The thing is though, when taken over several decades, what starts as incompetence, budget restrictions etc will inevitably turn into conspiracy to at the very least keep that covered up, unless someone exposes it or you've got that rare breed of politician / management involved who cares more about truth and justice than their own careers.
This may just stay at a local level, but local politicians have a habit of ending up in westminster, so you end up with the daft situation of the leader of Islington council from 1982-92 at the time that a massive child abuse scandal was going on and being covered up (or at least not having the resources allocated to deal with it once it was reported) in its childrens homes, then ending up being appointed as the Children's Minister 10 years after she resigns from the council.
I don't think any of this starts with politicians having a meeting and deciding they're going to spend the next 30 years covering up child abuse, but I do think that they'll ignore complaints of child abuse and fail to allocate the resources needed, and get whistle blowers sacked to try to avoid there being a scandal that ruins their careers, then spend the rest of their careers conspiring to cover up for the fact that they allowed this to happen on their watch, and if that means that child abusers get to carry on abusing kids in the process... well that's just the price of a successful political career, and they're only scummer kids anyway, so it's all for the greater good eh what.
That's roughly how I see it working, and if they're involved in the masons or other clubs, then they'll use their connections within them to assist them in their arse covering.
That's just the politicians not doing their jobs properly then covering their arses side of things.
The paedophiles themselves have obviously got a hell of a lot more to hide, and from the sheer number of cases over the years that involve networks of (proven and alleged) dozens of paedophiles being active in an area / around a hub (or apparently in Savile and others cases several areas) for decades, there's got to be a fair old conspiracy of silence going on there. As paedophilia isn't confined to the working class, probability alone dictates that there almost certainly will be a fair number of paedophiles high enough up in society both in local government and judiciary terms, or central government and civil service to make active conspiracies from participants at those levels to be more likely than not IMO.
Essentially this whole idea of paedophiles generally being loners, which is / was the guiding principle on which child protection policy in this country has been based for decades, just doesn't fit with the evidence from the cases I quoted last night and the many others that have come out over the years. If these instances of long term endemic paedophile activity are to be tackled properly much earlier in future, then I reckon the starting point is to recognise this and then consider the changes in the scales of investigative resources and support this entails if it's to be tackled.
It's not enough to be reactive when investigating paedophile activity, they need to go after it as if they're taking down mafia organisations, using one paedophile to lead them through the network and take the entire network down - as they did in the Bristol investigation which resulted in 60 paedophiles being uncovered from the starting point of one building (which had basically been ignored for years before despite several reports being received about it).
eta - this is something that does seem to have been improving over the last 10-15 years, but is the exact opposite of what the government is now proposing to do as they're ripping up the current safeguarding protocol and replacing it with something much less detailed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/social-care-network/2012/nov/09/child-protection-guidance-under-threat
