Aw, Yew Guys!

 If you're reading this any time after about June of 2013, there's a chance you're the only one left.
 The rest of us will, of course, have been arrested by Operation Yew Tree, because it turns out that everyone in Britain was committing sex crimes in the seventies, including but not limited to me, you, Bagpuss, the Grand Old Duke of York, Carol Vorderman and Spotty from "Super Ted."
 Notice anything about that list of suspects? Aside from the fact that a lot them are fictional (me, Bagpuss) and several of them weren't around in the correct time frame (you, the Grand Old Duke of York) and at least one of the others is an alien, an important factor is that none of them held (or hold) any real power. Except Vorderman, who is Keyser Soze, but we'll ignore that.
In a week that has seen the always lovely Jim "casually racist, emphatically wife-punching" Davidson arrested for sex crimes, it really has begun to feel like all of light entertainment from our collective childhood was apparently involved in unspeakable acts with... well, with our collective childhood.
 Except, the more arrests are made - the more the veil is lifted and the rock pushed back to reveal the worms beneath - the more we all seem to wake from a collective hysterical blindness. Savile was obvious, looking back, but again: So is Jim Davidson. Is anyone really shocked that a repellent, right-wing misogynist might have behaved badly when it came to powerless young girls? Bearing in mind that the woman he was married to was being beaten up pretty regularly, it's hardly a stretch of the imagination.
 Are there any other people who obviously fit the bill? Yes. People like Rolf Harris, a man who never had children, but spent his career surrounded by them, and who, in a shockingly under-reported piece of news, is currently on suicide watch at the Priory after being questioned by police as part of the ever growing Yew Tree.
 Jimmy Savile, Freddie Starr, Jim Davidson, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter, Max Clifford... anyone faintly creepy seems to have turned out to be legitimately creepy, and there's more to come.
And again: None of them are important.
 There comes a point in this argument where I have to abandon reports and start speculating in a potentially libellous way*, so here goes: There was pretty clearly clearly a  wide ranging paedophile ring at work in British entertainment. These people were also involved with very high level politics and the Royal Family.
  Jimmy Savile has been described as a "marriage counsellor" to Charles and Diana, which probably goes some way to explaining where THAT went off the rails.
 Jim Davidson has done a number of private gigs for the royals, as he is very fond of telling anyone who will listen.
 Rolf Harris painted the Queen in a private sitting for a BBC puff piece.
 All three men have had various titles and honours bestowed upon them (Sir Jimmy, Jim Davidson OBE, Rolf Harris CBE) and it seems beyond credibility that there can have been this many sex offenders moving in similar circles without them having been aware of eachother.
 It seems equally unlikely that someone in government or at the palace (realistically, several someones) wouldn't have known something, too.
 Here's what I'm driving at: Yew Tree is going to run and run. It's going to uncover a lot of unsavoury shit. But it's going to run exactly as far and uncover exactly as much as the powers that be will allow. Is it any coincidence that the only politician caught so far is one who happened to be dead?
 There is, almost certainly, a huge and powerful group of people at the heart of this, and they're panicking. It has emerged that thirty years ago, there was sexism and abuse on a mass scale, and everyone thought they were going to get away clean because they were too important to be called on their behaviour.
 Now the balance of power has shifted. And rather than risk getting caught, the more important people in the firing line are doing the smart thing. They're sacrificing pawns.
 Years ago, some more modern and anti-establishment comedians came up with a show called "Bring Me The Head Of Light Entertainment." It turns out that this year, we'll probably get it. But we're only being given the head to save the rest of a body comprised of who-knows-what. The Old Boys Network, of which Savile et al were the clown princes, is dangerously close to getting caught in a legal nightmare. They're throwing the more high profile names overboard in the hopes of placating - or at least distracting - the public long enough to clean house.
 In my imagination right now, the shredders are running day and night in the Lords, the Commons, at the Palace, and in every other corner of the establishment. They - the great faceless they that run us all - know far more than they're letting on. It's just a shame we'll probably never find out what.


 *Okay, I don't HAVE to engage in libellous speculation, but I'm gonna.