To wonder why no one seems bothered by links to labour MPs + paedophile rights organisation?

[starlady]

The Mail has published new claims about Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey and Patricia Hewitt supporting The paedophile information exchange. Thought it was a rehash of an old story, but I've looked at the evidence published, and it looks as if harriet etc do have some explaining to do. I won't link to the Mail, but the Guardian gives a more nuanced point of view here

www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/feb/20/dailymail-harrietharman
What I'm finding puzzling is twitter is not bothered! And I haven't seen anything on mumsnet. Isn't anyone bothered? No wonder jimmy Saville et al got away with their actions. I am a labour voter myself, so I'm not trying to be partisan and stir up trouble, but the silence on this disturbs me.

Has everyone seen the letters page of today's Guardian?

There's letter from someone who attended a Gay Pride march in 1979 where PIE posters were openly displayed.

The writer also referred to an NUS gay rights conference at Leeds university in 1980 where a key note speaker was a member of PIE.

There's another from someone pointing out PIE held its annual conference in the early 80s on the premises of department of experimental psychology at Oxford.

The 70s were the time of the loony left

This is not an issue of the left, not even remotely. This is an issue of liberalism / libertarianism together with an establishment where child sex abuse was common in public schools.

Why is no one outraged by this?

Because it's in the Mail? Usually MN thinks the Mail is the worst scourge of the Earth.

Because politicians in general have sunk to such depths in the last few years, that absolutely nothing about them surprises us any more?

Why is no one outraged by this/

I am outraged by the Mail's smear campaign against a women who has consistently championed women & Children's rights throughout her career - something the Mail could never be accused of. It is not Harman who needs to apologise.

"Harman is refusing to apologise, I suspect, because she's got nothing to apologise for"

That was then, but times and mores have changed, people are now judging actions of 40 years ago by today's standards.

Chakrabati "go it", Harman hasn't. The more she vacillates, the longer it will go on and worse it will get.

it is such a red herring. there were actual MPs of the time (on all sides) engaged in paedophilia, visiting elm house, abusing children in care, giving access to paedophiles to care homes and hospitals etc.

yet the issue allowed out for debate and moral horror is HH having worked for an organisation which before she started there had given too much space to PIE??

no politicians on any side want to be pointing fingers anywhere or risking further attention because they know damn well that what would be uncovered would be damning to all sides.

HH will quite possibly have been firmly discouraged to ignore the DMs initial 'articles' - it won't have just been her hoping it would all go away and i'm guessing she was under firm instructions not to defend herself initially and to be as brief and non specific as possible when it became clear she was going to have to.

i suppose actually the true agenda from the mail, and quietly behind the scenes the wider interest groups of conservatism, is to implant in the public mind that anything even near left orientated (because we don't have a real left anymore let's face it) is the root of all evil and permissiveness.

it's not an attack on HH as such as on the public consciousness in the build up to the election. they want people thinking that conservatism and morality and protection of decency are one in the same.

Nail on head, HoneyBadger It is the same motive as Milliband's dad 'hating Britain' - imply that patriotism & love for your country is the preserve of the conservative right wing.

You don't need concrete evidence, just innuendo & a suggestion of guilt by association. Mud sticks, so even though the story is eventually discredited, the damage has been done.

yes and HH is representative of all a certain sector hates AND unlikely to be defended too rigorously by anyone and a safe target in that she isn't associated with paedophiles really.

if they went after someone who was actually associated with paedophiles or a paedophile themselves god knows what skeletons would fall out of the closet.

"if they went after someone who was actually associated with paedophiles or a paedophile themselves god knows what skeletons would fall out of the closet"

They were associated with the PIE which is why the Mail is going after them.

IMO blame the DPP not "right wing forces", by going after other people for things that happened 40 years ago they have opened Pandoras box and the tabloid media will jump right in.

I think if it was a male MP linked to PIE, even if the link was a tenuous one, there would be far more anger and supposition levelled at him. Harriet Hardperson is of course female so can't possibly be a paedophile, right?

She isn't deemed a literal threat, that's why there's little to no uproar over this.

^^
If it was a Tory male, everyone defending HH on this board would be spitting venom.

Patricia Hewitt isn't even an MP any more, as far as I'm aware, so there seems little point in going after her.

The worst I think you can accuse Harman of is bad judgment 40 years ago. Interesting bit about Peter Hain in today's guardian:

Peter Hain clashed with PIE in 1975 when he was honorary vice-president of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. PIE's founding chairman, Keith Hose, had persuaded the gay rights group not to relegate paedophilia to a minor issue at its conference and it was too much for Hain at the time.He fired off a letter to CHE: "Some plain speaking is called for: paedophilia is not a condition to be given a nod and a wink as a healthy fringe activity in society – it is a wholly undersireable abnormality requiring sensitive treatment." Recalling the dispute , Hain said: "There was a kind of loose trendiness around the debate that horrified and appalled me. It was crossing a boundary that should never have been crossed in my view.

TheHoneyBadger -

"it is such a red herring. there were actual MPs of the time (on all sides) engaged in paedophilia, visiting elm house, abusing children in care, giving access to paedophiles to care homes and hospitals etc."

• absolutely spot on.

There are much bigger things the Mail wants to leave firm;ly under wraps as it would upset their friends in the establishment.

Note the Tory MP Peter Bone who this week was in all the other papers being accused of major benefit fraud - 100 grand plus - over his mil's care home fees. If it had been anyone else, it would have been the top story. But as it was a Tory MP, it wasn't even mentioned until days after every news source, way way down, and then only to report his claims of hurt innocence and how distressing it was for the poor guy to be accused of such a mean, nasty, totally untrue thing.

I just want to add a note about the issue of changing social mores and "seeing things in context".

I think it is absolutely vital to see how things have changed in terms of power, abuse and sexual activity and what will and won't be put up with - not to excuse the habitual nasty behaviour of the past but to recognise that it was habitual and still disgusting, and to recognise the efforts that went into changing what was viewed as acceptable (thank you feminists); and by analogy to understand what hard issues we face now and the questions that are open now that are fundamental to how we view women and children as a society.

Patriarchal liberalism (especially through a filter of late capitalism) is never going to be the answer to protecting the human. Please can we all think about this in the context of children and pornography now.

Please can we all think about this in the context of what Amnesty want to do with respect to prostitution.

Please can we think about whose interests most need to be protected.

If you watch TOTP2 you will see that an incredibly high proportion of the ones they are showing now from the 70s and early 80s feature Peter Powell, I assume because he is one of the few djs / presenters left who isn't being YewTreed. However, despite his presumable relative innocence, he does all the conventional arch cuddling up to (very uncomfortable looking) girls (making a joke out of standardised groping, basically) and always pervily introduces Legs & Co (whose first names only appear in the end credits, while the rest of the crew get names and surnames like adult humans, Legs & Co have diminutive versions of first names only, like pets). It is very uncomfortable to me (born in 1971) to see all this, especially the facial expressions of the girls who are being fondled, as I remember clearly a culture where being a young teen meant that you did a lot of shy polite shuffling around guffawing smirking men who couldn't wait to get their arms around you and you weren't allowed to be "rude". In my case, none of these men were actually in my family thank goodness, though enough of my friends had dodgy uncles that I know well that they exist.

Anyway I think it is important to put all this into context to be proud of how far we have come, and also to give us strength to face how far we still have to go; to recognise that change is necessary, that taking a view of protecting the human is not always going to be the path of least resistance or the way that the rest of society seems to be going. I hope that my daughters, when they are 14, will not be fondled by random men and if they are I hope they will slap their hands off and say something and will not be considered rude and it will be the men who will bear the shame. On the other hand, I also hope, and have less reason to hope, that their first sexual experiences will be affectionate real life experimentation with someone lovely and special, informed by their own mutual desires and not by pornography. There is always further to go and the right way will often seem like going uphill.

I've got a 14 year old dd and feel things have got a lot worse since the 70s sadly - but the problem now is less likely to be dodgy old men but boys their own age with a view of women based on porn.

So a long way to go yet.

Oh yeah just wanted to add can people stop saying "OWN!" in outrage in the context of "pictures of their OWN!!! children in the bath!!!" like that makes it innocent, because as you know the family is the primary locus of sex abuse, so the pics are innocent if they are innocent, not because they are ONE'S OWN!!!! CHILDREN!!!!! which plays into this mistaken idea that they are possessions and anything you do with your own is AOK

I think right wing MPs will be implicated soon enough. I've said this before in my eyes this isn't a party issue. Yes, the Mail went after Harman because she is labour MP, but there was a legitimate story to be investigated, especially in light of historical legal cases.

Some MPs on the left did speak out. I think this Guardian piece gives some interesting insights www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/26/lobbying-paedophile-campaign-revealed-hewitt

"Harriet Hardperson is of course female so can't possibly be a paedophile, right?"

Well, she isn't, is she?

Did anyone hear BBC Radio 4 The World at One news programme?

Unbelievable stuff.

Try and listen to iplayer or youtube version when it is available.

Can you say any more, Claig? Can't listen at work. why unbelievable?

I can't remember all the details. But they went in to what was in the PIE's publications and that the NCCL had an advert in one of their magazines. The person talking about what was in PIE's literature said that there must be questions asked to people who were in NCCL at the time about if they knew what was in PIE's publications.

PIE wrote to Bryan Gould and asked him if he wanted to become honorary vice president. He wrote back declining, saying something like he had a good deal of sympathy for its objectives.

Bryan Gould was a Labour MP from 1974 to 1979, and again from 1983 to 1994. He was a member of the Labour Party's Shadow Cabinet from 1986 to 1994, and stood unsuccessfully for the leadership of the party in 1992.

Unbelievable.

I've been wondering why people haven't been looking in archives. Any archives that haven't been accidentally "lost" by the government, that is. Well, now they have.