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| Former Tory party chairman Lord Tebbit claimed there was a mindset in the 1980s to protect the system |
The former Tory party chairman claimed there was a mindset to ‘protect the system’ which has been to shown to have gone ‘spectacularly’ wrong because incidents of abuse grew.
The Home Office has ordered a full-scale legal inquiry into claims of an Establishment cover-up, after admitting it has lost 114 files including a dossier relating to allegations of abuse.
David Cameron is to appoint a top lawyer to investigate the Government’s handling of a dossier alleging high-level paedophile activity.
The file was first passed to Home Secretary Leon Brittan by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in 1983 – but subsequently lost.
Mark Sedwill, the Home Office permanent secretary, said a massive review of 746,000 Home Office files covering 1979 to 1999 had identified ‘573 relevant files which had been retained’.
However, he added: ‘The extensive analysis of the central database identified 114 potentially relevant files had been destroyed, missing or not found.
'The investigation identified 13 items of alleged child abuse, nine of which were known or reported to the police including four involving Home Office staff.
‘The remaining four, which had not been previously disclosed, have now been passed to the police.’
Today Lord Tebbit, a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government from 1979-87, said social attitudes at the time had been wrong.
He told BBC One’s Marr Show : 'At that time I think most people would have thought that the establishment, the system, was to be protected and if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into it.
'That view, I think, was wrong then and it is spectacularly shown to be wrong because the abuses have grown.' (more...)
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