Social Work Today, 26th February 1980
MP claims boys’ home was bugged (26.2.80)
1 Comment
Monthly Archives: September 2013
Former Liberal MP gets caught out on Cyril Smith statements
Private Eye, September 2013
Ashdene children’s home, Southampton
Harry Bunker, a magistrate and superintendent of Ashdene children’s home in Southampton, was found guilty of sexually abusing girls in his care. The abuse started while Ashdene was run by Barnardo’s, and continued while it was run by Hampshire Council.
Judge Lewis McCreery tried his best to influence the verdict by suggesting to the jury that the abuse allegations could be a ‘conspiracy’ by the five girls – “childen sometimes collaborated to concoct allegatons” he said, but luckily the members of the jury didn’t fall for it. Bunker was sentenced to just 30 months in jail.
Social Work Today, 22nd November 1977
Social Work Today, 29th November 1977
Daily Express, 15th November 1977
Daily Mirror, 15th November 1977
Daily Express, 16th November 1977
Daily Express, 17th November 1977
Daily Mirror, 19th November 1977
Daily Express, 22nd November 1977
Daily Express, 23rd November 1977
Daily Express, 24th November 1977
Peter Righton on fostering and adoption
Peter Righton was highly influential in the social work establishment of the 1970s and 80s, and wrote dozens of articles for Social Work Today, the in-house journal of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and the Residential Care Association (RCA).
Righton was ostensibly gay, but in reality he was a paedophile who had formed a network of paedophiles who abused vulnerable children in schools and children’s homes across the UK for many years. He was exposed in the BBC documentary ‘Secret Life of a Paedophile’.
Some of his columns in Social Work Today revealed his true intentions, and the platform he was given by the magazine enabled him to reach out to other paedophiles in the social work profession.
In the article below, he recommends that single men and women should be able to adopt and foster children, but concedes that this will attract suspicion:
“The trouble is that people living on their own are not loved in our society. If they are spinsters, or (especially) bachelors, their sexual motives come under suspicious scrutiny; their “unnatural” way of life is compared unfavourably with that of the deified nuclear family…”
Righton’s influence may have played a part in changing council policies. A few years later, some London councils allowed single men to foster children, and this policy was exploited to the full by paedophiles. Michael John Carroll, a Lambeth children’s home worker, was only stopped from fostering two children when a criminal records check showed that he had a previous conviction for indecently assaulting a young boy. Read more
See also Peter Righton – Sex and the Residential Social Worker
Write to Your MP and ask them to support a national investigation into child abuse cover-ups
I ask everyone to send a copy of the ‘Open letter to David Cameron’ to their MP with a personal message.
Send via this website: http://www.writetothem.com/
Send a message in your own words, or if you’re pressed for time you could use this draft email template below.
Please contact me when your MP has replied so their responses can be collated.
Dear [my MP]
I call your attention to an open letter to David Cameron (below) which seeks to expose child abuse – both historic and current.
Whilst the letter is addressed to the Prime Minister, I look to all Members of Parliament to put pressure on the Cabinet and those in governmental office to demand investigation of all paedophiles – no matter of their standing in society or high office.
As my MP, I trust you to represent me on this matter and assist in exposing these horrendous crimes.
Do you support the request, summed up in the final paragraph of the open letter, for an independent inquiry and an immediate national police investigation?
Yours sincerely,
[your name]
Dear Mr. Cameron
On the very day, 24th October 2012, that Tom Watson asked you a PMQ re. the possibility of a link between a very large and highly organised paedophile ring and No 10, you made a number of quotes to the mainstream media.
You were in fact referring to the Savile/BBC/NHS scandal.
I made a note of some of those quotes :-
”The Government will do all it can do, other institutions must do what they can do, to make sure that we learn the lesson of this and it can NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN”
“Collusion should NEVER happen again ”
”The measure of how our society is, is how we treat its most vulnerable members”
There are no more vulnerable members of our society than children who have been taken in to care and then re-abused by the very people charged with the responsibility of caring for them and protecting them,and even worse then passing them on to be further abused by the very people who make the laws in this country and are expected to lead the way on the moral compass of that society.
I have no doubt that you have watched or been made aware of Channel 4′s Dispatches on 12th September and the allegations that arose from it regarding the role of senior politicians, the security services and the Crown Prosecution Service in covering up the horrendous abuse carried out by Cyril Smith over 5 decades.The overlap with Savile in terms of who knew about this abuse were laid bare.
I also have no doubt that you are aware that your colleagues in your party, Edwina Currie,Gyles Brandreth and Rod Richards have made very damning statements of how well known in Westminster circles it was that Peter Morrison was a dangerous paedophile, and yet his career was unaffected as he rose to be Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, Mrs. Thatcher’s PPS in 1990 and her campaign manager that same year despite this knowledge having been around for many years.
I also have no doubt that you are aware of the statement of Tim Fortescue,Edward Heath’s Chief Whip from 1970-73, made public on Michael Cockerell’s BBC Documentary in 1995 called “Westminster’s Secret Service “.
Talking about the role of the chief whip, Fortescue said ” For anyone with any sense who was in trouble would come to the whips and tell them the truth ………….. it might be erm erm a scandal involving small boys ……….. we would do everything we can because we would store up brownie points ……. and if I mean, that sounds a pretty,pretty nasty reason, but it’s one of the reasons because if we could get a chap out of trouble then,he will do as we ask forever more.”
I don’t need to tell you of the revulsion I feel towards our political masters having worked with sexually abused children for over 30 years when I heard of how the Whips ran the Dirt Book system.
Your colleague, John Whittingdale, in his role as Chair of the Culture Committee,put himself forward as the moral voice of Parliament in the days following the exposure of Savile on national TV.
He lost no opportunity to appear on every news channel for many days to demand in effect the head of the Director General of the BBC.To date I have not heard you or Mr. Whittingdale demand such investigations in to your own institution despite the mountain of concern a small proportion of which I have referred to above.
Just on Savile alone without looking any further why was there no investigation along the lines of the many BBC inquiries in to why a British Prime Minister was so close to Savile that he allegedly attended 13 consecutive New Year’s Eve parties at Chequers and why the same Prime Minister allegedly persevered for many years in insisting that such an evil man long identified as having a deviant sexual history should get a knighthood,ignoring the advice of her closest advisers.
Why was the same man so welcome in Prince Charles’s properties despite the security services and similar vetting institutions having enough opportunity to tap in to the ” gossip” about Savile that was around for decades.
I would dearly like to go in to more detail but until the Metropolitan Police’s Operations Fernbridge and Fairbank are completed then for obvious reasons I can not.
In the aftermath of the Lord McAlpine affair I was extremely disappointed by the confusion you attempted to create by making accusations of gay witch-hunts. There is no connection whatsoever between being gay and being a paedophile.
This is about and only about people who abuse young children regardless of whether the abuser is heterosexual or gay.
There is no witch-hunt against gay people and it was most irresponsible for a Prime Minister to make such a statement when the abuse of our most vulnerable was the issue.
Now is the time for you to show the genuine commitment expected of a Prime Minister and do what you preached in those statements last October especially ” COLLUSION SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN ” and the demand that ALL institutions look inwards and examine their role in past collusion/cover up.
A starting point, and to give Parliament and Government any credibility in this heinous historical scandal, is for you to put all party political considerations aside and arrange an urgent meeting with Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband to draw up a blueprint as to how your own institution will be investigated along the lines of the way you and colleagues demanded that people be brought to account in the BBC or NHS for their failure to blow the whistle on Savile.
It would be better if you led such an exercise before it is forced upon you by public demand.
The latter will happen in time.
A starting point would be an immediate statement that there will be urgent cross-party talks to set up an independant body to examine who ordered these cover ups of people like Smith and Morrison, after ordering an immediate Police investigation by the National Crime Agency and ensuring that the latter body has sufficient resources to go wherever the evidence takes them and however long it takes. This must include the investigation of living politicians, police officers,civil servants,security services personnel etc.
Yours sincerely,
The source of Tom Watson’s PMQ
An open letter to David Cameron
Dear Mr. Cameron
On the very day, 24th October 2012, that Tom Watson asked you a PMQ re. the possibility of a link between a very large and highly organised paedophile ring and No 10, you made a number of quotes to the mainstream media.
You were in fact referring to the Savile/BBC/NHS scandal.
I made a note of some of those quotes :-
”The Government will do all it can do, other institutions must do what they can do, to make sure that we learn the lesson of this and it can NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN”
“Collusion should NEVER happen again ”
”The measure of how our society is, is how we treat its most vulnerable members”
There are no more vulnerable members of our society than children who have been taken in to care and then re-abused by the very people charged with the responsibility of caring for them and protecting them,and even worse then passing them on to be further abused by the very people who make the laws in this country and are expected to lead the way on the moral compass of that society.
I have no doubt that you have watched or been made aware of Channel 4′s Dispatches on 12th September and the allegations that arose from it regarding the role of senior politicians, the security services and the Crown Prosecution Service in covering up the horrendous abuse carried out by Cyril Smith over 5 decades.The overlap with Savile in terms of who knew about this abuse were laid bare.
I also have no doubt that you are aware that your colleagues in your party, Edwina Currie,Gyles Brandreth and Rod Richards have made very damning statements of how well known in Westminster circles it was that Peter Morrison was a dangerous paedophile, and yet his career was unaffected as he rose to be Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, Mrs. Thatcher’s PPS in 1990 and her campaign manager that same year despite this knowledge having been around for many years.
I also have no doubt that you are aware of the statement of Tim Fortescue,Edward Heath’s Chief Whip from 1970-73, made public on Michael Cockerell’s BBC Documentary in 1995 called “Westminster’s Secret Service “.
Talking about the role of the chief whip, Fortescue said ” For anyone with any sense who was in trouble would come to the whips and tell them the truth ………….. it might be erm erm a scandal involving small boys ……….. we would do everything we can because we would store up brownie points ……. and if I mean, that sounds a pretty,pretty nasty reason, but it’s one of the reasons because if we could get a chap out of trouble then,he will do as we ask forever more.”
I don’t need to tell you of the revulsion I feel towards our political masters having worked with sexually abused children for over 30 years when I heard of how the Whips ran the Dirt Book system.
Your colleague, John Whittingdale, in his role as Chair of the Culture Committee,put himself forward as the moral voice of Parliament in the days following the exposure of Savile on national TV.
He lost no opportunity to appear on every news channel for many days to demand in effect the head of the Director General of the BBC.To date I have not heard you or Mr. Whittingdale demand such investigations in to your own institution despite the mountain of concern a small proportion of which I have referred to above.
Just on Savile alone without looking any further why was there no investigation along the lines of the many BBC inquiries in to why a British Prime Minister was so close to Savile that he allegedly attended 13 consecutive New Year’s Eve parties at Chequers and why the same Prime Minister allegedly persevered for many years in insisting that such an evil man long identified as having a deviant sexual history should get a knighthood,ignoring the advice of her closest advisers.
Why was the same man so welcome in Prince Charles’s properties despite the security services and similar vetting institutions having enough opportunity to tap in to the ” gossip” about Savile that was around for decades.
I would dearly like to go in to more detail but until the Metropolitan Police’s Operations Fernbridge and Fairbank are completed then for obvious reasons I can not.
In the aftermath of the Lord McAlpine affair I was extremely disappointed by the confusion you attempted to create by making accusations of gay witch-hunts. There is no connection whatsoever between being gay and being a paedophile.
This is about and only about people who abuse young children regardless of whether the abuser is heterosexual or gay.
There is no witch-hunt against gay people and it was most irresponsible for a Prime Minister to make such a statement when the abuse of our most vulnerable was the issue.
Now is the time for you to show the genuine commitment expected of a Prime Minister and do what you preached in those statements last October especially ” COLLUSION SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN ” and the demand that ALL institutions look inwards and examine their role in past collusion/cover up.
A starting point, and to give Parliament and Government any credibility in this heinous historical scandal, is for you to put all party political considerations aside and arrange an urgent meeting with Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband to draw up a blueprint as to how your own institution will be investigated along the lines of the way you and colleagues demanded that people be brought to account in the BBC or NHS for their failure to blow the whistle on Savile.
It would be better if you led such an exercise before it is forced upon you by public demand.
The latter will happen in time.
A starting point would be an immediate statement that there will be urgent cross-party talks to set up an independant body to examine who ordered these cover ups of people like Smith and Morrison, after ordering an immediate Police investigation by the National Crime Agency and ensuring that the latter body has sufficient resources to go wherever the evidence takes them and however long it takes. This must include the investigation of living politicians, police officers,civil servants,security services personnel etc.
Yours sincerely,
The source of Tom Watson’s PMQ
Harvey Proctor’s research trip (18.09.87)
Private Eye, 18th September 1987
Greville Janner and Frank Beck
Private Eye, 14th February 1992
See also:
Paedophile children’s home boss Frank Beck wrote for Social Work Today
Peter Righton was a regular contributor to Social Work Today, the official publication of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), and one article in particular – ‘Sex and the Residential Social Worker’ – reads like an appeal to other paedophiles working in residential care.
But Peter Righton wasn’t the only paedophile who wrote for Social Work Today. Frank Beck, the paedophile at the centre of the Leicestershire children’s homes scandal, was also given a platform for his views.
Social Work Today, 22nd July 1976
Head is remanded in custody (30.09.85)
Social Work Today, 30th September 1985
spotlight 