Gosling: Labour didn’ttake Janner concerns seriously

Paul Gosling was a former secretary of the Leicester district Labour party and a councillor in the city at the time of the trial in 1991.

Greville Janner denied the allegations from the floor of the House of Commons at the time and has always denied them yet the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said in April there was enough evidence to warrant testing the “extermely serious” allegations in court.

The CPS, however, said the elderly peer’s demenita deemed him unfit for trial.

Speaking to Channel 4 News on Monday (June 22) Mr Gosling said Labour didn’t take the allegations seriously when they were first made.

“In 1991 it was known that allegations were going to be made against Greville Janner during the Frank Beck trial. Senior Labour councillors attempted to have a meeting with a member of the national executive committee. They were told they could have a meeting in a taxi ride. That was not seriously treating the allegations.

“Therefore they took the matter to an official of the Labour party who said that they’d had a couple of conversations. He didn’t believe there was anything to them and that was the end of the matter as far as the Labour party was concerned.

“It was clearly not good enough. The Labour party did not take the matter seriously in 1991 and has not really taken at all it seriously since then until the last few months.”

Mr Gosling added: “They didn’t want to find Greville Janner guilty of any allegations. They didn’t want to hear the allegations. They didn’t want these allegations to exist. So they pretended that the allegations didn’t exist. And they’ve managed to carry on pretending from 1991 until 2015.”

In a statment the UK Labour Party said: “Any allegation of abuse should be taken seriously, and where crimes may have been committed it is rightly the job of the police to investigate them.

“When the Labour party received notice of the allegations against Lord Janner, we asked Leicestershire Police to confirm that they were pursuing an investigation with a view to bringing charges, but they were unable to do so.

“As soon as evidence was produced by the Crown Prosecution Service, Lord Janner was suspended from the Labour party.

“The victims of child sex exploitation need real support from the criminal justice system.”