Margaret Hodge

[Blairite former minister]

Margaret Hodge, filthy social workers and the VIP child-abuse connection

[2012 Nov] Jimmy Savile and British Establishments Paedophile ring  When allegations were first made that there was an active paedophile ring within Islington's council homes Margaret Hodge council leader refused to allocate resources for an investigation to take place.
    A senior social worker, Liz Davies, and her manager, David Cofie, first told Margaret Hodge, then leader of Islington council, in 1990 of their suspicions that there was widespread sexual abuse of children in Islington care homes.     Ms Hodge instead believed senior officials who assured her that nothing was the matter. In 1992, the London Evening Standard published extensive evidence of the abuse, which Ms Hodge denounced as "a sensationalist piece of gutter journalism". In 1995, an independent report found that the council had indeed failed to investigate the allegations properly.     In 2003, Tony Blair appointed Ms Hodge the first ever Minister for Children. Some questioned her suitability, including a courageous and articulate man called Demetrious Panton who had been sexually abused in an Islington care home in the late 1970s and whose attempts to expose what was happening had been repeatedly ignored. 
    Ms Hodge wrote privately to the BBC describing Mr. Panton as "extremely disturbed", a remark for which she was later compelled to apologise in the High Court. The first person to categorise Panton as "disturbed" was the paedophile boss of his children's home, Bernie Bain, a man later described by police as "a brutal sexual abuser": Panton was 10 at the time.
    Interestingly while Hodge was children's minister in Blair's Government she supported sex education for 5 year olds.
    Her late husband was Sir Henry Hodge a high court judge. Margaret Hodge (nee) Oppenheimer is a very powerful woman, more so than you would think. Extract from Wikipedia:
Margaret Eve Oppenheimer was born in Egypt in 1944 to Hans and Lisbeth Oppenheimer, a refugee multi-millionaire German Jewish steel trader and his Austrian Jewish wife. The family's company Stemcor is the world's largest privately owned steel-trading corporation, with an annual turnover of £6.28 billion in 2008 

[2008] Haut de la Garenne: Why abuse on this level could happen again  Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote reports on my abusers, demanding an inquiry. In 1992, I even lobbied Margaret Hodge's office - she was then council leader - and met her stand-in, Stephen Twigg, now also a Labour MP. He did nothing......In 2003, when Tony Blair shocked many by appointing Margaret Hodge as Children's Minister, she tried to halt a media investigation into her Islington history by claiming I was "extremely disturbed".  She eventually had to apologise to me in the High Court. I was by then a Government adviser, producing reports for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.