This news article reports the latest in a long line of damp squib “investigations”. The events date back decades.
Political institutions failed to respond to historical claims of child sexual abuse but there was no evidence of an organised paedophile network at Westminster [ie, the UK Parliament], an inquiry has found.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse said there had been a “significant problem” of deference towards people of public prominence.
Its report said political parties and police had turned a “blind eye”.
No evidence of an organised paedophile network was found – right? Nothing to see here, move on.
So that’s an end to it? I hope not. There’s a reason why no evidence was found. It had (been?) “disappeared” :
A dossier on paedophiles allegedly associated with the British government was assembled by the British Member of Parliament Geoffrey Dickens, who handed it to the then-Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, in 1984. The whereabouts of the dossier is unknown, along with other files on organised child abuse that had been held by the Home Office.
In 2013, the Home Office stated that all relevant information had been passed to the police, and that Dickens’ dossier had not been retained. It was later disclosed that 114 documents concerning child abuse allegations were missing. In July 2014, the Labour Party called for a new inquiry into the way that the allegations had been handled, and the Prime Minister, David Cameron, ordered the permanent secretary of the Home Office, Mark Sedwill, to investigate the circumstances of the lost dossier……
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I’ll say this: if there was nothing of substance in the Dickens dossier, I don’t think for a second that the remarkable coincidence of both copies going missing would have occurred. (Aside from all the other evidence that “disappeared”.)
And so we blunder on. Good Old British Obfuscation will win the day. Don’t worry, no sound chaps of principle (who came from a fine family and went to a bloody good school) will suffer. In a way the argument is kinda academic – you could view it as simply being about whether the abuse was *organised *or not. See: Cyril Smith, MP.
In November 2012, GMP Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood said there was “overwhelming evidence” that young boys were sexually and physically abused by Smith. In April 2014, it was reported that there had been 144 complaints against Smith from victims as young as eight, but attempts to prosecute him had always been blocked……In 2015, it emerged that Smith had been arrested in the early 1980s in relation to these offences, but a high-level cover-up reportedly led to his being released within hours, the evidence destroyed and the investigating officers prevented from discussing the matter under the Official Secrets Act.
And so we blunder on. The Establishment. It’s rotten to the core.
j
RioRico
February 28, 2020, 4:35am
2
I first interpreted the thread title to mean the Westminster Kennel Club, but I’m glad there’s no bestiality here.