Delays at Knowl View down to MP!

IN a letter in last Saturday's Rochdale Observer Rochdale MP, Simon Danczuk, was accused of holding up the inquiry into what happened at Knowl View Residential School in the 1980s and 90s.  Les May, a Rochdale resident, wrote to remind readers 'that had it not been for two interventions of Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk we would already have known a lot more about what happened at Knowl View School' with regard to the allegations of sexual abuse.

Mr May claimed that an early 'inquiry was abandoned after the publication in April of "Smile for the Camera" which Mr Danczuk co-authored.'  He wrote:
'in this book Mr Danczuk conflated two quite separate issues, the report into the health issues surrounding homosexual activities between the boys at the school, and the question of whether Cyril Smith continued the sort of activities he had been involved in at Cambridge House and which had already been revealed by Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP) in 1979.'

After this book's publication a second inquiry was started with more scopeand to report at the end of July.

Yet again, this second inquiry was halted when Danczuk introduced the so-called Dicken's 'dossier' after a Parliamentary Select Committee Inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation in early July this year. 

The problem is that these delays benefit the political pundits who want to seek continuous publicity for themselves; it benefits the Home Secretary and the government to have the results of the investigations placed beyond the next General Election; and the delays produced by 'overarching inquiries' help to provide journalists and newspapers with constant copy:  the people who suffer from all this are the victims who never seem to get closure.