The principle that it is better for a guilty man to go free than for an innocent one to be convicted is out of fashion. And when child abuse is under discussion, it takes courage even to mention it.
Last Thursday the Commons debated The Conduct of Investigations into Past Cases of Abuse in Children’s Homes, a report from the Home Affairs Select Committee published last October.
The most authoritative speech came from Labour's Claire Curtis-Thomas. She was worried that the trawling methods used by the police encourage false allegations. She argued that it was impossibly difficult for people to defend themselves against accusations that may involve events 20 years in the past. And she spoke of people whose lives and careers were ruined by unfounded allegations of abuse.
Time was short, so MPs who demurred from her line had to make their points through interventions. Their case was that abuse in children's homes is a recent discovery and court and police procedures must change so we can investigate it.
Depressingly, they are wrong. Dickens’ early novels and journalism are full of the subject. And in 1910 one of my favourite Liberals, Charles Masterman, was asked to investigate allegations about the treatment of boys on the Akbar training ship. The publisher and swindler Horatio Bottomley (the Robert Maxwell of his day) dismissed the resultant report as a whitewash, and his magazine John Bull hounded Masterman ever after.
The sad truth is that we have always known about abuse in children’s homes, but have rarely felt moved do much about it. The emphasis on accusations about the past has created a climate where the innocent can be convicted, but doesn’t improve the lot of children today.
There is something voyeuristic about the media’s emphaisis on sexual matters. Reading the report of the 1992 inquiry into Leicestershire’s children’s homes, what comes through above is the squalor the children lived in and the inadequacies of those who regarded themselves as skilled therapists.
But these points never make the headlines. Nor do the appalling outcomes for children brought up in public care. So there is no sign of humility from government and the childcare professions. They continue to believe that the answer to any social problem lies in more intervention from them.
The hay fever season is here, and people are beginning to wonder why it is now such a problem. After all, thanks to development and the Common Agricultural Policy, there is less grassland around these days.
One theory suggests the problem lies in our infancy. Children are kept so clean that their immune systems are given nothing to do. So they look for work and take against innocent things like pollen.
A similar process take place politics. On most objective measures, people in Britain today are as healthy and wealthy as anyone has ever been on this plant. Yet they complain about their lot with increasing vehemence, and Parliament passes more and more laws.
Which is why Bill Tynan’s Fireworks Bill received its third reading on Friday. A bill, said David Ruffley “that will provide the protection that so many of our constituents want, especially in Bury St. Edmunds”. (Others were quite parochial about it. Richard Allan told the house about his parents’ dog Gipsy.)
You can understand MPs’ reasoning. They are inundated with complaints about fireworks from constituents and their parents’ dogs. So pass a new law. People will be happier and we will get fewer letters. But if the hay fever theory is right, they are going to be disappointed.
Tynan’s bill is an enabling measure. It throws more powers at the government and begs it to do something. So you had to listen to what the minister responsible said. It was clear that Melanie Johnson does not intend to upset the industry by banning lots of currently available fireworks.
But this will leave a lot of people unsatisfied. The RSPCA is running a “Quiet please” campaign to have noisy fireworks banned. As part of it they invited MPs to a display of quiet ones. By all accounts it was not an exciting evening.
Others want to ban private displays altogether. If they get their way, the hayfever theory suggests the issue will still not go away. After all, fireworks at public displays are louder than the ones you buy to use in your own garden. So the next thing will be a campaign to ban them too.
That is the problem with government by petition. People rarely go out to collect signatures in favour of the status quo. So we all suffer from hay fever.
At questions to the Leader of the House last Thursday Angela Browning grabbed House Points by the scruff of its neck and dragged it on to the field of play. The Conservatives’ Deputy Chairman asked John Reid for a debate this week on the middle classes.
“I am sure that the Leader of the House will have noted that in Liberal Democrat News of 30 May, Jonathan Calder, who is a member of the party's federal policy committee, wrote an article about the Conservative policy of scrapping tuition fees. He says that it ‘has a lot to be said for it’, but goes on to say: ‘If the Conservatives do not speak for the stupid middle classes, who do they speak for?’ We should like to debate that rather old-fashioned concept with them.”
My first reaction was delight. I feared I was becoming rather conservative in my old age, but to Smith Square I am still a dangerous class-war warrior. And they know I am a member of FPC, which House Points never mentions. I am tempted to ask to see a copy of the file they hold on me, but it would be too disappointing if they turned out not to have one.
What have I done to upset Angela Browning? I can’t think, unless it was the time, on the flimsiest of evidence, I suggested she was known to her colleagues as “Gravy” Browning.
But she does sound confused. If social class is “an old fashioned concept”, why does whe want a debate about it? When John Major talked of his ambition to see a classless society, he was clear that a lot of reforms would be needed to get there. Browning seems to think you can do away with class by calling it “old fashioned”.
A few weeks ago we fantasised that the Conservative front bench read this newspaper. It’s clear they really do, and they think the Government reads it too. John Reid’s confused supply suggests not. He had the sound of a man you will more often find curled up with Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.
If the Conservatives are reading this column I had better change my approach. I don’t mean I am going to tone down my views: I mean I am going to have to use shorter words.
Ask a member of the public if politicans tell lies and they will laugh and tell you politicians lie all of the time. It’s unfair, but that’s what a lot of people believe.
But if one politician claims another is not telling the truth, the accused will act like a choirboy unjustly accused of stealing a postal order.
Which is why the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has become so important. Their existence was crucial to the public case for war. Now the failure to find any weapons is bringing the truthfulness of the government into question.
It is worse that that. It is not just the government's credibilty which is in doubt, it is the prime minister's.
On 24 September he told the House of Commons that “his weapons of mass destruction regime is active, detailed and growing ... [Intelligence] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”
It is that “within 45 minutes” that may haunt Blair. It claimed much more precise knowledge than “within in an hour” would have done.
Meanwhile in America, with its tradition of open government, things are clearer. As long ago as September 2000, the Project for a New American Century published a document calling for an invasion of Iraq to bring about regime change. Its authors included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush.
Then last week Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair that the decision to make Iraqi WMDs the central point in the case for war was taken for “bureaucratic reasons” because it was “the one reason everyone could agree on”.
Which raises a question. Was Tony Blair equally cynical about WMDs, or did he believe the Americans were sincere about them? Or to put it another way: was he dishonest or was he duped?
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Concrete blocks outside Westminster. (The Victorians would have chosen the finest stone and had it carved.) Trainspotters banned from London termini for security reasons. (“Throw down your notebook and walk away.”)
It’s hard to argue that invading Iraq has made us feel more secure.