Moral Crusades in an Age of Mistrust

The Jimmy Savile Scandal

F. Furedi

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137338020
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Studien über Kinder in der Soziologie

The epidemic of scandals unleashed by the Savile Scandal highlights the precarious status of relations of trust. The rapid escalation of this crisis offers insights into the relationship between anxieties about childhood and the wider moral order. This book explains why western society has become so uncomfortable with the exercise of authority.

1

Introduction: Scandals, Panics and Crusades

Abstract: The Savile affair detonated an explosion of scandals which affected both individuals and key public institutions. Scandals usually play an important role in clarifying the moral issues preoccupying society. However, in the absence of moral consensus scandals breed uncertainty instead of restoring moral order. This is what occurred in the wake of the Savile scandal. The febrile atmosphere surrounding the exposure of Savile as a paedophile should be conceptualised as a moral crusade rather than as a moral panic.

Furedi, Frank. Moral Crusades in an Age of Mistrust: The Jimmy Savile Scandal. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137338020.

Jimmy Savile was one of the most influential celebrity entertainers working in British television in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a much-revered personality, whose tireless work on behalf of numerous charities was widely praised by leading members of the British establishment. Knighted by the Queen and by the Pope, ‘Sir Jimmy’ was hailed as a British hero when he went to his grave in October 2011. A year later, on 3 October 2012, a television documentary devoted to exploding this image of benevolence accused him of abusing underage girls in the 1970s. These allegations immediately prompted the police to launch an inquiry, which was swiftly upgraded to a formal criminal investigation. By this time most of the media displayed no doubt that the former British hero was in fact an evil monster. That is why a few days after the documentary, despite the absence of a trial or a thorough investigation, Commander Peter Spindler, head of Scotland Yard’s Specialist Crime Investigations, could publicly brand Savile a ‘sexual predator with a predilection for young girls’.¹

The rapid transformation of Savile from a celebrity-saint into the personification of evil was facilitated by an outburst of media interest in the scandal. This interest was not motivated simply by the significant news value of the hundreds of new abuse allegations against Savile in the weeks that followed the documentary. The denunciation of Savile’s criminal behaviour was, from the beginning, coupled with condemnation of the behaviour of the BBC. Even before the showing of the documentary by its main competitor, ITV, the BBC had been accused of burying its own investigative programme about Savile’s criminal behaviour in order to protect the reputation of its former star. Over the first two weeks of October 2012 criticism of the BBC’s decision to drop its programme acquired a ferocious intensity, which forced the organisation on the defensive.

On 23 October George Entwistle, the Director-General of the BBC, appeared before a committee of Members of Parliament and acknowledged that there was a ‘problem of culture within the BBC’ that had allowed Savile’s behaviour to remain undetected. The BBC became clearly disoriented by the pressure it faced. On 2 November the BBC’s flagship news programme Newsnight transmitted an interview with Steve Messham, a former resident of a North Wales children’s home, who alleged that he had been repeatedly abused by a leading Conservative politician in the 1970s. What began as a story surrounding the criminal behaviour of one person mutated into a potentially explosive scandal about Britain’s governing party. Social media sites immediately identified the unnamed target of Messham’s accusation as Lord McAlpine, a former treasurer of the Conservative Party – but a few days later Messham retracted his statement, and Newsnight and the BBC stood compromised by this allegation. On 10 November Entwistle recognised the damage caused by the very public targeting of an innocent man by Newsnight and resigned. The BBC faced the greatest crisis in its history.

The speed with which revelations about one man’s abusive behaviour engulfed and overwhelmed one of the most influential media organisations in the world indicates that this was no longer just a story about Jimmy Savile. Other institutions were brought into the frame. Allegations that Savile had abused people on hospital premises forced the National Health Service to launch a series of internal inquiries. Criticism of police indifference towards allegations made against Savile in the past led to investigations into this institution’s behaviour. Most unnerving was the sense of unease expressed by the British government. On 5 November Prime Minister David Cameron ordered an urgent investigation into the allegations made on Newsnight about how abuse claims had been dealt with in Wales in the 1970s and 1980s.²

The intervention of the Prime Minister politicised the issue and suggested that what was at stake was a matter of great interest to the state. This reaction encouraged a variety of political interests and campaigners to channel the concerns of the public into a moral crusade.

Rumour-mongering acquired a powerful momentum as different moral entrepreneurs harnessed the anxiety fuelled by press speculation to promote their own agenda. In the end Tom Watson, the Labour MP for West Bromwich East, trumped them all when he spelled out his theory of a Tory paedophile ring lurking in the shadowy wings of Westminster. He hinted at a conspiracy by a secret cabal of senior Tories based at Downing Street, and for a brief time succeeded in gaining the public’s attention.³

Watson’s claim was supported by a group of campaigning journalists and social media commentators. Iain Overton ran the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which helped to compile the Newsnight report on the Steve Messham allegations. Overton played a key role in a Twitter campaign designed to expose Lord McAlpine as the arch-paedophile, reportedly boasting a few hours before the programme was broadcast that Newsnight was going to expose a leading Tory figure as an abuser of boys in a North Wales children’s home, and later tweeting words to that effect.⁴ Within hours the Twitter campaign went viral.

An inspection of these tweets reveals the light-hearted and cavalier manner in which they dealt with their prey. Overton tweeted, ‘we’ve got a Newsnight out tonight about a very senior political figure who is a paedophile’. His boast was widely circulated, and soon others were piling in to demonstrate that they, too, had inside knowledge about the identity of the political figure in question. The campaign acquired such momentum that on 8 November David Cameron was forced to respond to a television interviewer’s demands for action by warning that there was now a danger of a witch-hunt.

Even those who were responsible for circulating rumours on Twitter acknowledge that speculation online acquired a frenzied character. When some of them were eventually forced to apologise for their false allegation of paedophilia, they justified their behaviour on the ground that they got caught up in the intense mood of rumour mongering. One journalist tweeted his apology for contributing to what he called a ‘febrile’ atmosphere; another campaigner wrote that she was ‘VERY sorry for inadvertently fanning flames’.

In this feverish atmosphere the police investigation into Savile appeared to acquire a momentum of its own. During the weeks that followed, numerous celebrities and entertainers were arrested over allegations that they, too, had been abusers. The fact that large numbers of allegations were forthcoming is not surprising, since, in effect, the police called on the entire nation to recollect any incident of abuse that might have happened to them in the past. In December 2012 it was reported that the police were investigating allegations against 25 celebrities for a variety of sex offences committed in the 1970s.⁵ With the police claiming that they were dealing with almost 500 lines of inquiry, some commentators said that it seemed as if the entire decade of the 1970s was being morally condemned.

An epidemic of scandals

Throughout history scandals have precipitated political upheavals and even caused revolutions. Scandals can set off a powerful and unpredictable chain of events because they outrage moral sensibilities and encourage people to demonstrate that they are on the side of the right against the wrong. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a scandal represents an ‘offence to moral feeling or sense of decency’. From a sociological perspective a scandal can be interpreted as a moment when society becomes aware of the point at which behaviour turns into an act of moral transgression. ‘Societal norms become more evident when they are violated, making outbursts of moral upset sociologically interesting,’ claims a sociological study of scandals, noting that ‘scandals provoke moral positioning and help in clarifying – and dramatizing – lines of difference or conflict’.⁶

Scandals often precipitate moral outrage because they are interpreted as expressing a violation of values that are held sacred. Usually a scandal reveals ‘a moral order that is temporarily disrupted’.⁷ Historically, communities have responded to such a disruption by consciously distancing themselves from the source of their concern through affirmation of the values that they hold dear. In the wake of the Savile scandal, the constant condemnation of paedophilia and the institutions that protect the predators can be understood as an attempt at this form of moral positioning.

The ease with which the reaction to the revelations about Savile was absorbed into a pre-existing cycle of institutional scandals indicates that what is at issue is not simply a temporary disruption of the moral order prevailing in British society. Although it has several unique features, in many respects the Savile affair represents the continuation of an ongoing series of scandals. At the moment when Savile was branded with infamy, British public life was still reeling from a more than year-long scandal concerning newspapers illegally hacking the phones of hundreds of people. From early 2011 the so-called hacking scandal had dominated British public life, and it overlapped with the Savile affair. Indeed the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking and the behaviour of the press, which was set up in July 2011 by the Prime Minister, published its report in the middle of the unfolding of the Savile crisis.

The phone-hacking scandal itself was preceded by a series of scandals that stretched back to the mid-1990s. New Labour’s portrayal of the Conservatives as a party of sleaze was crucial to its election victory in 1997. However, the New Labour government soon discovered that it was not immune to the politics of scandal. The 1997 election triumph was followed by a succession of minor scandals involving Labour MPs that led to the resignation of a number of ministers. Since 2000 scandals about corrupt political practices – ‘cash for honours’ – and the misuse of parliamentary expenses have undermined the credibility of professional politicians. Other scandals have implicated the banking and financial services industry, the police and the Church.

The recurrence of scandals indicates that their disruption of the moral order is far from temporary and that in current times the potential for scandals to restore the moral order and clarify society’s values is rarely realised. Why? Because the capacity to clarify values presupposes that there is an underlying consensus regarding fundamental norms of behaviour. Yet constant debates on topics such as the nature of the family, abortion and the right to assisted suicide indicate that there is little consensus even on some of the most elementary questions about the meaning of life. Heated exchanges about these issues indicate that society lacks a master-narrative that can endow communities’ experience with shared meaning. In response to this absence of shared meaning, the unresolved suspicions that are fuelled by scandals continue to attach themselves to new issues and concerns. As a result scandals today are often not followed by the restoration of moral order. The lack of a shared gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Scandals, Panics and Crusades
• 2  Jimmy Savile: Man, Monster, Celebrity
• 3  Remembering the Past: Good Old Days Bad Old Days
• 4  Childhood at Risk: How Children Became So Precious
• 5  The Inflation of Abuse and the Rise of the Victim
• 6  Modern Demonology: Ritual Abuse, Conspiracy and Cover-up
• 7  The Crisis of Authority and the Cult of the Judicial Inquiry
• 8  Conclusion: How the Moral Crusades Harm Us All
• References
• Index