Patricia Hewitt
New Labour

PIE

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 Harman, 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’.

[2009] Harriet Harman - Paedophile Supporter