A moral scandal that shames liberal elite
TODAY the Mail begins serialising a profoundly disturbing book that should shake the conscience of Britain’s liberal elite, while raising questions of huge topical relevance about moral corruption at the heart of politics and the State. Written by the Labour MP who inherited Cyril Smith’s Rochdale seat, this excoriating investigation is shocking not only for the massive scale and harrowing details of Smith’s grotesque sexual abuse of young boys over four decades.
Even more chilling are its revelations about how the Establishment and the Liberal Party closed ranks to protect one of their own, in a cover-up involving MI5, the Crown Prosecution Service and local and national politicians.
The book also casts merciless light on the attitudes of many on the permissive Left who helped create a moral climate in which monsters such as Smith could flourish. With appalling echoes of the Jimmy Savile scandal, Simon Danczuk details how police r eceived at l east 144 complaints of abuse by the 29- stone predatory paedophile, and tried on at least three occasions to prosecute him.
Yet every time, the authorities blocked attempts to bring him to justice, issuing orders to discontinue inquiries or refusing to act on evidence.
Particularly damning are the book’s insights into how Smith and his crimes were seen at Westminster.
For years, rumours of his vile activities circulated in every party. Yet nobody in the political class lifted a finger to protect his victims or sought to challenge his public image as the charitable, humorous, larger-than-life figure with the ‘electoral Midas touch’.
But it is the sleaze-ridden Liberals who emerge worst.
Indeed, so anxious was David Steel to perpetuate the myth of lovable Cyril, the public benefactor, that he nominated him for a knighthood – a fact the Cabinet Office tried to conceal, until forced to disclose it by the Information Commissioner.
As late as 2008, Nick Clegg described Smith gushingly as a ‘beacon of our party in the 70s and 80s’, while saying on his death that everyone in Rochdale knew him ‘as a friend’. But then what can you expect of the party with the Liberals’ history of trying to cover up accusations of sexual misconduct against its politicians, from Jeremy Thorpe to Lord Rennard?
Rightly, Mr Danczuk also censures the National Council for Civil Liberties for giving spurious respectability to Smith and his fellow child abusers by admitting the vile Paedophile Information Exchange as an associate member. As he points out, those who ran the NCCL – Patricia Hewitt, Jack Dromey and Harriet Harman – went on to become leading figures in his own party.
If only we could forget the never-ending pain that Smith’s hundreds of victims still suffer, it might be comforting to dismiss tolerance of child abuse as an aberration of past decades.
But fast forward to Rochdale, May 2012, and the jailing of nine men for pitiless abuse of teenage girls in the town.
Again, horrifying stories have emerged of cries f or help i gnored and the authorities uninterested in investigating – seemingly for the politically correct reason that the abusers were Asian.
Searingly, Mr Danczuk comments of his constituency: ‘I began to wonder if years of child abuse being covered up in Rochdale had normalised this crime. We had become institutionally blind.’
If the Lib Dems, who so specialise in telling the rest of us how to run our lives, had an ounce of decency, they would immediately order a major review to learn the lessons from this shameful scandal, still being investigated by police. In the meantime, the Mail will be carrying more revelations next week.