15 July 2014

Dead men tell no tales……...


……or do they. I felt some sympathy for Baroness Butler Sloss as she stood down from her leading role in the Review of Reviews into the ongoing child abuse scandal that continues to hubble and bubble and threaten to destabilise the establishment.

She clearly has great integrity and a track record of doing a good job in similar situations. And she clearly placed great faith in her own view of her capabilities, a faith which was, most probably, justified. But what she, and Theresa May who appointed her, and the Civil Servants who advised Theresa all forgot was the simple fact that the Baroness was the sister of a previous Attorney General who made what might look, from 2014, some pretty odd decisions regarding who got prosecuted for what, back in the day.

Things have changed and it might just have been that the Baroness might have had a hard time squaring some of those past decisions with the way we consider the victims today. Back in the day, it wasn't the victims who were considered, it was the perpetrators and the whole sad story was held together by boy's clubs and private schools and ivy-league colleges and masonic lodges and the panoply of establishment power networks, networks which still function today, just in slightly different ways.

I'm sure that abuse still goes on: abuse of children; abuse of staff; abuse of power; abuse of influence; abuse of access……..the list is endless. But I suspect that the influential and the powerful are a little more careful how they indulge their desires to abuse. I'm sure they will take greater care to make sure that they cover their tracks, unlike their predecessors, who may well have left a few traces of their passing.

And had the Baroness found those traces, would she have been able to draw them out into the open and risk the ire of the hand that feeds her? Particularly if they had led to the Attorney General's office.