Shockwaves to British Politics changing engagement with Parliment and Government

 

First joined Labour Party 1960, Ruskin College student 1961-1963 and GMB union member

When writing commenced, the purpose was to reinforce the main points of a talk given by Alasdair Mackenzie, senior Outreach and Engagement Officer for Parliament, at a reunion of former students of the adult further education college, Ruskin, on the process of engaging with Parliament and influencing Government. Mr Mackenzie demonstrated that Parliament and Government is open to influence by anyone and everyone and the importance of understanding the ways in which this can be undertaken.

The plan was to show that it is possible to engage and influence when outside the systems and traditional networks of power, and sometimes to be able to engage more directly and have greater influence than when holding a position of power within the political system, and to demonstrate this with examples from the three periods of my life when I moved from a poacher to gamekeeper, after which I went back to being a poacher but as someone who had been a gamekeeper.

The first point is that it is better to act with others, or on behalf of others, sometimes with help from the media, but also quietly, communicating and informing those who have the power and where achieving a goal depends on understanding the nature of power, and its abuse, within and without Parliament, and the widening imbalance between what any one individual or small community interest group can achieve compared to those with great wealth and existing power.

My experience, which commenced in 1959, is that the process described by Mr McKenzie has not changed fundamentally since the absolute power of the UK Government during the second world war ended, at home, and with the transfer of power from Empire to the independent nations of the Commonwealth.

Because of national and international developments since setting off for Oxford on June 24^th, the day of the Referendum result, and a week after the assassination of the Member of Parliament for Batley and Spen, I have reviewed and rewritten in an attempt to assess if these events are likely to make a difference. I believe we have reached a critical, dangerous and uncertain period of months where it is only possible to begin to understand what is happening and why. I suggest we face not just the decision to leave the European Community but the potential break up of Britain into autonomous or semi- autonomous states, the ending and creation of new political parties, and civilian unrest with the re-imposition of the kind of governmental controls not experienced since the mid-fifties when rationing ended and when there was control over the movement of financial capital.

Large numbers of people, including those from overseas who settled in Britain before the 1990’s have come to feel strangers in their own country, powerless subjects who do not matter and who have increasing contempt for politicians, business, finance and religious leaders with the exception of the present Head of State.                                   

It can be demonstrated that dissatisfaction and tension has built up over several decades between electorate and the body politics and there has also been dissatisfaction and frustration within the executive of Government as the Prime Minister, the first of equals, became Presidential; between Government and Parliament; between Government and Parliament and the European Government and its Parliament and separate Court; between the British Government and the devolved Governments of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales; between Central and Local government; between Government and semi-autonomous Security Services and the Police; between Government and the semi-autonomous Military; between Government and the Justice system; and between State and the  Established Church, State and Religions; between the democratically elected and the public paid servant; between the former independence of local government committees and their chief officers and the development of corporate government and administration which is a euphemism for control by finance.

While each aspect merits attention my focus is on the recent major shocks to the political system and where the British Way, allowing, some venting through expressions of dissent, but quickly re-establishing the status quo, has failed to date and has led to the present crisis. The first of these is the elimination of the Labour Party representation from Scotland to the House of Commons and the effectiveness of the single minded and competent Scottish Nationalist Party members at Westminster; the second was the overwhelming democratic election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Leader of the Labour Party and the immediate rejection of his leadership by the Parliamentary Party where members considered the best way to force his resignation. The third shock has been the referendum vote, where admittedly I predicated a greater margin of dissent.

The first recent warning indicator that the public is no longer prepared to accept government failure, incompetence and the deliberate misrepresentation of what had happened, and why, was the exposure of the greed and the fraud inherent in gambling capitalism with the banking collapses which commenced on 2008, closely followed by the Parliamentary Expenses scandal.

This was followed by the burning and looting of the summer of 2011 when it can be said that the police appeared to abdicate, and which I believe was a major factor in Mrs May abolishing the executive role of the Association of Chief Constables with the establishment of the National Crime Agency and warning the Police Federation in their Den to change or be changed. As a private citizen I wrote at length to my constituency Member of Parliament, David Miliband and he passed a copy of the communication to the Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and where one of the main points was that Chief Constables and their organisations appeared to reject the democratic right of government to determine their priorities in a situation where responsibility for resource management had been delegated to Police Committees and then to individually elected Police Commissioners. The hidden aspect which developed over decades was the sweetheart relationship between the police and politicians, between politicians and the media and between Chief Constables and Chief Executives of local authorities and which led to protectionism and to asking- Who Guards the Guardians?

The police, as the civilian protectors of the people from law breakers, have undermined confidence by their attempt to pervert the course of justice and cover up in what happened at the Hillsborough massacre revealed by the recent Independent Inquiry with access to documentation followed by the second Inquest.

The Statutory Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales alongside the inquiries in Northern Ireland and Scotland, the associated police investigation into their own previous conduct and the those of Independent Police Complaints Commission, now itself in the process of reform, begins years of investigations before the full extent of police complicity in protectionism and cover up will be exposed alongside the roles of the other institutions of State and Religion.

The first past the post system for the General Election covering England produced one member of  Parliament representing the United Kingdom Independence Party despite four million votes in total from four nations and although I suggest the Brexit  means Brexit stance of the new Prime Minister together with the appointments of Boris Johnson, David Davies and Dr Liam Fox prevented the financial owner of UKIP seeking to enlarge with defections from the Conservative party and there is now concentration of gaining seats from the Labour Party where between thirty and forty have been targeted. One source has pointed out that if the number sacked former Ministers is added to those disappointed at not getting the promotion anticipated, the total is greater than the present Conservative majority over all other political parties.

I suggest that the rise of the UKIP voter and Momentum movement in support of the political approach of the Leader of the Labour party is also an indication of tension between the form of Representative House of Commons democracy and demands for something more participative. On Saturday July 16th BBC Four broadcast “Who were the Greeks” which highlighted the development of a direct and participative democracy and law when every eligible citizen could attend any meeting including the decision to go to war, speak and vote by an open show of hands and where the citizen presented their own case for an adjudication in disputes.

Present British democracy is very different where the eligible electorate is only asked to vote for a constituency Member of the House of Commons at a General Election and which is the only open aspect within the otherwise close structure of a heredity Head of State with direct control over government, church, internal and external security, and the law, through the Privy Council and with the unelected and nominated Upper Chamber, the House of Lords, acting as the constitutional long stop.

Membership of a political party provides what has been the only open means of gaining Access to political power through a democratic process of selection and election and where both selection and the election is dependent on the funding, work and support of others members of the same Party. Once elected the Member of the House of Commons has a duty to represent the interests of every constituent, group or interest irrespective of how they voted or Party political allegiance although the reality is often very different. For an individual Member of the House of Commons an essential aspect of their position is the ability to continue to command the support of the membership which is often built up before as well after their selection. This became easier as party membership declined. The Ed Miliband Reforms changed the position for Labour.

In 1961 I used a book grant from my constituency Labour Party (Mitcham held by Sir Robert Carr who became a Home Secretary and where I had been a member of the Executive for Beddington and Wallington matching the local council) to buy Parliamentary Socialism by Ralph Miliband and published by George Allen and Unwin at Ruskin House with its third chapter” Parliamentarism versus Direct Action”, chapter six “The Price of respectability” and ten “The sickness of Labourism” with as subheading “Paralysis as ideology”. I also bought Out of Apathy a New Left Book with the final chapter by E P Thompson headed Revolution and where at one point he hoped that Reformism was nearing the end of its road. (I worked casually in the coffee bar in the basement of the Soho building of the Review and Books), with the books resurrected recently, and where in 2010 marking the 50^th birthday the Guardian posed the question “Can an intellectual project thrive without a movement? I also read Anthony Crossland’s, The Future of Socialism (1956) buying in 1962 his “Conservative Enemy “together with Douglas Jay’s “Socialism in the New Society” books which can be argued formed the original thinking for Harold Wilson and the New Labour of Blair and Brown.

Ed Miliband wanted to tackle the Parliamentary obstacles for an alternative to global trade and finance based on corporate profit and worker exploitation proposing the outright abolition of the House of Lords and the current honours system. I am not aware, if he also recognised that the only way to stop the aggressive and abusive combative exchanges in the House of Commons, the language of ‘weaponise’ and ‘smash’, and end the absurd obsession with the rituals of a gentleman’s club, is for Parliament to be relocated purpose designed outside of London. The present building should be sold to a Russian or Chinese oligarch, or a President Trump as a museum monument to British Imperialism.

A balanced understanding also recognises that political activism can provoke unhealthy divisions, violence and quick fix solutions that with reflection can be seen  destined to fail, and because of having had proximity with the revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1980’s I am a continuing fan of the traditional British Way which on the Andrew Marr programme in 2014, on the morning before the Home Secretary surrendered on behalf of the Coalition government to political and media pressure for an ill-conceived instant national inquiry into historical crimes of child sex abuse, was the way the Establishment had become skilled in dealing with problems and their cover up, albeit with disastrous consequences in relation to child protection.

What I describe as the British Way is an idiosyncratic system and approach which usually is able to adapt to events however powerful their shock, as happened after the accidental death of Diana, Princess of Wales, where on a visit to London, there was revolution in the air and where it can be said that the state funeral was a magnificent demonstration of how the British establishment can respond and commence the process enabling the majority to move back to the status quo.

It is when the British Way of managing major events fails such as the Bloody Sunday massacre, the Hillsborough massacre, the Iraq War civilian deaths or the historical crimes against children within and by institutions, and most recently the demolition of the Labour Party in Scotland by the Scottish Nationalist Party and at Westminster, quickly followed by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party, that the accumulative long term impact of such events is open.

It is too early to say if the approach taken by the new Conservative Government led by Teresa May will succeed in managing the Referendum vote to leave the European Parliament and its Court without further damaging the political process and political party structures as they are now. It is likely Mrs May will rank alongside the war time Prime Minister Churchill if she is able to satisfy competing interests at home and in Europe, Exit, but retain open trading relationships and a more reasonable movement of people to travel, work and live and keep the four nations within a British Parliament.

Mrs May like Churchill does have an immediate external threat although the terrorist death bombings which over a thirty-year period averaged more than two a year, with other explosions, and all the ‘political’ based assassinations of the ‘Troubles,’ followed by those since 7/7 2005, associated with perversion of Islam, are insignificant compared to what those of us born in greater London and other cities and towns experienced during World War II experienced. My earliest memory is a VI rocket heading directly to where we lived and falling and exploding a little distance away, over 340 V1’s VII’s falling in the area of Croydon airport. I have relatives who will never accept the dicktats of a Mrs Merkel.

But although despite the slaughter of the first day of the Somme when 20000 died or the millions of civilians slaughtered across the planet during WWII, and the UK Parliamentary state remaining prepared to exterminate millions through the use of nuclear weapons, we have become intolerant of what history may say is the meaningless deaths of two hundred British service people in Iraq and four hundred and fifty in Afghanistan. Mrs May will need therefore to ensure terrorist outrages are kept to a minimum while achieving an acceptable balance between measures required to combat the digital communication war, the traditional methods of infiltration and surveillance, and the British conviction that their castle is their home, and their personal privacy is a right, despite  the reality that we all should be loyal and obedient  subjects of an heredity head of state which perpetuates the trappings and privileges of  a divine monarchy.

The British Way of the Establishment has been to welcome the rebel with a cause especially when they have popular backing, the film and TV Star, sports person and latest personality, but only if they accept the prevailing system, hence everyone liked to be photographed with Jimmy Savile. A different standard has also applied to British relationships with the dictator, the crime boss and corporate tax dodger if they offer enough.

The Establishment, as Anthony Sampson in his series of books on the anatomy of power 1962-2004 explained, is a changing, adapting group of interacting institutions with restricted memberships but a willingness to accept new members who conform and accept the authority then in operation. Lawyers dominated local government, for example, along with Medical Officers of Health until the 1970’s when the accountant became ascendant and the Town Clerk and Medical Officer was abolished. Entry to accountancy and advancement remains an open profession whereas progress as a lawyer to barrister has been restricted and membership of an Oxford college has remained a direct route to political power. The rebel, the community activist has been embraced as long as there is no attempt to undermine the foundations of the British Way.

Under the  Leadership of David Cameron the Conservative Party became more open in the selection of parliamentary candidates moving away from a patrician class of land owner, business man and soldier but it can be argued that the two leaders of the Coalition were interchangeable, and that this followed on from similar developments under the stewardship of Tony Blair who moved from recruiting to Parliament and Government the trade unionist and local political activist to the professional politician who had little or no experience of the reality of manual or being on your feet all working day labour, being on the dole, homeless, disabled or a victim.  Jeremy Corbin has said he wants to see more people in Parliament from the work force, those who have organised and represented labour or who worked with the most vulnerable and neglected in society and the future role of Ruskin College and neighbouring Brookes University located in Headington should be reviewed, if not already underway, as a source for this, as it once was.

Signs also emerged of a new Labour dynasty of the professional politician with the brothers David and Ed Miliband and Stephen Kinnock whose parents are Members of the House of Lords, contrasting with Jo Cox who shared an office suite, who had worked for the wife of Prime Minister Gordon Brown but then became a doer and her brutal assassination as the Member of the House of Commons for Batley and Spen is one of the shocks to the Parliamentary system in Britain over the past couple of years.

The first significant shock was the sweeping to power of the Scottish National Party in Scotland and to Westminster obliterating the Labour Party on a platform which has continued to highlight a unilateral end to Britain’s possession and potential use of weapons of mass civilian extermination.

I listened and then read the maiden speeches of all the new members to House of Commons in 2015 and watched their progress in presenting an informed and articulate radical alternative to the status quo of Parliament. I was also impressed by a number of new Members in the 2015 intake on the Conservative and Labour benches and when combined appeared to mark a significant shift towards a more liberal and open House of Commons and building on some of those who first entered in 2010. It should be evident that the only threat to the continued domination in Scotland and Scottish representation at Westminster of the Scottish National Party comes from the politics and policies of Jeremy Corbyn who also challenges the overall power structure of heredity Head of State, the Privy Council and its sub committees and where the position of the Scottish Nationalist Party on this is unclear to me.

The second shock has been the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour party with a huge mandate despite having difficulty securing the required support from the Parliamentary Labour Party. The dishonesty of a substantial number of Labour Members of the Commons has not surprised in their pretence that the prolonged and now public opposition was about his leadership ability, his ability to connect or his role in the result of the Referendum, all of which can be quickly set aside if the available evidence is examined without prejudice. The Independent on Nov 5^th 2015 revealed the private talks plot for mass resignations from the Shadow Cabinet when the time was right and an awareness that if the plot failed, the consequences would be disastrous.

In a nutshell the Parliamentary Party from the beginning rejected the authority of Jeremy Corbyn because they opposed what he had stood for and proposed, but believed he could be managed, and which in turn led to a bunker mentality and open political warfare when he felt he was in a position to stand firm and to fight back, sacking Hillary Benn. The so called fight to save the Labour party is a fight to save the political power order established by Blair and Brown years created, fair enough then, because of realities global trading and finance and which had developed during the reign of Margaret, Lady Thatcher, and which the joint Labour leaders Blair foreign policy and security, and Brown controlling the domestic economy, were able to reinforce by the public mandate following the General Elections of 1997 and 2001.

The present Leadership contest within the Labour Party appears to have also arisen because of a difference between those who are prepared to work within the current framework of global trading and finance and those who want actual change and not just the talk and the promise of change. I am suggesting that the divide is more than between conservatives and progressives argued in the Guardian article by David Wearing on 26^th July and a more fundamental challenge to the way things have become and which Mrs May recognised by her decision to launch as fierce a personal attack on Jeremy Corbyn as anything from David Cameron, accusing him of misusing power to remain the Party Leader.  The Momentum does not present an immediate threat to the State, but threatens the ability of Mrs May to gain an effective majority.

It is also an immediate threat to the existing power of the Parliamentary Labour Party. With the original criticisms not having worked, the campaign against Jeremy has focussed more on his supporters and staff but the brick said to have been a personal attack against the Leadership candidate Angela Eagle was thrown against the Remain poster of the stairwell of the building of the local Labour Party office. An allegation of unauthorised entry into the office of an MP at the House of Commons was explained as a mistake by the Office Manager for the Shadow Front bench who assumed the office had been vacated and apologised before reference was made to the Speaker. 

I suspect that Jeremy is only now beginning to understand that it is his limitations, and his vulnerability because of his past record together with what he has stood for, and still does, has created a movement of people the like of which has not been seen for generations, people of all ages and backgrounds who have reached the point of deciding enough is enough.

However, there should be no underestimation of the strength and the power of the interest involved in present day global trading and finance first planned in the 1980’s of Margaret Thatcher.

In 1985 the Labour controlled South Tyneside Council sponsored my attendance at a world leading International senior general management course (then Henley Management Course and now Henley Business School) at the end of which I was offered the opportunity to become the chief executive of a local authority which I did not accept.

During a four week, life changing, residential experience, one of only two individuals from the public sector among forty participants, business and financial leaders from around the world and the UK communicated the clear message of the importance of stable political systems with low corporate taxation to locate headquarters and the need to relocate business production and financial enterprise units to stable political countries with no or ineffective trade union power which could adversely affect labour costs and profitability. An official from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office presented the position in relation to each country in Africa and the Middle East in terms of stability for trade and finance. On August 5^th Nissan Sunderland which directly employs 7000 emphasised the plant was its European base and therefore its future depended on how Brexit is managed.

Returning to my role as Director of Social Services (1974-1990) with the local authority I prepared a series papers on the implications of the course, including one on Management Teams and Team roles where mine had been assessed as a Creative and Shaper Leader with the unusual secondary  characteristic of Completer Finisher,   (see Management Teams, R Meredith Belbin -Why they succeed or Fail) ending with an overview on the implications of what had been learned for local government and with a wider circulation which included the then Secretary of State for Defence Michael Heseltine (Henley Member of Parliament) who sent a personal letter saying he was arranging for wide circulation in Whitehall just before he departed from government because of issues related to what is now known as the Westland Affair.

 I also received a letter from a senior civil servant at the Department who wrote 13 January 1986 “2- My own concern is with the approach of this Department to its management task and I must say that I found the perspective opened up by your article both interesting and stimulating. Those of us concerned in what is really a small revolution in the management of the Civil Service are I think is too well aware of the Herculean nature of our task and that many factors particularly social factors, bear upon our work. I find it valuable to see these problems expressed from a different viewpoint.”

The second significant aspect of the course which informed my subsequent understanding of political policies and decisions was the hatred of the public sector which restricted the available market and put pressure on wage levels from worker benefits such as occupational pensions based on final salaries, limitations on hours, the amount of holiday and sickness benefit and health and safety standards. The valid aspect was the insecurity of the business world versus the perceived security of working for government. It was the politician more than the public servant who was regarded with greater contempt although it was never clear if this was because they could be bought or could not. It was also evident that many did not understand how government worked in practice within a democratic and party political framework and that those of us engaged in public service could be as skilled as anyone in the private world although our motivation and objectives were different.

The closing course project was energy with a focus on the lack of a government strategy and our syndicate was allocated coal at the time of Miner’s strike and where all the evidence pointed to a significant reduction in the annual tonnage produced because of the availability of cheaper imports. I argued unsuccessfully for a higher total and a more gradual reduction because of the impact on miners and my understanding of the close working effectiveness of mining communities. At the end of the week there was a presentation of an energy plan by the course to a government Minister and a course member, an army officer, had the task of agreeing the plan at a meeting between each head of syndicate responsible for energy sources including alternatives such as wind, water and sun.

Secretly the college arranged for me a motorcyclist to arrive with a letter from the Prime Minister which requested a higher level of coal tonnage because of the social implications of that being recommended and being a person used to taking orders he assumed that the intervention was college based and not from an individual participant and adjusted the syndicate plan without its knowledge.

I did not reveal my involvement but the college did and that brought approval from other participants subsequently but someone in the syndicate was affronted and whose view of politicians and business I had previously challenged, and who in fairness told me directly he would ensure I progressed no further.  My experience is that working quietly without seeking recognition or personal reward one is usually more effective and also enables a quieter and more stress free life.

My knowledge of mining communities stretched some fifty years from living in Sunderland and working in South Shields from 1974 and where hundreds of men worked miles under the North Sea and the Northern headquarters of the National Coal Board was at Whitburn, now a coastal park. In 1970 I had work for the West Riding with Child Care and Protection responsibility for Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley. In 1961 I became an honorary member at the headquarters the Scottish Miners Union by Abe and Alec Moffat when bringing a banker’s draft to reimburse the fines of the Direct Action Committee marchers arrested for going along Princess Street prior to first Holy Loch anti Polaris march and action and the march and protest was my idea with Peter Currell Brown the author of Smallcreep’s Day (see Gandhi and West footnote by Sean Scalmar and online archives of D.A.C at the J B Priestley Library, University of Bradford).

Although I agreed with his leadership manifesto I did not vote for Jeremy Corbin in 2015, in part because I anticipated what has been the outcome of his success, although I did not foresee the strength of his mandate and the breadth of his growing support.

As I explained to members of his Leadership campaign at the time, I voted for Yvette Cooper and Angela Eagle because they represented a more feminine approach to politics which if it became a worldwide movement could challenge the worst aspects of global capitalism and its alliance with religions where the subjugation of women is fundamental to both. It is noteworthy that Jo Cox who had Labour Party responsibility for bringing more women into Parliament and government is reported to have assisted someone who wanted to enter the House of Commons as a Conservative, one confirmation that the movement to alter the gender balance in Parliament cuts across what has become traditional Party political interests and differences.

In fairness to the leaderships of the Conservative and Labour Parties over the past decade there has been recognition of the need for greater ethnic, religious and gender diversity and for equality in representation according to numbers of the electorate. David Cameron was persuaded to introduce and support legislation allowing gay marriage and there is now Cross Party support for understanding and providing equality for all those on the gender spectrum of sexual orientation irrespective of any outward physical appearance.

It can be argued that the election of a second woman as Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, the appointment of the first female Lord Chancellor and that nine women formed the front bench of Government and the official Opposition on July 21^st, signals the progress being made. However, Mrs May, as mentioned, outdid David Cameron in heaping personal abuse upon Jeremey Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions on July 20th and it is difficult at a distance to understand the venom of the hostility between a powerful group of Labour woman Members of the House of Commons and Jeremy Corbyn personally, and where nothing in his political record or behaviour since becoming Leader suggests that he has not always put into practice what he believes and says in this respect.

Despite claims that the objective is to establish a working Party unity the indication is that all sides are preparing for an irrevocable break and a battle to control the name Labour, the party organisation and its funding sources. Having written this and tweeted as a warning to others, the Telegraph published a story on July 29th stating that my speculation was fact with a plan for a significant number of the Parliamentary Party to sit as a separate group(s) in the Commons, elect their own leader, press the Speaker to recognise them as the Official Opposition and then use the legal process to bid for the name, the organisation and its resources.

Nor is the potential for break up and splits restricted to Labour for as previously stated the malcontents now on the backbenches of the Conservative Party outnumber the present majority over all other parties and this may explain the theatrical combative tone of the new the Prime Minister at her first Question time which appeared to unite the majority in her party and drew political blood from the Labour Opposition.

The present sense of division and political uncertainty is very different from the mood in both Houses of Parliament who met in special sessions on Monday June 20^th to pay Tribute to the life and political work of Jo Cox brutally assassinated on June 16^th outside the building where she had been holding a political surgery for constituents. I attended the celebration of the life of Jo Cox in Trafalgar Square on Wednesday June 22^nd and delayed my departure for Oxford and Ruskin College on June 24^th to finish printing a letter to all those who had contributed to the Tribute in Parliament

The letter first suggested that Malala Yousafzai who had spoken in Trafalgar Square with an authority and understanding which belies her youth, seemed to me the ideal person to be made the hon member for the constituency because she had survived an assassination attempt, shared the interests and values of Jo Cox and because the main other political parties said they would not oppose the candidate selected by the constituency and Labour Party. I also agreed with the suggestion of Barry Sherman that Parliament, and the House of Commons in particular, had a responsibility to offer ongoing help to her husband, children and other family members.

However, I added that although the Tributes showed Parliament at its best and the launch of the LoveLifeJo event was emotionally powerful the impact would only last days. No one who was present could have failed to be moved by the primary school children attended by the eldest child of Jo and her husband Brendan when they sang “If I had hammer” with a passion I have not heard before emphasising the lines

“It’s a hammer of Justice, it’s a bell of Freedom

It’s a song about love between my brothers and my sisters

All over this land.”

I made reference to the immediate impact of the death of Princess Diana and to having played an active role in movement for change in relation to weapons of mass civilian extermination in the early 1960’s and how this too fell away from a mixture of management by the institutions of the state and subsequent geo political events. From this perspective I concluded that it was inevitable that “the fine and genuine words spoken in Parliament would quickly become history and the political bloodletting would begin again after the referendum decision, together with the same level of personal abuse and party political taunting and jeering at Prime Minister’s Questions, until Parliamentarians told their leaderships and the Party Whips to stop. The letter was written before the result of the Referendum vote which is the fourth and potentially most significant shock to the British Way of managing political engagement.

The response to my letter was disappointing with the notable exception a response from Andrew Mitchell, Conservative, who understood my purpose in writing and provided a copy of the obituary he published in the Telegraph. The Lord (Chris) Smith of Finsbury admitted subsequent events had been overwhelming but agreed that Jo’s work should be continued. Caroline Lucas and the Bishop of Leeds sent acknowledgments and my local Member suggested the future of the seat was a matter for the constituents. I agree that while this should be the normal choice, subject to national vetting, the decision by the Government not to contest the seat makes a difference. I also received a flamboyant signature from Lord Paddy Ashdown who agreed with the view of Emma Lewell-Buck, the first ever female M.P for South Shields, the seat previously held by David Miliband.

Baron Ashdown has now launched what he describes as a Progressive platform to bring together people from all political parties although like Tim Farron Leader of the Social Democrats he has not ruled out the creation of a new party aimed at discontented Labour Members of Parliament in particular. In fact, a Progressive party was in control of the South Shields County Borough when Social Services departments were first created in 1971 and where a Progressive Councillor, now a Labour Councillor, was responsible for forming a committee which brought the first women’s refuge to Tyne and Wear, using a redundant home for the Elderly, one of several establishments closed on my recommendation as being unsafe and unsuitable when first visiting in 1974.  The Progressives of South Shields, were reactionary not spending one penny more on the new services in 1971 than the year before whereas Conservative Cheshire County Council allocated a quarter of a million for additional staffing with one of my first tasks which I shared with the senior Training officer was successfully recruiting a senior and fifteen other Occupational Therapists to help implement the New Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act.

As I drove to Oxford on June 24^th the Referendum result caused a spike in race hate crimes which in London rose from an average of over forty reported to over sixty a day and a rise of 20% nationally since. The extent of the previous number of reported incidents ought to be as concerning as the number of ongoing rapes reported and the inability of the police and justice system to obtain convictions, and that as with migrants we do not know the numbers not reported and therefore unregistered.

I believe it was not only the extreme or far right who had assumed the result meant that all existing foreigners would be told to leave the country. When I first arrived in the North East there was no indication of the transformation which was to take place throughout greater London and most cities and towns in terms of ethnicity and spoken language. In the local authority area in 1974 tribalism between Council run estates, between Catholics and Protestants and Newcastle and Sunderland Football supporters was more significant than colour racism. The uniting hate which bound the North East together was against southerners, Londoners and Westminster, and the Director of Housing and I were the only individuals appointed from outside the region to the new Local Authority with everyone else from the affected authorities slotted in if they had not secured a more preferable position with Durham County Council.

My favourite story is being invited to speak for the Council at a public meeting arranged to oppose the closure of a local hospital at which the Chairman of the Health Authority and its Chief Executive were told to attend. When the Health Authority Chief Executive rose to speak he was asked if he lived in the Borough (Hexham isn’t it) and told to sit down and shut up before he could enquire what where he lived had to do with it. “Colin what do you have you to say?” Colin actually then lived several hundred yards over the border in neighbouring Sunderland.

One of the reasons I have sympathy and some understanding with Jeremy Corbyn is that I know what it is like to be selected and then find there are those who did not want the appointment and are plotting against you from the beginning.

In 1973 the political leadership in South Shields constituency had promised the job of Director of Social Services, South Tyneside to the Director of Social Services South Shields who was a kind man, a Freemason and one of only two Medical Officers of Health in UK appointed chief officers for adult social care and child care and protection. The Jarrow constituency Labour Members objected to all the new Chief Offices coming from the South Shields authority which had been achieved by an alliance between all the South Shields Councillors irrespective of Party allegiance. They did a deal with some Shields Councillors offering them Chairmanships of Committees, voting in me aged 34 and the Director of Housing aged 26.

Upset by my appointment the Labour leadership of South Shields leaked that I had been to prison to a freelance journalist later appointed press officer tor the authority and story was taken up nationally with one headline Ex Con gets top Job.

When taking up the appointment as Director designate, I was not given an office in the management and administrative headquarters so when I needed secretarial assistance, the person had to travel across the town to her desk and then bring back communications for me to sign.

Fortunately, I had been trained by my previously employers in corporate management and knew not only what to do but how to do it. I also had the support of the politicians controlling the Labour group so we thanked those who prepared the organisation and structure for the new Department, its proposed policies and department procedures and not having anyone to work with, I submitted my own in consultation with the Chairman who was hostile and the Vice Chairman who was not. I enlarged the proposed revenue budget by 50% overall which the controlling group rejected making up to 100%. The most memorable moment was when I proposed doubling the budget for telephones for the disabled from £750 to £1500 and someone moved £15000 which was agreed without dissent as by then the opposition had been stunned into silence. We submitted to the Department of Health a capital new build and modernization programme which I was told echoed round Whitehall as the last of the big spenders. The big failure was caused by an inherited senior manager, also a Freemason, who stopped my first attempt to end generic social work practice and management and I had to wait until he retired before approval for a new structure which created an adult services and children’s services organisation within the social services umbrella, the first such development in the UK.

There was nothing left wing or ideological about the need for fundamental change and as a former Ruskin student and councillor said to me on the day of appointment you won’t find any ideological socialists here but practical politics in the hard reality of every day survival.

The most significant problem immediately faced was the condition of residential homes and their staffing levels in South Shields compared to those transferred from County Durham.

In the reception home for children there was a vertical ladder from a trap door in the ceiling with a warning bell tied to the back of the double bed of the officer in charge and his wife and another vertical ladder from a corner of their floor down to the porch. The elderly on the second floor of one home had to crawl through Alice in Wonderland doors between rooms at floor levels to get to the fire escape. The solution was to suggest that all the Committee visited all the establishments arranged over three days possible in what was then the smallest of the metropolitan local authorities accompanied by key members of the local authority management team.  I did not have to say a word except make sure the orders which emerged were immediately implemented.

When I found similar potential risks at Sunderland in 1991 and other political and corporate priorities predominated, particularly a four-year corruption investigation in which it was alleged Council leaders and key Chief officers were implicated, the only solution was to use delegated power to ban permanent admissions until the Council produced a replacement plan and it was good to see after I departed the homes in question demolished albeit replaced by private enterprise.

Sunderland, despite the location of the important Nissan car assembly plant and other European market trading enterprises, voted significantly to Brexit although this in part reflected the existence of a hard core right which I believe is also tied into the criminal networks and where it should not be assumed the world of Get Cater and Our Friends in North disappeared with the films, the TV series, the plays and books

The issue of race has always been with the UK, a leading slave trader and exploitation of indigenous populations throughout the Empire. The first recorded race rioting took place in South Shields before World War II and Orange marches were held in South Tyneside for several years until the 1990’s.

In 1967 I had become a Senior Child Care and court officer for the west part of the London Borough of Ealing which included a significant migrant population from the West Indies in Acton. I then became Area Children’s officer for central Ealing which included refugees from the Hungarian and Polish uprisings against the Soviet Union in 1956 and where at Southall in the east of the Borough there was a large immigrant population from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Over forty percent of the present population in the present Ealing were born outside the UK from southern Asia and with Hindus Muslims and Sikhs out numbering Christians. There were problems arising from the concentrations of immigrant families during the time when I worked in the Borough and which was not helped by Enoch Powell and his Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, just as the UKIP poster was a negative factor in the referendum campaign.

But, it has to be said that from the 1960’s to the 1980’s I did not find that there was any sense that the majority of the indigenous British people felt strangers in their own country

My maternal family were the first refugees in then then white community of Wallington, Surrey in 1939 and who within the home spoke Llanito, the first language of Gibraltarians representing the Spanish, Italian and Maltese basis of the small community of the British territory not of 30000 population, and where 96% of those voting in the Referendum were for Remain. In 1939, 15000 of the 20000 permanent population were evicted from their homeland by an order of the Privy Council because of a deal between the Fascist leaders of Spain and Germany to attack France from Spain (The Fortress Came First, T J Finlayson Gibraltar Books)

It was members of this family who lived in the same house as then who alerted on the extent to which English was not being spoken on the street and bus, and I made the journey from neighbouring Croydon to central London twice by bus to confirm they were not exaggerating. They also spoke of the impact on local jobs and pay rates well before the bankers crashed the economy. I also visited a relative for a number of years before and after 9/11 who lived close to what is now the Olympic Park and wrote to a former colleague and active Conservative party member of the sense of shock from an experience when prior to the 2001 General Election I had encountered a motorcade of Arabic and English speaking young men who were ordering Muslims not to vote for anyone who did not support the adoption of Sharia law.

At the LoveLikeJo event in Trafalgar Square I met a doctor of psychological medicine who like me had been to Trafalgar Square several times in the 1960’s in support of the Campaign for Nuclear Department, and I mentioned that I had been arrested once across the Square for sitting down on the pavement and refusing to move outside of South Africa House in March 1960 following the Sharpville township massacre. I had read of the massacre in the London Evening Standard, travelled by commuter train and stood in silent protest outside the Embassy with others when a prospective Liberal parliamentary candidate arrived, suggested we should do something and sat down, so I did too. I then spent several hours with others in a room at Bow Street Police Station and the last hours alone with a black South African attending the London School of Economics, who did not say much apart from thank you which he kept repeating and that he would be sent home for being arrested. The reason for the two of us being together was the absence of anyone to provide police bail, which in my instance was eventually paid enabling me to take a train to Croydon then walking the three miles to home.

When in prison in Stafford with five others later that year we formally accepted and then returned the weekly issue of an orange because they were imports from South Africa, we were then joined by every black person in that prison (Christophe Driver- The Disarmers). I am no racist and have never been but I object to the level of change brought about by the decision of a Labour government to allow uncontrolled immigration and make the point that as with other mass revolts of recent times which includes the protests against involvement in the Iraq war, the burnings and lootings of the summer of 2011 and the single digit voting protest of the Leave vote, they are expressions of frustration and discontent built up over time and where only placing a sticking plaster over a festering wound is dangerous and potentially terminal.

Present circumstances may be opportune for fundamental change but this must be through the democratic processes and an understanding that this has to be evolutionary to be positive, effective and lasting.

I spent the first twenty-two years of my life in what was then the Mitcham constituency, and first wrote to the local Member of Parliament advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament. In 1960, someone knocked at the door because of a letter published in the local newspaper and pressed me to join the Labour party which I did and heard nothing more until several months later the same individual knocked again and invited me to the Annual Meeting to elect the Executive, saying that the meeting would have to accept me as the ward delegate on the basis that I was the only member in the ward.

I did not know that the Young Socialists had got themselves selected as delegates in sufficient number for a coup and after agreeing to the nomination of the existing Chairwoman and Secretary, the head and deputy headmistress of a primary school, they nominated each other leaving the last place open for me to be nominated and they then moved nominations closed which was narrowly passed. The coincidence is that my unmarried and officially childless birth mother worked at the same school as the Chairwoman and Secretary, and although I lived at the same address we never discussed my relationship with the ‘aunties’ but they took a special interest often staying behind meetings to talk, introducing me to someone who had been to Ruskin College, acting as references in my application and arranged a book grant which I used on the history of the Labour movement including biographies of its leaders.

On my way on a bus to Aldermaston in 1961 a solitary passenger across the aisle overheard the conversation with two others about our prison experience and this led to telling him of the project we had devised and which the Direct Action Committee adopted as a six week Gandhi style Satyagraha march and campaign from Trafalgar Square ending with a land and sea action at Holy Loch timed with the arrival of the first Polaris Submarine following establishment of a base. I told the man the story of how I became a member of the local executive of the Beddington and Wallington part of the constituency and where Wallington is now in the Sutton constituency with a surviving Liberal democrat Tom Brake, the Member of Parliament. The man on the bus to Aldermaston was the Labour Member of Parliament for Salford, Frank Allaun with a special interest in Housing and a chairman of the Party and where I undertook my first social work in the summer of 1962 for the Manchester and Salford Family Service Unit. Jeremy Corbyn mentioned his admiration for Allaun at one of his launch meetings at the Lowry. Lowry would take tea with previous owner of the home purchased in Seaburn in 1974 when he stayed at the nearby Seaburn Hotel and telephoned that year and was provided with information on the local whereabouts the previous owner, a local baker.

In 1962 as a Ruskin College student I wrote again to a Member of Parliament, Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskell about unilateral nuclear disarmament and other matters, and he replied with words which I suggest are as relevant today as they were then.

The personally signed 11^th April 1962 letter said

“I can well understand your anxiety about Opinion Polls. There is little doubt that the Daily Mail Poll did have a quite definite influence in the Orpington by-election. Until then I am fairly sure we would have held the Labour vote but the prospect of the Liberals winning and defeating the Tories lead a number of our people to switch their votes to the Liberal. One must admit that this is not likely in a General Election. Nor is it easy to say exactly what can be done to prevent it. But we still certainly keep the matter in mind.”

“On the question of unilateralism, I am sorry that you did not like the line that I took at the Oxford Labour Club meeting. I am not sure, however what you are really suggesting. If you were expecting from me any kind of repudiation of official policy, then I am afraid you are bound to be proved wrong (my highlighting). If on the other hand, you feel that I was merely unkind or unsympathetic to those with whom I differ, I can only say I am sorry and that it was not my intention. Although I have suffered a good deal from the most bitter and offensive comments from unilateralists and pacifists, I have always tried to keep a sense of proportion and my temper. I do not think I lost either at the meeting in question.”

“As for the party political broadcast I think there is general agreement that it was technically weak but I will not bother you with the reasons for that. The general idea, nevertheless was not a bad one.”

“On your final paragraph there is something on the danger of what you mentioned-that is the more less immediate consequences of entering the Common Market can be very difficult in the economic field (my highlighting). On the other hand, I do not believe myself that the Tories have any intention of deliberately losing the Election. On the contrary all their policies are governed by the sole aim of maintaining themselves in power by fair means or foul.” (my highlighting)

The argument about sticking to agreed Party policy was echoed by many of those contributing to the Trident Debate but was a bogus point because the Party Leader had previously made clear his position and expectation for a change in Party policy as well as giving a free vote because it was a matter for the individual conscience of each member of the Parliamentary Party.

I was surprised and remain puzzled that Mrs May was bounced into holding the Trident debate by David Cameron given that former military leaders who have spoken as well as prominent UK geopolitical analysts have all said the project is political and not strategic just as was the vote to bomb civilians in Syria. I accept the view that it is important the country keeps up with the development of nuclear and other weapons of mass civilian extermination in order to plan and prepare our defence but the priority must be to build up our defence capabilities in terms of the actual threats today and where any external activity should be based on exceptionally trained and equipped mobile units able to undertake specific tasks before extraction, supported by ground and digital based intelligence and the latest intelligent, directly controllable offensive pilotless weaponry.

I cannot remember what I said in my letter to Hugh Gaitskell which merited the personal response although it is likely to have included mention of participation on behalf of the college in a special committee set up by the University Labour Club to campaign for staying out of a Common market based on capitalist profit and worker exploitation. I am unsure if we had more than a couple of meetings with the first memorable because a relative descendent of Harold Laski arrived, told us what we needed to do, and then left to complete an essay assignment while we agreed to her plan. The French President said non and our work ended before it began.

The point can also be made that Oxford students, particularly those interested in politics and the major issues of day, received disproportionate Access based on their future prospects than political or social achievements already accomplished. After returning from professional child care training to live in the city and work for the Oxfordshire Children’s Department I was invited to talk to the Crime a Challenge Society, where I had  been a member after switching from a university Politics and Economics Diploma course to Public and Social Administration at Barnett (Henrietta  founder of Tonybee Hal) House (now the Department of Social Policy and Intervention) to read Criminology and Psychology in particular, I was invited to dine by the Committee at the Oxford Union and we had a centre table alongside the Committee of the Conservative and Unionist club where Ted Heath was the guest and Speaker. I noted that he encouraged his hosts to give their views and listened intently to what they had to say. Oxford University students never seemed to me in awe of anyone and respect was shown to students at Ruskin because of their experience of life and no privilege backgrounds.

On Boxing Day afternoon in 1961 I received a telephone call from a student at Christchurch College who had contacted the editor of Isis at her home for my home number (which she later confirmed) who wanted to discuss an article on prison I had written just before the end of the University term. He said to impress, which it did, that he also spoken to the Home Secretary that morning wanting to take up some issues I had raised. It was only after Ruskin I commenced to read the novels of Waugh, Snow and Powell and appreciated that I had missed my Brideshead moment by not seeking to maintain contact as suggested.

I did not write to Hugh Gaitskell about Prison Reform as Inside Story had not then been published. Jane Buxton and Margaret Turner were two of six women, including Pat Arrowsmith who decided to stay in prison for six months following our second sit down protest in a country road in 1960 with a line of police before us and a few journalists outnumbered by neighbouring cows some distance away from the Foulness Research establishment.

Thirteen of the fifteen who participated refused to enter into an oral commitment to halt activities and all completed the term knowing we could have left at any time which caused anxiety for the warders and disbelief from other prisoners. Jane and Margaret’s book, Gate Fever, remains a no nonsense account of prison experience for a woman at that time. Jane had clout, the daughter of a former Labour Minister Noel Buxton with her brother, a heredity peer. Together with Victor, Lord Stonham, then Shadow Minister of State at the Home office as its President, they reformed the Prison Reform Council and asked me to chair a group of ex-prisoners who had participated in nonviolent direct action

Among those who participated in the discussions was Biddy Youngday who lived in Nazi Germany with her German husband and whose diary based Flags in Berlin should continue to be in print. Arnold Wesker provided written comments and suggestions.  Margaret Turner and I sent Inside Story to the Prison Commission and Lord Stonham arranged a half hour meeting with the then Minister of State in the House of Lords, the influential Lord Jellicoe. We had closely followed the advice of Victor (Collins), the former Member of Parliament for Taunton and the Finsbury and Shoreditch in concentrating on practical suggestions rather than attacking staff or the system and he also prepared us for the meeting with the Minister which I believed was a factor in the Home Office subsequently securing me a place and funding for Professional training in Child Care. Victor also arranged a full debate on prison reform in the House of Lords. He asked a Bishop to join us for tea and the party included the head of a civil service union present because a member has been imprisoned because of assisting her lover who was found to be a Russian Spy. I will refer to how the State can treat spies shortly.

The Bishop was impressed by the Civil Service union head and by Jane but kept his distance when Victor introduced me as Colin who has been to prison several times. A few months later I shared this story with a some of the fellow students who had been invited to an end of year party by our Criminology Tutor, Nigel Walker (subsequently Professor at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology). One of the students commented that “Daddy can be diffident.”  Another student, the daughter of the Chief Probation officer Surrey had helped arrange a practical work placement with his department.

Hugh Gaitskell died in 1963 and I sent a copy of Inside Story to Harold Wilson. The future Prime Minister mentioned that reference was made by several Labour Members to Inside story in the debate in Commons on 12 March and was also to be reference on the 20^th when the Opposition has put down prisons as one of the matters to be debated on the Supplementary Estimates.

“The Labour Party is much concerned about the state of our prisons. In particular we attach great importance to the need for a complete reappraisal of the methods of treating women and girls.” He made reference to the role of Alice Bacon and suggested that I made contact with Peter Shore at the Research Department of the Party. It is said that between Harold Wilson and Tony Blair Peter Shore was the most feared politician by the Conservatives also described as idiosyncratic, left wing and anti the Common Market.

I will now jump to the early 1980’s when as a Director of Social Services I was invited to participate in an independent judicial led and run inquiry into the role of authorities and other following the horrible prolonged death of a child by fire after the single parent mother had left the child. I will return to experiences between 1963 and 1980 later but my involvement and knowledge of the Gates inquiry is crucial to understanding aspects of the British Way and because the resurrection of my involvement by others since 2014 had some extraordinary coincidences.

In 1980 I had no advance warning of the phone call (a year after Mrs Thatcher first became Prime Minister) so I asked the caller who represented the commissioning local authority of Bexley and the Bexley and Greenwich Health Authority why me and why an inquiry? I had been recommended by the Department of Health and because of national media pressure the local authority had come to hold the Inquiry from, the individual hesitated, so I said government, he said no, so I said Thatcher and he said no again, paused and said Palace, so I said no more, including to the Inquiry Chairman, the other panel members until a secret meeting with the then Chief Adviser at the Department of Health two years later.

The Chairman of the Inquiry did disclose one aspect which I will describe as a matter of national interest which overrode the public interest. It was only in 2014 that I obtained documentary evidence what I now believe is the background.

Before explaining further it should be noted that in 1979 Margaret Thatcher, a few of months after she had become Prime Minister, and I assume had several briefings from the Head of State about things she should know and which civil servants were duty bound not to pass on, she used a Question from a Labour Member of the Commons to disclose that Harold Wilson had used the Prerogative to protect the double agent Spy, Anthony Blunt from prosecution and to allow him to continue in his role as Keeper of the Royal Art and participate in the top London society of the day.  According to her official biographer Mrs Thatcher had warned Blunt the day before as I assume she also did the Palace. He was allowed to live quietly until his death.

Thirty years later a national newspaper under the headline Queen Mother’s Favourite Spy (a distant relative) explained that Blunt had written a memoir about his early life and at university which had been locked away at the British Library until those who could have been directly embarrassed had died. When her famous press secretary was asked why did she do it, he is reported to have replied because she did not believe in cover up.

In 2013 I had discovered that the internet site Cathy Fox was using the Freedom of Information request site whatdotheyknow.com to seek publication of a document(s) mentioned by Nick Davies in an article one of three about the extent of abuse in children’s homes and its cover up first published in 1998 but which had become widely recirculated and commented upon in social media and Blogs since Nick had put his investigative work online. I noted at the same time that Cathy Fox (a site and not a person) a request for the Gates Inquiry reports to be published and this led to correspondence and in 2014 advised that a ten page communication from former Secretary of State Patrick, now Lord Jenkin to Margaret Thatcher following a request from her private secretary and the communication included a contribution from the then Chief Social Services Adviser, Bill Utting, and who between 1986 and 1991 became the first Chief Inspector of Social Services of which there were to be three in total.

The interest of Margaret Thatcher was understandable because she had fought the neighbouring constituency twice, her former comrade in arms, Ted Heath, was the MP for Bexleyheath and her husband drank in a Bexley pub with friends on a regular basis. However, the odd aspect was that Patrick Jenkin was one her closest political allies so why had she not mentioned her interest to him direct before or after a Cabinet meeting or by phone? Why use her private Secretary?

Some two years after this I received another telephone call, this time from Bill, who is now Sir William Utting, saying he was making a visit to the North East to meet the Regional team and meet up with his friends having been Chief Probation Officer for Newcastle and a buddy of the influential Director of Social Services of that City.

Bill Utting emphasised that his visit to my office would be private and as with most of what is in this writing I have not put to print before or until recently. He wanted to know the background to why I considered it necessary to draft a separate report from that of the Chairman and which the other two non-lawyers on the panel had also agreed. I explained that I intended not to sign the Chairman’s drafted report but submit a brief one-page letter of explanation as Olive Stevenson had done in relation to the Maria Colwell Inquiry at which the chairman of the Gates Panel, Sir Arthur Mildon, had been Counsel for that Inquiry.

(Olive Stevenson had led the joint Diploma and Public Administration and Social Work Training Course at Oxford and one of my memorable events was when she and my tutor on the course in Social Administration, both then Professors of Social Work and involved with the Supplementary Benefits Commission, visited my office to discuss issues of concern based on my personal experience (Olive Stevenson Reflections on a Life in Social Work Hinton House 2013 published shortly after her death).

I had been persuaded by the two non-lawyer colleagues to present my reasons in writing with evidence and this had grown into what became the majority report and which was then amended and agreed with them, line by line, with one suggesting a summary list of the one hundred situations where if different choices had been made, the child may have been alive today. Although I was interviewed by Sue Lawley for the BBC London evening television I made no public statement about the background which Bill asked that I advise the new Secretary of State, Norman, Lord Fowler. It was only in 2014 that I learned that the Spectator magazine had published an article by Auberon Waugh that the two reports reflected different perspectives and which mentioned my authorship. OK you may say what has this to do with issues of the present day or understanding the nature of power and influence over a fifty-year period?

The precipitating cause of the 1981 Gates Inquiry was a statement made by the acting police commander on the steps of the Central Criminal Court which was followed by a photograph obtained by a newspaper of the child dying as she lay in hospital. The acting police commander had been awarded the George Medal for his bravery with two others in the capture the three most important members of the Irish Republican Army who were then convicted and imprisoned. The need to bring to an end to 30 years of terrorist atrocities had been a priority for government after government.

By coincidence Lord John Stevens was also involved in the Balcombe Street siege. I wrote to John Stevens in 1992 when Chief Constable Northumbria Police in relation to Sunderland Council. He was involved in a number of investigations concerning the role of the security services and the para military groups in Northern Ireland and also has given recent interviews on the subject. I do not know if he has provided information on the role of security services and the Kincora Boys Home and on the abuse of children more generally presently under investigation in Northern Ireland.

I do not know if the Acting Bexley Commander, who died after the Inquiry, was aware of the information that was provided before the Hearing of testimony commenced or if this information would have made a difference to the Criminal Court deciding that the parent who had left her children alone should be given a sentence which enabled her to immediately return to the community and regain the care of her surviving children which the local authority planned to do. 

Secondly the local authority was negligent in losing the family file, then not attempting to recreate it until shortly before the child died and even then failing to check the Register of Boarding Out children which after requesting this to be done late on in the Hearing two sets of foster parents were discovered whose evidence was crucial. and would have been important at the Inquest and the Criminal Trial. Thirdly the two other panel members supported by the link officer from the Department of Health threatened to resign after the first day of Hearing, the chairman asked for my help and negotiated an arrangement with the core participants which included a number of barristers that panel members would open the questioning of witnesses, following by the core participants representing the witnesses and then Counsel for the Inquiry. These three facts have significance in what has happened since January 2^nd 2014.

On that date I met two of the leading campaigners for a national inquiry and they mentioned the involvement of Tom Watson and also someone who I had questioned in my role on then Gates Inquiry and who on the basis of that experience I advised was a person of professional integrity.

When that individual was appointed by Mrs May to the first panel Inquiry for England and Wales in 2014, I considered it my responsibility to check awareness of a matter not disclosed in either of the reports. I was also able to assist Bexley Council with information which helped the local authority to determine how best to respond to a Freedom of Information request via Cathy Fox and whatdotheyknow.com. I also provided assistance to a surviving former child in the family when put into contact and to a key witness who had been troubled by what happened for over 30 years. As stated the 1983 Auberon Waugh article disclosed my authorship of the majority report something I had not previously mentioned or knew about until 2014.

I also made no comment at the time or since on the contents of the three published articles by the former Gates Inquiry witnesses subsequently appointed by Mrs May to the first panel Inquiry. However, being silent, assuming those with power have good records and know what actually happened has over time been shown to be wrong. Having reached the opening of what I hope is a long last chapter of self-awareness consciousness I am finding ways to ensure my experience based perspective and available documentation is preserved in case it is of present or future value. Listening to the plea of the daughter of Lord Janner on Newsnight I was also reminded that the lives of all children should not be blighted by the sins of their parents. It is also important that children should not be prevented from learning the truth of their origins, he writes this with great personal feeling.

In 1974 as a new Director of Social Services I was invited to participate in an ad hoc committee advising government on whether the proposed, and 1975 passed legislation, enabling adopted children to try and obtain information about their biological identity should be retrospective. The committee, overwhelming men, put forward very good arguments for the change to be available only for those then adopted on reaching adulthood and in my usual fashion I successfully pressed the need to know against the havoc knowing could cause. In 1999 as my birth mother developed greater memory loss with psychosis I pressed her to reveal who my father had been, the repercussions of which continue to reverberate around her homeland and that of the revealed father, a Catholic priest, a Vicar General of Gibraltar and a family background of several hundred years on the Island of Malta.

Going back to 1961 I had a friend who said she worked for the Admiralty and who claimed “we knew” when I mentioned there had been two attempts to sink a launch crammed with some fifty protestors, first by water cannon and then by sandwiching the waterlogged and engineless launch between a buoy and sympathetic larger boat taking protestors and which damaged had to leave the scene, drama played out before thousands and worldwide media of the day. In 1963 I was contacted to say the friend had been murdered and in 2015 I became aware that the murder had remained unsolved with the papers secured in the national archives until 2063 although this did not prevent me obtaining under freedom of information a copy of the statement I had volunteered to the police although I had been discouraged from doing so by the Director of the Child Care Course at Birmingham University where the place had been arranged by the Home Office who paid for my attendance and provided a maintenance grant. The statement is a copy of one said to have been signed although in fact it was read over the phone and the contents differs because of omission of the Holy Loch information project and although employment at the Admiralty is mentioned, but not the relationship with a married colleague which I also remember stating. The person had said there was a child adopted before we met so the right to know or not know what happened and why is the right of that child not mine.

Disentangling coincidence from connection has always been a challenge for me, and curiosity to know can take one into territory where angels fear to tread,

In 1969 I was involved with a campaign to prevent Children’s Departments being absorbed by Local Authority Health Committees and amalgamated with Health Departments, chairing as Vice President of the Association of Child Care Officers what is now known as the Blacklisting Committee, after Jim Callaghan and Roy Jenkins had advised the Association that if we did not find a way to stop the amalgamations it would be impossible for the government to introduce legislation to implement the report of the inquiry chaired by the Lord Seebohm. (I met Lord Seebohm once when the fire alarm went off in the early hours at the Randolph Hotel, Oxford and we discovered we had adjoining bedrooms and made our way to the courtyard as requested while a fire in the kitchen was dealt with).

I wrote to David Winnick about the campaign and he replied with a letter from Minister John Dunwoody on 31^st December 1969 as did Eric Varley and where Richard Crossman, the Secretary of State had previously written 25^th September 1969 “what you say is very interesting and I am grateful to you for having written to me.” David Winnick became a member of the now controversial Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons into past abuse in Children’s Home in 2002.

One did not always get attention wanted. The Seebohm Implementation Action Group had taken up the suggestion in an article I had written as Parliamentary Officer for the Association of Child Care Officers that organisations representing social workers should hold a mass Lobby of Parliament and as a constituent I had written to the local Member of Parliament for Richmond who replied that unfortunately because of an engagement he would not be in the House that day.

Before the Lobby I was contacted by a former colleague with whom I worked as Child Care officers in Oxfordshire covering a patch which included the present constituency of David Cameron, the Brize Norton base and the mobile home sites where some seventy single parent mothers once lived and whose children and been fathered by USSAF men before they returned to their homeland. I was invited to lead the Lobby and advised that a press notice stating my role had been issued so I bought the morning papers and saw several references to this and led about a thousand social workers walking (marching was not allowed) from where we assembled into the central of Lobby of Parliament advising the singe policeman at the front door what we were doing. I completed a Lobby card (on principle) and then joined others whose Members of Parliament or contacts in the House of Lords said they would be available.

I was advised by the Chairman of the Implementation Group, a former Labour Party National Youth Officer, that my MP was looking for me.  He or a staff member had evidently drawn to his attention the publicity and he had returned from what appeared to have been a very hospitable lunch somewhere and as others who attended our meeting could testify he seemed to believe we wanted the opposite of the purpose of the Lobby.

1969 was also the year that the now infamous Children’s and Young Persons Act was passed which attempted to integrate the Approved Schools system with behaviour modification and control regimes into a new system of Community Homes with Education on the premises and which led to the publication in 1991 of the Levy Kahan Pindown report on Staffordshire. In 1969 I was asked to arrange with the help of a sympathetic Member of the Commons, a social function with alcohol, to mark the passage of the legislation to Royal Assent at which all the organisations, Ministers and Opposition together with the civil servants were invited. The event was covered by the British Hospital and Social Services Journal whose editor I had been introduced by the Children’s officer of Oxfordshire.

People tended to arrive at the function in batches with Callaghan and Jenkins arriving together and conversing in Welsh. The Conservative Shadow Home Office Ministers arrived looked us in the eye and told us what parts of the legislation they would implement when they came to power in 1970 and what parts they would not and they were as good as their word. The usual legislative trick is to pass the legislation but to leave the level of implementation to individual local authorities and the level of finance which the government is prepared to make available. In this instance Parliament’s decision to raise the age for criminal responsibility was set aside.

The best insight into the person Roy Jenkins became was when he was invited to speak to the Gateshead branch of the Fabian Society and said he was would only agree if put up in the best hotel and provided with the best meal in town. Instead we listened to Robin Cooke who accepted what the small group were able to afford.

Sometimes Access and influence can bring about an unintended consequence. The Association of Child Care Officers became the most influential of all the social work bodies, able to employ a full tine Secretary and someone on a sessional basis to monitor the passage of 1969 Children’s and Young Persons legislation. The three of us attended the Third Reading in the House of Lords and sat on the floor of chamber as guests of the Home Office Minister Lady Serota. Before the session started we were advised that a new clause was to be introduced about which there had been no prior civil service investigation and which was added after the Secretary of State had been taken out to dinner by the Magistrates Association who opposed the abolition of the Approved School order and the placement of Children on Care Orders. They were concerned that children previously restricted to a maximum three-year order would some instance spend several more years in the control of closed establishments under Care orders without an external interest.

The civil servants and legislation draughtsmen had produced a new clause which created an external visitor who would have contact with those who had no family or other external visitor within a stated period of time. The clause was added and only later was it discovered there were no children in the new Community Homes system where it applied, but it did apply to residential education establishments the responsibility of the Department of Education. All legislation should involve an assessment of potential unintended consequence.

In 1970 with the help of the former Children’s Officer Oxfordshire who had become a Deputy Chief Inspector in the Home Office Children’s Department I became an Assistant County Children’s Officer West Riding of Yorkshire, a department where every decision including expenditure on clothing for children in care was reported to Committee so copies of the duplicate files of the 1800 children accumulated in a huge pile in the office of the Children’s officer and then conveyed in a convoy of laundry baskets on wheels to County Hall for the Committee.

It is important to understand that there was no golden era of child care although by their demise in 1971 many Children’s Departments were well managed with trained and skilled staff. Oxford City was one of these and its Children’s Officer was exceptional and who as Baroness Faithfull established a Foundation which still undertakes internationally important work with perpetrators as well as victims of abuse. (Lucy Faithfull mother to hundreds Judith Niechcial 2010). In 1967 the National Children’s Bureau published two summaries of research into Residential Care and Foster Care under its Studies in Child Development Rosemary Dinnage and M L Kellmer Pringle (its Director) and which described the limitations of both services.

In 1970 I became a Czar for a third of the county with responsibility for decisions previously taken by Committee including the management of three teams of child care officers, one became the Director of Social Services Cleveland (see scandal and Butler-Sloss report. Her Hon Butler-Sloss  was appointed the first chair of the  panel inquiry by Mrs May) I also had direct responsibility for the management of all the Children’s home in that part of the County and I was asked to investigate allegations of inappropriate conduct between the head of a home and a girl in the care of that home who he had married shortly after her sixteenth birthday and where he had a  special relationship with a leading County Councillor who chaired the selection committee for management positions to the new Social Services Department which came into force in 1971.

In the absence of evidence meriting formal action, I informally advised Baroness Serota and Barbara Kahan and consequently spoke with a legal officer at the County Council. The politician in question went on to become a leading member of the new Association of Metropolitan Local Authorities. I was invited to lunch by the influential senior Children’s Department Inspector of Social Services for the Northern region and informed that I was being recommended to local authorities as one the new Directors of Social Services. I was later advised that I was to have been appointed at Dewsbury if I had not already accepted a position with Cheshire County Council.

By coincidence my appointment with the West Riding coincided with the involvement of the County in what is still the most notorious of political corruption scandals involving local and central government and where the former leaders of Newcastle and Durham County Councils went to prison along with John Poulson and where the one of the foremost Conservative politicians of his time Reggie Maudling was the subject of an inquiry in to his conduct by the House of Commons and where the subsequent Home Secretary Leon Brittan was  a member of the Inquiry panel for a time.

T. Dan Smith, Mr Newcastle and Mr North East was persuaded to plead guilty to a charge which was open to challenge and where he was given six years instead of the six months advised. Dan came to see me at my office in South Shields on his release from prison on the advice of the Director of Social Services Newcastle. (T Dan Smith Downfall of a Visionary Chris Foote Wood).

Sir Keith Joseph was dinner guest speaker at the first Family and Child care conference of the newly formed British Association of Social Worker and as its first chairman we shared a flat at the conference centre. Sir Keith was direct in his response to information about my background and political approach wanting to know why I was not going to live in Russia. I hope he was convinced that come the revolution we would both be early candidates for a firing squad. Sir Keith approved my appointment as Director of Social Services South Tyneside despite the headlines.

Sir Keith was also reported to be another close associate of Margaret Thatcher and mentioning the Cleveland Scandal and the Butler Sloss report reminds of the day that Mrs Thatcher thought I was the Director of Social Services for Cleveland. I was in London for a Committee meeting in the morning when a debate on Cleveland was being held in the House of Commons. I telephoned the Deputy Chief Whip of the Labour Party who was the Member of Parliament for Jarrow to arrange a visitor pass to the public Gallery but instead he arranged for me to sit where the Peers can sit which is on the floor of the Commons but officially outside the Chamber and the Deputy Chief Whip sat on the bench in front so we could talk about what was beings said.  For those who have not taken the public tour and been inside the chamber it is small and soon I became aware of a stare in our direction from the Prime Minister and she turned to her Parliamentary Private Secretary who went over where the officials of the Department of Health were sitting and it can be assumed to check if I was the Director of Cleveland Social Services.

Because of centralised control by accountants in central and local governments, national government is able to direct or limit resources according to party political interests but before Thatcherism the position was very different. Until then an influential chair of a committee or an influential chief officer could have almost unlimited power over resources and policies. The level of expenditure per capita on Social Services by Newcastle Council was legendary although Advisors/Inspectors the Regional Office of the Department of Health privately voiced their concerns on how the resources were being used.

I was present when the Director of Social Services for the city recommended to colleagues placing children in the North Wales Bryn Alyn commercial run homes of its now twice convicted and imprisoned owner. Although police in North Wales came to the North East to find out why 69 children in the care of city were sent away from their families, schools and friends to the homes, oddly there was no mention of this in Waterhouse and more recent Macur inquiry reports.  By coincidence a member of the team I lead on policy and service development for the Cheshire County Council’s new Social Services Department 1971-1973 was appointed to undertake the first local authority investigation in the principality and made an official but private visit, meeting in a hotel in Washington County Durham. Subsequently he was to have been appointed to the Jillings Inquiry which preceded Waterhouse but the decision was taken to appoint a woman panel member although he is reported to have provided valuable assistance and where the private goings on at Bryn Alwyn were excluded and from where it is reported children were trafficked (see Professor Jane Tunstill’s online notes of her reflections to the Social Work History Network 24 November 2015). I agreed with the Macur recommendation that what happened in North Wales, decisions to limit the role of Waterhouse and other issues are now for the Statutory Inquiry.

The most remarkable aspect of the career of the former Director of Social Services Newcastle is that as a socialist Labour man Margaret Thatcher appointed him the only European Commissioner not a politician much to the bewilderment of the County Councils Association who had put forward the names of three Chief Executives as had been suggested to them by the Cabinet Office and after a pub lunch asked if I could explain how this could come about.

Before moving to South Tyneside the Cheshire experience was invaluable as despite its High Tory veneer it was a pioneering local authority. I say High Tory because as its chairman explained to me over tea at his modest country home after I had been invited by his wife, also a Councillor, who I had taken to a meeting of the North West Children’s Planning Committee, new Conservative Councillors were advised they could not speak in Committee for one year unless invited and for three years at meetings of the County Council.

Cheshire operated a genuine one nation Toryism, the first Council to create a purpose designed site for travellers under new legislation although as joint leader of the project with an assistant county Chief Executive I did moan about the need for officer planning committee to debate whether we should have push down or swivel water taps. However, the merit of going into such detail became apparent when the Director took leading politicians to view a new purpose built home for those with learning difficulties and found that the planned toilets had not been put in. At a conference where my function was look after the new Chairman and Vice Chairman of the New Cheshire, post 1974 Social Services Committee, the chairman, a World War II hero, hired as I also had, a dinner jacket, and he teased the Labour Vice Chairman of the new Committee to be, who was from Chester City, over how well-worn his DJ was because of all the functions held at the nearby country home of the Duke of Westminster. Another of my early jobs was to persuade and arrange for Lady Masham to come and advise the County Council and its chief Officers over a weekend on how the Chronically Sick and Disabled Act should be implemented.

It is noteworthy that two of the Chief Executive’s team between 1971 and 1973 became Chief Executives as did a member of the Social Services Department after first becoming a Director of Social Services, and as did three other colleagues. Five child care officers from the Kahan era at Oxfordshire Children’s Department also became Directors of Social Services, two deputy Directors, two Department of Health Inspectors and two academia and social work teaching.

The most significant legacy of the now abolished County Council is the way a subsequent Director of Social Services and management team worked with police in the North West to uncover and bring to justice those involved with crimes against children in the care of the County.

Sometimes the collective participative involvement of Councillors and party members in the day to day work of the authority can prove counter-productive. When I first arrived in South Tyneside the situation was little different from that in West Riding where every decision required sending to Council for confirmation before implementation at a cycle of monthly meetings of sub committees, committees and Council. This continued until the politicians were made aware that no one appeared to checking if what was agreed was being implemented or implemented in the way the politicians had intended and a better more effective balance developed to ensure this was no longer the position. Later central government set about checking if the money allocated to local authorities was being spent as intended, and the concept of zero budgets was taken up with enthusiasm by Labour Council Leaders as it was by Conservatives as a means of controlling their colleagues and departmental chiefs. Education Chief officers had become the most powerful because every Councillor became a governor of a school and was therefore open to influence over a good lunch.

Mrs May has set about reorganising Ministries as well as changing her Ministers and I hope she knows what she is doing as the evidence is that organisational change does not work as intended unless you are able to recruit appropriate trained, skilled committed staff for the task required.  Between 1970 and 1974 the new Social Services Departments in England and Wales got off to the worst possible of starts unlike these in Scotland where the legislation was clear in the task required with some 160 pages of detail and the requirement that the new Directors of Social Work possessed a recognised social work qualification which excluded the majority of those who were appointed in England Wales.  At one point I was asked by the Department of Health If I wanted to be considered for the sudden vacant post of Director of Social Work of the local authority where the Lockerbie terrorist disaster subsequently happened as the appointed man and his referees had amazingly misunderstood the qualification required.

In England and Wales there was no such requirement and this led to a plethora of chief offices, unqualified, with no knowledge of Child Care and some prejudiced against the previous power and authority of Children’s Officers. Many did not understand the implications of the 1969 Children’s and Young Persons Act and became preoccupied with trying to find a job as the number of Social Service departments was slashed by the reorganisation of local government outside of London. The situation was repeated again as the 1980’s ended with Government decision to introduce a major new piece of Child Care Legislation and a well-intentioned Community Care Act to bridge the divide between hospital and community care but where competitive tendering was expected to produce the funding required. In South Tyneside we knew this was going to end in disaster and the Council supported the presentation of a number of papers to the Social Services Select Committee of the House of Commons and to government explaining that if something works don’t try and fix it and don’t try to implement significant change without the required resources.

The local authority was able to speak with authority on the subject as independent research into the working of the Home Help and Visiting Service for the elderly and disabled had surprised the researches because staff were spending many additional hours each week in unpaid time going back in the afternoon, or early evening, to do some shopping, collect medication or just visit for a cup of tea and chat. The explanation was a simple one, the staff were local people visiting their former school teacher, a hospital nurse, the parent of school friend. The Council had twice used special government grants for the most socially deprived communities to recruit and train local people on the unemployed register to undertake comprehensive home survey visits, achieving over 95% of the sixty thousand households in the borough to find out what social services were being provided, if the department had helped and what services might be needed. Those undertaking the work were then found secure jobs with the local authority when each project ended and the politicians paid close attention to the findings.

I was invited to a meeting of the Select Committee to answer questions about the South Tyneside viewpoint and it was only afterwards coincidentally meeting the Social Services adviser on the train back homeward that I learned that I had been set up.  The Association of Directors of Social Services who fully supported both new legislative developments become so confident and arrogant of their power that they had not bothered to respond to the request of the Select Committee for views and information. They were invited alongside me to counter what was regarded as negative submission. I also failed badly to press the alternative view not appreciating the level of preparation required.

In my resignation statement from Sunderland a couple of years later I focussed on the shortcomings of the attempt to implement the new legislation without appropriate resources and staff training, and in an article published in the Guardian later in 1992 I called for the creation of a national service for adults combining the local authority and health services under a new local government framework. I also tried to explain the disaster which local authority funded child care had become pointing out that while it is always difficult to disentangle the impact of the circumstances which bring a child into public care from what happens when in care, there was clear evidence that some children were being more harmed by what happened to them in care than their previous circumstances. Instead of using the opportunity to support and speak out the Association of Directors of Social Services were at best silent but also aided and abetted the cover up.

In 1992 I had provided detailed evidence to the then Secretary of State whose staff wrote to say the information would be used for the continued monitoring of the particular local authority where consideration had been given to removing its child care powers, something which in fact occurred only recently, and also raised the wider issues of experience and evidence based concern in relation to adult services. I had seen happening again what had been evident before.

In 1976 the chairman of the Social Services Committee agreed I should write to express concern about the amount of money and its distribution involved in Joint Financing projects to the then Labour Secretary, of State Barbara Castle and she opened her response by saying “I was very surprised to read what you wrote because in working out the Joint Finance Scheme I had certainly given thought to where the additional local authority contribution would come from.” The problem is that Ministers, unless they have worked in Local government, usually have little idea how even ring fenced funds can be redirected. A journalist friend who visited Northern Ireland in the 1960’s was amazed how open the Unionists had become, boasting how British Government funding was being used to keep the Catholics out of power. Twenty years later a senior civil servant on behalf of Mrs Bottomley accepted my point that what local authorities said they were doing was not necessarily what they were doing.

Barbara Castle left government with the arrival of Callaghan replacing Wilson but there was opportunity to meet her when I was invited by a colleague in the North East who was also a parliamentary Candidate, to participate in a fringe meeting on Mental Health at the Labour Party Conference at Blackpool and again made the mistake of not finding out what such occasions were like.

In addition to Mrs Castle the two other speakers were or had been Secretaries of State for Social Services at the Department of Health and Social Security, with David Ennals on the far right to me and whose brother John Ennals when Secretary at Ruskin College had made sure I was a member of a trades union.  Next to me on right was Dr David Owen who went off to found the Liberal and Social Democratic Party and the place on the left was vacant, and everyone stood and cheered when Barbara Castle came in gave the kind of speech I wish I had prepared, and left to even louder cheers than before.

The focus of my contribution was the importance of the care children received during the first seven years, with the Jesuit in me knowing “Give me a child for seven years and I give you the adult.”. In those days the Conference report was filled with motions for debate from constituencies, trade unions and affiliated bodies and not one concerned child care and services for preschool children in particular which I wanted promote. I said this looking directly into the faces of a group of young women members sitting on the front row and who had come to hear Barbara Castle and who became Ministers promoting service for children and those under 5. However, I bottled the opportunity sat down to some polite applause but mostly stone faced silence. Mental health service for children in care and when they leave have remained a stain on the proposition that Britain is an advanced and civilised society.

1997, five years after departing the service, a local solicitor, now a District judge brought to my home representatives of a group of former children in care whose story shocked, saddened but did not surprise because I warned the Department of Health in 1993 that I was not satisfied that all the situations I had identified had been effectively investigated. I wrote to the new Conservative Secretary of State who appointed a link officer and required the local authority to appoint an independent body to investigate. Criminal Proceedings in 2000 failed to progress for a number of reason including negligence by the NSPCC.

In 1998 I took a detailed submission to the office of Solicitor General requesting intervention on behalf of former children in care and was seen by someone clearly aware of what was happening nationally. This individual became Permanent Secretary Cabinet Office 2010-2015 and is now Permanent Secretary at the Department of Justice.

I followed written advice and an International law firm provided pro bono help between 1998 and 2003 with the Bar Council appointing its former Chairman the Lord Brennen to provide Counsel Opinion Pro Bono.

Also in 1998 the investigative Journalist Nick Davies published three articles following an investigation into the scale of what happened and the issue of cover up and which unfortunately the Guardian headed one to give the impression that I had been silenced. This was not the position as under a High Court agreement I had been invited to list those with whom I could continue to communicate over the matters of concern and all the voluminous documentation identified in an affidavit has had to be retained unless I authorise its destruction or the local authority makes request to the High Court.  In fact, between 2013 and 2016 Sunderland Council without prior notification published online under third party Freedom of Information requests documentation covered by the High Court Order with the most recent documentation I had authored and marked private and confidential without redactions thus revealing the names in addition to designations of those circulated.

It is not widely known that back in 1987 I became an ad hoc Inspector of Social Services at the Department of Health, signing the Official Secretary Acts to help establish the National Drug advisory service submitting four reports to the Secretary of State. I was given briefings by the Home Office and the Department of Health before making visits and these revealed a gulf between what was happening in practice and how the authorities and agencies wanted and sometimes genuinely believed the local situation to be.

The legitimate constraints of office did not prevent a good relationship being established with national, regional and local media. The most memorable experience was when my Secretary put through the female Editor of the News of the World who has asked to speak to me personally. A family which the department was trying to help had contacted the paper so I agreed to find out the situation contacting the editor back explaining why at that point the department did not believe it was in the interests of the family for publicity and this was respected.  From my experience most journalists can quickly suss out if you are being as honest and open as you are able to be and will respect your position, although they are also subject to editorial direction and policy.

In 1961, I attended a meeting with a journalist on behalf of a national newspaper at an office in Dumbarton and where local authority officials had refused to meet to discuss proposals for the march from Glasgow to Holy Loch going along both banks of the Clyde. The journalist was honest and admitted that whatever I said was going to be twisted to present our activity in the worst possible light so I decided to at least say what I thought needed to be said but the journalist and editorial team were very skilled and the overall impact was damaging.

When working at Ealing my immediate boss who was also the Press and Publicity Officer for the Association of Child Care officers, asked me to join him when the Daily Mirror wanted to do a piece on local authority child care work and the paper then published a major spread with photographs and the banner headline “The Men Who Care.” One of the points being made was that child care was then still considered to be work only for women.

In 1991 after a Department of Health investigation had failed to uncover information held by a local newspaper, its editor wrote to me personally and at a meeting with the deputy editor the information was said to have been confirmed with my predecessor whose son in law worked for the paper. I agreed to investigate and the paper held back the story until after I reported matters to the police and the police agreed to commence investigations which led to one successful prosecution in 1993.  The argument I put in writing to the Editor, (I also put to Michael Gove, as Secretary of State for Education in 2014, and to anyone who has cared to listen since) is that while media interest in the cover up of crimes against children in care can be crucial, account needs to be taken on the impact of publicity on all children in care at that time.  Children in care are treated as being different and not the same as the majority of children living with their families.

In 2014 I attended a private meeting at one of the Universities of the Educationalist Guru Sir Cyril Taylor to hear a presentation from John Cooper QC on the need for a UK Peoples Tribunal on the cover up of sexual exploitation by institutions and in domestic settings. I had been asked to bring with me a victim survivor and understandably she was incensed when Sir Cyril attempted to make the case for several hundred thousand children living in the community in generational families with multiple social problems to be placed in residential schools to be given the experience of being with “normal” children.  The problem of the family with generational multiple problems was identified at the time of 2011 rioting and David Cameron promoted the idea of a volunteer working with each family. In Scotland the proposal of the Government is for every family with children at home having someone external to be a contact with the children to try and limit the extent of domestic child abuse. It is also the motivation for speeding up and developing the adoption process although removing children from mothers and enforcing adoption is barbaric and a national scandal to be investigated in time.

My first ever social work visit was arranged by the Manchester and Salford Family Service Unit to a woman who had been on local TV as the problem family mum of all problem family mums. I sat at her feet (she was known as Queenie) with her husband sitting alongside who was a great royalist and advocate for capital punishment and who I knew from the file had been to prison several times and fathered children in several other families with multiple problems) while she described all the previous local authority and voluntary organisation people who had visited over the decades.

In those days I only listened and learned with the point being well made that when you look into the abyss the abyss will look back into you. You address what you see and then look even harder. Denial can be a deadly sin but as T S Elliot commented human beings cannot cope with too much reality (Cocktail Party?).

A couple of years later and fifty years ago I spent a month in an independent run and funded unit in Birmingham where homeless mums and their children were taken into care and shown how to parent, how to cook and budget. Of course men still came in and out of their lives as my first function each day was to check they had had taken a birth control pill and to suggest while I appreciated a cuppa, burning the furniture in the grate to brew up, was short sighted. The reality is that taking a mum and child into care is less expensive than taking the child alone and in the longer term more effective and hopefully sometime soon those now in power will work this out again.

A couple of years later the Children’s Officer of Oxfordshire arranged for her husband, a child psychiatrist of Russian background and three former wives, one a Home Office Children’s Department Inspector it was said, to make a home visit with me to see a young man in care, home on trial, who was being prosecuted in the Crown Court for offences committed alongside adults who had been sent to prison and where I was asked to undertake a social inquiry report before sentencing. At the conclusion of the visit Dr Kahan made the point that the only way to help the family was for me to ask the local Council to build an extension and I move in and live full time as their social behaviour controller. He and his wife nevertheless pressed me to recommend the continuation of the care order to avoid the young man moving into an academy for crime. The Judge read my report, and I was appropriately savaged and I believe had it been possible he would have sentenced me along with the young man into youth custody.

The second issue I presented to the Editor of the Sunderland Echo, to Michael Gove and whoever cares to listen, is that every time there is publicity about child abuse, some who have been abused and managing to survive are triggered and some experience new traumas as a consequence. Those who have suffered abuse in childhood, and in fact at any time in their lives remain vulnerable and open to exploitation unless they have the good fortune to experience the kind of ongoing loving and understanding help necessary.

The third aspect is that the publicity does nothing to enhance the work of those involved in providing child care and protection and which is work coping with the demons of others as well as of one’s own, one’s family and of friends. In this respect the child care officer has the same task and challenges as the policeman and the politician. I reflected as I listened to the anger and frustration of disabled people over many years, you asking me something I cannot do, remove the disability when all I can do with others is to help reduce the inequality and create more and better opportunities for you.

But this then is the dilemma because despite the very good reasons as well as bad for avoiding publicity, it is often only through publicity that villains face retribution justice, that national scandals are given attention and persistent campaigning has a positive outcome, and where secrecy is the weapon of those who wish to cover up, and where cover up in the interests of the state can be in the public interest but also may not. The concentration of media power in the hands of the already wealthy and powerful challenges democracy with the greatest danger coming from those able to control and direct 24/7 on the ground TV news, to focus one day and then move on elsewhere.

In relation to events in Sunderland the local media did nothing to compromise police and professional investigations and the problems which arose were caused by individual councillors, senior council officers, Department of Health Officials, a Director of Social Services employed to advise the local authority and negligence by the NSPCC, otherwise former children may well have experienced a more meaningful sense of justice than was achieved, and sooner.

The widespread failure to care and protect children was highlighted by Frank Dobson, the first Secretary of State for Social Service appointed by Tony Blair after the 1997 General Election victory. I wrote to Frank soon after he was appointed and Sir William Utting, who as mentioned, I had briefed back some two decades before about the Gates Inquiry and who retired in 1991, completed his investigation into Child Protection and published People Like Us. Tony Blair asked Frank Dobson to chair a ministerial group to consider the recommendations and make a government response which was published in November 1998, a year later as Command paper 4105

Frank in his forward wrote “This wasn’t just a failure by care staff. The children had been failed by social service managers, councils, police, schools, neighbours, the Social Service Inspectorate, Government Departments and Parliament. Some people from all those categories and institutions had worked hard to do a good job for these children but many did not. The whole system had failed.” His comment did not cover the Church of England, the Catholic Church, other religions, the armed services, the work of agencies overseas which is part of the Statutory Inquiry for England and Wales. Frank ended his introduction. “Additional resources are being made available. There can be no more excuses.

Separately, Home Office and Department of Health Minister, Paul Boateng. warned Director of Social Services they were in last chance saloon in relation to the Children services which were then transferred to the Education Department in 2006.

I was on a commuter train in London evening going back to the former home of my birth and care mothers which I was able to continue with for a time, when I overheard a conversation between the civil servant transferred from Education to Health to facilitate the change and someone in the Ministerial office of Clare Short, the Minister for Oversees Development, so I introduce myself and suggested a look at my files because the issues I had raised were not closed.

What happened previously was that on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5^th,1998, the government announced £450 million to carry out the Utting recommendations over three years. The present Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, then a backbench M.P established that this was additional money and the former Secretary of State, Virginia Bottomley said the problem was intractable.

In 2000 an international transport expert, Christian Woolmar, published Forgotten Children, The Secret Abuse Scandal in Children’s Homes, which includes important chapters on the what happened and why with one headed “Never Again,” but also “But did it Happen at All.”  On June 30^th, a month ago, the House of Lord passed the following motion “That this House takes note of the case for introducing statutory guidelines relating to the investigation of historical child abuse.” I am yet to write to those participating in the debate in the support for due process standards but also reminding of the history of cover up and protectionism.

The chapter, “Did it happen?” was timely because it reflected a campaign by interests determined to discredit survivors and belittle the scale of the problem but it also has some basis for concern that rough justice and token justice meant that the state needs someone to be prosecuted regardless of the strength of the evidence and some victims were vulnerable to pressure from police and lawyers to say what others wanted to hear.  One of the areas which I hope the latest statutory Inquiry will undertake is to examine the events which led to it taking place or that there will be a separate inquiry to do this, given three chairmen appointed so far and three formats within the space of two years.

Between 1997 and 2003 I had assistance from someone with Access to various interests from Police with organised crime in the Region, with regional and national media and with a national investigative body and original centred on one local authority, the interest widened to Operation Rose which was Newcastle centred, then Northumberland and the North East, widening to Islington, the Isles of Wight and Scilly, Contact was made with the Sunderland South Member of Parliament Chris Mullin sometime junior Minister who became Chairman of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. The associate gained valuable information from a range if sources which I was assured was being passed on to the appropriate authorities and which I also altered the pro bono lawyers. Contact with the associate was continued until 2003 which after the individual left the region and attempts to locate, especially the digital records proved unsuccessful in 2014

The former Sunderland South, Member of Parliament, Chris Mullin was once just as hated by mainstream national Press for his left wing stance on various issues as Jeremy Corbin. Chris Mullin he is now known mainly for his successful campaign to achieve the release of the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four wrongly convicted of the responsibility for terrorist bombings in the city and the town.  As Chairman of the influential Home Affairs Select Committee, Chris conducted an investigation into the role of Freemasonry in Local Government and the Police, highlighting the huge number of Lodges in Sunderland and also mentioning South Tyneside and that in Sunderland there was a Civic Lodge which was able to meet just across the road from the Civic Centre.

Less well known, until I commenced to highlight with appropriate interests. is that in 2002 the Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons published its report on an investigation into Allegations of Past Abuse in Children’s Home Online as HC836-1 together with the detailed responses to a questionnaire by some 70 organisations and individuals, and available online, and which concluded that police investigations should stop unless authorised by a Judge and civil compensation claims should be restricted to a new Criminal Injuries Board approach.

In 2002 two members of the Home Affairs Committee chaired by Chris Mullin were David Cameron, recent Prime Minister, and one of two recent Machiavellian fixers of the Labour party, the present Deputy Leader Tom Watson.

Another signatory was David Winnick and who remains a member of the Home Affairs Committee.

Interestingly John Cooper who made the UK People’s Tribunal presentation became a legal adviser to the Home Affairs Select Committee about the time of the setting up of the statutory Inquiry in 2015.

Of course coincidence is more likely than connection and the parallel with Lady Thatcher arranging the P.M.Q about Blunt in 1979 can be discounted but it is interesting that it was a P.M.Q from Tom Watson to David Cameron in the Autumn of 2012 after the public revelations regarding Jimmy Savile that kicked off the first of the current police Operations and where at one point it was disclosed that dozens of politicians, past and present together with hundreds of VIP personalities were under policy scrutiny. From personal knowledge there should be no doubt that without the efforts of Tom Watson there would be no Inquiry for England and Wales until all the police investigations and the judicial process had been completed.

Tom was also a key politician involved with the Hacked Off campaign and the Leveson Inquiry and with whom sections of the national press have a score to settle. Leveson II appears unlikely to now happen although Mrs May could keep the possibility open if Mr Murdoch tries to dictate the terms of his support. It can be argued that had Mrs May not gone ahead with the statutory Inquiry, given the setbacks when the first two Chairman appointed failed to meet the test of ongoing media scrutiny, Cameron would have blocked further action when coming into sole power in 2015.

The power of 24/7 media is such that those with the power can now make news rather than report and several days of intense negative publicity can usually finish a politician, sometimes never to return although I would be surprised if this applied to the most recent casualty, Michael Gove. Such media events require the fuel of insider information and in this respect the role of public relations industry and the linkage between public relations and politicians is yet to be fully explored. Nick Davies has published an important study in Flat Earth News and the next work should cover the defence of Tony Blair and the attempted destruction of Jeremy Corbyn.

At the Ruskin College talk by Alasdair Mackenzie there was little opportunity to explore the secret power role of the registered and unregistered Special Interest Groups of Parliament and which also has demonstrated the merit of printing out information as the capacity to edit and remove Internet based information gas developed. At present it is possible to find basic information on line of the 400 or so registered Special Interest groups which cover the 1500 or those members of the House of Lords and Commons, a reduction from those registered during 2010-2015 and where all the members ten from each House for each group were listed

The register is of those group who receive financial assistance from outside bodies in bands of £2500 but is my understanding that this does not does not prevent individual members being given hospitality separately which they are required to declare if they speak or vote on an issue directly related. There are also unregistered groups about which I only have limited knowledge. The Bar at the House of Commons frequented by the Northern MPs is the place to be when the Party Leader is revising his Cabinet.

The investigative Journalist David Hencke who I met at the first meetings of the UK People’s Tribunal and like Nick Davies a Journalist of the Year and previously also a major writer for the Guardian and now for Tribune has several claims to justified status with his work on exposing the relationship between public relations and politics and which led to the now UKIP member of the Welsh Parliament resigning his Ministerial position, Neil Hamilton.  David was also involved in work in relation to the exposure of Elm House as a base for the sexual exploitation of children and more recently with the publication of a book and a TV documentary on the wealth of Tony Blair.

There is no published record of meetings of the secret special interest groups, who attends them, or visits made, although the leadership of each group is stated together with the source of registered funding. This is how the huge number of public relations firms and individual commercial, chartable and other Interests engage with Parliamentarians, away from the media spotlight.

My interest has been on the activities of the all-party Gibraltar Interest group which is one of the most powerful given the size of territory but which is in the process of dramatic change as work begins to transform into the Hong Kong of the Mediterranean. My understanding is not based on past limited contact with first cousins who used to control taxation and customs for the Gib government. It commenced with tales from my care mother who used to engage in smuggling coffee and tobacco for one of her brothers and where a recent production of Carmen at the Royal Opera House had a scene set as smugglers moved contraband over the border with Spain. The uncle went to live in the USA and became a citizen with sons and grandsons serving in the USA navy and marines

My most recent source apart from the research I did for a visit a decade ago, is the Golden Book of Business a 160 page glossy I discovered available in the First Class lounge at Kings Cross. Gibraltar is today one of the online gambling capitals of the world and a no nonsense low taxation haven as well as having two births for the Trident. Most armed service people have visited Gibraltar since mid-Victorian times of the Empire when my mother’s grandfather set off after service in Ireland, for Malta Hong Kong, Singapore, Malacca and Penang. His first born with a Spanish wife worked for the Navy is ordinance stores and as an accountant for the Army at South barrack which is now the impressive St Joseph’s School and where my mother was a pupil teacher at the age of 12 at the original school attach to St Joseph’s Church where she first met my father when she was four and he was appointed assistant parish priest at the age of 28, awarded the OBE for his service of 50 years. It was great when the then Bishop of Gibraltar, with whom I had previously communicated and whose was the brother of the first Minister at the time, sent my birth mother a formal blessing on behalf of the Catholic Church to mark her 100^th birthday.

The Bishop was not popular in some circles for having written “The Rock under a Cloud.”  A history of the Bishops of Gibraltar and the Church. I noted the reference to the street of brothels as during the Empire, only Sergeants and above, were able to cross the border to the delights of La Linea del La Concepcion. It troubles me that two of my favourite musical works, the Opera Madam Butterfly and the musical Miss Saigon are about child exploitation by USA servicemen abroad.

The Justice Goddard led Inquiry was undertaking an investigation into the role of Military at home and abroad and of British agents such as the British Council when they went abroad. Given the protectionism of some on the backbenches of the House of Commons in relation to Bloody Sunday it can be assumed the military Lobby pressing for exclusion from Inquiry, Version Four, will be as strong as other interests for a cutting the Inquiry down to size if not for an ending of all the proposed investigations leading to Hearings.

Within the past couple of years, I was contacted by another relative whose family had settled in Paris and learned that my maternal great grandfather had another son who had joined the army at 14 served in South Africa and India before re-enlisting and serving throughout the first World War. We are a fortunate people in having young men, and today young women who volunteer to put themselves into harm’s way to protect their homeland and its interests. We should always treat as special the families of those who die when in service or who return injured in body and in mind.

I remember the day when after the war in Europe had ended one of older first cousins, one of the earliest to volunteer, the telegram came to say that he had died in a prisoner of war camp in the Far East, and I also remember the day his brother came home from prisoner of war camps in North Africa, Italy and central Europe where he was released by the Russians and where he could barely speak of the terror they inflicted because if what had happened to their people before. He found it difficult to settle.

At the age of sixteen my first job age was with Middlesex County Council in a building now Random House as junior to a section for six men, one showed me his part tin leg from first World War Service, the unit head a naval officer from the second, three others as soldiers, one also serving in North Africa and the sixth, I who came later I believe from service in Korea. They did not feel strangers in their own land because their families, and friends had all experienced something of the same terror, the horror and the deprivations. Life by comparison became predicable and they were locked into jobs for the rest of their occupational life because of the lack of transferrable skills. They were not however impressed with the decision to invade Suez and the petrol rationing that was then imposed.

Only a handful of the Members of the House of Commons who voted to bomb the people of Syria or to create new submarines to carry weapons of mass civilian extermination have had any similar experience to draw upon.

Going back to Ruskin College as June came to an end was an emotional experience after what was becoming a very emotional time as events were unfolding. The Fellowship had arranged what became a two-hour coach trip within the city crossing back and forth and passing Magdalene college four if not five times during which at least five hundred beautiful young men and women in evening attire some in top hats against a darkening sky where torrential rain extraordinary drenched hours before, queued round and around and around and around again the college grounds waiting to enter the May ball at over £100 a ticket. I speculated on how many would become politicians, join the armed services, enter public service or seek a lifetime of learning.

Ten years after leaving Ruskin at the birth of the Social Service Department I interviewed graduates and others wanting to receive a salary while undertaking professional social work training and when asked why, one had looked me in the eye and said he had worked out this had become the quickest way to become a local authority chief officer and help change society for the better that way.  Apart from a few days attending a conference and inviting the former Children’s Officer to tea at the Randolph remembering that she used take us out for smoked salmon sandwiches at the Trout. I returned on behalf of the Department of Health as the 1980’s drew to a close and struggled to find the appropriate people to meet and tell us the reality of drug misuse in the University as an improved motorway system meant it was easier for substances to be bought in than acquired on visits to London. The problem then we were told was alcohol.

The problem since has been sexual exploitation which led to Operation Bullfinch and reports of over 350 children groomed and trafficked. There was inevitable less national attention on the rapes and sexual exploitation within the university confines and indication of the continuing double standard which divides the majority of people from their rulers and would be rulers.

The Oxford Times on Sunday 7^th August, as I decided to stop revising this writing, reported that both the leader of the County Council and a spokesperson for the City Scrutiny Committee pleaded for the government to act quickly get the statutory child abuse inquiry back on course after the sudden announcement of the departure of the its third chairman in two years a week ago. The Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons has asked the Home Secretary and Justice Goddard to appear at a meeting arranged for September 7^th but as it is revealed that Justice Goddard has accepted payment in lieu of notice and is expected to return to her homeland as soon as practical her attendance is in question. My latest attempt to engage and influence took place the previous day as I sent Chairman Keith Vaz and a number of others connected with the Select Committee together with Opposition spokespeople notes on the terms of the contract with some background comments.

My assumption was that back in their constituencies away from the Commons Library, the Committee officers and their support team they may have forgotten that the full contract and conditions of employment were published prior to the Confirmation Hearing before the Committee. This is still available under the Library tab of the Official Inquiry site but it is necessary to scroll back 21 pages of listed documentation. Keith said thanks by email on Saturday evening.

Without a Times subscription I rely on Google searches and  on contacts to advise if there is an article of interest and over the past two weeks there has been several articles from or on behalf of the Greville Janner family objecting that the Inquiry was holding an investigation and Hearing and in particular that the Counsel for the Inquiry indicated that it would be possible to make a factual determination whether Lord Janner had committed the acts for which he had and was being accused but had not faced criminal prosecution. Following the decision to open the formal hearing on March 7^th 2017 the family announced it was seeking an order to prevent the Inquiry continuing with the hearing and the/a son, a QC, is reported to have said he had planned to call for the resignation of the Inquiry Chairman.

The day before the resignation statement there was a short article in the Telegraph which mentioned that Justice Goddard spent over 40 days in New Zealand and Australia, officially studying developments including the progress of the Royal Commission. This was in addition to the holiday entitlement and where on close examination of the article her future position is raised.

Given my detailed knowledge of the work undertaken to achieve the Inquiry and then of the problems which beset the original decision taken against the consensus view within government that police inquiries and the justice system first needed to take their course, it was evident to me that something had happened unrelated to the private circumstances of Justice Goddard which justified government acceptance of her resignation. How far the allegations made in the Sunday Times this weekend are accurate or the precipitating justification for the departure may not become immediately public but the development reinforces the need for an in depth review and where I will try and find time to write up my knowledge. I will next communicate to government, Opposition and others a view on the opportunity the departure provides to ensure the Inquiry remains focussed on its original purpose.

I commenced to write something of potential interest to the Ruskin Fellowship, to the college and those interested in the future of the college, but events quickly led to writing something which is essentially for me and also part of my contemporary artwork project but which I hope will also be of interest to others. I had recently decided to return to my rest of lifetime project before the quick succession of important events meant that I ought to engage and seek to influence.

I have always been driven by a sense of mission but also recognising it was and remains an individual view to be considered alongside those of everyone else who care or need sufficiently to step outside the struggle for personal survival, self-protection and furthering self-interest, together with meeting the needs of those closest. I have also recognised the value of being part of a closely knit and sustaining tribe or a series of tribes but that such social mechanisms can function to the detriment of others.

I have considerable sympathy with those in any political party, employment or social organisation who have done the work, sometimes for decades and who suddenly find their position under threat especially from those whose motives and purpose may be in question or who threaten others who are dependent or who have been in close association. History and personal experience often reinforces the view nowt good will come of it. But we are where we now are and it is important that there is progress in the general interest and welfare which demands radical change which is likely to be challenging and painful in the short term of several years but which should not be shirked.

We are fortunate to live and belong in a society which encourages everyone to engage in political debate, action and power, whoever they are or who have been.

8^th August 2016