THE PAEDOFILE: Michael Gove in dramatic volte-face on the issue of systemic sexual abuse

Gove….”I met a wall of silence”

The Slog: If you haven’t already seen it, there’s a quite astonishing piece in today’s Daily Telegraph about Michael Gove’s sudden conversion to the reality of Family Courts/Care Home secrecy….and how this “obviously” leads to lots of sexual abuse.
“In the name of ‘protecting children’ by officially ‘protecting’ their information,” says Gove at one point, “we have ended up helping the very people we were supposed to be protecting them from. We shielded the children from the authorities who needed to be looking out for them.” This was a bit like hearing an infinite echo from The Slog and thousands of other sites over the years that have campaigned tirelessly to make politicians fess up to the problem.
My problem with Gove’s sudden conversion on the road to Tarsus is that he clearly wants to make political capital out of it (it’s obviously a precursor to privatisation as ‘the answer’) and I think we can be sure that the next place he’ll go is Labour local politics, where the paedophile ring syndrome meets pc to produce some truly ghastly results.
Supporting my thesis is one part of the article where the interviewer writes, ‘The Rochdale case, in which nine men, predominantly of Pakistani origin, were last year jailed for grooming and raping a group of girls as young as 13, shone a light on the practice of councils sending vulnerable children to homes hundreds of miles away from friends and family.’ In the light of further Exaro revelations about Cyril Smith’s “harmless bottom-smacking” (David Steel, 1998) there is an obvious Right wing agenda in the wings here. The corollary of this, I have to say, is that we will see yet more BBC distractions to take eyes off the ball of Tom Watson’s PMQ about paedophile activity in the bowels of the Conservative Party past and present.
Unfortunately, Labour is very vulnerable on this question. Not only is their Big State solution to the issue a causal factor, Ed Balls and Harriet Harman (when in power as Ministers for Families and Women respectively) were pathetically ineffective at doing anything about either Family Courts or local government corruption. Many people today still find Harman’s motives questionable, given her past of referring to paedophilia as “merely part of the rainbow of sexual experience”.
The obvious thing for Labour to do in this context is fight back on the basis of Establishment bias in favour of abusers: almost half of all sex offenders were spared jail last year. Lenient judges let 2,497 – or 43% – of the 5,784 convicted walk free from court, while we continue to wait in vain for any Elm House arrests of former Cabinet Ministers in the second Thatcher administration.
But the Ed Miller Band never do the obvious: instead, they emit pompous tweets about the need for a negotiated settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

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