Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Harriet Harman, Moral Panics and the 1970s

It's all very well for Patricia Hewitt, Jack Dromey and Harriet Harman and their supporters to complain that they are being smeared by the Daily Mail regarding their role at the National Council for Civil Liberties when it was working with the Paedophile Information Exchange, but aren't these the same people who are leading the case for the prosecution of celebrities from the 1970s for sexual abuse? They are the same people who argue that it is right to prosecute historic abuse cases. The same people who want to go after those in positions of 'power' who may have commited sexual offences. The same people driving a moral panic that suggests that the 1970s were rife with the abuse of children and that we should apply the mores of today to what happened back then.

So it's OK to challenge minor celebrities and to seek evidence of paedophile abuse in every corner, but not OK to suggest that leading Labour figures were involved in supporting campaigns by paedophiles to lower the age of consent, to legalise sex with children and to seek the 'liberation' of paedophiles from negative stereotypes. The NCCL were not the only group to have flirted with paedophile rights at the time. Leading leftist figures such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit (now a leading Green politician in the European Parliament) even admitted to sexual relations with kids. And as a working class boy at school at the time I can remember that there were lefty teachers who passed out copies of the 'little red schoolbook', which was also paedo friendly if I remember correctly.

This isn't to excuse anybody, it's a reminder that the 1970s were very different and that the leftist mantra to question everything extended to things like legalising sex with children. People like the NCCL were not out on a limb as far as the left were concerned, they were very much mainstream. And for Harman and co to pretend otherwise is to lie in the face of the evidence. The decent thing to do is to admit they were wrong and to quit playing the victim here.

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