Saturday 12 July 2014

PAEDOPHILES IN UK PARLIAMENT


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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