Sloppy language on my part. i was wanting to suggest that many people to the left of Labour at the time of PIE's prominence crossed a line. There were explanations for this, but, given hindsight and subsequent developments (ie better insight into how paedophiles can operate) we got it catastrophically wrong. i personally regret defending PIE's right to a voice, and aspects of the personal politics that underpinned that mistake. Fortunately for everyone i was uninfluential, a mere grunt in the big scheme - not that thats an excuse. In some respects i wouldn't like to have met me in the late 1970s.
The NCCL, Harriet Harman and government funded childmolester propaganda.
- Thread starter Casually Red
- Start date
Sloppy language on my part. i was wanting to suggest that many people to the left of Labour at the time of PIE's prominence crossed a line. There were explanations for this, but, given hindsight and subsequent developments (ie better insight into how paedophiles can operate) we got it catastrophically wrong. i personally regret defending PIE's right to a voice, and aspects of the personal politics that underpinned that mistake. Fortunately for everyone i was uninfluential, a mere grunt in the big scheme - not that thats an excuse. In some respects i wouldn't like to have met me in the late 1970s.
SaskiaJayne
Rural Guerrilla
I'm imagining I'm reading this at the time it was written in 1976 & nothing in it would have suggested legalising sex with young kids, I would have seen it at the time in the context of lowering the age of consent for gay sex to that of hetro sex, ie equality. At the time many, perhaps most parents would have been horrified if their teenaged son or indeed son of any age over that had been having a sexual relationship with another man. they would have regarded gays as 'perverts' & 'queers', these were terms bandied about by ordinary people chatting in pubs & at work etc at the time along with 'sending them fuckin Pakis home', it really was like this in provincial towns like Colchester. The Colchester pub, The Headgate with gay landlords & where gay men met in the front bar was known as 'the queers pub'. A local public toilet was regularly staked out by cops to catch cottagers, local residents campaigned for the demolition of these toilets & finally got their way. Popular TV programmes regularly took the piss out of gays. I'm trying to paint a picture here of the endemic anti gay feeling that existed at the time among ordinary working class folk.
Tbf although PIE was in the news, it wasn't like now, post Savile, stuff about paedos every day on the news, by now even 9yr olds must know what a paedophile is & if they don't they can use google. In those days to find out information about child sexual abuse would have required an afternoon at the reference library & I doubt there would have been many books about it. The daily & particularly Sunday tabloid press at the time were all about sexual titillation, 16yr old page 3 girls & which famous folk were shagging each other, sometimes with long lense photos, undercover reporters 'making an excuse & leaving' etc. The News of the World had always been known as 'the news of the screws' & articles about PIE were in the usual context of sexual scandal with the paper taking its usual hypocritical moral high ground stance. The main spokesman for PIE was Tom O'Carroll, iirc he appeared all about wanting to shag teenage boys & this is what PIE seemed mostly about. Obviously there were PIE members who wanted to sexually abuse young kids but my guess is Harman & co were zeroed in on the inequality of the age of consent for gay sex being 21 & the belief it should be lowered & saw this as an entirely separate issue to the sexual abuse of young children.
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Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
it seems there's more to hewitt's involvement http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/28/patricia-hewitt-age-of-consent
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
I think that's a very fair overview of the context and the, essentially progressive reasons that propelled nccl into this mess. My only real differences is that, as I think Belboid said earlier, there was a difference between the mid 70s and early 80s. Certainly by 82 when PIE were apparently still affiliated, there was more public knowledge of what they were about. I'd also add that whilst nccl might have good reasons for stumbling into some kind of relationship with PIE - the homophobia of the right - they should have wised up pretty sharpish. They were clued up lawyers, heavily involved in sexual politics, aware of child abuse issues - more than that, the very act of dealing with PIE should have got them to look into the organisation. The Daily Mail are vile hypocrites and are spinning the whole story in a one eyed dishonest manner, but that doesn't absolve Hewitt et al of what they really did get wrong.
SaskiaJayne
Rural Guerrilla
Again context, read this now & it looks like they were saying it was ok for grown men to shag kids of 14 or 10 but looking at it as one might of in 1976 & actually reading it carefully it might be a bit different.
Its actually more about school kids shagging each other, I think. As I mentioned earlier, in those days prosecutions of teenaged young men for having sex with their under aged girlfriends were not uncommon after complaints from the girl's parents whereas nowadays police are not interested in pursuing these cases provided sex is consensual. Even then family doctors were prescribing the pill to girls as young as 13 on grounds that their patient's(ie the girl's)health could be adversely affected if they didn't, there was indeed outrage from some quarters about this, ie the 'Mary Whitehouse' brigade.
The problem is today this is being viewed soley as 'permissive 70s people wanted to make it legal for grown men to sexually abuse young kids'. It simply was not the case & that was not the issue. There are 2 separate issues here. One was that the gay activist movement was getting up to speed to eventually achieve the gay equailty we have now & the other one was the fight between the old idea of sex only within the sanctity of marriage & the newer idea that teenaged schoolkids were actually sexual beings & those that wanted to shag each other should be given contraceptive advice & not criminalised. These were all issues of civil liberties that concerned people in the 70s.
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Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Nicely put saskia. In fact Hewitt and the others, whilst having something to genuinely apologise for regarding the length of their association with PIE, should have come out and said all this (they may have to be honest, the last time this came up, but haven't done this time round). It's hard trying to steer a shrill media campaign into more sensible waters, but their first inclination was to act like politicians with their denials and silences.
SaskiaJayne
Rural Guerrilla
Time to revisit the op, I think. Are things a bit more clear to you now CR? I do appreciate that if you wern't alive in the 70s it is hard to grasp the mood of things at the time so its easy to get the wrong end of the stick with all the hypocritical bullshit in today's media. I do think though you are being somewhat dismissive of & indeed disrespectful to the 'various feminist and gay rights campaigners' that have achieved so much in the last 40odd yrs.
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Casually Red
tomorrow belongs to me
I was going to primary school in the 70s and was very well aware there were adults out there who were a menace to children, trying to get you into cars and all that . And that they could look and sound perfectly normal , that they werent necessarily strange old men in flashers macs .
My point stands, and its been illustrated by a number of other peoples posts . There were a bunch of arseholes witin the libertarian left, archetypal trendy lefties, who in their ideological zeal thought child molestation would one day be regarded as normal sexual activity as opposed to an old fashioned conservative taboo . And who for 9 years despite regular public, media and government outcry took the side of an organised group of predators who sought public acceptance of their perversion . And sadly it appears there still remains a hangover on the fringes of the left of this inane belief posing under the guise of sexual liberation .
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
I've agreed with you CR, that the NCCL went badly wrong on this (or at least should have wised up a lot quicker). However neither this thread or what has come out about the NCCL could go anywhere near the conclusions you have drawn in the underlined bits. Also, I'm not sure who the last underlined bit is aimed at?
Casually Red
tomorrow belongs to me
Well Im assuming the left libertarians on the NCCL werent child molesters themselves, therefore their mistake..over 9 years in the face of public disgust ..was based on an inane ideological zeal as opposed to personal interest in child molestation .
The bit youve undelined is aimed at those on the left fringes who still peddle that line , expressed sympathy and carried their literature long after PIE disbanded itself. Examples of which weve had on this thread . Such as Sparts, WP and others who havent abandoned that ideological position or did so long after PIE were removed fro the NCCL. Or disbanded themselves after all those arrests. Both happened the same year, not sure which happened first though .
Casually Red said:
Can't disagree, but it does look like he genuinely was opposed to PIE at the time. Not likely that he's rewriting his own history or anything?
Not defending those nutters, at all, but as you say they were fringe. In fact the people you highlight (and overinflate in significance I reckon) were always ultra ultra fringe ...
The Sparts with their ten or fewer members and WP with around 30-40 at their peak?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
But...but..."the left", damn you!
You can't let "the left" off the hook!!! They're obviously all complicit!! butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Yes, notice the lack of his ranting about right wingers who actually put forward unambiguous pro paedophile arguments at the time and later, the libertarian alliance for example. And that's what it is, a libertarians problem, not the lefts.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Pretty much all I've noticed is CR's casual unsubstantiated smearing, both of "the left" and posters on this thread.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
What actually fucks me off more is that CR has a bit of a tendency to recruit pretty much any cause he can find to use as a stick with which to beat "the left".
I object to the whole complex, and frequently far more nuanced that CR seems capable of understanding, issue of child sexual abuse being cheapened in this way, because it gets in the way of sensible, factual debate about the subject and turns it into the kind of pitchfork-waving rabble rousing crap we already have far too much of in connection with it.
As butchersapron has pithily pointed out, "the left" have no monopoly on cack-handed dealing with this issue, and it is disingenuous for anyone to start selectively cherrypicking through the history in order to try to use it in this way.
A lot went wrong to allow the close-to-flagrant abuse of children by all kinds of people, and to make it so extremely difficult for those children to be heard when they tried to tell others what was going on. Society was to blame for that, not this or that political grouping, and all this kind of fingerpointing really does is to distract from the real issue, which is to make sure that the potential for people to abuse children is reduced as far as possible. Trying to smear politicians for decisions they took (or failed to) 30 years ago goes nowhere near achieving that, and is a pointless and unhelpful distraction.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
At the time the abuse occurred, condemnation of "politically-informed" decisions might have been apposite. It's certainly the case that identity politics played a part in the suppression of a "mini-scandal" I tried to publicise back in the '80s, but the decisions being taken to suppress this, or ignore that weren't taken on a "party line" basis. They were always taken on the basis of power looking to its own, and silencing the "other".
Trying to smear politicians for what they did before they were politicians, whatever their political bent, is first and foremost malignant. It shows that the doer has little concern except for the smear potential.
The Daily Mail should be ashamed of itself, but isn't and won't be. As for CR, why would we expect anything different from what he's done?
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
The Mail should remember the old maxim about glasshouses and stones.
Interesting blog from David Hencke
Interesting blog from David Hencke
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