WHAT A WHITEWASH
Theresa May's predictable grandstanding announcement last
week announcing an inquiry into the growing clamour for something to be done
about allegations of a paedophile ring operating within Parliament was a
classic Establishment dodge. It was a case study in media management as will
her appearance before the Home Affairs select committee today (Monday 14 July).
Perhaps there is some irony in that 14 July is Bastille Day, celebrated in
Republican France as the beginning of the end of absolute Monarchy and
preceding the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen which enshrined the concept of free individuals protected equally by
Law. Not exactly what we see being carried out in terms of the legal
investigations into the vile abuse of small children by MP's.
By widening the scope of the inevitable inquiry to include
the BBC the NHS, the Churches and other unnamed 'Public Bodies' the Home
Secretary has sown the seeds of a strategy designed deliberately to produce a
huge amount of dust and smoke in which the truth will be hidden. Crucially she
has succeeded in removing the spotlight from Parliament and close scrutiny of
MP's.
She even admitted that the over-arching inquiry by the
Establishment Peer, Baroness Butler-Sloss, a former failed Tory parliamentary
candidate and retired Family Division Judge, would not be completed before the
next general election. So the public have been cheated from having details of
Parliamentary Paedophiles revealed before deciding how to vote next year.
Butler-Sloss is the sister of the late Sir Michael Havers, who sat in the
Thatcher Cabinet alongside Lord Brittan, who has admitted as Home Secretary he
received the now “lost” Dickens dossier into allegations of a paedophile ring
involving MPs. Sir Michael Havers was the Attorney General under the Thatcher
government when many of the allegations were made.
In the early 1980s, Sir Michael was accused by the
campaigning MP Geoffrey Dickens of a cover-up when he refused to prosecute Sir
Peter Hayman, a diplomat, former MI6 deputy director, and member of the
Paedophile Information Exchange, (PIE) a lobbying organisation for child
abusers. We now know that another PIE member has confirmed that he kept PIE
files, records and membership details in the Home Office itself. Home Office
advisers argued in 1979 that the age of consent be lowered from 16 to 14 and
called for a reduction in the length of prison sentences for paedophiles.
The members' hotline for the Paedophile Information Exchange
(PIE) rang inside the Home Office where
Steven Smith, a convicted paedophile and chairman of PIE who worked in security
in Whitehall, would tell callers where to go for the next meeting to discuss
issues including decriminalising sex with children as young as four.
Baroness Butler-Sloss was forced to issue an apology in 2012
after making crucial errors in a previous inquiry into two paedophile priests.
The peer was put in charge of a “flawed” investigation into how the Church of
England handled the cases of two ministers in Sussex who had sexually abused
boys. Eight months after her report was published Butler-Sloss (a devout
Anglican) had to issue a six-page addendum in which she apologised for
“inaccuracies” which, she admitted, arose from her failure to corroborate
information which was given to her by senior Anglican figures as part of the
inquiry.
The separate inquiry into the hundreds of missing Home
Office files has now been fast tracked and due to report in a few weeks time
before the Parliamentary summer recess by Mark Sedwill a career civil servant
who was involved in the notorious Iraq War 'dodgy dossier' used to illegally
invade Iraq in 2003. The evidence of
former police officers suggests Home Office files based on the original Dickens
dossier were snatched by MI5. This
report has already been discounted in advance and heavily spun by the
governments' media managers to downplay expectations. The files have gone and
there are no records of why, how or who was involved in their disappearance or
destruction. The Establishment have started another inevitable media narrative
about the need to avoid 'witch-hunts' amid the tabloid newspapers climate of
hysteria and wild allegations.
There are also concerns about the appointment of NSPCC Chief
Executive Peter Wanless to assist with the over-arching inquiry. The NSPCC is
well-connected within Parliament and patrons include: The Queen, Knights of the
Realm, various House of Lords members, the Duke of Westminster and The Bishop
of London. The notorious case of the murder of Victoria Climbie in Haringey,
North London in 2000 was widely reported as a failure by the council social
services and in particular two social workers. Later it was revealed that a
doctor had failed to spot a broken spine, but hidden among the hysteria at the
time was the role of the NSPCC.
Victoria had been referred to an NSPCC-run family centre in
north London seven months before her death, by which time she was being
regularly beaten, tortured, trussed up in a bin bag and left in freezing baths.
No one from the centre went to see her, and when forced to present evidence to
the subsequent inquiry the NSPCC revealed it had lost crucial documents and
altered case files raising questions about an attempted cover-up to avoid bad
publicity. The NSPCC is a very wealthy charity but in recent years it has
closed down direct services to support children at risk. Less than half of its
annual multi-million pound budget is spent on direct child protection work, the
rest is spent on publicity, campaigning and fundraising.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a moral panic emerged
over alleged ritual satanic abuse. The NSPCC provided a publication known as
'Satanic' Indicators' to social services
around the country that was been blamed for some social workers panicking and
making false accusations. The most prominent of these cases was in Rochdale in
1990 when up to 20 children were taken from their homes and parents after
social services believed them to be involved in satanic or occult ritual abuse.
The allegations were later found out to be false. The case was the subject of a
BBC documentary which featured recordings of the interviews made by NSPCC
social workers, revealing that flawed techniques and leading questions were
used to gain evidence of abuse from the children. The documentary claimed that
the social services were wrongly convinced, by organisations such as the NSPCC,
that abuse was occurring and so rife that they made allegations before any
evidence was considered
Frank Furedi Professor of Sociology at the University of
Kent branded NSPCC a "lobby group devoted to publicising its peculiar
brand of anti-parent propaganda and promoting itself." Tory MP Gerald
Howarth is on record as describing it as "completely incompetent".
So there we have it. A knee-jerk response from the Home
Secretary with a brief to play this scandal long, spend lots of money and
appoint plausible individuals to conduct so-called independent investigations.
But scratch below the glossy spin and we reveal an inquiry staffed by Establishment
people with less than unblemished records in their professionalism and
accuracy. But they can be depended upon to deliver the goods and stick to their
brief which is to convey the appearance of competence while further muddying
the waters, inadvertently protecting child abusers, and potentially wrecking
several on-going police investigations closing in on bringing alleged
Paedophiles to face justice in criminal trials for the most heinous offences
against vulnerable children.
The award-winning journalist Philip Knightly coined the
phrase - Truth: The First Casualty of War, in his book of the same name about
the way The Establishment managed information about the First World War
debacle. He said: "More deliberate lies were told than in any other period
of history, and the whole apparatus of the state went into action to suppress
the truth". At the moment we are witnessing another example of The
Establishment in action doing what it has been doing for centuries, making sure
that it protects its own and prevent the people from knowing the truth.
Steven Walker
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