Part Two of today’s Slog Special unveils the key four-letter word:
FEAR
Masons perform odd rituals, bullies choose positions of power, and exclusive clubs tolerate unspeakable practices. But the central truth I have arrived at in relation to institutional paedophilia is that the conspiracy element stops where the perpetrators end, and the tolerators begin. One simple thing stops most senior public in public life from opening up the sexual abuse of children in our systemic lives: fear of unforeseen consequences.
They are rarely if ever ‘in on it’. The reality is, they are scared of how far the tentacles will reach.
The chronic need to bully, cause suffering to, and control small people is the driving psychological background to most paedophiles hiding in the system. Some systems give them better excuses to be with children, and more protection because of the respect paid to the job title. This is why the presence of rape-rings is almost entirely restricted to teaching, the priesthood, childcare (private or social), charities, local government, juvenile correction centres, and – more rarely – the police, Westminster politics, and show business.
Although times are changing, cops, MPs, priests and celebrities get more respect than most, and more power than most. Teachers, social workers and care-home leaders get more access than most.
The reason why the Ed Balls Vett & Bar system would’ve been useless is because paedophiles are already in the system, and already armed with a dozen excuses for their behaviour.
The reason why Ed Balls felt the need to vett 12 million people was because he had no idea at all how prevalent the problem might be.
The reason why our Westminster legislators are running away from the issue yet again is because they have no idea where this trail of slime will lead.
And last but not least, the reason why our security services are heavily involved is because they have no idea whether paedophiles in their midst have been turned on the basis of foreign blackmail.
These are all incredibly powerful reasons for keeping the lid on things. The reason is rarely a conspiracy of evil. The overwhelming motive is terror of the collateral damage that might be done by the unpredictability of the explosion.
But while those protecting the perpetrators may not be evil (if indeed anyone is) their methods will be ruthless. The entire social contract between government and citizen could be blown apart. Or not. The thing is, nobody knows.
What we have here is the equivalent of a 400 megaton nuclear UXB. What we therefore also have is those in charge wishing to bury it elsewhere a long way from them….and shooting anyone who tries to stop them. I’m serious about this: I have met senior security services staff. Very often, they see their job as not dissimilar to shooting any male passenger likely to start a rush for the lifeboats. (You’ll meet people in the American Federal Reserve and the Bank of England with similar ideas).
A few awkward buggers in this world think the risks are massively over-stated, and even if they aren’t, the truth and the survival of the citizen’s dignity are always more important than any State….and almost always more important than any State secret.
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Where might Britain’s burgeoning paedophile scandals go from here? Much depends on what Tom Watson decides to do: but in the general scheme of things, the entire impetus will drain away unless the full extent of the problem is at last audited in some way.
Without more names coming into the public domain, we will simply get public boredom, and a return to abnormality. Which is why the legal, political, justice, security and policing forces at the State’s disposal will use every media contact and ruse to suggest that speculation based on circumstantial evidence should immediately cease. (And why the braying for more blogosphere controls is already well under way).
Tonight I am going to suggest more names: not as “random smearing” (the erroneous government description that has now replaced “innuendo” as the Establishment drivel of the hour)…but because, in some important ways, outright publication can give those around whom clouds exist the chance not to sue and injunct, but to present powerful evidence for the false nature of those suspicions.
Exactly, if I may say so, as Lord McAlpine did last weekend. For he is, be assured, a man with far more access to the front pages of our press and website media than the 2010 estimated 5% of boys and fully 18% of girls likely to suffer sexual abuse in the care home system. Their only recourse last year – all 10,000 of them – was to go on the run. So let us from here on leave the la-la land of Boris Johnson behind us, and accept that the care system playing fields are rather more uphill for the victims than they are for sexual sadists who prey upon them.
I hope that fair-minded readers who still inhabit the ordinary realism of Planet Earth will see that I am reporting doubts in what follows, rather than blindly accusing.
As I have said, the tentacle lengths are unknown even to the dissemblers. Let’s examine what they fear about this potentially giant squid.
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I will start if I may with politics. Tom Watson has made specific reference to evidence collected during 1992. So that is most likely to apply to high-profile Prime Ministerial aides in the more immediate history preceding it.
‘Sir Peter Morrison II’ for example could turn out to be Leon Brittan, a former Thatcher Minister who shuffled off to the EU during her reign of error. I have heard his name mentioned so many times by civil servants, MPs, hacks and others of the great and good in relation to paedophile tendencies, it seems to me that either somebody truly pernicious has it in for the bloke, or there could be some basis for the accusation. I honestly don’t know. He was an usher at Ken Clarke’s wedding: hardly the sort of connection justifying the booking of Court time at the Old Bailey. But he was a man spending much time in Europe…and the ultra-safe diplomatic bag import of naughty photos therefrom is part of what (I suspect) Tom Watson is driving at.
What of Ken Clarke himself? Former child actor Ben Fellows has accused Kenneth of grabbing his willy, and Mr Clarke has twice strenuously denied Ben’s allegation as “complete fabrication”. He would, wouldn’t he etc etc, but for me he doesn’t fit the description of ‘a former PM’s aide before 1992’. One is, of course, left wondering therefore why Ben Fellows would make such a thing up. And perhaps why Mr Clarke, along with Ed Balls and Harriet Harman, never moved against those paedophile supply warehouses otherwise known as the Secret Family Courts when he had the opportunity. Finally however, call me cynical, but there are numerous members of the Parliamentary Conservative Party who would rejoice at the sight of Kenneth Clarke being consumed by scandal.
But the European Union is attractive to chaps of eclectic sexual interests for all kinds of reasons. Not all of them came from the Tory ranks, and so of course we must be talking about the then Peter Mandelson. Two Times journalists thought they’d got very close to evidence of a Mandy peccadillo five years ago. And very briefly, a Hungarian website did make some truly remarkable allegations about his stamina around the same time. For all I know, both accusations were entirely groundless, and had no links at all to similar circles elsewhere in the EU. But that’s my point: I doubt if any people in the contemporary Parliamentary Labour Party know for sure either. Media officers ponder (as the Tories did with Peter Morrison): “How old were the boys? What was the law about it then?” Uncertainty breeds both caution and cowardice.
First coward out of the Labour Ministerial sprint away from Tom Watson’s enquiries yesterday was Harriet Harman. Ever since her youthfully tolerant madness about the Paedophile Information Exchange, Harman has been the subject of doubts, clouds and rumours about all this. So too has her husband, Jack Dromey – an equally enthusiastic supporter of PIE at the time. Jack is a big-beast Labour fixer. He leads straight back to the Unite Union, whose main Parliamentary mandate he more or less controls. The Unite Union is a powerful supporter of the teachers and social workers. And the Unite union’s vote swung the Leadership Ed Miliband’s way pretty much as Chicago won the US for JFK in 1960
You see what I mean here? I bet Tessa Jowell doesn’t know what truth there is or isn’t to any of these probably baseless rumours. Tell you what: I’d lay 12-1 Ed himself doesn’t know either. We’ve seen Mr Miliband in action before at the start of Hackgate. He waited until the very last minute before piling in on Tom Watson’s side against Newscorp. Because he didn’t know what deals had passed between Gordon Brown, Sarah Brown, and the Murdoch men before Cameron came to power.
This is the way national politics are these days: absolutely nobody trusts anyone else, because nobody knows for sure where truth ends and rumour begins.
But while we’re back here at Newscorp again, let us note that StrangeBenfellows has also lobbed accusations at the Sky News team, using a description that fits Dermot Murnaghan almost perfectly. My instincts tell me that Murnagham is a straight, ambitious bloke who gives off none of the vibes one might expect from a pervert. But it might give the Times and the Sun yet another reason for Sky to remain in the shadows, while the BBC’s Jimmy Savile remains in the limelight. Do the senior executives at Sky know for sure whether all of their anchors are sexually normal? Of course they don’t.
One other phone-hacking side-effect, by the way, was that it started a bitter feud between Newscorp and the Royal Family on the subject of Prince Andrew’s ambassadorial business trips around the world. Andrew has also believed for some time that his daughters were being hacked by the Digger. But others still find the sexual nature of some of the Prince’s male friends decidedly odd too. One has done time for paedophile pimping. The odd scurrilous tidbit has suggested that Andrew himself is an admirer of young flesh.
For a genuine royalist like David Cameron – and probably most of the Establishment – the idea of any sort of investigation leading to a senior royal coming under suspicion would be their worst nightmare. But then three months ago, a highly respected investigative journalist alleged to me that the paedophile website linked to the Groucho Club’s domain was indeed shared by a well-known member of the Windsor dynasty. Oh dear.
As for the Groucho itself, regular Sloggers will know that we’ve been there oft-times before. Its leading light JHJ Lewis illegally employed surveillance cameras there, presumably to spy on his clients. That much has been established in Court. Lewis has in turn never denied the Club’s connection to the paedo-site. And JHJ Lewis is the mysterious sugar-Daddy who bankrolls Jeremy Hunt on his fact-finding missions among the Newscorp subsidiaries of New York and other destinations around the globe.
It is very likely that Jeremy Hunt’s connection by money to alleged tolerance of paedophile online exchanges is nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence. But Mr Hunt is now Britain’s Secretary of State for Health, and in his Parliamentary interest declarations he has gone to some lengths to disguise the identity of his benefactor. Mr Hunt’s ministerial remit includes Mental Health, as well as the treatment of children while in hospital. Before that it centred on the country’s culture, and the Newscorp bid for BSkyB.
Does the Coalition Cabinet know for certain (or even vaguely) that no bomb might explode at some point under one of its members? My answer would be an unqualified “No”. Several of those very close to the Prime Minister during 2011 had – genuinely – no idea as to the guilt or otherwise of Andy Coulson. I know, because I asked them…and I’m convinced they gave me the truth as they perceived it.
On and on they go, these potential tidal waves from the nuclear UXB. What ghastly monsters might they wash up on the shores of Fleet Street and Wapping? Already in this cursory wander, we have gone from Downing Street to Brussels via Hungary and the Unite trade union. From Harriet Harman and Newscorp to Buckingham Palace and the NHS. From Welsh care homes to the Downing Street Cabinet.
And yes, even in that last link there is another shadowy place from which nobody is certain what ghoulish spectres might emerge. For there is a man who in the 1990s was Welsh secretary. Who got himself embroiled in a somewhat unsavoury debate about bedsharing while in the field with a young male colleague two years ago.
David Cameron said nine days ago he would be “appointing a senior independent figure” to look into the way allegations of sexual abuse at North Wellian children’s homes in the 1970s and ’80s were dealt with. The man described above – who is now one of his most senior colleagues – did indeed set up an enquiry into the very same thing during 1996. It heard from 650 people over three years who had been in care during the period after 1974. But as the BBC stated last November 5th, ‘Concerns have now been raised that the remit of the inquiry had been too narrow and that it had failed to consider allegations about children being taken out of the homes’ for the warped pleasure of various nasty persons driving big cars, wearing nice shiny shoes, and inhabiting very large houses in the countryside between Wrexham and Chester.
That man was and is Great Britain’s Foreign Secretary, the Rt Hon Mr William Hague. A very firm favourite of Margaret Thatcher from the day, as a schoolboy himself, he made an impassioned speech at Conference.
Yet again, let me hasten to say that these links are at best tenuous. But in the infernally suspicious mind of a senior, ultra-cautious politician or Military Intelligence spook, such things ring alarm bells. Because once again, the concerned (and involved) observer is 100% deficient in the certain knowledge thing.
* * * * * * * *
In the risk-averse and desperately declining Health & Safety culture we inhabit here in 2012 Cruel Britannia, every senior politico’s instinct is to do nothing, or do nothing beyond a pointless gesture. Thus David Cameron dishes out EU vetos with all the influence enjoyed by the FA over Alex Ferguson, and Ed Miliband declares that a minimum wage increase can be achieved in the world of neocon bourse lunacy he seems happy to accept.
What I’ve been doing in this piece tonight represents a probably uninfluential but nevertheless carefully argued case for once again forcing our political ‘élite’ to go further than they’d like, and investigate those under suspicion…..rather than publicly suspecting the motives of those in search of some kind of truth and justice.
The juvenile bollocks put out by opponents of serious discussion about the nature and extent of endemic sexual rape of the children passing through our ‘care’ system should not be allowed to suffice this time. There is no excuse for injuncting evidenced speculation where the wellbeing of children is concerned. But there is every reason to circumvent the injuncting sociopaths with reasoned argument.
Steven Messham and the 10,000 kids on the run from predators tonight deserve better than House of Commons onanism. Let’s get this sick mess out in the open once and for all, remove the uncertainty, and then make some proper decisions about how to stop it ever again gathering so much power to deprave and destroy.
The Slog 