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.

devora I know stonewall did not exist back then - its history is rooted in this firmly not by vague association or suggestion, I suggest you read the available material on this (which I as others had thought was crap when it was wheeled out in the past).

I don't know whether the other bit about heterosexual males was aimed at me, but if so, I was suggesting that hiding this stuff may be seen as socially responsible by editors to prevent such perceptions, not drawing such conclusions myself.

Quick note, paedophiles are not an oppressed group, they are people who rape children or wish to. Let's not start confusing evildoers with victims as has apparently been done in the past.

"Quick note, paedophiles are not an oppressed group, they are people who rape children or wish to. Let's not start confusing evildoers with victims as has apparently been done in the past."

This is a difficult and complex issue. Is is possible that we could discuss it without simplistic accusations?

Did anyone say paedophiles were an oppressed group?

Defending a murderer/rapist/child abuser through the legal system doesn't make you an advocate or supporter of it.

AFAIK the raison d'etre of PIE was that paedophiles were an oppressed group, hence their demand for solidarity from other oppressed groups.

This is why this issue is so tough to discuss. Devora I can see why you're upset. I don't think this issue is about gay people.

It's about people being open-eyed that anyone can be an abuser. I think that's what VulvaBeaker* was trying to express, probably not quite as well as she could have done.

• OK, probably a bit more likely men than women.

Of course this issue is not about gay people, but some posters were making it so. Don't think I saw anybody describing paedophiles as an oppressed group, though.

No, the "oppressed group" thing was a historic claim by PIE, and referred to on here. That claim caused a huge amount of confusion. It's what it was all about back then. No-one is saying it on MN.

Exactly, falaaa. It's important for people (especially younger people, who weren't there)to understand the context for this, which included the historic (and wrong, even if well-intentioned) debate about whether paedophilia could be considered an alternative and legitimate sexual orientation.

But I don't think we need be told not to start confusing evildoers with victims. I see no risk of that, on this thread or elsewhere.

I know very little about it, but understood that Harman et als involvement was to do with getting homosexual age of consent lowered to be the same as heterosexual age of consent (16) because prior to that gay people having sex below the age of 21 were considered criminal. Or maybe I am just imagining that.

Andrew Gilligan has a very perceptive piece on this in the Telegraph today:

www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/10653944/The-right-to-sleep-with-children-was-one-civil-liberty-that-NCCL-supported.html

And Eileen Fairweather here:

www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/10653950/We-on-the-Left-lacked-the-courage-to-be-branded-homophobic-so-we-just-ignored-it.-I-wish-I-hadnt.html

I apologise in advance for any "comments" following the articles in these links - I haven't read the comments, but I expect some are appalling. Nonetheless I think the articles themselves are worth reading.

Both good pieces. I've already said I think they should apologise, and I think the Islington scandal is well due some revival - those responsible got away with it far too lightly.

It's an interesting question, though, about how much we should hold people responsible for stupid things they did when young, and for how long. John Bercow seems to have shaken the dust of the Monday Club off his heels, and its frequent calls for Nelson Mandela to be hung. So far as I remember, pretty much every Tory MP in power at the time supported Clause 28. And what about the Daily Mail's deep comfort with fascism?

I'm not tit for tatting here, just genuinely interested.

I find the silence over this bewildering and wonder why tbh.
I agree with posters saying if this was in Osborne's or Cameron's past the BBC would be all over it.
Very strange.
And these people,at least 2 of them,are still MPs and always pretty vocal on every issue.

Does anyone know what happened to the list with the names of the 1000 PIE members?

Has it been archived away or lost like many of the other relevant documents detailing the horrific abuse by those in power like the dossier Leon Brittan managed to lose

devora I guess it's because the people who were made vulnerable by Tories' narrow minded views were adults, not children. Most of us are hard wired to find sexual violence against children particularly repulsive.

pretty much every Tory MP in power at the time supported Clause 28... Not exactly the same thing as supporting paedophilia, is it!

"pretty much every Tory MP in power at the time supported Clause 28... Not exactly the same thing as supporting paedophilia, is it!"

No.

However, being part of a group that believed that the PIE should have a right to express it's views, however repellent, publicly, is not the same as supporting paedophilia either.

Devora,

I'm sorry if you found my post offensive, however, I was careful to mention homosexual men not lesbians.

I don't honestly think lesbian women would form an organisation like PIE to campaign for it to be legal for sexual relations with very young girls.

Otherwise, I stand by what I said.

Women- regardless of their sexuality are much much less likely to abuse children then men regardless of their (that's men's) sexuality.

Third post in a row-sorry- Devora,

I'll try to explain myself better: if you were a person in the 1970s who was very ignorant about homosexual men (women weren't supposed to be sexual creatures- be they gay or straight, remember) and knew very little about them, and there was a group attached to them that was very dodgy, you could be forgiven for associating gay men with dodgy behaviour.

Yes, we know better now, but I'm only trying to see the point of view of people at the time.

Barbara Ellen has a piece in The Observer today.

I think the issue probably is going to carry on bubbling under for a while. I suspect that the BBC, having had its fingers burnt over Lord McAlpine, isn't going to touch a story like this until they have absolutely watertight evidence.

I did not in any way say paedophilia is morally equivalent to Clause 28, or to anything else. i was merely trying to move the conversation on to a more general space. I could, though, have raised Nazi camp guards, or those who enthusiastically supported Hitler while never directly hurting anyone - indeed, there were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler who were horrified by Auschwitz. Is that morally equivalent enough for you?

i'm not going to reiterate any more on this thread that I am not an apologist for paedophilia. Unlike most of you young 'uns, I was there, an activist against sexual violence, and this issue upset me hugely at the time. I don't need lectures now about how most right-thinking people detest paedophilia.

Starlady, you're absolutely wrong about Clause 28: it DID make children vulnerable.

Bluedays - the fact that you were talking about gay men rather than lesbians does not make it less homophobic or more ok. And you were not just talking in the past tense. I don't know why you can't see that stereotyping is precisely part of the problem here: a group of paedophiles sought shelter under the wing of the GLF. SOME gay men were confused about whether that was ok. A group of heterosexual left activists made common cause with PIE because they were too ignorant to challenge the argument that sexual liberation should be for all sexual minorities. This was everything to do with the way that identity politics played out across the wider political landscape in the 1970s and 80s.

Here's an analogy you'll hate: Rochdale, and the other grooming scandals involving Asian men. Do we think it's ok to be a little more racist in the wake of Rochdale? Of course we don't. But we equally have to come down hard on those who shirked their responsibilities to deal with it, because of fear of being called racist.

The fact that Dromey, Hewitt and Harman are heterosexual - as were Margaret Hodge and Wendy Thomson in Islington - should surely make clear that it is idiotic to start musing about, "Is it time we stopped thinking gay men are all luvverly and started agreeing that maybe there is, indeed, Something of the Night about them?" FGS, if you think you get to choose whether a group numbering hundreds of thousands of people are basically ok or not, then are you approaching this all wrong.

I think Barbara Ellen's piece is spot on. Reading it reminded me that my mum gave me something called 'The Little Red Schoolbook', which was basically a Maoist tract for children's liberation. I took it into school. The headteacher sent it home in a brown paper envelope with a stiff note.

It basically called on schoolchildren to overthrow adults as the class enemy. It certainly called for the abolition of the age of consent.

My mum worked for years in children's charities. She was certainly no apologist for paedophilia, then or now. But this is the kind of nonsense that was going on at the time. Doesn't excuse it, but it is really important to understand that context.