Abuse: Establishment Cover Up Or Establishment Cover Up?

We are used to politicians legally dodging their tax liabilities and "accidentally" claiming too much on their expenses. We've even become used to politicians perverting the course of justice and then returning to government after being "re-habilitated." The disproportionate number of MP's and Lords with criminal records is no longer shocking, though it should be. Nor are we any longer amazed when a so-called celebrity is shown to have feet of clay and to have been hiding from us all a darker side. But what is about to crash into the headlines, the widespread abuse of power by politicians in the 1980's, threatens to rock our democracy to its very foundations. Should we be so shocked however? It is clear from the cases involving Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, the miner's strikes and Hillsborough that there was something very wrong about the 1980's. Perhaps Lord Tebbitt summed it all up for us when he revealed on TV that a cover up was not unlikely and that, at that time, such things were routine. It was a different time with different attitudes he blithely informed us as if that makes it all OK. The truth is that, apart from the attitudes of the political elite, it wasn't different in the 1980's. I was a young man then and, if sexual freedom was taken for granted, rape, sexual abuse and child molestation were not. It was a matter of knowing right from wrong. Sex, even then, was a mutually consensual activity and children under 18 were strictly off limits. What is being revealed by all of this is that the abuse of power in the 1980's was not only widespread but was considered normal. The 1980's were not what many of us believed they were and now stand revealed as a house of cards erected upon rotten foundations. Worse yet we now find that the establishment cover up continued well after the 1980's and even up to the present day. Today the Labour MP Simon Danczuk has revealed in the Mail Online that he has been pressurised by a Tory Minister to keep quiet about child abuse by politicians, while documents are now known to have conveniently disappeared. Meanwhile Michael Gove is desperately trying to tell us that this was all in the past and we should now concentrate on the future instead of raking over old coals. The Tory party is heavily implicated in all this, although it should be noted that they don't stand completely alone. But one thing is now becoming crystal clear at that is that Tory hegemony of power between 1979 and 1997 was a period in which the abuse of power lay at the very heart of government and, like now, formed a cornerstone of Tory philosophy.

Tebbitt Savages Cameron.

Lord Tebbitt, the embalmed corpse of the old Thatcherite Tory party, has savaged David Cameron in the "Guardian" today and told him to get a grip. This attack was apparently prompted by the resignation of Andrew Mitchell, but not because Tebbitt was disgusted by what Mitchell did and said. No, his beef is that Cameron has failed to hide the basic partisanship of the Tory party and has failed to obscure their selfish objectives. He proudly listed the "toffs" that have always dominated the Tory party and roundly criticised Cameron for failing to disguise what that means for the rest of us - the plebs. However, what Norman Tebbitt seems to misunderstand is the present context. While it is true that "toffs" have always dominated the Tory party and have always worked for their own selfish and greedy ends, what has changed is the revelation, in the wake of the financial crisis, that the Tory party is far more interested in defending the privileges of the wealthy than they are in protecting the interests of the country as a whole. They always were, of course, but they can no longer hide it from the electorate. Cameron is being criticised not because he's incompetent but because he's failed to hide the truth from the public and fluffed his primary task of creating believable spin. Tebbitt has always been the consumate snake oil salesman and is simply aghast that the present leader is not as good at this as he and Margaret Thatcher once were.