In the early 1990s Mr Parnell and his wife adopted two lovely daughters from Stockport Council. This was an out of area adoption from Wigan Council. Stockport were paid to place them. One of his daughters had the wrong details on her official documents, so if he took her to A & E she didn’t officially exist. He asked for this problem to be put right. In addition, the girls had had a terrible time with their birth parents. At first the family was given excellent counselling from After Adoption but despite receiving £600,000 to fund this, Stockport Council stopped allowing the family to have the counselling.
The girls behaviour deteriorated. I don’t want to go too much into this for the sake of the lovely girls, but children who have had a bad start in life need a little longer to grow up. The Parnell family home life became hell. No-one told the girls or Mr & Mrs Parnell for 10 months when the children’s birth mother died.
Mr Parnell, a gentle, uneducated man, asked for a decade for help for his family. After a decade he decided to stand on the town hall steps until someone did. No help came. He stood there often night and day, winter and summer, attending all meetings he could to ask for help for his family, which was his legal right.
In May 2007 now Lord Goddard became Leader. It states in the Council log that Goddard asks – “can’t we stop him protesting”. That is when the arrests started. Goddard was on the Police Authority. He seemed to be able to use the police force whenever he wanted.
Mr Parnell was charged with assault with a sneeze on a security guard. The CCTV of the incident, which was not allowed to be shown at his trial but was shown at his successful appeal, shows no assault took place.
He was given a CRASBO for this assault and not allowed to pass within 1 mile of the town hall. He couldn’t go to the police station, he couldn’t go to see his solicitor without permission, he couldn’t access the train station or the library – all within 1 mile of the town hall.
They couldn’t stop his democratic right to attend council meetings which he did to calmly and peacefully ask for help for his family. If he tried to leave a council meeting before the end, they called the police and had him arrested for breaching the terms of his CRASBO. I had to beg the police one night not to arrest him for trying to leave a council meeting early.
He has masses of court documents. He kept every document and he gave them to me to publicise what had been done to him.
I kept writing to everyone to try to stop what was being done to him. I wrote to the Chair of the Police Authority, the Chief Constable, Keir Starmer – no-one stepped in to stop the horrendous waste of police resources and the horrible things being done to him.
Eventually the Chief Constable stopped him being arrested but the Council still kept calling them out sometimes several times a day in a huge waste of police resources. The same councillors often complained at area committees of the poor police response to other crimes.
When the council could no longer rely on the police to detain him, they started to hassle him over non-existent council tax arrears. They would take payments from his current account and pay off fictional arrears from past years. When up for this in the Magistrate’s Court the magistrate would not look into “history” so they penalised him in this way without him having any recourse to justice.
I tried to act on his behalf to sort out his council tax. The Freedom of Information Officer, Clare Naven, would not accept my letter of authority to act on his behalf. She said she would write to him to get another one. She didn’t write the letter. Eventually they allowed me to act on his behalf in a half hearted manner, but it was too late – he was dying.
The Citizen’s Advice Bureau was in the Council office which his CRASBO banned him from entering. If he did he faced 5 years in prison for each offence. Please remember this man was completely innocent and the police have confirmed this in writing.
They called him to a meeting one day, phoned his home after he had left home to say the meeting was cancelled and then arrested him for entering a council building without permission when he turned up for the meeting which he didn’t know had been cancelled.
This persecution carried on until his death aged 58.
The building mentioned in his CRASBO which he wasn’t allowed to enter was knocked down and a new one built at a cost of £12m. The CPS said the new building was the old one re-named and continued to arrest him for entering it.
Andrew Stunell MP and his potential replacement – Lisa Smart telephoned Mr Parnell’s widow twice to ask her to vote LibDem and also called at her house to ask the same thing. You can imagine her distress.
This is a huge story with masses of documentary evidence. I have just tried to give an overview.
