Labour’s Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, along with her husband, Jack Dromey MP, shadow spokesman for Home Affairs, and the former Labour Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt (the Godmother of Harman’s daughter), have been named in media reports as key figures who helped the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) gain credibility as a legitimate campaign group.
According to Christian Concern; as officials of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), the forerunner of today’s Liberty, the three were in power when PIE was granted affiliation to the civil liberties group. Subsequently a Home Office investigation is taking place into allegations that PIE received tens of thousands of pounds from taxpayers, between 1976-1979, when James Callaghan was the Labour Prime Minister.
According to Sami Chakrabarti, now the director of Liberty, “It is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the Seventies. The most important lesson learned by Liberty over the subsequent 30 years was to become a well-governed modern human rights movement in which protecting the vulnerable, especially children, will always come first.”
At the time the NCCL was part of the Radical Left lobbying for a change in the law to reflect a more ‘enlightened’ attitude to sex between adults and minors and promote the ‘human rights’ of paedophiles, including attempts to lower the age of sexual consent from sixteen to four.
The Daily Mail quotes a feminist writer as saying “The PIE somehow managed to convince feminists and the gay rights lobby that they had shared values and that we all belonged in the same club. Anyone who spoke out against them feared being called a ‘homophobe’, which in left-wing circles at the time was about the biggest insult anyone could throw at you. So they were invited into the liberal establishment.”
When Dromey was on the NCCL board it filed a submission to a parliamentary committee claiming that a proposed Bill to protect children from sex abusers would lead to “damaging and absurd prosecutions”. The submission said: “Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in with an adult, result in no identifiable damage. The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.” – This person is now a senior person in the British Shadow Cabinet.
Harman as the NCCL’s legal officer wrote such a law would “increase censorship”, and argued that a pornographic picture of a naked child should not be considered indecent unless it could be proven that the subject had suffered. She wrote: “Our amendment [to the proposed law] places the onus of proof on the prosecution to show that the child was actually harmed”
For Harman it’s quite a turn around. In more recent time she authored legislation making men criminally responsible for knowing the age of a prostitute. (The practice is not illegal in Britain but subject to a variety of restrictions) Harman remains a feminist by self-definition and it is rumoured that Labour back-benchers refer to her as Harriet Harperson.
Australian born Hewitt is no stranger to controversy either. She was once listed as a communist sympathizer by MI5 while she was at NCCL, increased her globetrotting working for Bill Clinton in 1992, and was one of three MP’s in 2010 suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party for illegal political lobbying.
Rod Liddle, writing in the Sunday Times criticises what he calls “the former NCCL troika” for not addressing the historic allegations against them. His commentary says only a handful of newspapers have so far reported “the fact that three very senior Labour Party figures had rather close links” with PIE. He further wrote “Can you imagine how the media — and especially the BBC — would react if three current senior Conservative MPs were revealed to have had links to a paedophile group. The Beeb would be in a state of perpetual agitation: you would not hear the last. It would make the reporting of Nelson Mandela’s death look a model of restraint and brevity.”
The revelations have come to light following probes by both prosecutors and media following the Jimmy Savile scandal. A TV & Radio personality known for his charity work Savile was revealed to have been a serial paedophile a year after his 2011 death.
Press inquiries directed towards Hewitt and Dromey yielded no responses so far while a spokesman for Ms. Harman said: ‘This story is untrue and ridiculous.’ Back in December her spokesman said ‘The very suggestion that Harriet was in any way supportive of the PIE or its aims is untrue and misleading.’
Now clearly the cries of ignorance from Harman’s office are untrue because the connections obviously existed at some point. It seems that the spokes-people in question either went to the Jay Carney school of ignorance or apprenticed in press briefings by Susan Rice.
The Labour Party says it is conducting its own investigation into the matter. Maybe now we will find out if the ideologically driven Ed Miliband has a foundation of character or if instead it has already been eaten by political moths following an overdose of denials. Either way this news has the potential to rock the Labour Party to the core with Euro elections less than three months away.
