Anti-fracking rally in Manchester in November 2016. Photo: DrillOrDrop
- Update 29/8/2018: See section headed Swapping fracking at the bottom of this post.
A report published today on social cohesion in Greater Manchester has been rewritten this evening after it emerged that a case study falsely accused anti-fracking activists of “grooming” a 14-year-old boy.
The first version of the report, commissioned after the Manchester Arena bombing, said the boy was referred to Channel, part of the government’s anti-extremist Prevent programme. His school was said to have been concerned about what were described as his “extreme beliefs” around fracking.
The boy, named Aaron, was said to have been targeted aggressively via social media after signing an online petition. The case study said he was encouraged to participate in local protests and was on “the periphery of engaging in criminal behaviour”. He engaged with local activists through the dark web, it added.
Paragraph from version 1 of the report, p89
But this evening, a revised version of the 124-page report, titled A Shared Future, has removed all reference to anti-fracking campaigners.
Revised version of the paragraph
A statement from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority said:
“The A Shared Future report contains a number of case studies where some details have been changed to protect the identities of those involved. This is standard practice where sensitive information is being used in a report.
“However, in one of these case studies – Case Study J – a factual detail has been altered which should not have been.
“The case study mistakenly said that concerns were raised around fracking. They were actually raised around a form of environmental extremism – but it had nothing to do with fracking.
“Although this change was made with the good intention of protecting the individual’s identity, ultimately if was the wrong thing to do. We apologise for this error.
“Because of a genuine fear that this vulnerable child cold be identified, we cannot give more specific details about the type of extremism.”
The report, commissioned by the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, was designed to improve social cohesion across the region. The conclusion included a recommendation to submit it as the Greater Manchester response to the Government’s Green Paper consultation on the Integrated Communities Strategy.
The Green Party peer, Baroness Jones, told The Guardian:
“To potentially drag the name of fracking activists through the mud like this is totally unacceptable. We should not stand by and watch while environmental campaigners are discredited in this way.
“Disguising the identity of a vulnerable young person and ensuring appropriate safeguards are in place is of course very important, but we must also make sure we are not wrongly implicating activists in this fashion.”
Anti-fracking campaigners reacted angrily in 2016 when opposition to fracking was listed alongside terrorist organisations, including the IRA, Al Quaeda, the PKK and ISIL, in official counter-extremism documents.
The police monitoring group, Netpol, recently won a case in its challenge to establish how many anti-fracking campaigners have been referred to Channel. Five police forces refused to respond to a question asked in Freedom of Information requests, citing “national security”.
But in June, a tribunal ruled that police could not use this reason and ordered the police forces to respond to the requests. Netpol said today that it was still waiting.
Swapping fracking
A Freedom of Information request has revealed some details of how the case study falsely accused anti-fracking activists of “grooming” the teenager.
According to correspondence released in response, the author of the report (name redacted) was concerned that the original case study might identify the teenager.
Eleven days before the report was released, the author, employed by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, contacted someone (name also redacted) who knew the teenager and asked for advice.
The contact replied the following day:
“People working in [redacted] could easily work out who this is as it was such an unusual – [redacted].
“I wonder if the subject matter being changed might help. [redacted]
“Would it work to changing it to something like ‘anti-fracking’ or something like that? The methodologies of grooming and being ‘pulled into that world etc would be the same but it would be harder for someone reading it to make the connection to the real case of both the [redacted] matter were different.”
The report author replied within seven minutes with a new version of the case study. The author wrote:
“Thank you for your quick response. I completely share your concerns. Your idea around changing the motivation is a good one – I have changed to anti-fracking (please see below), what are your thoughts on the edit?”
Within 16 minutes the contact replied:
“Yes that feels more comfortable and less identifiable.”
The contact suggested another change to the case study text, suggesting that the teenager became known to activists by attending a local protest or signing a petition”.
The FOI request was made by John Hobson, a Lancashire anti-fracking campaigner. He has asked the Greater Manchester Combined Authority to reconsider its decision not to identify the report author.
Categories: policing
DRILL OR DROP? 
Simply shameful, but what is equally shameful is the glee with which [edited] Backing Fracking, FORGED and Geza Tarjanyi have leaped to repeat the calumny.
We’ll look forward to their apologies.
What did I say, this whole debacle is just another false flag attempt to demonise the environmental protection movements and are now totally revealed in their true colours just like the previous smear fear attempts of the fake “poisoning the dog” and “vandalising the rig” utter nonsense.
Utterly disgusting and quite deliberate demonization of the environmental protection movements.
Nothing less than a false flag attack.
What becomes clear from this is the depths to which these anti antis will sink to get their way, and it is obvious now that anything goes to achieve that, so we must treat every subsequent attack with the same knowledge.
It’s all a sham, a fraud and a smear campaign, and that is all it is.
Wake up ladies and gentlemen, these people will stop at nothing and this proves it.
No Phil – I don’t think it’s a false flag attack – that would suggest that the authorities conspired to groom this child so as to pass the blame onto anti-frackers. I think this episode is simpler than that. A child was apparently groomed, but to protect it’s identity in this case study, the interpolated totally unnecessary “detail” about anti-fracking. They didn’t need to do that – they could simply have left the activist area concerned vague and few would have read this case study anyway.
Now, not only do the report’s authors stand accused of deliberately and falsely tarnishing the reputations of anti-fracking protesters, but they have drawn attention to this child in a way which is totally irresponsible. This is far worse than incompetence and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority needs to investigate what happened here and take appropriate action to ensure it ever happens again.
Hi Refracktion, i would say the false flag, is the deliberate miss reporting to demonise protesters against fracking.
Like all the false flag events we see around us, the original event may or may not be a genuine event, with genuine consequences, but the false flag event is in the deliberate misreporting of it to demonise a person, persons, organisation, or country as if they are responsible when they are not.
That is what i mean by a false flag event, and as you say, to drag a 14 year old child into such machinations is simply disgusting and highly dangerous for the child.
The fact that there are “reporters” presumably following orders or being prompted by whatever fashion, is more indicative of the governmental, media and industry descent into desperation and manipulation than anything else.
So I stick to what I said, I don’t know the true circumstances that led to this, we probably never will, but the subsequent deliberate smearing of the anti fracking protesters can be followed up.
I think we should demand a front page apology from the Guardian and other rags that pushed this out.
[Comments removed by moderator]
Oh, the irony. Environmental extremists getting their knickers in a twist over other environmental extremists coercing an impressionable youngster using the same kind of techniques adopted by most environmental extremists.
What a messy story.
Probably a little difficult for you to understand , perhaps get a grown up to help explain it to you.
Doh Mr Audi! The point of the story is that anti-fracking protesters are NOT environmental extremists but have been deliberately wrongly portrayed as such in this report.
Try to keep up, you should be able to go faster than this in that car. 😂
Divide and rule, weaken and conquer, love and enslave, these are three tenets of politics.
If it is true then it is shocking bad. Why the Guardian of all people hasnt taken the article down if it is untrue.
It is true TW and it IS shockingly bad. The Guardian have issued a follow up story and added a warning to the original article headline stating “After this story was published, misleading claims in the anti-extremism report on which it was based came to light: read the updated news here”
The Daily Telegraph however have failed to correct or remove their version of the story in spite of repeated requests, since the deception was uncovered, to the journalist concerned (Francesca Marshall) and her newspaper to correct it. I do hope it is not in today’s print version. That really would be naughty of them wouldn’t it?
The print version of the Daily Telegraph, dated 31/7, carries the original story, uncorrected.
The Telegraph’s web version of the story https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/30/14-year-old-student-referred-anti-terror-programme-groomed-fracking/ now has an update at the top and a link to a new story which was posted at 1:55 pm today.
Paul – the Telegraph have behaved very badly here in my opinion and they have “form” as well as you can see here https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/ruling/?id=01440-17
I understand that several complaints have now been lodged with IPSO relating to this latest episode.
Speaking as someone who is a survivor of child abuse and someone who knows many others who have also suffered I am appalled at this attempt to link anti fracking protests and child grooming . Can you imagine how much hatred stories like this can cause ? Those who choose to twist the truth to further an evil agenda need to be ashamed , whether they are police , councils or just someone who adds flippant comments here . The lowest of the low . Much like the dog poisoning story an obvious attempt to anger the public into forming an opinion based on lies .
Thanks Jono, and bravely said too, i am sorry you had to go through that and congratulations on being survivor, many do not get that far.we forget the effects of child abuse when some on here only seek to make political point scoring out of it, and ignore the reality of what it does to survivors of such horrors.
I am sure this whole episode was designed to demonise anti fracking environmental protectors and even if retractions are made, it won’t be front page news and be just a few words buried in some back page.
The telling thing is, that the subject is a can of worms for government and the industry, and it has probably opened some very carefully locked back doors and that needs to be further investigated.
With the work I do, certain things become horribly apparent, that child abuse is endemic from the top and higher and right down to the dregs of society.
It took a long time for me to even understand and come to terms with such things, but finding out how deep it went into formerly trusted systems, was probably the worst most horrifying realisation I have ever had.
We are now trained to look for signs, changes of behaviour, mood, depression, anger, in order to trigger further investigation. Then it is out of our remit and specialist teams take over.
It is one of the worst crimes that human beings can commit, and for these false flag crows to try to smear accusations, whilst not doing anything about it themselves, speaks of the most disgusting volumes.
This can not be passed off as inconsequential, it has a lot to say about our society today, relating to press coverage, social media, false news and institutional bias.
As Refracktion has explained well, it seems clear that in the grooming case the newspapers reacted to what was indeed published, not just as a press release but a released full report. The Guardian quotes the original version. This has now been changed to “Aaron 14 year old “A” star pupil was referred to the Channel programme by his school, due to concerns about his extreme beliefs in relation to a form of environmental extremism.” Reference to fracking has been removed.
The Guardian has changed its story, in response to the alteration of the published report. (Not so the Telegraph, which has still not published a retraction.)
There are two major concerns here. The first is that the GMCA report still maintains that “The child continued to engage with the local activists via social media, including through the ‘dark web’ and local partners were struggling to identify a tactic which would effectively disrupt this behaviour and protect Aaron.” This does indicate we should rightly be concerned about impact and misuse of social media.
But secondly this grooming story (In a report for GMCA by the Greater Manchester Preventing Hateful Extremism and Promoting Social Cohesion Commission) indicates a fault not with the media but with the producers of the report. It is to them we should address our anger about this story. We deserve an explanation as why fracking was picked out for the purposes of the report as a form of “extreme environmentalism”. We deserve an explanation of why the author(s) chose fracking, what malignant false news and misleading propaganda led them to this statement. Was it police influence? Clearly the police were involved in this case “The police and other partners have a wealth of disruption tactics at their disposal.” Or was it more general institutional influence? The report states “Some details may have been changed in order to protect the identity(ies) of the person(s) involved.” Are there other examples in this report of further falsification?
In brief – Just WHO was responsible for choosing fracking, and why was it chosen, to falsify the report?
We need an answer to this. It is an absolute disgrace that anti-fracking protestors were falsely maligned. We need an answer from the Mayor Andy Burnham, and his sidekick Baroness Beverley Hughes. Heads should roll. I point the finger at the Commissioners.
DrillOrDrop put very similar questions to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority this morning. The piece will be updated with any response.
Clearly we shouldn’t believe everything that is published in the Guardian. Getting a bit like the Daily Mail. It will be interesting to learn (as Mr Tootill has noted) how this got linked with “fracking”. I expect Ian Crane will enlighten us shortly via Phil C.
Interesting that DOD did not publish this story until the correction. Good call or do they know more?
.. and we certainly shoudln’t believe what we read (still uncorrected) in the Telegraph Paul
Feel free to report it yourself Paul, you certainly didn’t hesitate to publish the original accusation?
In fact i name it your duty to publish any honest revelatory report that Ian R Crane as you are clearly such a fan, or indeed anyone elses reports as your “penance” for your thoughtless publishing of the original comments?
You never know, you might become a dedicated follower of truth fashion or a “discipline” junky yourself?
Ahh, gowan, gowan, gowan, You know you want to.
We all know that the true Environmental Extremists are the fracking industry and the present UK Government!
Looks like they could be getting their perverse way in Lancashire soon! Best top up your insurance cover if you live near PNR, if you are able to!
So, even newspapers fail to tell the truth! Well, neither do the BBC “News” or Sky “News”. Most of the media now want to make news rather than report it-ask Cliff Richard. And social media is worse, and probably a big factor in why the mainstream media have joined in.
300 + arrests and not extremists. See how easy it is to do?
No wonder we have a rubbish load of politicians-they can also state any old twaddle and still get it reported as “sense” by someone.
Perhaps, if Guardian journalists spent a bit more time researching their stories and a bit less time trailing around TV studios trying to whip up support for anti Trump protests, the public would get more value?
Approximately 85,000 people are convicted of drink driving related offences each and every year in England and Wales alone. Car drivers are extremists. See how easy it is to be stupid?
I know were I to be arrested whether I would prefer to be arrested for peaceful demonstration in pursuit of my environmental and democratic ideas, or whether I would be arrested for putting my community’s lives and well-being at risk. And I haven’ even mentioned driving yet in that sentence. And fortunately I don’t work for a fracking company.