Rochdale is a terrible place to live. I spent time there in the late Nineties reporting on the grooming gangs and found a toxic mix of self-serving politicians, poor policing, grinding hardship and failing social services. The borough has one of the highest child poverty rates in the whole of the UK, and the council was variously described as “a disgrace” and “not fit for purpose” by unimpressed residents.
It’s bleak here. The main shopping area, Yorkshire Street, is a sad parade of charity shops, discount stores, and closed-down businesses. Each time I go, I see more and more homeless people on the street. And the stories of poverty and neglect are heart-breaking. In 2020, a toddler died from a respiratory condition caused by mould in the housing association property he lived in. Shockingly, his death changed nothing: it’s still a widespread problem, almost four years on.
Steeped in political scandal and poverty as it is, things could be about to get a whole lot worse. The result of today’s contentious by-election could mean the infamous constituency could end up represented in Parliament by a clown.
Once the pride of industrial Britain, the town was soiled redeemably by “Mr Rochdale” for decades. Real name Cyril Smith, he became a Labour councillor in 1952 at the age of 23, and was Rochdale’s MP from 1972 until he retired from Parliament in 1992. He managed to sustain this lengthy term in office despite multiple allegations of profoundly inappropriate behaviour. In total, eight men alleged that Smith had indecently assaulted them as teenagers in the Sixties; six of them were living at a residential establishment for boys named Cambridge House Hostel, which Smith had been involved in setting up.
When the Director of Public Prosecutions was informed in 1970, the advice was not to prosecute. That advice was reviewed by the Crown Prosecution Service in 1998 and 1999, when two further complainants were identified. Yet neither review led to Smith being charged. He was knighted in 1988, and died in 2010.
It’s only in the years since his death that the extent of his shocking behaviour has been revealed. Among other things, it transpired that in his spare time, Smith had been taking money from — and being handed shares in — a local asbestos firm in return for delivering speeches in parliament minimising its dangers. Then, as part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), published in 2022, Lord David Steel stated that Smith had told him that media reports of his abuse of children were true. Yet Steel had allowed Smith to continue in office until he stepped down in 1992. The police, I’m told, were in his pocket. The IICSA report stated that this was not the case, but it’s easy to be sceptical when you’re even slightly familiar with his corruption.