Who is that someone? Who will Make Rochdale Great Again?

Since storming to victory in February’s by-election, George Galloway has vowed to tackle Labour’s “corruption”, restore a maternity ward to the local hospital, and, as part of his “lasting legacy”, coax Primark to open a new store in the town. With the help of a Grand Alliance between his hard-Left Workers Party and other local candidates, he has also pledged to destroy Rochdale’s Labour Party in Thursday’s local elections.

One man hoping he’ll succeed is Billy Howarth. The flat-capped, plain-talking local attacked Galloway as “divisive” while running against him as an independent in Rochdale’s by-election but is now standing as a candidate for the Workers Party. “I thought his election would be a stepping-stone for the international stuff [Israel-Gaza], but actually he’s gone totally the opposite way,” he says. “Yes, he’s still speaking about the international stuff, but he’s speaking about Rochdale, and what Rochdale needs and he’s willing to fight for it.”

Howarth’s life has been deeply scarred by Rochdale’s depredations. Growing up on the sprawling Kirkholt Estate, built in the Forties by German prisoners of war, he was groomed and abused by a local paedophile, George Crawford, from the age of eight. “He was an animal of a man,” Howarth says now. “He was notorious. Never got convicted of it, but he was supposed to have raped over 200 boys.”

Widespread sexual abuse is still taking place in Rochdale, Howarth tells me, but he believes he has at least had some measure of justice. In 2000, Crawford, by then in his 60s and nearly blind, was charged with the sexual abuse of 10 boys during the Seventies and Eighties. A year later, while the trial was still ongoing, his wife found his body slumped against their living room door. He had been beaten to death by a local man with an ornamental lamp. At the killer’s trial, the prosecution said Crawford’s murder had been motivated at least in part by reports of his abuse spreading through the local area.

“I wouldn’t join any mainstream party,” Howarth says. “I hold all three of them accountable for Rochdale’s children being abused. It’s the poverty; it’s a class thing. I don’t believe it’s racial. There’s white guys involved in this too. They target girls from children’s homes and girls from dysfunctional families. They’re easy targets.”

More from this author

The betrayal of Borisland

By Felix Pope

Out on the doorstep, he claims that people are warming to the Workers Party. “I don’t have Palestine conversations on the door. It’s not my field.” Instead, Howarth claims, voters care more about the poor quality of housing in the region. Few have forgotten the death four years ago of two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who suffered from respiratory problems caused by the mould growing throughout his parents’ housing association flat. The tragedy led news bulletins, but little was done to make Rochdale’s houses safer.

Walking through a predominantly Asian part of Rochdale — where Palestinian flags flutter from buildings and a newsagent displays an advert for Salaam Cola, the BDS-approved alternative to Coke — support for the Workers Party seems widespread. Posters in shop windows feature Galloway shaking hands with local candidate Minaam Ellahi, a clean-cut young man who hopes to unseat the “pro-genocide Labour Party”. Standing on a nearby street, Muhammed, a bearded young man, tells me how Galloway won him over. “He’s trying to get a Primark in the town, he’s working on the market. Primark is a big deal for the town. We need to give him time. What have Labour done for Rochdale? At least Galloway is trying.” Waiting in a barbers’ shop, another man tells me he voted for Galloway because of Palestine, but thinks he is doing a lot for the town too. “Keir has failed to help Gaza,” he says bluntly. “I would never vote Labour again. Most Muslim voters will vote for the Workers Party, not Labour.”

In Rochdale, this is significant. While the town itself is 19% Muslim, that figure rises to 31% for the parliamentary constituency. And crucially, support among the community, long taken for granted by Labour, is faltering amid the fall-out from the Israel-Gaza war, with just 60% of Muslim voters who backed the party in 2019 willing to do so at the next election. This recalibration, the Labour Muslim Network said, revealed a “crisis point” that could prove irreparable.

And yet, when I ask the barber about the Workers Party poster in his window, he shrugs. “Someone came in and asked me to put it up.” A few doors down the road, Amhed, a butcher, seems equally perplexed at the Workers Party poster in his window. “I’m not supporting Galloway,” he tells me. “I was a Tory voter last time. Tories support businesses. They helped us during Covid.”

He is, however, the exception. Walking around the town, most Muslim voters praise Galloway’s character, while many non-Muslims condemn him as a fraud. He is a “showman” who is “all lip”, observes one retiree who is struggling to pay her rent on a basic pension.

Chris, walking two whippets and missing several teeth, tells me that he did not vote in the by-election on principle. “It was a farce. Galloway is a chancer — he’s not really seen in Rochdale now.” Labour, who control three quarters of council seats, have been in power here since 2011 and, Chris thinks, they will do well at the local elections. But, he adds: “They’re out for their egos — you never see any changes.”

In the shadow of Rochdale’s soaring Gothic town hall (so impressive, a local rumour goes, that Hitler had planned to ship it to Germany brick-by-brick were he to invade England), I speak to Jules, a middle-aged man who wastes no time tearing into his town’s new representative. Galloway, he insists, is a “disgrace”. “Anyone who hosts a show on RT should not be an MP,” he says. “He just wants a platform for supporting Russia in parliament.” People will be sick of Galloway soon, he believes, and his support will collapse.

A local Labour insider is similarly confident. “Voters seem to be making the distinction between the by-election and the local election,” he says. “That’s working for us. The council has a pretty good record. It’s not financially distressed.” Accusations of corruption have swirled around the local party, however. In 2018, a recording of former council leader Allen Brett surfaced in which he suggested he “might” withhold road funding from wards that declined to vote for his party. After being reprimanded for breaching the local authority’s code of conduct, he insisted his comments were just “banter”.

Suggested reading

When Gaza came to Rochdale

By MIchael Crick

Aware that the Labour vote is counted rather than weighed in Rochdale, where the Liberal Democrats have always held significant support, the local party has been out on the doorstep since the first morning after their election loss. And Labour have reason to be more confident this time. Galloway, after all, has always failed to convert his by-election wins into political momentum. In Bethnal Green, he stepped down; in Bradford, he lost; in Rochdale, Labour are confident the same will happen.

As for the local elections, while Muslims voters may be furious with Starmer over Palestine, the Labour insider claims, they also understand that their council cannot save Gaza. Galloway leans heavily on endorsements from community leaders, but that model of campaigning for ethnic-minority votes is outdated, they insist. “There are canny heads among south Asian voters who say: ‘are we being used as political pawns?’ I think they’re wise enough to realise that.”

But if this is true, I failed to meet any. Rather, the Muslim voters I spoke to gave the impression that a more decisive break had taken place. Palestine was just the most painful expression of a longstanding alienation between the party and its electoral base. For many, supporting the Workers Party stemmed less from a desire to empower Galloway than to give Starmer a kick in the teeth.

In the meantime, Galloway’s much-trumpeted Grand Alliance has struggled to cohere. Several Liberal Democrats and independent candidates offered his “personal endorsement” have angrily refused the support. Dave Tully, a popular local businessman who came second in the by-election, has accused Galloway of “manipulating the situation” after the MP claimed his backing. The coalition is, Galloway admitted on X earlier this month, “not as grand as we’d have liked”. When I visited Rochdale, he was not available to be interviewed, having left town for a Gaza solidarity rally elsewhere.

Back on the high street, the pair of florists insist they will not be voting for Labour or the Workers Party. “I think Galloway looks a bit like a pervert to me,” says one. “I only know him from when he dressed up like a cat on Big Brother.” Around the corner, another resident articulates the town’s lingering sense of pessimism with more clarity. She hopes Labour will win, but that little will change. “Rochdale can’t get any worse,” she adds wryly.

It’s bleak here. The main shopping area, Yorkshire Street, is a sad parade of charity shops, discount stores, and closed-down businesses. Each time I go, I see more and more homeless people on the street. And the stories of poverty and neglect are heart-breaking. In 2020, a toddler died from a respiratory condition caused by mould in the housing association property he lived in. Shockingly, his death changed nothing: it’s still a widespread problem, almost four years on.

Steeped in political scandal and poverty as it is, things could be about to get a whole lot worse. The result of today’s contentious by-election could mean the infamous constituency could end up represented in Parliament by a clown.

Once the pride of industrial Britain, the town was soiled redeemably by “Mr Rochdale” for decades. Real name Cyril Smith, he became a Labour councillor in 1952 at the age of 23, and was Rochdale’s MP from 1972 until he retired from Parliament in 1992. He managed to sustain this lengthy term in office despite multiple allegations of profoundly inappropriate behaviour. In total, eight men alleged that Smith had indecently assaulted them as teenagers in the Sixties; six of them were living at a residential establishment for boys named Cambridge House Hostel, which Smith had been involved in setting up.

When the Director of Public Prosecutions was informed in 1970, the advice was not to prosecute. That advice was reviewed by the Crown Prosecution Service in 1998 and 1999, when two further complainants were identified. Yet neither review led to Smith being charged. He was knighted in 1988, and died in 2010.

It’s only in the years since his death that the extent of his shocking behaviour has been revealed. Among other things, it transpired that in his spare time, Smith had been taking money from — and being handed shares in — a local asbestos firm in return for delivering speeches in parliament minimising its dangers. Then, as part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), published in 2022, Lord David Steel stated that Smith had told him that media reports of his abuse of children were true. Yet Steel had allowed Smith to continue in office until he stepped down in 1992. The police, I’m told, were in his pocket. The IICSA report stated that this was not the case, but it’s easy to be sceptical when you’re even slightly familiar with his corruption.

Smith’s moral depravity cast a dark shadow across Rochdale where the authorities have a long history of turning a blind eye to abuse of the vulnerable. In the Smith Street public toilets scandal, for example, boys as young as primary school age were sexually abused by men for the price of an ice lolly in full view of the Social Services Department. The Child Protection Manager later described how she would regularly notice boys sitting on the walls and being beckoned by men to follow them inside. It was obvious to her and other staff who witnessed it that sexual abuse was happening. And in March 1989, representatives from the police, social services and schools met to discuss what was happening to a group of children aged 10-14 when they gathered daily at a local restaurant named “Tasty Bites”, when they should have been at school. Of the 12 children identified, five were in the care of Rochdale and a number were being paid for sex.

As the IICSA report made clear,  allegations of sexual assault were simply not taken seriously by those in authority — a culture that infected the council for years, and endured right up to the moment the grooming gang scandal that also took place in Tasty Bites was finally laid bare in 2012. Dozens of vulnerable girls — some as young as 14 — had been plied with alcohol and cannabis, threatened with violence, and passed around man after man for sex, while the authorities ignored their pleas for help. The ringleader was found guilty of 30 counts of rape. A string of inquiries followed, concluding that those in authority “lacked human compassion” and were “inexcusably slow” in dealing with the victims — who were seen as making “life choices”, rather than suffering.

There’s little doubt that Smith’s 20-year reign set in stone the culture of corruption, lethargy and abject failure of its statutory services that lingers. To this day, Rochdale is offered a dire choice of politicians. It’s difficult to believe that many voters will be inspired to turn out to vote for any of them. It is a battle between an ultra-macho, all-male list of prospective MPs, fought along Israeli-Palestinian lines, rather than between political parties. Amid the chaotic run-up, the Labour and Green parties dropped their candidates; not one woman is standing.

It’s an unedifying list of characters and Azhar Ali, is pretty representative of the calibre: a Labour Councillor who trotted out antisemitic conspiracy theories at a public meeting: he’s now out of the party, yet still standing. George Galloway, also accused in the past of antisemitism, is also standing — and is the favourite to win. He wants to “make Rochdale great again” — which makes you wonder when exactly he’s referring to. Standing for the Workers Party for Britain, he claims that he would save Rochdale AFC, and reopen the market. He also has the dubious honour of being endorsed by Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party. (Galloway rejected the endorsement.)

Galloway knows his audience. Rochdale is 19% ethnically Asian, and 13.9% Muslim — one of the biggest communities in the country — and appealing to ethnically Asian Muslims has always served the Scottish Catholic politician very well. When he won Bradford West from Labour in 2012 by a massive majority, he announced his victory through a megaphone, shouting, “All praise to Allah!” During that by-election campaign, Galloway produced a leaflet reading:

“I’m a better Pakistani than [Imran Hussain, the Labour candidate] will ever be. God knows who’s a Muslim and who is not. And a man that’s never out of the pub shouldn’t be going around telling people you should vote for him because he’s a Muslim.”

His success was short-lived: he lost the seat in 2015, to Naseem (Naz) Shah, a local of Pakistani Muslim origin. During his campaign he repeatedly insinuated that Shah was pro-Israel, despite the fact that she had regularly and publicly expressed support for Gaza and Palestine. I accompanied Shah on her campaign trail back then, and was told by a number of Pakistani Muslim voters that they were sick of Galloway posturing while doing little for the community. “He expects us to vote the way the men do,” one Muslim woman told me, “so ignores the women.” Undeterred by his failure in Bradford, he has set his sights on Rochdale.

Also standing is Guy Otten, originally a Green Party candidate who was disowned when old social media posts (from 2013, 2014 and 2015) cast him in a questionable light. In one, he wrote: “The Koran is full of war, slaughter, rape and pillage with genocide and slavery as well. It’s not fit for the 21st century.” In other words, as well as the two candidates accused of antisemitism, there’s one who’s been accused on anti-Muslim prejudice.

And then, last but not least, there is Simon Danczuk, the disgraced former Labour MP for Rochdale. Now running for Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party), Danczuk launched his campaign by taking aim at his old party with a “work not woke” slogan. He has now pivoted to describing himself as the only alternative to Galloway, with a slightly less catchy motto: “Rochdale not Gaza.” In other words, he is also trying to capitalise on the tensions in the town over race, religion and ethnicity. Whether he has a vision for addressing poverty is less certain.

It is worth mentioning here why, exactly, Danczuk was kicked out of Labour. In March 2015 he made headlines because he appeared to have liked hardcore pornography on Twitter. He blamed an iPhone glitch, but admitted to having used porn, saying “I think we should not be too sanctimonious about this”. (Owen Jones wrote a column in defence of Danczuk, for the Guardian.) Then, in December that year, Danczuk was suspended. He had sexted 17-year-old Sophena Houlihan saying: “You want me to spank you?” and “God I’m horny!” Houlihan says she was bombarded with explicit messages for a month after asking him for a summer job in his Rochdale constituency office.

This candidate list is a tragedy. No wonder the people of Rochdale have lost faith in politics. Perhaps most disappointing is Labour’s failure: the party should have been a first choice for the majority of voters in a town that has been so abandoned by the bourgeoisie. Instead, its best hope is to become a case study that helps Labour understand why so many working-class northerners are turning their backs on the party that is supposed to represent them. The disenfranchised, impoverished people of Rochdale embody the negative consequences of exactly the kind of poverty and marginalisation that Labour romanticises or makes use of. But its residents are too angry, too battered to spark a revolution. In perhaps an attempt at protest, 60% of the town voted for Brexit in 2016.

What this means for the future of politics is as bleak as it is worrying. At times like this, when the downtrodden can neither take another kicking nor find the strength to get up from the ground and carry on, it is easy to get sucked into a world in which any enemy of an enemy is a friend. Rochdale, having been abused and abandoned by the state, exemplifies how and why dangerous, disgraceful politicians get elected. The beleaguered town deserves far better than any of the men currently vying to be its MP. Whoever wins this election, Rochdale will lose.

It is rare these days for a foreign issue to be so central to a British political campaign: two by-elections being fought this week — in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, and in Kingswood near Bristol — will be decided by the economy and other domestic concerns. The battle for Rochdale, which will be fought at the end of this month, is the exception.

The former textile town, in the Pennine foothills north of Manchester, is Labour’s biggest problem between now and the next general election. At the weekend, The Mail on Sunday published a recording of its candidate Azhar Ali telling a meeting of party members that Israel had “allowed” Hamas’s October 7 massacre to take place, to give it the “green light” to invade Gaza. Ali swiftly issued an apology, but it came too late: last night, the Labour Party withdrew its support for his campaign, after receiving “new information” about his comments. All of which makes for a rather peculiar scenario: come polling day, a constituency that has voted Labour since 2010 will not have a Labour candidate on the ballot.

Yet even before Ali’s comments were unearthed, the Rochdale by-election had been tainted by vicious dysfunction. From the moment it was called, after incumbent MP Sir Tony Lloyd died following a long illness, Labour insiders feared — correctly, as it turned out — that it would expose the party’s growing struggle to both retain its loyal support among Muslims and regain the confidence of British Jews. In Rochdale, around 30% of voters are Muslim; beyond the town and across north Lancashire, roughly two dozen Labour councillors have now resigned from the party over Gaza.

Events in the Middle East are far from Labour’s only local trial. There’s also the notorious child-abuse scandal, in which predominantly Pakistani men from the town, many of them gangsters and drug dealers, committed horrific sexual crimes against white, working-class teenage girls over many years, and indeed some are suspected of still doing so. Labour has run the council since 2010 and their councillors have been accused of brushing the issue aside — not least by Simon Danczuk, Rochdale’s former Labour MP, who was suspended by the party in 2017 following reports that he sent explicit messages to a 17-year-old girl. He is now running for the seat under the banners of the Reform Party.

And following last night’s developments, outsider campaigns such as his have been handed a significant boost. Indeed, how different the mood seems from 2019, when, despite losing scores of other northern working-class seats, Labour held Rochdale comfortably, with a majority of almost 10,000. For Starmer to lose such a solid seat, only a few months before the country votes as a whole, will shock and demoralise his party — and rejuvenate his opponents.

Yet the scent of defeat was never far away. Galloway’s announcement that he would join the fight in Rochdale must have terrified Labour organisers. Galloway, after all, is the most effective constituency campaigner of modern times. For 16 years, he was a Labour MP in Glasgow, before his party expelled him for attacking Tony Blair over the Iraq War and calling the party leadership “a blood-spattered, lying, crooked group of war criminals”.

Galloway took his revenge by moving to London’s East End, where he took the safe Labour seat of Bethnal Green and Bow for his new Respect Party in 2005. Then, in 2012, he contested a by-election in another strongly Muslim Labour constituency — Bradford West — and scored the most spectacular by-election victory of modern times, with a swing of 36.6%. He almost repeated his success three years ago in Batley and Spen, when, despite running a campaign accused of homophobia, he won almost 22% of the vote and gained so many ex-Labour Muslim supporters that Starmer’s party held on by barely 300 ballots.

“There’s a Labour mafia in Rochdale, run by total inadequates,” Galloway, now standing for the Workers’ Party, tells me when I visit his campaign headquarters in a Suzuki showroom. Despite the pro-Palestine chants at his launch rally, Galloway claims, “this by-election is about Labour, not about Gaza… Labour’s name is mud here. Gaza is just the hat on it.”

Suggested reading

The Mexican side of the border crisis

By Ioan Grillo

Is it not also about Rochdale? I ask him if he has any links to the area. Well, he replies, one of his daughters was born locally — during his 2017 campaign for Manchester Gorton. And then he tells me he was a Manchester United season-ticket holder. “Really?“ I reply. “I go to most United games, and I don’t ever recall seeing you there.” He smiles.

Galloway seems just as unconvincing when he denounces his now-suspended Labour opponent. “Labour picked the wrong candidate,” he says a few days before Ali’s October 7 comments come to light. He then claims that Ali has to canvas alongside a minder who acts as his translator because he is a Gujarati Indian and doesn’t speak Urdu or Kashmiri like most Muslims in Rochdale. But this is simply not true, as Ali’s agent told me later: “Azhar was born in Burnley. His mum and dad came from Pakistan, and he doesn’t speak Gujarati. But he can speak Urdu and Punjabi.”

Yet this is how Galloway has always campaigned: in an aggressive and, many believe, unbecoming manner. It’s curious, for instance, that while Ali’s campaign literature doesn’t mention Starmer once (he is instead pictured with deputy leader and nearby MP Angela Rayner), Galloway’s glossy leaflet mentions him eight times. Starmer is, it claims, “in the pocket of Israel”.

Such tawdriness is never far from these parts. The town may have birthed Britain’s cooperative movement, conceived by the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844, but in recent decades, it’s become a byword for political scandal and betrayal. It was here that former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was caught describing Gillian Duffy as “a sort of bigoted woman”, the first sign that Labour was losing touch with its traditional working-class base. And it was here that a string of horrific child sex abuse rings were uncovered. It has, as a result, become a petri dish for political disaffection, a mood which culminated in 60% of the area voting for Brexit.

“Rochdale has been badly let down by Labour in local government,” says Danczuk. He claims two Labour councillors are being investigated for sexual harassment. “Is the Labour parliamentary candidate going to challenge it, or cover it up?” When I ask about his own suspension from Labour, Danczuk dismisses the allegations as “absolute nonsense”, though he admits to texting three words to the girl that were “inappropriate”. The “real reason” for his sacking, he explains, “was because I’d been Jeremy Corbyn’s fiercest critic”.

In many ways, Danczuk is a similar figure to Galloway. Both are colourful mavericks sacked by Labour after being blunt and outspoken. And both are raffish characters. Galloway has had four wives, while Danczuk is now on his third, having married a Rwandan beauty therapist last summer. Galloway has six children; Danczuk has four. They even use the same turn of phrase to describe the local Labour Party: it’s run “like the mafia”.

But not every voter in Rochdale is convinced by such rhetoric. Tariq, a market trader, says he is “not happy about Labour’s response to the war in Gaza. I know Galloway has been doing well in the community. He’s been visiting takeaways and chicken shops late at night and then the videos are shared all over Facebook.”

Lorraine, who used to work in urban regeneration but is now retired, is more concerned about Rochdale’s interminable crime wave than a distant conflict in the Middle East. “Everybody knew the child abuse was going on,” she tells me. “You can’t get away from the fact it’s Asian men grooming young white girls. A lot of it is gang and drug-related.” She cites a horrific incident in the town recently, when a man had his hand chopped off by a machete after trying to defend an elderly woman who was being harassed by a gang of men. The attacker was convicted, but the gang leader allegedly escaped to Pakistan and has never been caught. “Nothing’s being done. This is what we have to contend with.” Only at the weekend, four boys — aged between 12 and 14 — were arrested on suspicion of raping a young female near the town centre.

Suggested reading

How the Cleveland scandal silenced children

By Julie Bindel

How likely is it that any of the candidates vying for Rochdale’s votes will remedy this? Although Labour were the clear favourites until yesterday, few could say how Ali planned to help his constituents. Indeed, Labour were so keen to get this campaign underway — and, one suspects, avoid a drawn-out contest against Galloway — that they ignored the normal by-election convention that, following an MP’s death, the incumbent party doesn’t move the writ until after the deceased’s funeral. Suffice it to say that Labour’s impatience has backfired, an act of self-harm that could wreak huge damage both locally and nationally.

Beyond Rochdale, this latest scandal illustrates a broader threat to Labour. For decades, the party has become dependent on the Muslim vote, which has been well-organised by influential leaders in Muslim communities. That strong support may partly explain why Labour politicians in towns such as Rochdale, Oldham and Rotherham seemed slow and reluctant to clamp down on child sex rings. It may also explain why Labour allowed antisemitism to seep into its ranks, both under Corbyn and now Starmer.

The result is that, thanks to the past few days, we now have an idea of what lies ahead for Starmer. When Labour returns to power, relations between the party and its Muslim supporters are likely to become even more strained. In the meantime, ordinary voters will be caught in the crossfire — and characters such as Galloway will continue to thrive.

There was, of course, a public inquiry. It concluded that most of the diagnoses by Higgs and another paediatrician, Geoff Wyatt, were incorrect. Higgs was subsequently banned by her local health authority from dealing with child sex abuse cases. But this scandal is not what it seems, and it destroyed far more than the careers of two medics. It baked into child protection services a scepticism of children’s accounts of their own experiences.

The campaigning journalist Beatrix Campbell has followed the Cleveland case since it broke in 1987. A year later, her first book on the scandal, Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse — The Cleveland Case, was published. In it, Campbell examines how Cleveland council made child sexual abuse a priority, engaging with medical experts and innovative diagnostic procedures, only to be met by a backlash from statutory services. Children had not been abused, it was decided. Rather, the scandal was a witch-hunt against parents.

Now, her new book, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the Legacy of the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Case, revisits the scandal — with the proof necessary to back up her earlier suspicions. The 30-year rule allows certain government documents to be released publicly three decades after they entered the National Archive. Thanks to this, Campbell found evidence that “there was a cover-up, and that the doctors and social workers were not wrong about so many of those children having been sexually abused”.

Shocking failures led to the government inquiry coming to a completely false conclusion. For instance, the only international expert consulted was Dr Ralph Underwager, who in 1992 helped found the False Memory Syndrome Foundation — an organisation that claimed counsellors and parents were manipulating kids into believing they had been abused. Underwager became mired in controversy when, a year later, he gave an interview to a Dutch paedophile magazine in which he said that paedophiles should “boldly and courageously affirm what they choose”.

More from this author

The murder trial that broke me

By Julie Bindel

Campbell also found evidence that the Government knew at least 80% of the diagnoses of these children were correct — but hushed it up because the Treasury had warned that dealing with this abuse would be expensive. Saving money was more important than saving children. Local MP Stuart Bell set the agenda, saying it was simply “not possible” that all these children could have been abused. He became, says Campbell, “the advocate for accused adults”. Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister at the time, made clear her deep mistrust of social workers, and of feminists. Two days before the inquiry was announced, she was asked if she would “allocate extra funds to deal with the rising rate of child abuse referrals”. She replied simply, “no”.

Support fell behind the police — who, Campbell argues, were the main culprits in enabling abusers to evade justice. “Cleveland had a macho, misogynistic police force,” she says. And, as has been proved time and time again, “asking a patriarchal service to police patriarchal behaviour is pointless”. Cleveland was unlike other authorities, “for example in Leeds, where there was a very well-developed, collegial culture between police, paediatricians, social workers, rape crisis centres”. In Cleveland, by contrast, police “were pretty much told they didn’t have to liaise with other professionals over child sexual abuse, and that was a complete disaster, and one that was repeated in many subsequent child abuse scandals”.

The media also failed, quickly falling in line with the government. National newspapers called for the blood of social workers, and the local Evening Gazette ran a “Give Us Back Our Children” campaign. Ultimately, no perpetrators were identified, let alone charged or convicted. Following the inquiry, 27 families sued the NHS, as well as the council and individual medics, costing the state £1 million in out-of-court settlements.

Campbell tells me that what she finds most cruel in this whole story is that the children at its heart — whose difficulties had prompted responses by professionals — were then subjected to a very public inquisition. Only a handful of those children have ever come forward to tell their stories, and just one has done so both before and after reading her social service records. When, at the age of 40, Minnie* first approached Campbell out of the blue, she asked: “Are there a few of us, like me?”

In Minnie’s eyes, Marietta Higgs — who one journalist at the time of the inquiry described as “the most hated woman in Britain” — was a hero. Minnie met her after being referred to social services at the age of 10, following her brother’s revelations about child sexual abuse at the hands of their sadistic stepfather. Minnie was examined by Higgs, who found signs of rape. Higgs made Minnie feel safe. “She was my saviour,” she says.

For Campbell, this is what a good child protection system looks like: “The abused child who describes an experience of feeling saved.” And yet, the name of Marietta Higgs has long been used as a warning against overactive imaginations in social workers, doctors or other advocates for children. It has been evoked to discredit victims who choose to speak out later in life, as Minnie has.

The disgrace of it is that, when her name was first being dragged through mud, secret documents that vindicated Higgs’s conclusions were circulating around Westminster. A confidential dossier put together by the Northern Regional Health Authority was sent to the Ministry of Health in 1988 and presented to Parliament. It exonerated Higgs and accepted that around 70-75% of the diagnoses were correct. Campbell got hold of the document while updating her original book on Cleveland. She assumed that Higgs had read it, but when she visited her at her home in 2017, discovered she had not. Higgs has since retired.

One of the many disappointing things about the Cleveland scandal is that it had been preceded by a moment of enlightenment, largely triggered by feminist activism: people working in health and social services had been paying better attention to testimony about sexual abuse. Campbell sees the scandal as “a devastating example of a backlash against what feminists had achieved: as a result, all of that learning was thrown away, squandered, and condemned”.

Suggested reading

Pakistani child sex abuse is an open secret

By Hina Husain

As a result, the campaign by Cleveland parents, and the public humiliation of the doctors at the heart of the scandal, focused on the accused adults, rather than the vulnerable children. Jean La Fontaine, a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics who specialised in the study of sexual abuse, told the inquiry:

“Whenever we come to consider this issue, the children seem to get lost in the system. In the public inquiry, and before it, we heard a lot about parents’ rights. Perhaps it’s one of the tragedies of Cleveland that the children’s voices have not been heard.”

The legacy of this, which lasts to this day, is tragic. “It shaped the entire approach to child protection politics for three decades, and was completely catastrophic,” says Campbell. Services today are still heavily influenced by what happened in 1987, in that few children are believed, and it is almost impossible to secure a conviction when they are. We just have to look at the so-called grooming gangs scandals in Rochdale, Rotherham and elsewhere to see how children are routinely disbelieved. “We now have a situation where, if you want to sexually abuse children, you can just do it, because you will get away with it,” says Campbell.

This could have been stopped in 1987, when there was a unique opportunity in Cleveland to bring the prevalence of child sexual abuse out of the shadows. Instead, it set back the issue significantly. It plunged Britain back into a dark age, by telling future generations of abused children that if they spoke out, they would not be listened to. It also created professional anxiety among doctors and social workers, who feared being treated as Marietta Higgs was.

Campbell met endless obstacles in the course of her reporting, from unobtainable documents to the influence of “false memory” organisations on the general public. Campbell even found herself arguing with her publishers’ “sensitivity readers”, who were offended by the description of “anal dilation” being used to detect whether the children had been anally raped. “I am offended at child rape, and those that seek to cover it up,” she tells me. The truth is gruesome, but that doesn’t mean we should hide from it.

As for the Cleveland children, they are now well into adulthood. Aside from the small number that have ever spoken out, where are they now? “We don’t know what happened to them because there was no follow-up,” says Campbell. “It would be like 121 children falling off a cliff in a bus and surviving terrible injuries, and nobody was interested in how they managed.” We can only hope her reporting is the first step towards the public hearing these children’s stories again — and, this time, believing them.

*This name has been changed.