The cost of endless public inquires
IT has been estimated that the coming overarching
inquiry into historic child sexual abuse presided over by Judge Lowell Goddard
from New Zealand, will last for between five and eight years having cost
perhaps £120 million. By the time it reports
many of the victims may well be dead.
Yet, none of this discourages campaigning and
ambitious politicians like Tom Watson or Simon Danczuk. In some ways their behaviour delayed the
start of the inquiries, by forcing first Baroness Butler-Sloss and later Fiona
Woolf to stand down as presiding judges.
One victim from Lancashire who suffered at the
hands of Cyril Smith told me that he had been approached by a local media
outlet to try to get him to complain about the appointment of Baroness Butler-Sloss,
but that when he had failed to play the role of 'Mr. Angry' the
journalist lost interest.
Today, the journalist Richard Littlejohn in the Daily
Mail writes:
'More than a month has past since it was revealed that detectives had
failed to find a shred of evidence to suggest that there was a VIP paedophile
and murder ring operating in the Seventies and Eighties.... Nothing credible has been unearthed to
support any of these allegations. So why
on earth is this public inquiry continuing – especially as several of its
potential “star” witnesses have been exposed as fantasists?'
Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker are now claiming
that they were sceptical about one of the recently exposed romancers Mr. Fay
claims about Elm Guest House.
Meanwhile, Richard Littlejohn claims 'the lurid allegations [paedo rings and
murder] have been at the centre of an outrageous attempt by Nonce Finder
General Tom Watson to smear leading Conservatives, notably Leon Brittan, as
child molesters and worse.'
But now we know that there has been a major
Scotland Yard VIP murder investigation without any proof that anyone has been
murdered.
And yet, as Littlejohn says the 'Labour M.P., Simon Danczuk, accused
Brittan, during his time as Home Secretary, of covering up a secret dossier
that would have proved the existence of a child abuse conspiracy at
Westminster.'
Littlejohn continues:
'Danczuk's claims, added to the hysteria which surrounded Jimmy Savile,
prompted the Government to set up a full-scale public inquiry into historical
sex abuse in high places. (Yet) [s]ince
then, the case against Brittan has collapsed in spectacular style.'
Clearly Richard Littlejohn believes the Home
Secretary Theresa May was bounced into setting up the current costly Goddard
Inquiry by the tub-thumping of Simon Danczuk and Tom Watson, when he writes:
'This is the public inquiry into “historic” child sex abuse in high
places, which the Home Secretary ordered when the Paedos In High Places panic
was in full Corporal Jones mode.'
That was after Simon Danczuk MP and his aide
Matthew Baker had published their piece of flowery flannel documented in a book
entitled 'Smile for the Camera'.
In a review in Northern Voices No.15, Les May
describes the book as 'a series of assertions and opinions by the authors'. Mr. May writes:
'There's gossip, second and third hand stories originating in bars;
supposedly verbatim accounts of conversations which took place thirty years
ago; accounts which we are led to believe are the authentic voices of men who
had unpleasant encounters with Cyril yet which have a strange sameness about
them; few definite dates; a garbled chronology; the same story apparently told
more than once; misquotation of documents; a seeming absence of proper
methodology; and no indication of how many abused men they interviewed.'
Despite this lonely criticism from people in
Rochdale who have for years closely followed the case of Cyril Smith and Simon
Danczuk, and published comments in the small regional publication Northern Voices,
Danczuk has gone on to win the Contrarian award and plaudits nationally for his impact on public debate mostly owing to the book that was mainly written by Baker.
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