“You are not Sherlock Holmes are you?” asked Keith Vaz, Labour MP chairman of Parliament’s Home Affairs select committee, of Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich East and the newly elected deputy leader of the Labour party.
Who could possibly confuse high minded Holmes with his loyal side-kick Dr. Watson or Tom Watson MP with either? Perhaps, Mr Vaz had in mind Sandwell MBC’s campaign against dog fouling with its “No S**t Sherlock” posters and was sending a coded warning to Mr.Watson that the committee was unprepared to take any nonsense or worse from him.
Mr. Watson was appearing before the committee to explain his allegations of sexual offences made against Leon Brittan a former Conservative Home Secretary. The allegations were made as Brittan was dying and following his death. They were investigated by the Metropolitan Police and found insubstantial.
Mr. Watson had earlier faced a furious House of Commons when he had refused an apology claiming all politicians had “presided over a state of affairs where children have been abused and then ignored, dismissed and then disdained”. The latest band-wagon Mr Watson has hauled his bulk aboard.
Unfortunately, Mr. Watson has not shown a similar enthusiasm for child protection in his own backyard.
Ofsted branded Sandwell council’s Children’s Service department inadequate again in its report published in July 2015; found “widespread and serious failures”, that protection “arrangements for… children missing [or] at risk of sexual exploitation are poor” and that the local authority did not “understand the scale and prevalence of child sexual exploitation in Sandwell”.
The reaction of the council has been a bland denial of the truth of the report and to slash the department’s budget by £7 million.
One would expect Mr Watson’s zeal for child protection from sexual abuse to be aroused by this state of affairs. Yet he has uttered hardly a public word about the Sandwell situation or of concern for Sandwell children placed at risk of sexual exploitation by an inadequate council department tasked to protect them.
We wonder why.