The Guardian View on an Establishment Child Sex Abuse Ring: No More Excuses, No More Delays

The Guardian
March 17, 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/17/guardian-view-establishment-child-sex-abuse

Acording to the Newsnight, the Met had video evidence of sex parties involving Cyril Smith MP and a senior figure from the security services abusing boys, but a senior officer threatened to prosecute any officer who revealed this. Photograph: John Giles/PA

Piece by piece, the evidence mounts of a high-level paedophile ring in the 1970s and 80s involving figures from what used to be called the establishment: MPs, diplomats, officials and senior police officers. On Tuesday, the Independent Police Complaints Commission announced that it was to supervise an inquiry into the Metropolitan police’s failure to continue inquiries into child abuse because they involved public figures. Later that day, BBC Newsnight alleged that an extensive investigation conducted by the Met in 1981 secured video evidence of sex parties involving the Liberal MP Cyril Smith and a senior figure from the security services abusing teenage boys from care homes. But – according to the Newsnight report – the Met’s investigation was abruptly halted by an unknown senior officer who threatened to prosecute under the Official Secrets Act any officer who revealed what they had found.

If this charge is substantiated, it marks another new low in the wretched history of the failure to protect victims of abuse. But this would be abuse of a different and even darker kind, for it would amount to a grotesque misappropriation of state power. The Official Secrets Act has only one purpose: to protect the security of the state. It is the weapon of last resort, to be employed only in extremes. It is almost beyond belief that it could have been used to stifle an investigation into a crime as terrible as the sexual abuse of children by adults.

There is a second point. Whatever was threatened more than 30 years ago cannot be prayed in aid now. Officers are reportedly telling MPs that they are still worried that they might be prosecuted under the Act. At a session before the cross-party home affairs committee on Tuesday afternoon, the home secretary, Theresa May, agreed to demands that there should be a guarantee of immunity for any officer who gave evidence. Although ultimately it is a matter for the attorney general and the new chair of the child sexual abuse inquiry, the New Zealand judge Justice Lowell Goddard, a precedent has already been set in the inquiry into the Belfast boys home, Kincora, the subject of a separate inquiry. But it is very hard to understand how the threat of prosecution could have power over any officer with evidence of such a crime. Are they really claiming that the state, after all that we have learned over the past few years, is still so wilfully blind to the nature of child abuse that it might threaten official secrets prosecutions in order to stifle the truth?

The persistence of the rumours and the steadily growing number of sources of allegations has shifted the claims from the realms of conspiracy theory into a much more substantial case. The proper response is a vigorous and powerful inquiry. But it is still hard to be confident that such an inquiry is going to happen. Justice Goddard, after a fleeting visit to London to meet Mrs May last month, has gone home again. Last week her terms of reference were slipped out in a written answer to the Commons. She will not actually sit down to decide her priorities and assess the powers she needs until after Easter, nearly 10 months after the home secretary first promised a full investigation into the failure of state and non-state institutions to protect vulnerable children from abuse.

Among the first decisions Justice Goddard will have to make, when she does finally get her knees under the desk, is the relationship between her inquiry and the IPCC. The IPCC has acquired a significant role now that it is supervising the Met investigation into 14 allegations that its officers suppressed or hindered inquiries and covered up offences involving MPs or their own officers. That investigation runs alongside its inquiry, launched last autumn, into other allegations about a derailed investigation into a 1980s establishment paedophile ring. But the IPCC is tainted by old failures. Doubts linger that it is well enough resourced to oversee such a sensitive and complex investigation.

Theresa May has made up a lot of ground in the past year. She has slowly built a relationship of trust with survivors of abuse. After the election, her successor must nurture it. Not only are there many old and terrible secrets still to uncover, but the fight against the abuse of children is far from over.