Sunday 30 November 2014

CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE: THE TRUTH EMERGES


BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT SHAME

The recent reports from the UK that children may have been murdered by paedophiles — including British MPs known to have visited the notorious Elm Guest House in London — has followed a relentless pattern of allegations that the British Establishment has been sitting on one of the biggest scandals in modern times. 

On Wednesday 26 November, the first conviction under the Operation Pallial investigation into allegations of sexual abuse at the Bryn Alyn Community in Wrexham saw John Allen, the former head of the children’s homes, jailed for 26 offences committed over several decades against children placed in his care. 

Wrexham in North Wales is the area where local MP and paedophile Peter Morrison, a former top aide to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, preyed on vulnerable children. It seems that the testimony of historic victims of child sexual abuse, the various campaigns to obtain evidence and other efforts to force the government to act, have begun to take effect. 

Week after week it seems that more news emerges to confirm the suspicion that the Establishment is working hard to disguise the actions of MI5, Special Branch, Scotland Yard and Parliament in covering up some of the most heinous crimes against vulnerable children.

The vast majority of the public now believe MPs and ministers covered up child sex abuse by other politicians, according to a recent Sunday Mirror opinion poll. 

The ComRes survey found that an overwhelming 77 per cent of those quizzed think politicians “probably” stopped details of scandals involving their colleagues from emerging. Only 5 per cent disagreed.

Of those polled, 73 per cent felt it was right that allegations of child sex abuse from the 1960s and 1970s should be probed by police. But only 30 per cent said they had faith the inquiries announced by the government will uncover the truth. 

There are now so many separate police operations launched in various parts of Britain that there is a danger that testimony, forensic evidence and audit trails of paperwork may be lost. 

The vast numbers of allegations are a sign that adults abused as children have now been empowered to come forward. But it also provides an opportunity for the cover-ups to continue because police cannot cope with the volume of work and mistakes can happen either by default or deliberately.

The father of a murdered boy has claimed that his son may have died at the hands of a Westminster paedophile ring and said Scotland Yard helped cover up the crime. Vishambar Mehrotra, a retired magistrate whose eight-year-old son Vishal was killed in 1981, said he was contacted by a male prostitute at the time who said the boy may have been abducted and murdered by “highly placed” paedophiles linked to the Elm Guest House in south-west London. 

 

Paedophile Liberal MP Cyril Smith is known to have visited the guest house where vulnerable children had been taken from children’s homes in nearby Richmond. Two years ago a former Special Branch police officer, Tony Robinson, said a historic dossier “packed” with information about Cyril Smith’s sex crimes was actually in the hands of MI5 — despite officially having been “lost” decades earlier in the Home Office while led by Leon Brittan. 

Another boy may also have been murdered by the same paedophile ring in 1979. 

Detective Chief Inspector Diane Tudway of the Metropolitan Police told Kevin Allen last Friday that his brother Martin, who disappeared aged 15 in King’s Cross, may have been a victim of the same group of paedophiles including politicians and other high-powered figures, the Independent has reported. 

The case was closed in the early 1980s, reopened in 2009 and then closed again. The Sunday People and the Exaro online investigations website also reported that a man called Nick had told them he saw a Conservative MP strangle a 12-year-old boy to death.

Scotland Yard’s Operation Midland, launched last month and the latest in a number of police investigations into high-level child abuse, has said it is looking into possible homicide connected to its other inquiries.

The British security services are facing more questions over the cover-up of a Westminster paedophile ring as it emerged that files relating to official requests for media blackouts in the early 1980s were destroyed. 

Two newspaper executives recently told the Observer that their publications were issued with D-notices — warnings not to publish intelligence that might damage national security — when they sought to report on allegations of a powerful group of men engaging in child sex abuse in 1984. 

One executive said he had been accosted in his office by 15 uniformed and two non-uniformed police over a dossier on Westminster paedophiles passed to him by the former Labour Cabinet minister Barbara Castle.

The other executive said that his newspaper had received a D-notice when a reporter sought to write about a police investigation into Elm Guest House. Now it has emerged that these claims are impossible to verify or discount because the D-notice archives for that period “are not complete.” 

Two years ago it was revealed that at the inquest into the death of Carole Kasir, who ran the Elm Guest House and died in 1990, evidence was submitted at the coroner’s court that MPs including members of the right-wing Monday Club, judges, a bishop, a local authority children’s services director and a prominent businessman all used the Elm Guest House to rape children who had been procured from Grafton Close children’s home in Richmond. 

A former Scotland Yard commander has admitted he knew of an alleged paedophile ring at Westminster. John O’Connor, once head of the Flying Squad, confirmed there were rumours of a sex scandal and he had been on standby for a major investigation. 

His allegations suggest that Thatcher covered up child abuse allegations against a senior minister in the 1980s. O’Connor said: “I remember when this was first flying about. I think it was in the early 1980s but then it just seemed to die a natural death.”

The Sunday People reported in July that Thatcher had told an up and coming minister: “You have to clean up your sexual act.” 

This followed allegations that the politician had abused young boys. However the same leading Tory was seen by police trying to procure young boys at Victoria railway station four years later.

In another recent development, the focus of attention has switched to Dolphin Square in Pimlico, a complex of flats used almost exclusively by MPs due to its proximity to Westminster. 

One of the VIPs who sexually abused boys at Dolphin Square has been identified as Sir Peter Hayman,  a diplomat and former MI6 deputy director who was also a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange.

The disclosure of his identity has been provided to Scotland Yard for its new investigation into historical allegations that MPs and other prominent people carried out child sex abuse at Dolphin Square. 

Sir Michael Havers was the attorney general under the Thatcher government when many of the allegations were made. In the early 1980s, Havers was accused by campaigning MP Geoffrey Dickens of a cover-up when he refused to prosecute Hayman.

So there are a number of separate pieces of testimony being provided to the police and senior Scotland Yard commanders going back 30 years, as well as statements by former senior detectives, that information was obtained but not acted upon. 

Newspapers were silenced by secrecy laws usually reserved for times of war to prevent espionage. Now these cover-ups by the security services are being reported in the national media. 

Files have gone missing or been seized by MI5 and so it seems as if the full force of the state is engaged in preventing the truth coming out into the open. 

Unless these investigations are allowed access to evidence and the allegations against senior politicians are brought to court, justice for childhood victims of paedophile abuse by MPs will be denied.

Steven Walker is a Unicef Children’s Champion

Wednesday 19 November 2014

PAEDOPHILE INQUIRY COVER-UP



Fiona Woolf was recently appointed by Home Secretary Theresa May as head of the promised overarching inquiry into child sexual abuse after the first appointee, retired judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, resigned. Woolf has now gone as well, after links to former Home Secretary Leon Brittan embarrassed her. Butler-Sloss quit following revelations that her brother Michael Havers, who was attorney-general under Margaret Thatcher, limited the scope of an inquiry into child sexual abuse at the Kincora Children’s Home in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Cabinet minutes from 1983 reveal that Havers ensured that MPs and other prominent public figures were protected by restricting the terms of reference of the inquiry. Anglican judge and one-time failed Tory parliamentary candidate Butler-Sloss, also recently admitted covering up the crimes of Anglican priests while presiding over an inquiry into their paedophile activities. Leon Brittan, is accused by many people of involvement in a cover-up when he was home secretary. He recently admitted that as home secretary he received the now “lost”  dossier on Paedophile MPs compiled by campaigning MP Geoffrey Dickens.


In the early 1980s, Havers was accused by 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. A victim has now named Hayman as the man who sexually abused him in a block of flats used by British MP's. Another PIE member has confirmed that he kept PIE files, records and membership details in the Home Office itself.


What these inquiry appointments confirm again and again is that when it comes to the government appointing one of its own to an important public inquiry, one whose outcome is likely to impact on the legitimacy of the political Establishment, only a safe pair of hands will do. We have seen this over the decades, from the first tribunal under lord chief justice Widgery that covered up the truth around the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry in 1972 all the way through to the Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly in 2003 and the Butler Review into the infamous Iraq war “dodgy dossier” in 2004.


Woolf, like these previous appointees, has impeccable Establishment credentials. She is currently Lord Mayor of the City of London, the heart of British capitalism, which since deregulation in the 1980s, has operated as a giant casino that helped caused a trillion-dollar crash in 2008. Woolf was previously president of the Law Society and is a global ambassador for Britain’s financial services sector.


The City is immersed in financial scandal yet receives the lightest of regulation and no democratic scrutiny. Whether mis-selling of dubious financial products, fiddling Libor interest rates, dodging corporation tax, fixing false foreign exchange rates or money laundering the proceeds of drug cartels, the City is a cesspool of rapacious greed and mind-boggling levels of income.


Yet even the banking crash of 2008 and the wild behaviour of finance traders leading to the collapse of major financial institutions, later bailed out by ordinary workers’ taxes, has failed to prompt meaningful change in an inherently corrupt culture. Woolf took a City of London lobbying team out to Bahrain earlier this year which prompted Amnesty International to report that children are being routinely detained, ill-treated and tortured in the Gulf state.


Scores of children arrested on suspicion of participating in anti-government protests — including some as young as 13 — were blindfolded, beaten and tortured in detention over the past two years following mass unrest in 2011. Others were threatened with rape in order to extract forced confessions. “By rounding up suspected under-age offenders and locking them up, Bahrain’s authorities are displaying an appalling disregard for its international human rights obligations,” said Said Boumedouha, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa programme.


Amnesty posed the following questions: “Did Fiona Woolf’s team make any effort to research the notorious human rights environment in Bahrain before they went out there, and once they were there did they show any interest in finding out more about what was going on?  “Did Fiona Woolf pay any attention to the abuse of human rights and in particular children’s rights in a country which presumably she already knew well from her three years spent there as representative of the lawyers CMS Cameron McKenna?”


Last November, the all-party UK Commons foreign affairs committee urged the Foreign Office to classify Bahrain as a “country of concern” if its human rights record did not improve.
Britain sold Bahrain military equipment worth £18 million in 2013, according to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT). Britain also hopes to sell Bahrain Typhoon jet fighters worth £1 billion. So money counts but children don't.


Patrick Rock, a senior Downing Street aide to David Cameron, was arrested earlier this year on allegations of downloading computerised child abuse imagery. His brief was to advise Cameron on internet security for filtering online pornography. This is just the latest in a series of revelations that began with the exposure of the crimes of late paedophile Liberal MP Cyril Smith, which together prove that paedophiles have had unfettered access to the corridors of power for the past 30 years, while police investigations have been stopped and official inquiries stymied as files go missing, are shredded or seized by the Secret Intelligence Services.

Leader of the House of Commons William Hague has declined MPs’ calls for a debate into Woolf’s appointment. The independent inquiry has been broadened to shift the focus away from Parliamentary Paedophiles, and the Establishment are closing ranks, covering their tracks and making sure the truth will not get out. But the latest revelations involving the alleged murder of a child by a British MP has sent shock waves throughout the UK Political Establishment, and prompted the Police to speed up their investigations into the activities of named Paedophile MP's.

Steven Walker is the author of The Social Worker’s Guide to Child and Adolescent Mental Health


Gyles Brandreth’s new book reveals how the main Westminster party whips conceal many dark secrets about MPs and goes a small way to lifting the lid on an Establishment cover-up of paedophile MPs. In Breaking The Code: Westminster Diaries, Brandreth writes about his time as a Tory whip and confirms previous evidence of a deliberate cover-up of criminal acts against vulnerable working-class youngsters.

Asked about allegations of a paedophile ring operating in Parliament, Norman Tebbit even admitted this summer that “there was probably an Establishment cover-up.” Brandreth, Edwina Currie and others named Peter Morrison as a dangerous paedophile while serving as a Tory MP.
Morrison worked as a government whip himself and was a close adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.


Police have gone on record to say that he was found sexually abusing young boys in public toilets and seen driving away from the notorious Bryn Easten children’s home with a young boy in his car near his parliamentary constituency in north Wales.


The police took no action against him and a previous inquiry led by Judge Waterhouse into organised paedophile abuse in north Wales prevented investigators from following up high-profile suspects.
In Michael Cockerell’s 1995 BBC documentary Westminster’s Secret Service, Tim Fortescue, Edward Heath’s chief whip from 1970 to 1973, stated there was a tried and tested method for cover-ups called the “Dirt Book” system.


Talking about the role of the chief whip, Fortescue said: “Anyone with any sense who was in trouble would come to the whips and tell them the truth … a scandal involving small boys … we would do everything we can because we would store up brownie points … and if, I mean, that sounds a pretty, pretty nasty reason, but it’s one of the reasons because if we could get a chap out of trouble then he will do as we ask forever more.”


Put together with the fiasco of the Home Secretary’s second attempt at appointing as head of the promised overarching child sexual abuse inquiry, it becomes clear how the rich and powerful operate within a secret world where the laws of the land don’t really apply.