Whether It's Paedophile Politicians Or Priests Justice Goddard Must Not Bow To Power

In the middle of a Dublin street I got a phone call. Sky news were doing a package on Paedophilia and wanted me to provide an expert perspective. What with the traffic noise and being out with my 8 year old, it wasn’t a good time. Isn’t there a quiet building you can duck into for the interview, my husband suggested. I was standing in front of a church called, “Our Lady of Dolours”, which means pain in Spanish. “Not really,” I said.

It’s only a few months since Spotlight was released in cinemas throughout the country. It tracks the work of the investigative journalism team set up at the Boston Globe to expose paedophile priests. The establishment closed ranks, emboldened by the inoculation against justice that power affords.  Undeterred, the Boston Globe pursued truth with the same determination with which the church sought to obscure it.

With investigative journalism all but extinct, UK survivors of abuse are pinning their hopes on Justice Goddard’s inquiry into child sex abuse.  They are relying on her to fulfil her brief to investigate child sex abuse, in all areas of the establishment. The winding down of police investigations into the Westminster VIP paedophile ring, with no convictions, was a blow to survivors. One witness, “Darren”, who said he believed a 15 year old girl was killed at a paedophile orgy in Dolphin Square in the 1990s, was allegedly reported by police to social services as being a danger to his baby. Fortunately, social services found the claims to be unsubstantiated.

When Ben Fellows accused Kenneth Clark of groping him at 18 when he was acting undercover for ITV’s Cook report, he feared for his safety. Instead of being treated as a victim by the police, he was accused of perverting the course of justice. It was he, not the accused, who stood trial. Despite widespread media coverage prior to the trial portraying Fellows as a, “fantasist”, when the jury acquitted him, the media was conspicuous in its silence.

In stark contrast, when charges against high profile figures are dropped due to lack of evidence, the words, “acquitted” and “exonerated” are regularly and speciously used in headlines. One can only be exculpated by standing trial.

Some survivors have expressed misgivings about the pressure being brought to bear on Justice Goddard by lawyers representing the myriad of institutions accused of exposing children to abuse by powerful politicians.

Nigel O’Mara was recently rejected by Goddard to be a “core participant” in her inquiry into alleged abuses by Lord Greville Janner, the late Labour peer, and Sir Cyril Smith, the late Liberal MP. In 1992 Mr O’Mara co-founded a helpline for survivors of sexual abuse and claims to have received a number of calls from young men alleging that they had been sexually abused as children, while in care, by Janner and Smith. He said the reports were sent to Kenneth Clarke, then home secretary, in 1992 and 1993 but that no response was forthcoming.

David Enright, Mr O’Mara’s solicitor, said: “When we appeared in the High Court before Lady Justice Goddard on behalf of Mr O’Mara the court was overflowing with lawyers and barristers representing every institution and organisation alleged to have failed to protect children from sexual abuse by these powerful politicians.

“All of those institutions have full participation in this judicial inquiry and will have the opportunity to see the evidence and influence the inquiry. 

“A key survivor witness will not.”

If Justice Goddard is to claim any kind of legitimacy of process, the voices of survivors cannot be silenced and side-lined by loquacious lawyers acting on behalf of the institutions and individuals in the dock. If this inquiry is to have any credence it must retain its independence and not lose sight of who the victims are. This must not become yet another process where abuse of power reigns supreme. 

100 years After The 1916 Uprising, Is Britain On The Brink Of Civil Unrest?

To assuage my guilt I rationalised that the DVD I sat my child in front of was educational. Admittedly, Box Trolls does not elucidate the latest curriculum but that’s because it seeks to reduce schools to fact factories where fanciful, or god forbid, critical thinking, is stridently discouraged. Mr Grandgrind of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, would be immensely gratified.

Nevertheless, Box Trolls gave me a 90 minute window to pull together a body of clinical evidence to present to my local hospital board. They were poised to vote on the principle of closing our much needed A&E, which already takes over an hour to get to in the back of an ambulance – yes, I’m talking about the UK, not Malawi.

The evidence was compelling but when has patient safety ever gotten in the way of axing services and systematically dismantling the NHS? Why waste my time going to a meeting in the vain hope of influencing a decision that had already been made, when I could/should be spending time with my child during half term?

When the film was over I asked, “So, what was the moral of the story?”. Without missing a beat my 8 year old said, “There are two morals mummy. Firstly, always fight evil wherever you see it. It’s no good ignoring it, it won’t go away, and secondly, even bad people can become good if they make the right choices”. My doubts dissolved and hardened into a steely resolve. If we want to protect the NHS for future generations, we must be prepared to fight for it.

Sitting in the oppressive board room, powerless to speak unless permission is granted, disenfranchised by democracy, reduced now to a redundant concept invoked only by “militants” and “dreamers”. I watched helplessly from the side-lines, impotent in all but symbolic gestures with no real mechanism to be heard.

As the cost of the future of our A&E was presented purely in fiscal terms, with no consideration whatsoever given to the cost to lives, the words of James Connolly, one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter rising came to mind. “Yes, friends, government in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”

And I recognised the similarities between, what has become my reality under a totalitarian Tory regime, and that of my ancestor’s under British rule. All of my spare time is invested in various campaigns to defend hard won public services, civil liberties and human rights. We’re under constant siege with sniper fire coming from all directions.

As a parent who knows what it’s like for their seriously injured child to have to travel great distances in an ambulance to get to A&E, the madness of suggesting that journey increases, is a battle I cannot surrender to. As a parent who believes in schools being accountable to parents and communities and not owned by academy chains who are not accountable to anyone but their shareholders and for whom profit, not child well-being, is their primary motive, I have no choice but to fight imposed academisation.

Our schools are now on the brink of being removed from local accountability to voters, parents, students or staff. They are to be signed over to private companies and directors who will not be required to have any connection whatsoever to our schools or our communities.

In the same way that splitting the NHS into individual Trusts makes it easier to pick them off one by one, the imposed conversion of schools into academy Trusts will achieve the same goal- privatisation. It’s so much easier to do under the radar if they’re all fragmented into separate local entities

This in turn makes our public services easy picking for US healthcare giants and “edu-businesses” to swoop in if TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) ever gets past the European Commission. Under TTIP, future governments would be unable to preserve education as a public service.

The investment protector clause (ISDS), allows corporations to sue governments. In the UK, critics are concerned that US healthcare companies now running parts of the NHS might use ISDS tribunals to sue future British governments wanting to reverse privatisation of parts of the health service. Cigarette maker Phillip Morris used ISDS to sue Australia and Uruguay for implementing plain cigarette packaging. Governments’ duty to promote public health is subjugated to corporate profit.

Writing in today’s Conservative Home, Peter Lilley MP raises the red flag on TTIP saying, US companies could sue the UK government should it want to take back into the public sector privately provided services in the NHS, education, and so forth – or open fewer services to private provision.

Then there’s the attack on our libraries and leisure centres. Too many battles and so little time and energy to fight them all. Which is all part of the grand plan. Overwhelm us, divide us, demoralise us. This is how this government, acting as an agent for the insatiable, greed crazed capitalist machine, plans to break us.

George Osborne, who James Connolly would no doubt describe as the capitalist committee’s finance director, didn’t disguise his motives in the recent budget. His plans to sell the Government’s 73 % in Royal Bank of Scotland at a loss of £22m was described by critics as “reckless and short-termist”. Christine Berry, a senior researcher at the New Economics Foundation, accused Osborne of relying on the sale of public assets to plug holes in the budget coupled with an “ideological obsession” with private ownership. While hedge fund managers stand to profit at our expense, George Osborne announced that cuts to disability benefits would raise £4.4 billion.

The same conditions that precipitated the Dublin rebellion 100 years ago are present today. A disenfranchised, disillusioned, dispossessed people, have had enough. Enough of the transference of wealth to absentee landlords, enough of rack rents, starvation and poverty, enough of inequality and injustice. In the absence of fairness, justice and democracy, an uprising is surely inevitable.