Complete, Unfettered Access

“Grooming gang monsters and their relatives could be exploiting a devastating child protection loophole that would give them “complete, unfettered access” to vulnerable young girls”? I bet. In May, Shabana Mahmood tried to give nonces “chemical castration” instead of prison, where that proposal was received, not only by the inmates, as well as one might have expected. As an old lag, the word “nonce” is part of my culture. In that culture’s citadels, nonces are given the suspended sentences that we were not, or they are given the cushiest jobs inside, they are housed in the newest or the most recently refurbished wings, they have gym when ours has been cancelled, and so on. Why?

Well, like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country’s cultural and political elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe. If we ever did, then we no longer do, even stripping Peter Mandelson of the Freedom of the Borough of Hartlepool. The Labour-controlled Borough Council was unanimous. But while Mandelson has stopped attending the House of Lords, he could go back whenever he pleased, and there is no sign that he has stopped using his title. The former Prince Andrew has relinquished his membership of the Order of the Garter, but Tony Blair retains his despite having been Prime Minister when he met Jeffrey Epstein. Like illegal drug use, the sexual abuse of children is fundamental to power in this country, both in itself and as a pretext for blackmail.

Margaret Thatcher knew about Cyril Smith when she arranged his knighthood. Jimmy Savile’s knighthood was rejected four times by the relevant committee, until she absolutely insisted upon it for the man with whom she spent every New Year’s Eve, and on whose programmes she was so obsessed with appearing that her staff had to ration those appearances. Her closest lieutenant was Peter Morrison. She would have had sight of every file on Laurens van der Post. Smith was a highly eccentric and largely absentee MP for a tiny minority party, but he was a Thatcherite avant la lettre, who had left the Labour Party when he had started to see cars outside council houses. Thatcher’s father was also a Liberal until all of that fell apart between the Wars, and he was never a member of the Conservative Party. He, she and Smith were politically indistinguishable. That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North. That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed quite a major subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy.

As Home Secretary, Mahmood has the power to revoke the citizenship of anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for another nationality, whether or not they were. Bangladesh has consistently and understandably refused to have anything to do with the London-born Shamima Begum. Undoubtedly with the full cooperation of its British counterparts, Canadian intelligence was trafficking British girls to Syria to join the side that we were aiding and abetting there while bombing it across the Sykes-Picot Line in Iraq, where our intervention had created it in the first place. The 15-year-old Begum was married almost immediately upon her arrival in that country, and pregnant almost immediately after that. “She wanted it” is not an argument that would normally be admitted under such circumstances.

All of this had the enthusiastic support of the Liberal Democrats, of the Labour Party until 2015, and of more than 90 per cent of Labour MPs, as well as the whole of the party’s staff, to the very end, if it is not still going on. Both economically and internationally, and the connection between the two has never been more glaring, Labour is now far to the right of the Conservatives. Begum ought to be tried by a jury that, unless it were unanimously convinced beyond reasonable doubt of her guilt, ought to deliver a verdict of not guilty, which should be an enduring verdict, affording lifelong protection from double jeopardy. In the event of such a conviction, then like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be blameless, but like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be the most to blame.  If Nigel Farage is not answerable at all for things that he did when he was of voting age, then why is Begum so singularly deserving of punishment?

It bears repetition that even while bombing the IS that it had created in Iraq, NATO was so committed to the victory of IS in Syria, as has since been won, that via the NATO member state of Turkey, it trafficked British schoolgirls to Syria to hand over to IS. In at least one case, a 15-year-old was pregnant almost immediately, having been married so soon after her arrival that the arrangements had clearly been made in advance. Via the NATO member state of Turkey, IS fighters have been brought into Ukraine, carrying out the suicide bombing of the Kerch Bridge under British direction. Russia has long been bringing in Assadists against them. IS is now part of the side that we are backing in Ukraine. Do we know that our girls are not being smuggled into Ukraine, which is itself a global centre of sex trafficking, in order to be handed over to IS? Or our boys, to be sent to the front line?

The war in Afghanistan was in defence of the endemic abuse of boys, to which, whatever else may be said of the Taliban, they had been very actively opposed and not without success in seeking to eradicate, whereas the regime that we installed in their place actively colluded in it as surely as in the heroin trade. There is no minimum age for marriage either at federal level in the United States or at all in Saudi Arabia. Along line of child molesters has fled from the United States and elsewhere to Israel, which also has a huge child rape problem of its own, especially in the precious West Bank settlements.

Underage groupies have always been integral to rock and roll. We all know what at least used to be endemic at public schools. Popular entertainers slept with underage girls at the youth conferences of the political parties. And so on. Reading about the role in grooming gangs of fast food outlets, minicab offices, and other such establishments, I am not alone in asking to be told something that I did not already know from towns and villages that were still overwhelmingly white, and which were literally or practically 100 per cent so in the 1990s, when it was effectively less illegal than underage drinking for men in their twenties, or even older, to have sex with girls of 15, 14, or even younger.

White men who commit certain offences are “lone wolves”, black men who do so are “gang members”, and brown men who do so are “homegrown Islamist terrorists”, yet the crimes are the same. Likewise, a certain type of organised crime syndicate is a “grooming gang” or a “rape gang” when the members are South Asian, or Muslim, or both, but a “paedophile ring” when they are not, and most emphatically when they are all white and non-Muslim. But again, they are the same thing.

Earlier this year, Radio Four broadcast a series on the Paedophile Information Exchange, a story known to readers of this blog throughout its 19 years of existence. If PIE was not a grooming gang and a rape gang, then what ever has been or could be? It was at the very heart of the Establishment, and this year, it will be 40 years since the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence. The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no apparent authority. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now.

PIE’s Patricia Hewitt took over Greville Janner’s seat. Then she passed it on to Liz Kendall, so it is obviously a right-wing Labour fiefdom. Britain is internationally known for the prevalence of kiddy-fiddling, but even within that, the right-wing Labour machine is something else. Having inherited his father’s seat, a man whose proclivities were common knowledge for 70 years handed it on to a PIE lady, who served in Tony Blair’s Cabinet before handing it on to the most overtly right-wing candidate for the Labour Leadership since 1994.

As Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Kendall will now administer digital ID. At least that will no longer be Peter Kyle. One could almost admire his sheer gall in attacking Farage by comparing him to Savile. Like Anna Turley, Kyle was given his big break in politics by the Chief Whip whose Whips’ Office contained both Kyle’s close friend, closest ally, and sometime lover, Ivor Caplin, and Caplin’s close friend, Dan Norris. Along with the subsequently adjudicated and disqualified electoral fraud Phil Woolas, such was the Whips’ Office that forced through the Iraq War. Caplin, Norris and Woolas were all made Ministers a few weeks later. Up behind them has come Kyle, among others. And Alastair Campbell had cut his teeth under Robert Maxwell. There is that Epstein connection again.

This year, one of Epstein’s closest friends, with no diplomatic background, was made the British Ambassador to Washington while we guffawed at the then Prince Andrew and at Sarah Ferguson. Also as part of the restoration, Stephen Fry was knighted. He has never retracted his statement that, “It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy – but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy.” When Fry’s novel The Hippopotamus was filmed, then the central character had to be aged up to 16. But he is younger than that in the book. The Liar has never been filmed. Sir Stephen is very much in the line of Sir Jimmy Savile and his close protector, Sir Keir Starmer.

Kyle joined his old boss in supporting the brief Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

 

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre.

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was only six years ago. If he were still an MP, then Streeting would certainly become Leader after the defeat of Labour by Reform UK in 2029, and he would do so unopposed because the nomination process now made a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible. Streeting may then be Prime Minister within 18 months, since almost all Reform MPs will be freshers. The only thing stopping this is the high likelihood that Streeting will lose his seat to Leanne Mohamad. But although the Greens came fifth at Ilford North last year, they took well over three times more votes than Streeting’s margin of victory.

Meanwhile, the Chief Whip of Caplin, Woolas and Norris has had the gall to endorse a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. False allegations of sexual violence are fundamental to the demonisation of working-class and nonwhite males, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as at Medomsley Detention Centre, and such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a June 2024 report that was also highly critical of Hamas, found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces. A month later, the unrepentant Sde Teiman rapists held a defiant press conference, and their supporters rioted, among them Members of the Knesset and men in the uniforms of the IDF’s Force 100. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

Was Rolf Harris a Pakistani? Was Chris Denning? Is Stuart Hall? Is Paul Gadd? There were and are Pakistani grooming gangs. But they were and are far from the only ones, and far from the most powerful. Boris Johnson was a pupil at a private school when Paedophile Action for Liberation, which later merged into PIE, said without challenge that it could shut down both the private school system and the youth criminal justice system by calling its members out on strike. As Prime Minister, Johnson described the money spent on investigating Medomsley as having been “spaffed up the wall”. Clearly, he could not see the problem. He had been groomed.

Of the same generation is Starmer, late of Reigate Grammar School, the Sunday Times Independent School of the Year 2025. Yes, it was private when Starmer was there. In the words of Doughty Street Chambers, on its page about Starmer, now amusingly removed from public view: “He was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008-2013. As DPP, Keir was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales.” Therefore, Starmer would have been responsible for the decision not to charge Savile even if he had never seen the file. But that is in any case inconceivable. We are talking about Jimmy Savile here. That Starmer took the decision not to charge Savile has been repeated all over the place, far beyond parliamentary privilege. Starmer has never sued. Again, he could not see the problem. Again, he had been groomed.