Peter Michael Ward

Two years in office and not one of you has fought for it. Not a minister, not a backbencher, not a single member for a northern town. Strip out the language of process, of reviews and remits and lessons learned, and what is left is a sequence of deliberate acts by people who knew better. Ignorance is not available to you: much of the world has watched this and been disgusted by it. Set out plainly, the conduct meets the elements of seven offences. • MISCONDUCT IN PUBLIC OFFICE (common law, life). You buried the reports. • PERVERTING THE COURSE OF JUSTICE (common law, life). You closed cases on grounds you knew were false. • CONSPIRACY TO PERVERT THE COURSE OF JUSTICE (Criminal Law Act 1977 s.1, life). You agreed the finding before the review began. • FRAUD BY FALSE REPRESENTATION (Fraud Act 2006 s.2, 10 years). You told the House the survivors were wrong. • FRAUD BY ABUSE OF POSITION (Fraud Act 2006 s.4, 10 years). You knew, and said nothing. • FALSE ACCOUNTING (Theft Act 1968 s.17, 7 years). You let the record lie, and a generation went unrecorded. • PERJURY (Perjury Act 1911 s.1, 7 years). You will swear to it soon. Tongues nailed to tables for threatening to talk. Families told their throats would be cut and their heads taken. A gun to the face and the promise to blow it off. Laura Wilson talked. She was abused from eleven, and at seventeen she told the families of the men involved what had been done to her. She was lured to the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation Canal, stabbed more than forty times and put into the water alive by her boyfriend, Ashtiaq Asghar, then seventeen. A report into her death then concealed what was already known, and the social workers who had known six years earlier had said nothing. Boiling water from a kettle held over a face already pinned down. In Oxford: scratched, choked, beaten, branded, burnt. Gang raped. Assaulted with knives and a baseball bat. Locked in bedsits like animals, no food, no toilet. Deliberately addicted to hard drugs and alcohol. Pregnancy used as punishment, then backstreet abortions. Samantha, twelve, taken in Oldham, pushed out of a moving car, held in a room and raped by five men for nearly twenty-four hours. A thirteen year old who was examined and found to have been raped more than fifty times. Another twelve year old, doused in petrol and told she would burn if she spoke. Lucy Lowe did burn. She was fourteen when a twenty-six year old taxi driver took her up, and she had his child at fourteen. At sixteen, pregnant again, she was burned in her own bed: petrol through the house, set alight while the family slept. Her sister Sarah, seventeen and partially disabled, died with her. Her mother Eileen died with her. A sixteen month old was carried out to the garden. The man was never charged with the abuse, and her death was used to frighten other girls into silence. Charlene Downes was fourteen when she disappeared from Talbot Road in Blackpool. No body has ever been found. Two men were charged, the jury could not agree, and the retrial was abandoned after the investigation was judged to have been handled unprofessionally. Twenty-two years, no body, no conviction. The country knows. Much of the watching world knows. Nobody needs convincing that this is the worst thing done to children in living memory, and nobody is waiting for another review to be told it. So here is what being taken seriously now costs. Not a statement. Not a remit. Most of you in the dock, and the older ones first, because the older ones were there and the older ones signed it off. Lucy Lowe burned at sixteen. Laura Wilson went into the water alive at seventeen. Charlene Downes has been missing for twenty-two years. All three would be in their thirties now. The cost was paid in full, and it was paid by them. The courts were not bystanders in this either. For a decade the vocabulary of the courtroom did the covering up for them: girls called prostitutes, called willing, called unreliable, their cases quietly dropped when they did not perform well on the day. The bench heard them and believed the men. Nothing here needs new law. It needs a decision that it counts. Until most of you are in court, none of you will be taken seriously again. And one thing more, which is the only thing that matters. Everything above assumes you are the ones to fix it. You are not. A party that denied this, then diluted it, then argued about its own terms of reference has forfeited the right to finish it. The country does not need a better Labour government. It needs a government that throws this one out, and then the one after it if it goes quiet too. Seven offences. Three dead girls. That is the case, and it does not stop at one election. So the answer is not a prosecution. It is a prosecution the establishment does not run. Independent counsel, appointed from outside, with a power to compel and a remit that does not stop at the first comfortable name, because right now the accused and the prosecutor are the same people. The country is not waiting for your inquiry. It is waiting for your replacement.