IN ANY sane world, the Makin report would have discredited both independent safeguarding and mandatory reporting as remedies for all safeguarding problems. They’re not necessarily bad ideas, but they won’t do what is claimed for them.
John Smyth’s crimes were reported six times to different police forces before the scandal broke, to no effect whatever. The independent report itself hasn’t made any victims safer; it doesn’t seem even to have made them feel safer. The lasting effect has been to establish a narrative among people who have never read it in which the bishops and what Keith Makin calls “the reverends” of the Church of England are guilty of concealing from the police knowledge that would have stopped Smyth’s abuse.
This story owes quite a lot to the scandals surrounding the Roman Catholic Church in the US and Ireland, as well as here. They are all “the Church” in the popular imagination. Mr Makin himself appears to believe that the Church of England is a body as disciplined and hierarchical as the Church of Rome, as if “reverend” were a title of rank in the Church and an Archbishop were someone who told bishops what to do.
Thus the coverage of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech from the scaffold in the House of Lords. Rod Liddle, in The Sunday Times: “Why is the Church of England so often led by an idiot? Because prime ministers, who effectively make the appointment, do not want someone too cunning looking over their shoulders. . . ?
“Sometimes the person at the top is forced to depart as a consequence of the failures of those below him (although more often those lower down cop disproportionate blame). But this was not the case with Archbishop Welby. He was not ‘technically’ the head of the Church: he was head of the Church. And all the evidence suggests that he knew plenty about John Smyth but did absolutely nothing about it.”
All of the evidence does nothing of the sort. But then Liddle also believes that it was David Cameron who chose the Archbishop.
The Mail had the short form: “At the time of announcing his resignation, Mr Welby said he was quitting ‘in sorrow with all victims and survivors of abuse’ following days of pressure after the independent Makin Review concluded John Smyth — the most prolific serial abuser to be associated with the Church — might have been brought to justice had Mr Welby formally reported him to police in 2013.”
Not even Makin suggests that it was Welby’s job to report him to the police. Smyth was, in fact, formally reported, as the Church Times discovered (News, 29 November), and this still did not result in anyone being brought to justice.
Marina Hyde, in The Guardian, went even further: “As a reminder, Welby’s resignation was called for because he definitely knew about victims of John Smyth, a sadistic monster who he had once hugely admired. Smyth’s victims, groomed and horrifically beaten, begged repeatedly — and for years — for an investigation, which the Church of England did not instigate. Many of them now state the church’s ignoring of their trauma was equal to the abuse itself.”
This kind of journalism is exactly what “AI”, in the form of large language models, can be trained to do: to discover what everyone else has written before and then summarise or rephrase it with no interest in its truth. And so long as the advertisers are happy, that is what will happen.
AN ASTONISHING little story from the West Coast of the United States illustrates this process. Oregon Public Broadcasting investigated the Ashland Daily Tidings, a local newspaper in the south of the state, which went bust in 2023: “The Ashland Daily Tidings — established as a newspaper in 1876 — ceased operations in 2023, but if you were a local reader, you may not have known. Almost as soon as it closed, a website for the Tidings re-emerged, boasting a team of eight reporters . . . none of whom are reporters working in Southern Oregon. Two of the writers have sparse social media presences that suggest they live in South Africa. Neither responded to a request for comment from OPB, though one did share a social media post in November praising artificial intelligence.”
AND so, rather abruptly, to a story of unimaginable horror. The journalist Theo Padnos spent two years as a prisoner of the jihadis who have now taken over what is left of Syria. In the summer of 2013, he spent six weeks in a cell with 34 other men. All were tortured in that time; four survived the experience.
“In my opinion, the rebels’ greatest power is their capacity to generate new suicide bombers,” he writes on the Persuasion Substack. “[Syria] abounds with the raw material: daydreaming, idle young men. Now that a nation’s worth of dark basements have fallen under HTS [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham] control, the organization’s leaders are in a position to scale up their manufacturing process. . . In addition to blowing up enemy factions in Syria, some of the commanders dream of blowing up the faraway enemies of God. This bodes ill for subway passengers in London and Paris.”