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A Real Inquiry Or Another Cover-Up?

Morning Star
November 30, 2015

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-473f-A-real-inquiry-or-another-cover-up

The child sexual abuse investigation has been beset by errors from the off. STEVEN WALKER smells a rat

JUDGE Lowell Goddard, the head of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), has finally confirmed that there will be a separate inquiry into allegations that Westminster MPs were involved in the abuse of vulnerable children.

Her announcement on Friday revealed that another 11 inquiries would be undertaken as part of her work, but the news came after more evidence emerged of the way the Establishment is intent on sabotaging the inquiry.

Peter McKelvie, a former child protection manager whose allegations about child abuse led to a police inquiry in 2012, has resigned as an adviser to the inquiry.

McKelvie helped in the investigation which led to the prosecution of notorious paedophile Peter Righton in 1992.

Righton had links to the Establishment as a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange.

In 2014 McKelvie told BBC2’s Newsnight: “I believe that there is strong evidence — and an awful lot of information that can be converted into evidence if it is investigated properly — that there has been an extremely powerful elite among the highest levels of the political classes for as long as I am alive, and I am 65.

“There has been sufficient reason to investigate it over and over again, certainly for the last 30 years. There has always been the block and the cover-up and the collusion to prevent that happening.

“We are looking at the Lords, we are looking at the Commons, we are looking at the judiciary, we are looking at all institutions where there will be a small percentage of paedophiles and a slightly larger percentage of people who have known about it but have felt that in terms of their own self-interest and self-preservation and for political party reasons it’s been safer for them to cover it up rather than deal with it.”

It has also recently been revealed that evidence from hundreds of people who have submitted names of Establishment paedophiles to the inquiry have been deleted.

The IICSA established an online facility for survivors of child sexual abuse to provide details of their experiences in the hope it would encourage people normally reluctant to disclose distressing experiences.

But the inquiry has admitted that due to “technical problems” a large number of these submissions have been lost.

Journalists have also been thwarted by the Establishment. Hilton Tims revealed that his paper, the Surrey Comet, was issued with a D notice in 1984 — an official warning not to publish intelligence that might damage national security — when he sought to report on a police investigation into the notorious Elm Guest House.

This is the guest house where Cyril Smith MP and other Establishment figures preyed upon vulnerable children taken there from a nearby children’s home.

Don Hale, former editor of the Bury Messenger, has said that Special Branch officers seized a paedophile dossier naming Establishment figures drawn up by Labour peer Barbara Castle in the 1980s.

Officers citing “national security” confiscated the file which listed 16 MPs along with other local VIPs.

In September 2014, it was reported that Mike Creedon, currently the chief constable of Derbyshire Constabulary, claimed that in 1989, while he was serving as a detective sergeant in Leicestershire, senior police chiefs severely limited his enquiries into paedophilia allegations against Lord Greville Janner, despite “credible evidence” that warranted further investigation.

In 2013 after announcing that the Metropolitan Police were about to arrest a former Tory Cabinet minister Commander Peter Spindler, who had been leading the police criminal investigation into organised paedophiles, was taken off the investigation and moved sideways to another job.

He had been investigating the sexual abuse of young children from a council children’s home in Richmond on Thames, where children were procured and taken to a hotel frequented by paedophile Cyril Smith and other MPs.

In November 2012, Tony Robinson, a former special branch officer with Lancashire Police in the 1970s, said that a dossier of sexual abuse allegations against Cyril Smith which police claimed was “lost” was actually seized by MI5.

Robinson said that he was asked by MI5 to send to London a police dossier that had been kept in a safe in his office which he said was “thick” with allegations from boys claiming they had been abused by Smith. 

In another example of this pattern, a former social services official has said his warnings about the threat of a Westminster-based paedophile network were ignored by civil servants because he was told “there were too many of them over there.” 

David Tombs, who ran Hereford and Worcester social services, said he warned the government after the arrest of notorious paedophile Peter Righton in 1992.

“I was disappointed because I was told that I was probably wasting my time, that there were — and the words used were along these lines — that there were too many of them over there.

“Now, I was talking about paedophilia. I was in the Department of Health and the ‘over there’ to me indicated, although the words weren’t used, within Parliament or within government and Whitehall.”

In March 2008, the world’s media gathered outside Haut de la Garenne, a former workhouse and children’s home on Jersey. Police were digging for possible human remains and other evidence after almost 200 former residents of the home alleged abuse, including torture and rape, by staff and visitors over many years, with claims that some youngsters had disappeared.

Jersey’s former chief officer Graham Power and its former deputy chief officer Lenny Harper, the senior officer in the Haut de la Garenne abuse inquiry, recently confirmed their belief that the home was at the heart of a well-protected paedophile ring.

Right from the start attempts to set up an inquiry into paedophile politicians historic abuse of vulnerable children has been beset by a catalogue of errors, inappropriate appointments, delays and failure to prosecute. 

Credible witnesses have been sidelined while it has emerged that files have been lost or seized by MI5. There are too many coincidences in this shambolic pattern of events to shake off the conclusion that an almighty cover-up is taking place.

  • Steven Walker is a Unicef children’s champion.




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