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This is a very interesting header and discussion. Many thanks to Cyclefree and the commenters.

It is, but unfortunately one of two have tried to hijack the subject to make a specific political point about race and culture, which is unfortunate. I don't care whether the perpetrators are Bangladeshi taxi drivers or Barristers from Solihull, they each need to face the full force of the law.

I take it Leon is still in the sin bin. Thank Heavens for small mercies.

Do you not understand WHY there is a focus on ethnicity/race relations? No-one, I think, is suggesting that white men don't abuse children. No-one. But this investigation was set up specifically to look at the grooming gangs where the gangs were predominantly from Pakistan (either directly or 1st generation) and the reasons why NOTHING WAS DONE FOR DECADES. The suspicion is that the ethnicity of the perpetrators was a major reason for this, along with disdain for the abused.

@DavidL

The China Spy case was prosecuted under the 1911 OSA - https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/cps-authorises-charges-against-two-men-alleged-have-breached-official-secrets-act-behalf

Section 1 (1) c to be specific

1Penalties for spying
(1)
.....

(c) obtains or communicates to any other person any sketch, plan, model, article, or note, or other document or information which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy ;

My bold.

I am not a lawyer but that doesn't seem mean the person you communicate the information to has to be an enemy for this to apply?

It reads to me that communicating secrets to *anyone* is covered, if the secrets would be useful to an enemy of the country. So even if the Chinese are our besties, they might pass the information on to someone who is the enemy. The French, for example.

I am loathe to suggest it, but matters have deteriorated so badly that Britain probably needs an inquiry into how it handles inquiries in order to fix them.

They are too slow, too expensive, politicians meddle with them and they fail to provoke the improvement action we would hope for.

I think that if I were unfortunate enough to be in the position of the victims in this example, for whatever cause, and it was suggested to me that there should be an inquiry, my response would be, "no, I want to know what went wrong and how to stop it happening again, not a fecking inquiry."

It's already had it. I wrote about it here - https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/01/05/not-another-one/.

The key section -
This was the conclusion of a House of Lords Report on Public Inquiries and how to make them more effective – “Public Inquiries: Enhancing Public Trust,” published on 16 September 2024. It makes the blindingly obvious point that there is little point to these inquiries (as well as being a colossal waste of time and money) if their recommendations are ignored and if, every time a disaster or scandal happens, a new inquiry has to “reinvent the wheel”.

A decade earlier, there was a previous Lords Select Committee Report on how public inquiries operated. It made 33 recommendations. 19 were accepted. Of these, zero, yes, zero (are you really surprised?) were implemented. So this latest Report has endorsed those earlier recommendations, is recommending them again and hopes that this time they will be implemented. What are the chances?

The Report also looks at implementation monitoring and reveals that it is informal and ad hoc. Paragraph 82 is worth quoting in full:

“We heard that if the recommendations from the inquiry into deaths at the Bristol Royal Infirmary had been comprehensively implemented, then the events investigated by the Mid-Staffordshire Hospitals Inquiry may have been less likely to have occurred,……. A lack of implementation is not just a problem for statutory inquiries. ..... She gave the example of inquiries into healthcare where “almost every inquiry” makes “recommendations on the patient voice and blame culture. You see the same recommendations again and again.” This can come at a tragic cost to human lives and the suffering of the victims and survivors, and with a needless repetition of public inquiries.”

It went on:

“Witnesses told the present Committee that public inquiries often make recommendations which are common to other inquiries. Public policy failings rarely happen in isolation and there are often common themes which can only be identified by conducting meta-analyses of multiple inquiries. This function is currently missing from the governance structure for public inquiries and is not undertaken by the Inquiries Unit.”

Its recommendation is to establish a new joint Parliamentary Select Committee: the Public Inquiries Committee to monitor implementation and “compare and analyse multiple inquiry reports to identify common failures, which amount to more than the sum of individual public inquiry recommendations”.

This is all good stuff, even if it is depressing to read of the same fundamental issues arising here as elsewhere – the failure to learn from what has happened, the failure to join dots and spot patterns, the failure to implement any changes, the failure to share expertise, good practice, what not to do and so on.

What will happen to this Report? The government has said that it will respond within six months. March 2025 – mark it in your calendars. And then ……. ? "