Caring for the victims of the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal is the most important aspect of the claims now being made, not the media firestorm over who knew what when at the BBC.
Viewers to BBC Question Time were told that last night (Thursday) by outspoken local Tory MP Claire Perry, who was applauded for her views when a questioner asked: Has the BBC been fatally damaged in the public’s mind as a result of the Jimmy Saville scandal?
Mrs Perry replied: “The more that comes out the more disgusting and distressing actually the situation becomes. This is a man who was obviously a predatory paedophile who plied his trade for 40 years and defied successive BBC director generals.
“I don’t think it is particularly helpful now to have a firestorm over who knew what when on the Newsnight programme. The thing I find most worrying – and I think it is the same in the Rochdale grooming cases – is that the voices of the victims have been completely ignored.”
“I am sick to death of young women coming forward years later for whatever reason feeling they could not be believed or listened to. That I think is the real tragedy. And I want to focus on that and make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
“Frankly I think the BBC is doing too much navel gazing over who knew what when.”
But Mrs Perry frequently clashed with other members of the panel, in particularly on whether the latest economic figures showing the UK coming out of double-dip recession are the first green shoots of growth.
“We are coming out of the biggest recession we have had in Britain in peacetime and we are starting to see real growth,” she said. “It might be choppy going forward but it is real growth.”
However, she then asked the audience: “Who actually will go home tonight and talk about the growth figures and the deficit? We won’t.”
“We will go home tonight and talk about the cost of living which is still tough, it’s 60 shopping days till Christmas, people are going to have to start paying utility bills because we have a cold snap coming.”
“What we have to keep doing is relentlessly focusing on the cost of living because in my constituency we don’t talk about the deficit and borrowing we talk about what’s coming into our households and what’s going out.”
“And that’s why freezing the council tax, freezing fuel duty, these are the real things that actually make a difference in people’s pockets.”
There were further clashes on child benefit and the suggestion by welfare minister Ian Duncan Smith that it should be paid only to the first two children in a family.
“Child benefit has already been restructured and it is not going to be paid to the richest 15 per cent of families in the country,” said Mrs Perry.
“The average income of families in my constituency is £25,000 and I don’t think it fair to tax those people compared to MPs like Emily (Labour panellist Emily Thornberry) and myself. I don’t think that’s right.”
“It’s a question of fairness. I don’t think it’s fair that families on benefit – and I don’t what to stigmatise people in a certain way – that the decisions they make are different to those people in work have to make.”
“Many people here think very hard about the cost of bringing up a child, the cost of moving house, what it would cost to provide the next bedroom. What IDS (Ian Duncan Smith) is saying that people on benefits should be making those same sorts of decisions.”
It was essential that families were not trapped on benefits for a lifetime, she pointed out, and she added: “IDS is 100 per cent committed to resolving the very tough problems we have in that we have an incredibly complex, badly structured welfare system.”
“The most popular thing we have done is to introduce a welfare cap which means those in benefit can’t earn more than those in work. And Emily voted against that. It’s shocking.”
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