I may need to reach for my tin foil hat, and I hesitate to say this as I’m not naturally one for conspiracy theories, but is it completely inconceivable that Essex Police, or perhaps the Metropolitan Police, might have recruited a civilian or even assigned one of their own officers to post on boards like this and promote an anti-Bamber perspective, the aim being to divert and discourage discussion? You can imagine that such an operator would be obnoxious and repetitive, and would lie about the case and flame other posters. Another intriguing thought is that some of the screen handles on here might not be just one individual, but might be several perhaps working to an organised agenda.
It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. The Israeli Defence Force have a very large social media operation: their operators are known as hasbara.
I know quite a lot about the police and the way they work internally, and they do have covert media operations and, if there is a significant cover-up of wrong-doing, then it wouldn’t surprise me if they have individuals on the payroll to ‘manage perceptions’ and alert them to case developments.
Probably not, I’m probably allowing my imagination to run away with me. It’s just a thought.
What does prompt me to think along those lines is that, I have to say this, some anti-Bamber posters seem like very queer people. I’m neutral about Jeremy Bamber, but I can well understand somebody like Mike becoming committed to overturning the conviction. It’s the sort of thing that people do campaign about, and I’m willing to give people like Mike and Nigel considerable leeway because I can comprehend why somebody would become impassioned in such a cause.
What’s baffling me is the other side of it. It’s not as usual for people to become obsessed with wanting to keep somebody in prison and suppress or divert discussion of the case and lie about it – unless you’re a member of the family or working for the police, then it would make sense.
Maybe you are the obsessive here and not people who as you say have been posting for years, seeing people come and go, encouraging debate but most importantly making friends whom we would never disparage in a way you always seem to intimate in your writings.
Your latest disparagement comes as no surprise. Since you are a Johnny-come-lately (as you only too readily admit) let me explain my rationale behind posting on this site for years.
I'm from a neighbourhood very close to where Julie went to grammar school, we ended up choosing the same career in the mid-1980s and even working for the same employer in London when opportunities were limited in the North, when the savage cuts imposed by the Conservative government of the time began to bite.
I have never met her (which clears up one point made by david 1819, a member who is on the opposite side of the fence to myself but with whom I have had very few problems). I have been Julie's harshest critic over the years, to which my various threads attest, but there is one aspect of the Bamber case I may be able to shed light on from a personal perspective.
The education system of the 1980s was a victim of the prevailing selfishness of the time, mainly emanating from the top, and the result was a sharp deterioration in the behaviour of pupils at all levels. This has, to some extent, been rectified today, but if I take you back to a classroom of the 1980s you would find a small handful of wilful, unruly pupils who spoilt it for the rest, and which Senior Management had very little strategies in place for dealing with, let alone the teacher based in the classroom.
I am labouring this background information because it has a direct relevance to the Bamber case. It's actually ngb1066's pet topic (along with the News of the World deal) and if the case wasn't so intrinsically serious I would manage a wry smile every time it's mentioned to malign Julie, though nowadays all it brings forth is a grimace on my world-weary face.
I am alluding, of course, to the prescription Julie requested from the doctor at Lewisham in October 1984 to relieve what I believed to be tension type headaches. Of course the insinuation always is by the pro-Bamber supporters that she procured these tablets with the express intention of colluding with Jeremy's plan to drug his parents, simultaneously burning down the Farm. It was the plot Jeremy indirectly alluded to to Charles Marsden in The Frog and Beans shortly before Christmas 1984, but once again this evidence is dismissed by the Jeremy lovers.
I am here to tell you now that I knew personally several members of staff who were on medication of such a description. I could go into further detail but will desist, except to say it was not uncommon for female members of staff to put on weight, or male menbers to binge drink at weekends. Several members took early retirement after corporal punishment was abolished in 1986.
There is therefore in my opinion no sinister motive for Julie requesting sleeping tablets, and anyway credit her with enough sense to know that such mild tranquillizers dissolved in a gin and tonic would as likely as not be ineffectual. June had her own medication anyway and would be unlikely to drink anything her son proffered her.
I don't mind your imagination running away with you (as you put it) as long as there are not snide accompanying remarks. The double entendre of "
queer" may or may not be a case in point. It is to members' credit here that never in the whole history of my time here has anyone made any snide remark about Jeremy's alleged liaison with Brett Collins even though they may have been tempted so to do.
There are parameters on this website which you are perpetually bordering on and may well yet again have crossed. A tin hat? You need a Faraday cage.