Former PM: Forced migration of children ‘a scandal’

FORMER PRIME Minister Gordon Brown has described the forced migration of children as a bigger sex abuse scandal than that perpetrated by Jimmy Savile.

Giving evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), Mr Brown said the mass transportation of British children overseas was “government-enforced trafficking”.

More than 130,000 children were sent to a “better life” in former colonies, mainly Australia and Canada, from the 1920s to 1970s under the programme.

He said: “This seems to me as probably the biggest national sex abuse scandal. Bigger than what people alleged about Savile. Bigger than what people alleged about individual children’s homes. Bigger in scale, bigger in geographical spread, and bigger in the length of time that went on undetected.

“I’m shocked about the information that I have seen.”

Mr Brown, who issued a national apology to migrants in 2010, told the inquiry that a Government Minister should be “hauled” before it to explain why nothing has been done over “sickening” new evidence of abuse which has come to light in the past seven years.

“We now know that the apology was only half the story, and we have yet to do something to remedy and to deal with the consequences of what is the other part of the story, which is as significant, perhaps more... the abuse of so many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children.”

Mr Brown said he had not been aware of the scale of the abuse when he made his national apology in 2010. He said the surviving 2,000 victims of the migrant programmes should be compensated as a matter of urgency.

Mr Brown said the forced transportation programmes were a “violation of human rights”. Another former prime minister, Sir John Major, did not appear in person at the inquiry, but provided a statement which said his government took the approach that mistreatment of British children sent abroad was primarily a matter for the country concerned.