With prominent child abuse cases dominating the news in recent months and rumours of institutional cover-ups at the heart of politics, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced a wide-ranging inquiry into how cases were handled by public bodies. But her appointment of the former judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss has attracted criticism because her late brother Sir Michael Havers was attorney general in the 1980s.
Joining Tom Clark this week are the Guardian's Michael White, its columnist Polly Toynbee, and Edmund Fawcett, the author of Liberalism: The Life of an Idea.
Also this week: more than a million public-sector workers went on strike across Britain. Do they have public support? And is David Cameron right to pledge that future Conservative governments would legislate for a minimum threshold in strike ballots?
Finally, the Liberal Democrats may be on the verge of an electoral precipice, but what of liberalism itself? Edmund Fawcett argues that as a philosophy it must be rescued from the free-market right wing and re-embraced by the intellectual left.
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