The Power of the Paedos - another high profile case hits the 'never happened' wall?

[David Guyatt]

Baroness Butler-Sloss was behind controversial paedophile ruling

Retired judge who has been appointed the head of a major review of child sex abuse allegations said warnings could not be issued about dangerous paedophiles


One child protection expert said Baroness Butler-Sloss' involvement in the ruling had the unintended consequence of allowing paedophiles to get away with their crimes. Photo: PA


By David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent

8:00PM BST 13 Jul 2014

Baroness Butler-Sloss, the retired judge appointed to investigate claims of an establishment child sex abuse cover-up, was responsible for a controversial ruling which prevented warnings being issued about dangerous paedophiles.

Senior social workers attacked her decision - made when she was an Appeal Court judge - and warned that it would have "major ramifications".

As the Government faced growing pressure to review its decision to appoint Lady Butler-Sloss to the major new inquiry, one child protection expert said the peer's involvement in the ruling had the unintended consequence of allowing paedophiles to get away with their crimes.

Lady Butler-Sloss was appointed by Theresa May, the Home Secretary, last Tuesday to lead an overarching review of allegations of child sex abuse by prominent politicians and other figures in institutions such as the Church and the BBC.

But critics have claimed the judge cannot be impartial because her late brother, a former Attorney General, played a key role in the affair in the early 1980s, and it has also been claimed she kept allegations about an Anglican bishop out of a report she wrote three years ago into a paedophile scandalin the Diocese of Chichester.

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Lady Butler-Sloss led a panel of three judges who overturned a previous ruling which said councils could warn other local authorities about two men who had been found to have had inappropriate relationships with children.
Neither man had been convicted in a criminal court but in civil proceedings judges had ruled they had been involved in improper sexual relationships with children.
One man, who can only be identified by the initial L', then 36, was acquitted of attempting to rape his step-daughter and of indecently assaulting his five children but care proceedings in the family courts later found he had been responsible for sexual abusing three children in his care.
He posed a "significant risk" to the three youngest children, the court held.
Croydon council, in south London, where L had lived, sought to secure L's new address from the court to alert the local authority about his sexual behaviour.
A judge ruled in 1997 that Croydon could go ahead but Lady Butler-Sloss overturned that decision the following year.
Hannah Miller, Croydon's then director of social services, said at the time: "This is a bleak day for social services departments across the country in their crackdown on child sex abuse."
In the second case, a man only known as W' was found by Bournemouth county court in 1997 to pose a risk to children he coached at a junior football league.
A judge found "overwhelming evidence of an unusual and unhealthy relationship" between W and his partner's youngest son.
W was a "risk of significant harm" to his partner's sons and Bournemouth social services put restrictions on his access to the children and asked the courts permission to write warning letters to the football club and the football league.
A judge approved Bournemouth's application but this, too, was overturned by Lady Butler-Sloss.
With Lord Justice Hutchinson and Lord Justice Chadwick she ruled it was inappropriate to disclose information which had emerged as part of family court proceedings under the Children Act. Appeals by L and W were allowed.
Robert Hutchinson, of the Association of Directors of Social Services, said at the time: "This decision has major ramifications for all of us [with] public protection responsibilities. The commonsense approach would be to share information about people considered a danger to children."
The NSPCC also voiced its concern about the ruling, as a spokesman for the children's charity said: "information such as this should be passed on to parties who need to know in orderto give children protection."
[SUB]Jimmy Savile, the BBC entertainer exposed as a serial paedophile[/SUB]
Lady Butler-Sloss went on to become the most senior judge in England and Wales dealing with child abuse and other family issues, as president of the family division of the High Court from 1999 to 2005.
The way local authorities and police shared intelligence about suspected sex offenders was later the focus of an inquiry into the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both 11, in Soham, Cambs, by school caretaker Ian Huntley in 2002.
Mark Williams-Thomas, a former detective who presented a television documentary in 2012which led to Jimmy Savile being exposed as Britain's worst-ever paedophile, said: "This ruling led to a significant change in attitudes on the exchange of information and it caused real problems.
"In a way, it assisted offenders in the 1990s to get away with their offending behaviour.
"I'm sure [Lady Butler-Sloss] made that finding in the best of spirit, but it would not be something that would be acceptable today. Around that time there was confusion about what could and could not be shared between agencies - but things are clearer now.
"It heaps more pressure on the Government, which must take a very clear stance on this to say that, for the sake of clarity and for the victims, they need to take another look at this appointment."
Mrs May is understood to have invited to a meeting at the Home Office this week seven MPs who have led the campaign for an investigation into the child abuse allegations.
They are believed to include Simon Danczuk and Tom Watson, the Labour MPs who exposed a series of revelations about alleged paedophilia in Westminster, and Tessa Munt, the Liberal Democrat who last week disclosed she had been abused as a child.
Several of the members attending the meeting will ask Mrs May to reconsider Lady Butler-Sloss' appointment, sources said.
A Home Office minister has refused to rule out appointing a co-chairman to lead the child sex abuse inquiry alongside Baroness Butler-Sloss, as new detail emerged of her role in a controversial paedophile ruling.
James Brokenshire, the security and immigration minister, insisted the Government was still working out the "precise detail" of the inquiry which will examine allegations of a wide-ranging cover-up of paedophilia in Westminster and other British institutions.
Asked by Dermot Murnaghan on the Sky News channel if the panel members would have "equal powers" or be "co-chairs", Mr Brokenshire said: "Well I think it's this precise detail that we are working on at this stage because it is important that we do draw on the right experts."
If ministers appoint another senior figure to sit alongside Lady Butler-Sloss it would be seen as recognition of concerns over the peer's impartiality.

And from The herald of Scotland:

Why the truth can never emerge

Ian Bell
Columnist



Sunday 13 July 2014

WHEN Peter Cook opened a Soho comedy club in 1961 he called it The Establishment.


The joke didn't need to be explained. Satire began because there was a lot about Britain that demanded satire. Something in the country was rotten and the rot, said the smart young cynics, started at the top.
The word "Establishment" is handy. It can serve to describe an elite. It can explain - as in "established procedures" - the elite's customs and practices. It can also convey the sense that the Establishment, like an established Church, is in with the bricks, embedded in the fabric of society. Cook's choice of comedy targets - politicians, judges, clergy, tycoons, public school buffoons and military types - told that story.
In Britain, we are accustomed, dangerously so, to all of this. We take the existence of the Establishment hierarchy for granted. We watch them emerge from their handful of schools. We see their stately ascent up the ladders of politics, media, the law or the civil service until honours and peerages arrive. We do not flinch, or not too often, when each denies membership of the Establishment, or denies that such a thing even exists.
There's a small fuss every few years when coincidences become too obvious, when it can no longer be denied that a minority sharing a narrow social and educational background seem to monopolise power and influence. A quick, pointless discussion of the "whatever happened to meritocracy" variety soon extinguishes unease. The Establishment protects itself. That's its reason to exist.
Norman Tebbit, of all people, explained as much to Andrew Marr in a TV interview last weekend. The issue was deeply serious, but the peer of the realm gave an analysis that was only too plausible.
So, why might there have been an alleged cover-up of alleged organised child abuse at Westminster in the 1980s?
Tebbit said: "At that time I think most people would have thought that the Establishment, the system, was to be protected and if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into it."
Tebbit was not attempting to justify such behaviour. He sounded, nevertheless, as though he was explaining the obvious: even evidence of truly heinous crimes would be swept away if exposure put "the system" at risk. He believed "there may well have been" a "big political cover-up" to protect the well-connected, but - in so many words - that's just the way things were. His attempts to say that things have changed, a claim recited by eminent types when historic wrongdoing emerges, were less convincing.
The Establishment has been exposed repeatedly in recent years. Politicians on the fiddle, press grandees in the gutter, bankers rigging rates, governments lying their way into wars, sleazy celebs shielded from justice: at every turn, it has been a story of deceit, denial and defensiveness. Now we are told two things: that the abuse of trust, with children at stake, has been of the worst kind imaginable, and that the Establishment has covered things up for decades to protect itself and its members.
Timescales provide a clue to the nature of the standing conspiracy. The Establishment, as every student of 1960s satire knows, endures no matter what. The chief case in point would be the civil service, the service that now owns up, without much of an apology, to disposing of 114 files relating to child abuse. Governments come and go, but the civil service, guarantor of continuity, is as near eternal as makes no difference. The Establishment depends on the fact.
There's a small problem with that. The rest of us go through the palaver of democracy periodically in the naïve hope that sometimes, just occasionally, our votes will bring change. The very existence of the Establishment, that elite freemasonry, says we are conned - and con ourselves - utterly.
One of the claims made about child abuse is that each of the main Westminster parties is implicated. Another turns on the cover-ups allegedly sanctioned by institutions such as the civil service and the BBC. A third element is less a claim than a fact: time and again, police and prosecutors did nothing. Not once down the decades has a party leader swept to power and upset the elite apple cart. In the end, all shall have ermine. For no-one can point the finger.
They can have inquiries, though. There is always time enough and money enough for another of those. These affairs are ideal for demonstrating that "something is being done" even when, as in the case of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, it is obvious, first, that nothing useful is being done and, second, that the Government and the civil service are engineering a highly satisfactory state of affairs.
When the game is easy to rig, the Establishment can grow a little slapdash, even by its standards. Plainly, no-one at the Home Office - where the 114 files met their mysterious fate - imagined that anyone would dare object to the appointment of Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss to head the Home Secretary's "wide-ranging" inquiry into historical sex abuse. Who could be better than a retired appeal court judge, formerly of the family division, who distinguished herself in the late 1980s by leading the inquiry into the Cleveland abuse scandal?
Some would call judges typical Establishment figures, but it's hard to inquire judiciously without them. Butler-Sloss is a revered peer, however. By some accounts, certain individuals still picking up their attendance allowances in the Upper House could figure in her work for Theresa May, the Home Secretary. That doesn't sound clever.
Then there is the fact that the former judge had a brother, the late Michael Havers, a Tory politician. He was Attorney General during the 1980s when, it is alleged, paedophilia committed by political figures was covered up. It is a matter of record that as a government legal officer, Havers chose not to proceed against a diplomat involved, and more, with the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Butler-Sloss sees this as no barrier to her inquiry work. She refuses, in fact, to stand down, despite knowing full well that she would never have sat as a judge in a case involving one of her family. But that's another Establishment trait: it does not see itself as others see it. For this elite, their interests and the public interest are one and the same. And how dare anyone - in this case, even the victims of abuse - suggest otherwise?
Cyril Smith, the late Liberal MP, was investigated on three occasions over three decades for abusing children. On each occasion, no action was taken. Only now, too late, have the Crown Prosecution Service and Greater Manchester Police conceded that Smith should have been prosecuted on the grounds of "overwhelming evidence".
One Liberal non-entity was protected for all those years while he wrought God knows what damage. So what about others? Does anyone believe, amid a torrent of claims from victims, that Smith was one of those "isolated cases" that so comfort the Establishment? And does the Establishment still insist that Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, brilliant and blameless as she may be, will do?