31/07/24:
Huw Edwards pleads guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children as young as seven.
If you’re unfamiliar, Huw Edwards (pictured above) was the lead presenter of BBC News at Ten, the late evening news programme of the BBC, from 2003 to 2023.
Earning almost half a million pounds (£479,000) per year, Edwards was at the height of his career when last year (July 2023), allegations involving a BBC presenter and a minor were leaked to The Sun.
It was reported that an unnamed presenter, who later transpired to be Edwards, had paid a 17-year-old £35,000 in exchange for sexually explicit images.
While at the time there was some debate about the criminality of this, where the age of consent in the UK is 16, as I wrote about here, the full extent of the allegations have since come to light and they are truly shocking.
It’s truly shocking that the same man who we saw presenting the news on our TV screens every night for up to two decades, a well-respected, familiar presence, could be at the centre of such injustice…
How could he do this?
How could he get away with such abhorrent crimes, blindsiding us all, for so long?
Alas, we’ve seen it happen time and time again with powerful people who think that they’re indestructible, ‘above the law.’
As in Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell… Just three prominent examples of people who got a sick thrill out of destroying lives, relishing in the adrenaline of the ‘power trip.’
Putting themselves on a pedestal, they think that they can get away with committing heinous acts.
Keeping them on a pedestal, having grown so used to seeing them in a position of power, well respected, upon witnessing their downfall, ‘there must be a mistake’, we think.
But then as the evidence starts building, as the plea comes in, ‘guilty’, we realise that power is in fact the biggest source of corruption in the world.
It’s why the world leaders all get away with it.
- As in Trump and his attempts to overturn the US government in 2020.
- Netanyahu and his unwavering commitment to continuing a genocide.
- Starmer and Biden and Macron and Steinmeier, all of the world leaders who are complicit in watching the unthinkable happen and not demanding for it to be stopped.
Why aren’t they demanding that it be stopped?
When the source of corruption lies with the people at the top, the whole thing needs to be dismantled.
It’s not enough to just remove people from atop the pedestal as their criminality comes to light, the whole thing needs to be torn down.
All in a day’s work if there are enough of us around the base of it pushing hard enough.
We just have to want it enough.
When yet another abhorrent crime is in the headlines, the perpetrator being someone whom we should be able to trust and we all ask:
Who’s going to police the police?
ANARKISS 