruffley, have gone out of their way to register their considerable disquiet about the lack of proper investigation into the case and that an English member of the House of Lords, Lord Monckton has gone on film to demand a public inquiry.
Last week Robert Green was prosecuted and is now in prison. His crime? Handing out leaflets to the public in Aberdeen in his attempt to warn them of the dangerous members of the Scottish establishment who are still free to carry on raping children.
To show you how bad things are, Colin McKerracher, the Chief Constable of Grampian Police – the force which failed to investigate Hollie Greig’s abuse, but can arrest Robert Greig for speaking out – is Chairman of the North East of Scotland Child Protection Committee NESCPC. He is the main signatory of NESCPC’s 2008 – 2009 business plan.
There is a sense in the UK that people should not be described as guilty of a crime before they have appeared in court and been successfully convicted. If you are wondering that perhaps Hollie may be inventing this, since no people have been convicted for these crimes, you may want to take the following into account. In 2005, Hollie was awarded £13,500 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority. The CICA based it’s award on evidence from medical experts, including the eminent psychologist Dr Eva Harding who stated unequivocally that Hollie had been sexually abused.
There is some light in all of this. The official campaign is increasingly becoming known thanks to the efforts of many individuals leafletting in Aberdeen. And on the internet, many more independent websites are covering the story as well. These efforts will help bring those guilty to justice eventually.
Scotland is a beautiful country. As I write this, the countryside where I am is blooming with the first white snowdrops of the year. The name of the Scottish national anthem is Flower of Scotland. As the words to the anthem go, Oh flower of Scotland, when will we see your like again? Well Hollie is one Scottish Flower worth fighting for.
I ask that myself, and I ask now, to the five million-strong population of Scotland, Where are Scotland’s Bravehearts? Will you stand up and be counted, and fight for this beautiful flower of Scotland? Who is fighting for the disabled children, the children in care homes, the children like Hollie with Downs Syndrome, who have been savagely sexually abused by those whose oaths of office we now know were hollow lies?
Please Scotland, we need to find our Bravehearts and we need to find them now.
O flower of Scotland
When will we see
Your like again
That fought and died for
Your wee bit hill and glen
And stood against him
Proud Edward’s army
And sent him homeward
Tae think again
The hills are bare now
And autumn leaves lie thick and still
O’er land that is lost now
Which those so dearly held
And stood against him
Proud Edward’s army
And sent him homeward
Tae think again
Those days are passed now
And in the past they must remain
But we can still rise now
And be the nation again
And stood against him
Proud Edward’s army
And sent him homeward
Tae think again
