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Daily Mail Comment: Time to Rethink the ?100m Abuse Inquiry

Daily Mail
August 6, 2016

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3726335/DAILY-MAIL-COMMENT-Time-rethink-100m-abuse-inquiry.html

What a farce!

As Dame Lowell Goddard becomes the third chairman in two years to resign from Theresa May’s child abuse inquiry (or was she pushed?), this ill-fated exercise is once again up in the air.

The Mail has deep compassion for victims of paedophilia, who often bear mental scars throughout their lives.

But with the departure of this deeply unimpressive New Zealand judge, who spent three of her first 12 months in the ?500,000-a-year job on holiday or overseas, it is surely time to take stock.



Leave aside problems in finding a competent chairman with no links to Establishment figures under suspicion.

From the outset, the inquiry has been blighted by its dauntingly wide brief to cover more than 60 years and investigate dozens of institutions.

If it goes ahead as planned, it is expected to last at least a decade, at a cost of ?100million. With austerity Britain meant to be tightening its belt, this is money the country surely cannot afford to spend digging around in the distant past.

As the message has got through that child abuse must be taken hugely seriously, shouldn’t resources be focused on stamping it out and ensuring victims get the support they need?

At the very least, the scope of the inquiry should be narrowed. Otherwise, there’s a danger that the calls to abandon it altogether will become unanswerable.

Whipping up a crisis?

Was it really wise of Mark Carney to rush through his economic stimulus so soon after the referendum?

On the plus side, it is generally advisable to pre-empt difficulties rather than react to them later.

But isn’t there a danger that the Bank Governor’s intervention will heighten the impression of crisis, shamefully whipped up by disgruntled Remain supporters?

After all, economic indicators in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote were bound to reflect uncertainty.

Might it not have been better to wait for the dust to settle before rushing to cut interest rates and make ?100billion in cheap money available to the banks?

Indeed, there’s a disturbing touch of grandstanding about Mr Carney. Though he is meant to be utterly independent, he played a disgracefully politicised role in the Remain campaign.

If stimulus is needed – and Brexit is only a minor factor in global uncertainty – this is a job for Chancellor Philip Hammond, with well-targeted tax cuts and vitally needed infrastructure projects, neglected by his predecessors. For Britain’s sake, the Mail trusts he is working on it.

A posturing protest

As the paper that risked prosecution to bring Stephen Lawrence’s racist killers to justice, the Mail has done more than most to ram home to the police that Black Lives Matter.

But we have no sympathy whatever with the posturing protesters who chanted this American slogan yesterday, while making outrageously exaggerated claims of British police racism, as they brought transport to a standstill on motorways and at airport entrances.

Under any circumstances, their attempt to disrupt working lives and hard-earned holidays would be contemptible.



But they demeaned themselves and their cause further by timing their protest to mark the anniversary of the police shooting of Mark Duggan, the gun-toting gangster whose death sparked an orgy of arson and shoplifting in 2011.

In the name of decency, how could they equate the shooting of a dangerous criminal here with recent unprovoked violence against black people by US police?

If the protesters disrupt transport again, police should not hesitate to clear them off the streets.

 

 

 

 

 




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