Police state that had Edward Heath been alive today, he would have been interviewed under caution with regard to allegations of child sex abuse.
As the former Prime Minister is actually dead, he is not in a position to defend himself, or indeed to be interviewed.
However, child sex abuse goes on. We have seen the scandal in Rotherham, which does not just affect the accused and their victims.
The Labour local authority looked the other way while girls in its care were raped on an industrial scale. There were clear political reasons to do so.
There have been inquiries and investigations. The council was described as ‘not fit for purpose’ and is currently being run by civil commissioners. The commissioners will eventually give way to elected councillors in 2019. What is not clear is whether the people of Rotherham can ever produce from their number councillors who are better than their predecessors. There is no way to determine this. People will not be voting on the basis of the child rapes.
Last month, a report into the performance of those in charge in Rotherham was produced. It was compromised because 27 people refused to co-operate. The report, in the absence of this co-operation, could conclude only that the organised gang rapes took place due to incompetence rather than collusion or malice. It seems clear that families with daughters, when moving house, should not consider South Yorkshire as a location. Rotherham has the distinction of being the child rape capital of the UK.
There do remain reports of stolen information and a downplaying of the rapes by those in authority. No plausible explanation for this wilful blindness has been proffered by those responsible.
Once again, dear reader, this issue of the organised rape of hundreds of girls thousands of times is not seen as a feminist issue by the sisterhood. Perhaps because the victims were insufficiently middle-class, too ‘northern’, or their parents do not work in the professions. Instead the argument of late has been about feminist attitudes to men who have themselves been surgically altered and pumped with hormones to make them resemble women. There was even a fist-fight about this at Speakers’ Corner. And the metropolitan elites wonder why people voted Leave.
It is arguable that there were criminal levels of negligence amongst local and elected officials in Rotherham. Currently there are no plans to interview any of these people under caution, not even the 27 above who refused to cooperate. Perhaps it is because, unlike Edward Heath, they are still with us.
