Victoria Ricketts

You might have heard of Maggie Oliver. She's a former Greater Manchester detective who, in 2012, was ordered to abandon her investigation into the systematic rape of children in Rochdale, and decided she would rather resign her warrant card rather than do so. Maggie, as that would imply, is one of the good ones. I constantly ask how our police can consider themselves worthy of the badge if they are not willing to return the badge rather than commit injustice in its name. Maggie did just that; she was asked to cover for criminals, so she told the shirts to stuff themselves and handed back her commission. She won a small but consequential victory in the High Court on Friday. Mr Justice Kimblin granted her foundation a full judicial review of whether the British state has actually done anything about the recommendations it accepted, in 2022, at the end of a seven-year inquiry into the institutional cover-up of decades of child sexual abuse. Maggie Oliver is one woman. She has no political party behind her and no standing in Whitehall. She has no peerage, no chambers, no billionaire foundation footing her bills. She was ordered, by senior officers, to drop her investigation into a network of men who were raping children in industrial quantities in her city, because of the demographics to which those men belong made the whole thing a bit awkward. Fourteen years on, she has done what nobody else in this country has been able to. She has hauled the British state into open court to answer for the choice it made, over four years and under two governments, to hold a seven-year, £200 million inquiry into the institutional cover-up of child abuse and implement, deliberately, none of that inquiry's recommendations. The Home Office accepted those recommendations in 2022. So did the Department for Education, the police inspectorates and the Crown Prosecution Service. And then nothing happened. The recommendations sat. The departments restructured. Ministers rotated. The girls and women who had given evidence aged. More such operations continued around the country, while the men who had run the previous set of them either walked free, left the country, or drew their own pensions. The state, in the manner of every institution Tony Blair ever built, had decided that the writing of the report was the action, and the doing of the report could be handed off to history. That is what Maggie Oliver has now forced into court. And the political class knows what that means. The Home Secretary has not commented. The Prime Minister has not commented. The candidates jockeying through the post-Starmer Labour succession have, at the time of writing, failed even to speak her name, as though they know that, if they do, lightning will flash in the sky and they'll be turned into a pillar of Tesco's-own-brand dishwasher salt. They are silent because they recognise, accurately, that the answers a judicial review will produce - to the question of why their inquiry's findings were treated as ornamental - will, should, must end the careers of every official who was supposed to act on them and did not. That councillors and councils, mayors, indeed entire political parties, will be caught under ultraviolet light and shown for their guilt. It's time a government did what the British state has spent twenty years declining to do. Take on institutional failure. Name the institutions that failed, in public, on the record. Name the officers and officials who covered it up, and the officers and officials who pressed for the cover-up too. Prosecute them under the standards that any other employee of a public organisation defrauding the public would expect to face. The recommendations the inquiry produced must be implemented in full, alongside whatever further measures a second look at the evidence then demands. There will not be another inquiry into the inquiries. There will be the verdicts. Maggie Oliver is one of the bravest people in Britain. She has earned, by her own resignation and by fourteen years and a foundation and a court case carried on her back, the right to expect from a future British government the simple thing that ought to have happened in 2014, in 2016, in 2018, in 2022 and in every other year of this national disgrace. She has not yet been given it; we have not yet been given it. But it will be given, and soon.