Britain’s government, parliament and political parties spent decades turning “a blind eye” to high-profile child sex abusers and sometimes actively protected them, an investigation reported on Tuesday.
A former Liberal Party leader announced his resignation from the House of Lords after the report condemned his failure to act against a pedophile lawmaker from his party.
The government-commissioned report into how Westminster institutions dealt with abuse claims found a culture of deference by police, prosecutors and parties toward politicians.
It also said that there was widespread failure to put the needs of children first.
“It is clear to see that Westminster institutions have repeatedly failed to deal with allegations of child sexual abuse, from turning a blind eye to actively shielding abusers,” Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse chairwoman Alexis Jay said in a statement.
“A consistent pattern emerged of failures to put the welfare of children above political status, although we found no evidence of an organized network of pedophiles within government,” she said.
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, lawmakers, including the Liberal Party’s Cyril Smith and the Conservative Party’s Peter Morrison — both later knighted — “were known to be active in their sexual interest in children, but were protected from prosecution,” the report said.
In 1969, Smith admitted to allegations he sexually abused teenage boys, but was not prosecuted.
Ten years later, then-Liberal Party leader David Steel discussed the issue with him, but took no action.
Steel resigned his position in the House of Lords on publication of the report.
“I shall now stop the weekly travel from Scotland to London and enjoy a quiet retirement from public life,” he said in a statement.
“Not having secured a parliamentary scalp, I fear that I have been made a proxy for Cyril Smith,” he added.
The report also found that senior officials in the Conservative Party knew about allegations against Morrison, who later became minister of state for energy, “but did not pass them to police.”
“These are examples of a political culture which values its reputation far higher than the fate of the children involved,” the report concluded.
Jay said that things had changed, but it was “unacceptable” that some political parties still today had no specific child protection politics.
As recently as 2017, a prospective lawmaker for the Green Party appointed her father as an election agent despite him having been charged — and later convicted — of raping a child.
She was not elected as a lawmaker.
In a statement, British Secretary of State for the Home Department Priti Patel paid tribute to the “strength and courage of the victims and survivors who have shared their experiences.”
“The government will review this report and consider how to respond to its content in due course,” she said.
The inquiry was commissioned in 2015 in the wake of a series of high-profile sex abuse scandals, the most prominent of which involved former BBC TV presenter Jimmy Savile, who died in 2011.
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