THE COVER UP IS ALEADY STARTING

When I left Whitecraig School the bullying little creep that had driven me out, the Depute Head, became the Head Teacher. He didn't last long, though. I knew him as Mark Melville but in the papers, and in court, he was called Andrew Melville. He was part of a paedophile ring that e-mailed each other child porn. Although he had hundreds of images on his computer he did not receive a prison sentence, merely community service. One of the reasons the judge gave for his leniency was that all the images were of girls. My reaction was WTF? The images were of girls between the ages of 8 and 13 but, hey, at least he wasn't a homo, eh?

The same sort of thinking is behind the disgusting attempt at a cover-up that's now being attempted by our media. We're getting stories fed to us about dead Tories hiring rent boys at party conferences. Shock! Horror! Again, this is pandering to the homophobia that is still pervasive in our society. There is also a perverse pleasure to be had from finding out the sordid truth about disgusting old wretches like Nicholas Fairbairn. It looks like a few dead queers are going to be thrown to the dogs while our attention is taken away from the real scandal.

I think it's pretty much common knowledge that whenever you get huge gatherings of rich, powerful men the local prostitutes make a packet. If these revelations were about female prostitutes then everyone would tut-tut and the whole matter would be forgotten about within a week. Because it was male prostitutes that were involved, however, a bigger deal is being made about it. But, the argument goes, these rent boys were underage at the time, when the age of consent for homosexuals was 21. But does that make a difference?

At the time is the operative phrase here. At the time of the Easter Rising Ireland was part of the UK, so does that mean the shooting of the participants was justified? At the time, as late as the 1960s, it was perfectly legal to display signs like, 'No blacks, no Irish, no dogs', or 'RCs need not apply'. Does that mean that we should accept that these prejudices were perfectly justified? We need to make a distinction between people breaking the law and the law itself being wrong.

As I say, however, this is all a smokescreen. The man making the allegations, Anthony Gilberthorpe, has been a Tory spin doctor for years and it looks like he's still doing this job. Make no mistake, this is a deliberate and cynical attempt to deflect our attention away from what should be being investigated and our media, both in England and Scotland, are complicit in this cover-up.

Jimmy Savile was handed the keys to Broadmoor, where he was allowed to sexually abuse vulnerable people. Apparently Rolf Harris was involved in this sordid business as well. Cyril Smith, too, was free to sexually abuse children in various institutions across Britain. There is no way these men could have acted on their own, which means that others were involved. In fact, many people must have been involved to orchestrate this abuse and the subsequent cover-up. This is what should be being investigated.

The stories about Kincora won't go away and many top figures in the Establishment appear to have been involved. The current inquiry into institutional abuse in Northern Ireland has mostly concentrated on the Sisters of Nazareth in Derry. No effort has been made yet to look at non-religious institutions and it looks like there won't be enough time. The committee has only been given a year to carry out its investigations; more than half that year has already elapsed. The committee has asked the Government for another year. Do you think they'll get it, or has the hidden remit already been fulfilled that child abuse is a Catholic thing?

So there's Kincora, the many institutions where children were preyed on by Savile and Smith and no doubt others and then there's the Elm House b & b, as well as the children's homes in Jersey. The stories concerning the latter do not just involve abuse but murder as well. The abuse perpetrated by the Establishment seems to be far-reaching and probably still goes on. Savile's links to the Thatcher government, and that of Tony Blair, hint at how far up the cover-up goes. There were also strong links between Savile and the Royal Family, with Prince Charles frequently pictured with Savile in the Highlands. Where's the investigation into all of this?

So don't be fooled by these stories coming out in the press just now; they're irrelevant. Nobody should be interested in a bunch of old men, who were too frightened to come out of the closet, using male prostitutes. Let's have an investigation into the actual abuse that was perpetrated, and is probably still being perpetrated,  on children and vulnerable adults. Everyone's expecting a cover-up but the cover-up is already in place.