Today’s Times exclusive (£walled no links found) about endemic paedophile networks run almost exclusively by the Pakistani community in Britain reveals yet another South Yorkshire plod cover-up. But above all, it is about three things:
1. The obvious dangers of over-sensitive and appeasing political correctness.
2. The scandal of secrecy and lack of accountability in the childcare system.
3. Denialist polemics and blind ambition causing criminal dereliction of duty among senior Ministers of the Crown.
Taking each of these in turn:
A confidential report of 2010 written by the Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board noted that, ‘There are sensitivities of ethnicity with potential to endanger the harmony of community relationships. Great care will be taken in drafting this report to ensure that it embraces Rotherham’s qualities of diversity’.
So to hell with the unwanted embraces being forced upon innocent children which are, let’s face it, abhorrent to almost everyone: the pc agenda must not be seen to be false. And that’s OK, because it’s a cover-up in a good cause. In one astonishing extract, the practice of pimping for paedophiles is airily dismissed as ‘cultural characteristics’.
South Yorkshire police knew of at least five such rings, but chose to ignore the evidence – too busy as always toadying to political fashion.
Such corruption spreads easily when the judicial system itself is constructed in such a way as to invite collusion. This is and has long been the case with the infamous Secret Family Courts, dealing with the progeny of dysfunctional families in camera, and thus (perhaps unwittingly) providing a steady supply of clean young flesh to satisfy the perverted desires of paedophiles.
During the period at issue in this latest in a long line of similar scandals, Ed Balls was the Minister for Families, and Harriet Harman was the Minister for Women. After the 2009 Plymouth nurseries affair, Balls said, “This is a deeply distressing and disturbing case. It is vital we find out how an adult could abuse their position of trust in such an evil way, and we must do everything we can to prevent this kind of abuse happening in the future”. But Ed Balls did nothing.
As to the Secret Family Courts, in 2006 Harman said, “The idea that people are sent to prison without any reports of the proceedings makes even more important the work that we are undertaking with the family courts, and with the important intervention of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, to open them up so that they act in the public interest while maintaining personal privacy.” But she did nothing. Three years later she told the Commons that “regrettably” they was no Parliamentary time left to remedy the situation.
Plenty of time to debate the hunting of vermin, but no time to stop the hunting and grooming of innocent children.
The reality is that Harman had her sights firmly set on becoming Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and Ed Balls wanted to oust Alistair Darling as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Neither minister showed the remotest interest in pursuing a course that would lead to justice. Just like their equally creepy colleague Jack Straw on the issue of Hillsborough, they talked a good game in public, but dealt solely with their own career advancement in private.
The dereliction of duty involved here borders on the criminal. But if you throw together a daft cultural theory, politicised cops, and sociopathic politicians, this is what you get.
Read what The Slog’s predecessor said about the issue three years ago.
The Slog 