If ‘we’ are a ‘deeply conservative people’ then ‘we’ are also a pack of child rapists and torturers.

And, at the risk of trivialisation, an attitude such as the above , ‘retro-fitted’ is entirely visible in the attitudes which allowed this to happen*; it might be rephrased as ‘the vast bulk of people are respectable, with an isolated class of the immoral/ criminal/ idle and a privileged clergy existing untouched at the edges’ - each view abolished the working class and replaces it with something determined as culpably deficient with respect to the imagined majority.

* actually that’s too passive; ’caused this to happen and profited from it’ is better.

And is not even dealing with the systematic nature of the physical and emotional abuse. It was so widespread that it was clearly institutionalised. Up to now the focus as been mainly on a number of individuals, specific abusers - with conservative commentators saying that it shouldn’t be a witchhunt - but now we can see that it was a system one which involved the state and several other organisations of the state.

Class war, pure and simple.

On the report on institutional child abuse……..

As well as everything else, it was open class war: the criminalisation of 2 year olds for not being in possession of a fit guardian? belongs with the vagrancy laws. The industrial school system was, explicitly, the enslavement of working class kids as free farm labour for the enrichment of religious orders. Right now, I’m ready to hang the last Christian brother with the guts of the last complicit politician.

“The vast bulk of people are happily middle-class with an isolated underclass and a privileged oligarchy existing untouched at the edges”

I think Ms Carey may be making that classic grammatical mistake so common in her publication. Its like wanker tourette syndrome. She says “the vast bulk of people” but infact means “everyone i talk to”.

The term “happily middle-class” made my day though. As if the last hundred years of culture never happened