Children were being abused an industrial scale on Corbyn's doorstep... yet he did nothing
MUCH of Corbyn’s Islington North constituency was made up of white English and Irish workers alongside immigrants. Most inhabited either unrepaired private houses or dilapidated council estates. They suffered bad schools, stretched health services and one of the most corrupt Labour councils in the country.
But Corbyn never issued press releases about local issues. His frequent publicity flyers were about Palestine, Ireland, the Western Sahara or Nicaragua. He seemed oblivious to Islington being ranked as London’s worst borough for social services, housing, education and street maintenance.
Under Margaret Hodge, the council leader between 1982 and 1992, the People’s Republic of Islington boasted a red flag fluttering above the town hall and a bust of Lenin inside.
Despite levying London’s highest council tax, nearly half of its residents lived in 35,000 council houses plagued by crime, drugs, damp and dilapidation because Islington’s unionised labour force refused to undertake repairs.
Yet while Hodge regularly received complaints from Chris Smith, the Labour MP for Islington South, she never heard from Corbyn. Preoccupied by the needs of immigrants and foreign conflicts, he appeared uninterested in the many woes of his constituents.
Most shamefully, he didn’t seem to care about the systematic sexual abuse of vulnerable children in Islington’s residential homes, all of which were staffed by council employees, members of his old union, NUPE.
Horrifying evidence of sex orgies run from a ‘hot house’ on Islington’s Elthorne estate was exposed. Children had been rented out from a brothel to paedophiles.
Among the many victims was Vivian Loki, a 17-year-old girl whose decomposed body was discovered on the estate six months after her murder by a paedophile.
Further north, at Gisburne House, another Islington home, children were being abused on an industrial scale. ‘All this,’ Islington social worker Liz Davies discovered, ‘was happening on Corbyn’s doorstep. He knew all about it because it was raised by [Conservative MP] Geoffrey Dickens in the Commons’.
In October 1992, five Islington
He didn’t seem to care about child sex abuse in residential care homes
council social workers, led by Liz Davies, confronted Corbyn in his office at the Red Rose Community Centre.
By then, dozens of drugged, hungry and distressed young people of both sexes living in 12 council homes were being routinely raped by council employees. Paedophile gangs were rampant across the borough, and at least 30 employees who were suspected of crimes had been allowed to quietly resign.
Peter Righton, founder of the pro-paedophile group the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), had been given authority by the Home Office to brief council social workers to place vulnerable children with known sex offenders. Having set out this appalling scenario, the social workers told Corbyn that their complaints to Margaret Hodge had been ignored.
After London’s Evening Standard newspaper published a detailed exposé of Islington’s employment of known paedophiles, and the officials’ shredding of documents to cover up the crimes, the council accused the paper of ‘gutter journalism’.
The council employees’ meeting with Corbyn lasted 90 minutes, during which he pronounced ‘I’ve heard similar issues from other constituents,’ and then said little else.
As usual when confronted with complicated or unpalatable facts, he retreated into his shell, mumbling and smiling but offering no meaningful replies. At the end, he promised to speak to Virginia Bottomley, the Health Minister, but she does not recall any such conversation having taken place.
‘We heard nothing more from Corbyn,’ Liz Davies recalled. ‘We don’t know whether he did anything to help us.’