MARGARET ‘LOADS OF MONEY’ HODGE has featured prominently in a book which exposed sleazy politicians!
This book is like a who’s who of liars, fraudsters and cheats – aka politicians. They’re all there – Tony Blair, Neil Hamilton, Paddy Ashdown and so on. The only problem is how do you decide who is the sleaziest of them all?
Hodge, Margaret
b. Sept 8th 1944
MP (Lab), Barking, 1994-
Terrifying ‘original leftwing firebrand’ who will be forever associated with a child abuse scandal dating from her notorious reign over Islington Council (1982-92), when she was known as ‘Enver’ Hodge, after the brutal Albanian dictator.
While endorsing Poll Tax rebellion at the expense of a £16m shortfall in council revenue, she also sent her children to private schools outside her borough (see Blair, Tony). Stung by her critics, she sought to ban all office contact with the local paper while showering public money on what the Guardian later typified as ‘lesbian self-defence classes and non-sexist jigsaws’. But what blew her reputation apart was the inadequate and unsympathetic response to an ongoing child abuse scandal during her decade in charge, in which 32 council workers and staff at Islington children’s homes were implicated – of whom only four were disciplined, and just two prevented from going back to work. One social worker even resigned in 1992 because she couldn’t prevent a child being placed under the care of a suspect individual. On October 6th that year, tales of ‘degradation and exploitation’ involving grooming, drugs and prostitution under her council’s care were published in the Evening Standard – only to be dismissed by Hodge as ‘gutter journalism’.
But the subsequent investigation backed the story, and Hodge’s administration was panned by an independent inquiry in 1995 for having ‘failed to respond properly’. SDP Councillor David Hyams commented: “She had her own solution to childcare problems, of course. As services were being cut, she was advertising in The Lady magazine for a nanny”. Hodge, the daughter of a millionaire steel trader, ducked out of the firing line and headed for a lucrative consultancy post at Price Waterhouse in October 1992, from where she moved to Parliament in a 1994 by-election after the sudden death of Jo Richardson MP. It wasn’t until June 2003 – when she was appointed Children’s Minister, of all things – that trouble flared up again. As people questioned whether she was really the most sensitive candidate for the post, Hodge conceded a ‘terrible error of judgement’ when she’d failed to act back in 1992. But she tried to block a ‘sensationalist’ BBC investigation into her childcare record in November 2003, and wrote to the Chairman telling him that their chief witness was an ‘extremely disturbed person’. In fact Demetrious Panton, an abuse victim of Islington children’s homes, had transcended his background to become an advisor to the office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Again Hodge tried to resort to legal threats, this time to prevent her offending letter reaching the press; a week later she was apologizing for the slur in the High Court, making a £10k charity donation and covering costs.
Since then Hodge has held less high-profile posts, but hasn’t lost her talent for giving offence. Having been given the 2004 Big Brother Award for ‘Worst Public Servant’ by an individual freedoms group called Privacy International, she was moved to Work and Pensions, where she caused a row on July 17th 2005 by suggesting that laid-off MG Rovers workers could go and work at Tesco. In April 2006 there were further calls for her resignation when she gave the BNP a boost ahead of the May 4th local elections. Her claims in the Sunday Telegraph that ‘eight out of ten’ working class voters would be considering the BNP, partly because ‘they feel no one else is listening to them’ (including her own party) was felt to have legitimized the far-right vote. “They can’t get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry,” she said of her constituents. “Go through the middle of Barking and you could be in Camden or Brixton.” It was not a case of racism, she said, but people were ‘not ashamed’ to vote BNP any more. Sure enough, the race-issue party made record gains, especially in her own hood, Barking, where almost every candidate they put forward was selected. Suddenly the low-profile BNP campaign became the UK’s biggest fascist success story since the 1930s. One Labour activist called her comments “little more than an advert for the BNP,” adding “if I were Nick Griffin and I had a baby girl, I would be calling it Margaret.” Griffin and his send-em-back brigade had a bouquet of roses delivered to Hodge’s door the next day. “If I had paid her a million pounds I couldn’t have asked her to do more,” beamed one Barking extremist.
