Hattie Harperson: some strange colleagues on the radical Left
From Saturday's Daily Telegraph
Harriet Harman is calling for an independent inquiry into the Jimmy Savile scandal. A key question, she says, is why so many alleged victims felt “they couldn’t complain”.
Well, one answer is that attitudes towards paedophilia in the 1970s were bizarrely relaxed – and not just in Catholic presbyteries or BBC dressing rooms. This was the era when activists on the radical Left lobbied long and hard for changes in the law to reflect a more “enlightened” attitude towards sex between adults and minors.
But that won’t be news to Hattie. In 1978, she became legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), which – in its evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee in 1976 – had said the following:
“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.”
To be fair, the NCCL’s quite revolting parliamentary submission was written two years before Harriet joined its staff. But one wonders why she wanted to work for an outfit whose views on sex with minors were known to be extreme, even by the standards of the day.
In 1977, months before the future deputy leader of the Labour Party took up her post, the NCCL was quoted in the Evening Standard on the subject of the infamous Paedophile Information Exchange, the “information” in question being disgusting pictures of children involved in sex acts which members would pass to each other in plain envelopes. “NCCL has no policy on [the Paedophile Information Exchange’s] aims – other than the evidence that children are harmed if, after a mutual relationship with an adult, they are exposed to the attentions of the police, press and court,” said a spokesman.
In April 1978, the NCCL published a briefing paper on the Protection of Children Bill that was before Parliament. The author – one Harriet Harman – was worried that the draft Bill placed the onus on adults caught with film or photographs of nude children to show that they were possessed with a view to “scientific or learned study”.
“Our amendment places the onus of proof on the prosecution to show that the child was actually harmed,” she wrote.
Ms Harman maintains that she always opposed child pornography, and is not on record defending belief in “harmless” paedophilia, though it was held by her employers while she worked there. But no such excuse can be made for Patricia Hewitt, who was general secretary of the NCCL from 1974 to 1983 – i.e., during the period when it issued the notorious 1976 submission.
In 1982, the future Labour health secretary published The Police and Civil Liberties, in which she discussed the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, secretary of the Paedophile Information Exchange, for conspiracy to corrupt public morals. “Conspiring to corrupt public morals is an offence incapable of definition or precise proof,” wrote Hewitt. The fact that O’Carroll was involved in distributing child porn “overshadowed the deplorable nature of the conspiracy charge used by the prosecution”.
As it happens, I agree that the BBC can’t be trusted to conduct an investigation into the Savile allegations, or anything else, for that matter; a public inquiry is probably the way forward. But, for God’s sake, let’s make sure no one who sits on it was connected to the National Council for Civil Liberties, which in its own way did as much to make life dangerous for children as the nudge-and-wink culture of 1970s disc jockeys and pop stars.
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