Patricia Hewitt
New
Labour
Jimmy Savile and how the liberal left encouraged the sexualisation of our
children Back in 1978, an organisation called the Paedophile
Information Exchange affiliated itself to the National Council for Civil
Liberties — known today as Liberty. PIE — whose members were reportedly
attracted to boys and girls — set out to make paedophilia respectable.
It campaigned to reduce the age of consent and resist
controls on child pornography. Until it excluded PIE in 1983, the NCCL thus
backed this disgusting agenda of child abuse.
Indeed, even before PIE was affiliated to it, the NCCL was
campaigning to liberalise paedophilia and reduce the age of sexual consent to
14. In 1976, the NCCL argued ‘childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in
with an adult, result in no identifiable damage’. And in 1977 it said: ‘NCCL has
no policy on [PIE’s] aims, other than the evidence that children are harmed if,
after a mutual relationship with an adult, they are exposed to the attentions of
the police, Press and court.’ The assumption that paedophilia did not harm
a child, and that the only harm was done instead by reporting it to the police,
was, of course, grotesque. Yet during this time, when PIE members were
being prosecuted on indecency and pornography charges, the General Secretary of
the NCCL was Patricia Hewitt — later to become a Labour Cabinet minister.
A second future Labour minister, Harriet
,
served as the NCCL’s legal officer for four years from 1978. Harman has called
the Savile revelations ‘a stain’ on the BBC. Yet while she was at the NCCL
she seemed untroubled by its PIE affiliate. Moreover, she campaigned for a
liberalisation of child porn laws. In the NCCL’s response to a Bill that
aimed to ban indecent images of under-16s, she stated absurdly that
pornographic photographs or films of children should not be considered indecent
unless it could be shown the subject had suffered, claiming that the new law
could lead to ‘damaging and absurd prosecutions’ and ‘increase censorship’.
Embarrassed by this reminder, Harman now insists she never condoned pornography
and had merely wanted to ensure the new law delivered child protection rather
than censorship.
How disingenuous. For in such liberal circles, freedom
unconstrained by any rules at all had become the shibboleth. Not just freedom of
expression but — fatefully — freedom to have sex without any constraints.
Any form of sexual activity was seen as a ‘right’ — regardless of with whom you
did it. That’s why the NCCL also campaigned to decriminalise incest.
Objectors were damned as prigs, prudes and bigots. Their silence was enforced by
the vicious, politically correct demonisation of anyone who tried to blow the
whistle on licentious behaviour, which was blessed by liberals and thus deemed
to be untouchable. The result was that in case after case over the years, the
authorities turned a blind eye to the systematic sexual abuse of children in
care homes, principally through the terror of being labelled ‘homophobic’.