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…