There is no doubt that the distinguished lawyer Fiona Woolf is herself a successful woman of unimpeachable reputation and character. There is also no no doubt that her appointment to head up the child sex abuse inquiry, following on the disaster of the initial appointment of Lady Butler Sloss, is another extraordinary error of judgement . This is now set to become yet another media spectacle, which to the abused and those who represent or sympathise with them, and that is almost everyone, is beyond comprehension. How on earth could the government get this wrong twice?
The answer is that the Government, its advisers, the officials and lawyers who head up the legal teams in Whitehall, together with the distinguished candidates who are, have been, or may be lined up for this appointment, fail to understand the root issue. This is not just about child abuse. It is about them. And one of them cannot be an impartial chair of what they get up to and what they cover up. They are all part of the Establishment.
It has always been the case that ministers, mandarins, judges, bishops, lawyers and all those engaged in the top echelons of government and public service in this country, while technically at arms length are all cozy with each other. This extraordinary agglomeration of powerful people controls every facet and lever of power and public policy, yet only a relative handful, members of the House of Commons, are elected. Everyone else is appointed by people who were themselves appointed, and who are backed up by approximately one thousand two hundred quangos or government agencies which oversee almost every single aspect of the daily lives of the people.
To describe this as a fully fledged democracy requires a flight from reality. For long the British public have accepted the ascendancy of this imperial structure to manage their country, because they thought it honourable and efficient. The advent of social media, the eruption of extraordinary scandals, the failures in financial, foreign, energy, flood prevention, health, education, housing and other policies, has caused a profound change in this perception. The uneven recovery which has hugely benefited the people at the top, while leaving those lower down worse off, has finally caused a fundamental reorientation of view.
The Establishment is seen as self-serving and self-seeking, profiting at the expense of the masses, hopelessly inefficient at its myriad functions and over rewarded to a preposterous level. It is seen as protective of its own and the grand master of cover up using the device of an official Inquiry, which gets at the truth but ensures that the opprobrium of blame is so thinned and dissipated that the responsibility for disaster falls on the shoulders of no one. They also now know that it has within its ranks serial child abusers, whom it has shielded and protected from generation to generation.
That is why it is not possible to fill the vacancy of the chair of the child abuse inquiry with any candidate from within any part of the Establishment, because it is they who are actually under scrutiny, together with their sins and the devices they use to conceal them. It is also why the electoral pull of the anti-establishment UKIP party is now anchored very much deeper than disaffection with the EU.
