Will the dismal bleakness of the Jimmy Savile revelations get us any closer to the real truth of sex abuse and its legacy? Doubtful. Very doubtful.

 

Over the coming weeks and months and probably years we are all going to wail and gnash our teeth as the Savile scandal plays out. How could we not? It’s going to be another Hillsborough, except that this particular cover up spanned half a century as opposed to a mere 23 years. At Hillsborough 50,000 of us saw the whole thing play out in front of our eyes and then we saw the authorities tell a completely different story. And for 23 years we basically kept on and on saying ‘That’s not right! That’s total shite!’ But we were merely little people and the powers that be laughed their socks off at the lot of us. It isn’t hard to see how many parallels are about to appear as we are taken deeper and deeper into Savile’s depraved world. I would happily bet on the fact that the ongoing enquiry will throw up a pile of evidence that will show that any number of people have in fact stepped forward to report what was going down over rhe last half century. But they, like the 50,000 of us at Hillsborough, will turn out to be the kind of little people nobody ever wants to hear. Not when the truth we have to tell is of the inconvenient variety. Not when the truth offers a clear and present danger to the big people and their treasured pension funds

On the subject of which….

Norman Bettison was one of the cover up kings at Hillsborough.

Norman Bettison was promoted to be a Chief Constable – OF MERSEYSIDE!

Norman Bettison was made SIR Norman Bettison.

And now that the truth has been prised out and it has become clear that he is a conniving, scheming, conspiring, amoral, stop at nothing twat, he is trying to retire early so he can wriggle himself clear of the consequences.

He must have Googled ‘Fred the Shred’…

Retire.

Duck out

And get paid £88,000 a year for the rest of his disgusting life.

£88,000 a year from the people of Merseyside.

It is all so utterly, completely, rotten, stinking bad to the core that it makes you want to tear your teeth out. Oh, and by the way. £88,000 doesn’t represent the whole of his pension. The good folk of South and West Yorkshire are also chipping in to get him up to the £200,000 a year mark.

There will be a whole host of names we haven’t heard about yet who will be fingered over the coming months as we get to the bottom of just what a horrible bastard Jimmy Savile really was. It will be Sir this and OBE that. Good old boys who were deemed to offer a safe pair of hands. Salt of the earth types schooled in the age old art of sweeping under the carpet and smoothing over. Of course they didn’t want one of the BBC’s ‘National Treasures’ to be unveiled as a serial sex offender. You don’t get the OBE and the gong and the six figure tax payer pension when that kind of nastiness gets shovelled into the public view on your watch. No way Hose. So you make sure the voices of the inconvenient little people get shut down.

Shut right down.

The tabloids of course will love every second and revel in the utter horribleness of it all. The fact that these were the very same tabloids who threw down the red carpet to good old Jimmy is neither here nor there. The world moves on, and a favourite Celeb becomes much better box office as a piece of 'Paedo Scum Celeb!' (i.e. Headline - not me) as far as those magnificent men at the redtops are concerned.

Usually when one sex offender emerges from any institution of the 70’s and 80’s, it means that many more will inevitably follow. It was the case with the Boy Scouts and Childrens’ Homes and the Catholic Church. Probably Light Entertainment is about to be next in line. And no doubt there will be more much loved National Treasures who will emerge as something entirely different. We will revisit the issue of taking away knighthoods and OBE’s and those who manage the charitable legacies of these tainted legends will wish they had never volunteered for the job. But the Bettisons of this world will no doubt slip quietly through the net. There will of course be calls for their gold plated pensions to be taken away. And there will of course be politicians with their faces creased with concern telling us that the law is the law and we don’t do that sort of thing here in Britain. So we will continue to pay Fred the Shred his £700k a year. And Bettison his £200k a year. A the right honourable whoever who happened to shove the Savile complaints to the back of his filing cabinets back in 1976 his however much a year.

And grouse will still get shot on windswept moors and Pimms will still be slugged down at Henley and strawberries and cream will still fly off the shelves at a tenner a pop at Wimbledom.

Because in the end this is Great Britain and once you are admitted to the club you get to stay in the club. And the little people who try to tell the inconvenient truth will be forever hushed up.

The Jimmy Savile saga will play loud and long and the focus of media attention will be on predatory sex offenders who look a bit weird. And once again we will miss the real story because the real story is so ugly and nasty that hardly anyone ever wants to look at it.

At the First Base Agency we have little choice but to look at the real story. Why? Because we are a drug agency, that’s why. Before we opened our doors back in 2003 someone told me that 70% of those among us who have become dependent on heroin will have suffered some sort of abuse as kids. Surely not. 70% has to be an exaggeration, doesn't it? But it isn’t an exaggeration. It is another of those nasty, inconvenient truths. It is the sad and sorry career path of many a lost soul who discover the ever warm embrace of heroin. At eight they get abused by someone in the house who threatens to kill should they whisper a word about it. Or kill their mum. Or kill their little sister. Or kill their dog. And if they do tell their mum, their mum whacks them one and tells them to stop lying. So they bottle it up and bite their lip and suffer night after night of degradation until they are old enough for the abuser to lose interest in them. And the boiling shame, anger and despair they feel inside shows itself to the world in the form of anti-social behaviour at school and out on the street. They get thrown out of lessons and fall behind in their work. And they fall in with others who have been thrown out of lessons. And they play truant together. And they steal booze and swig it down in parks together. And they try street valium together. And they burn wheelie bins together. And they rob shops together. And they serve time in Young Offenders Prisons together. And they are bounced from hostel to hostel together. And they in the end find the only thing that takes away the nightmares about what happened when they were eight years old and their mum would have none of it.

It’s a well trodden path believe me. The long and winding road from the hell of abuse to the heaven of Smack.

And not many get abused by weird looking national treasures who strut their stuff on Top of the Tops. And not many are lifted from the playground in the park by weird looking types offering sweeties and a ride in the nice car for fish and chips. Instead the vast majority are abused by someone who lives in the house where they live. A father or a stepfather or some bloke their mum tells them to call uncle or an older stepbrother or a grandfather. It’s bleak and it’s ugly and it’s the way it almost always plays out.

Inconvenient truth. Ugly truth.

The real ugly truth is that among us there always have been and always will be some who crave the chance of taking their sexual pleasure with kids. At times this is deemed to be OK. In the days of the Roman Empire, having grown women as wives were deemed a dreary necessity to produce kids. Real pleasure was to be had from pre teen slave boys and girls. Mostly boys. Three or four hundred years ago in Britain it was considered perfectly right and proper for a man to marry an eleven year old. In India right here and right now, over 200,000 kids are abducted from the streets every year. No prizes for guessing how the organised criminal gangs who manage the abductions make their cash from the little girls.

The laws of our land have changed over the years and thank God for that. It has become harder and harder for the Jimmy Saviles among us to get their kicks following traditional methods. They have had to change their ways. Their Modus Operandi. Forty years ago, there were a number of career paths open to those who wanted access to vulnerable young people who nobody would listen to. Become a scout master. Work in a Childrens’ Home. Take your vows and become a Catholic priest. Light entertainment at the Beeb? Maybe.

One by one, we have managed to close these windows of opportunity. Thank Christ. Back in those dark days, an abuser’s own family offered a poor option. An abuser could take a wife, have kids and abuse those kids. But it wasn’t all that easy. Families were closer knit back then. Uncles and Aunties and Grandparents all lived in the streets nearby. There were more people for a young person to tell. People who loved them. People who were inclined to believe them. People willing to make sure things were nipped in the bud. And even if the abuser got away with it with their own kids, eventually their own kids would grow up. And that was that. Because marriages lasted for life back then. That’s why the Childrens’ Homes and the Catholic Church and the Scout groups made offered a more attractive option.

So where are we now? Well things have changed. Changed utterly, as Yeats once said. Now barely one in three marriages lasts the course. Online dating sites offer potential abusers literally millions of single mothers of one or two or three. And they have perfected the art of being Mr really, really nice who is ever so good with the kids. And they get asked to move in. And they move in. And the kids are asked to call the new guy uncle this or uncle that. And when they have taken the opportunity to use and abuse the kids on offer, they simply move out, log on and start over. Are there as many people to tell? No. Families are no longer nearly as close, either emotionally or geographically. And as a society, our leaders have encouraged us to despise the single mother with three out of control kids and forty fags a day and tattoos everywhere and a 42 inch widescreen TV and an ever open door for any bloke down the pub who will ply her with Blue Wicked all Friday night. Do we listen? Will we listen? Of course we don’t. We make Schemie jokes and Chav jokes and we silently cheer when George Osborne promises to come down on the spongers and the dissolute like a tonne of bricks.

The inconvenient truth.

Our miserable excuse of a society has become a veritable playground for the abusers who are forever among us. No longer do they have to go to the trouble of getting a job in a dismal Childrens Home or studying theology or learning the words of Ging-Gang-Gooligong. Not necessary. Now they simply have to log on. Play nice and find a single mum with no support network. And when they are done with that one, they can log back on and find another.

And will anyone listen? Of course we won’t. We’ll read about Jimmy Savile instead