Sometimes the disgrace is so horrible and the complicity in it so widespread that normal institutional responses are inadequate.
The tolerance, the complicity, of the racist rape gangs preying on working class girls, has stretched over decades and entrapped huge tracts of Britain’s institutional infrastructure. It has been called the worst crime, and the worst disgrace in our lifetime, and that’s not wrong. Public anger, and the - yes, let’s reach for the word - evil involved in multiple cover-ups over decades, and in so many layers of state administration is, I think, (I hope), unprecedented.
It required ‘good men and women’ to do nothing, for decade after decade, when confronted with evidence of monstrous predation, for evil to triumph, and to stay triumphant.
I speak only for myself, but I want justice. I want justice visited on the predators: they need to be purged from our society so they may never visit their wickedness on our shores ever again. But just as important, just as urgent, I also want our institutional system to be purged of all those who by omission or commission have been complicit in these crimes. All the social workers, all the police, all the councillors, all the MPs, and, yes, all the journalists who knew and were in a position to do something about it.
Why? Because when evil becomes part of the background to our lives, it marks us all. Me included: I’m from Huddersfield, and I’d read about Rotherham, Rochdale and damned well suspected my home town would be next. It was. Somewhere in the parts of my brain I don’t want to go to, I’d have known. I’m tarred, I’m smeared by it, and I suspect if you’re honest you are too.
So what I want is not even merely ‘justice’: I want a complete purging of the system, a full-scale colonic from our sewered system, from which we can try to recover not only our institutions, but ourselves as well.
A national inquiry isn’t going to do it, because we already know the shape of it: we’ll be horrified by the crimes, and horrified by the cover-ups pursued from social worker right up to the lawyers of the CPS and through the political establishment.
And anyway, find me an establishment figure to lead this enquiry who can say, hand on heart, ‘I never suspected a thing.’ Go on, make me believe it.
The only way we - our institutions, you, me - are going to recover from this is through the climactic transparency of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Only when we see, under the lights and pressed up against our screens, time after time, the sweat-soaked confessions of the flawed human beings who’s cowardice or worse allowed the evil to triumph, will we acknowledge the full scale of our institutional ethical collapse, the degraded State we find ourselves occupying.
Only when there’s no place left to hide for those who stood by, or worse, in the knowledge of these dreadful crimes, can we begin to heal our institutions, our society, our race relations and ourselves. Truth is the only foundation for reconciliation, and its revelation is long long overdue. So we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, not a mere national inquiry: it really is that serious, and that urgent.
1. It still goes on and must be stopped. This must be a national priority.
2. All victims need to be identified, compensated and fully supported.
3. Perpetrators brought before courts - no dithering. A Southport style fast track.
4. Public officials - police, councillors and others - identified and where evidence permits charged with malfeasance in public office.
5. A task force to ensure 1 to 4 are pursued vigorously. It should be announced as an emergency.
6. Police to patrol the 48 or so towns known for predatory gangs and robustly deter repitition.
There can be no reconciliation.