Free these poor kids from terror

IT was only seven days ago that we called in this column for an independent inquiry into the appalling child sex abuse in Telford.

On Wednesday we got it, when Theresa May threw her weight behind the long overdue investigation and said it should begin as soon as possible.

The PM also congratulated Sunday Mirror journalist Geraldine McKelvie for her dogged determination in exposing this evil. High praise indeed, but thoroughly deserved. Geraldine shows what campaigning investigative journalism should be about.

And this is what a free press in a free country is about too. It’s about shining a light into the dark places where no one else wants to look.

It’s about exposing wrongdoing and ensuring the wrongdoers are brought to book.

It’s about giving an ear to whistleblowers when officialdom won’t listen to them.

And it’s about giving a voice to vulnerable children, so grotesquely taken advantage of, when no one else will.

There are those who would seek to shackle our freedom to probe and to delve and to speak uncomfortable truths. They are in the Labour Party, and in the House of Lords.

They are in showbusiness, calling themselves Hacked Off. And they come in the shape of the unsavoury Max Mosley, who uses his wealth as a weapon to try to gag us.

HIDEOUS

To them we say: look at the child sexual exploitation in Telford. To them we say: look how it was covered up.

And to them we say it must be right that this most hideous of scandals should not have remained hidden in the shadows for a moment longer.

This is not to say our industry should not be regulated. It to say our nation would be a sorrier place if it was silent.

Reporting the horrors these children were forced to endure because those who were meant to protect them did not do their duty does not in itself cure Telford’s sickness.

But it starts the ball rolling. Our revelations led the news agenda all week until the ball rolled into Number 10 where Mrs May picked it up.

We know 1,000 children have been abused, but if anything that is a conservative figure.

We know 20 paedophiles who should have been on the sex offenders register escaped it.

We have been told it was because police felt it too much trouble to put them on.

We know that more could have been done by authorities responsible for safeguarding.

And we have been told that had they done more other children would have been spared their suffering.

What we know is more than enough reason to hold an independent inquiry.

What we have been told are the very things an independent inquiry should look at so past mistakes are not repeated in future.

We are at one with local MP Lucy Allan in demanding that this inquiry must begin its deliberations without delay. To give hope to children whose only companion has been fear.