UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour
theguardian.com, Tuesday 8 July 2014
Powerful people in the 1980s targeted children’s homes that served as a “supply line” for paedophiles, a former health minister has claimed.
As a former child protection manager warned that a “powerful elite” of at least 20 prominent figures carried out the “worst form of abuse”, the former health minister Lord Warner described the sexual abuse of children as a “power drive”.
Warner, a health minister in 2003-07 who conducted an inquiry into child abuse in Birmingham in 1992, spoke out after the home secretary, Theresa May, announced a national inquiry into how the authorities may have ignored child abuse at Westminster.
The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said the government’s approach had been dilatory and piecemeal. He said: “The inquiry needs to recommend child protection measures for the future. If the government does all those things, we will support them.”
He said: “They have been slow and piecemeal getting to this point. I think victims and others need to be able to give testimony and give their evidence.
“It is vital that the inquiry is sufficiently comprehensive and over-arching. The important thing is to get at the truth to get at justice, to get what happened in institutions, and to get the right answers for the future. The appalling examples of child protection abuse we have seen must never be allowed to happen again.”
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