Hewitt and Harman, the scandal of the PIE-men is spreading within the Labour Party and into the wider Left.

The Daily Mail has called the growing number of Labour Party parliamentarians, activists and supporters, who were involved in the National Council for Civil Liberties, whilst the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE)were also affiliated, ‘an astonishing list of the Left-wing great and good’

It is indeed an astonishing list, implicating some quite surprising people in this scandal. When even good constituency MP’s in working class areas like Barking, such as Jo Richardson, are accused of staying silent on the issue of PIE, it shows that there has been a long-standing moral vacuum at the heart of the British Labour party and the wider British Left. As wide a spectrum of people as former Cabinet Minister Lord Paul Boateng and the extreme Sexual Libertarian Nettie Pollard, of NCCL and also of Feminists Against Censorship, are being dragged out into the light for examination and to have their words and actions at that time questioned.

An incredible amount of people who were involved in NCCL when PIE was connected to it, saw and did nothing even when they could have been in a position to do so.

The Mail said:

“…..Instead of cowering in the face of justified public opprobrium, the increasingly self-confident Paedophile Information Exchange went on the offensive to promote its cause. Part of its strategy was to link up with other Left-wing campaign groups. So it infiltrated the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) and, more importantly, joined the National Council of Civil Liberties.

And what is so striking about the NCCL at the time of PIE’s affiliation is how many of its top officials went on to become major figures in the Labour Party or in civic life. As well as Harriet Harman’s husband Jack Dromey, who was  chairman of the NCCL, the body’s General Secretary was Patricia Hewitt, later a Labour Cabinet Minister.

There was also Henry Hodge, a solicitor, Labour Parliamentary candidate, and Islington councillor, who was elected chairman of the NCCL in 1974.

The husband of the aforementioned Margaret Hodge (the future Islington leader and East London MP, and now the influential chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee), Henry Hodge later became Britain’s most senior immigration judge before his premature death in 2009.

Other key members of the NCCL in this period included its chairmen Bill Birtles (who married Patricia Hewitt and is now a High Court judge); barrister Peter Thornton (now Chief Coroner of England and Wales); Catherine Scorer (who worked as a trade union legal officer); and Larry Grant (who became an adjudicator at the Immigration Appelate Authority).

Executive members included: Tony Smythe (later head of the mental health charity MIND), Bernard Dix (a Marxist trade union leader), Anna Coote (subsequently a think-tank adviser), Jo Richardson (who became a Labour MP), Tess Gill (later a senior union officer and lawyer), the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson (who has since defended WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange), one-time Communist Sue Slipman (later a quango chief), Paul Boateng (who became a Labour Cabinet minister, then British Commissioner in South Africa  and now a Labour peer), and there was legal officer Howard Levenson (now a judge of the Upper Tribunal — a senior judicial  appeals body).

It is, in short, an astonishing list of the Left-wing great and good.

‘We thought we could manipulate the Establishment and find allies within it,’ said the former PIE chairman Tom O’Carroll. Through the NCCL, he achieved a degree of success in that aim, at least within the Left.”

I’m very troubled by the lack of action on the part of this Leftist great and good because they could and should have acted. This lack of action disturbs me greatly because if I, who cannot claim to be a member of the great and the good can take an action against a group affiliating to a nonce-friendly organisation, then why could not those who had much more political puissance than I did? .

Way back in the mid 90’s my work placed me in a management position where I had to oversee the content of the constitution and other documents of an existing LGBT group that shall be nameless, to avoid smearing the innocent, but very stupid.  I was examining the organisations books and internal rules and looked down the list of this groups outside affiliations, and to my horror found that this group had affiliated with the International Lesbian and Gay Association.  ILGA is a British created group that had inexplicably given affiliate status to the Paedo group the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

I immediately decreed that this UK group cease to support or donate to ILGA because I saw massive problems in a smallish mostly self-funding LGBT health charity being associated with such an organisation. I explained to those who had unthinkingly and for years, affiliated itself with ILGA what the problems with ILGA were, and they were very surprised to hear of the association between ILGA and NAMBLA. They explained that the affiliation had been done back in the 1980’s and had been automatically renewed each year without oversight.

I also explained that for an organisation that placed itself in opposition to religious conservatism regarding sexual matters, supporting even without thinking, and at one remove, entities that approve of any form of non-consensual sex, gave their opponents valuable ammunition against them. Back in those days the internet had not become as ubiquitous as it is today, and it was considerably easier for paedo supporters to hide themselves in respectable LGBT organisations, than it would be today. I was lucky in that I did, in the mid nineties, have some internet access via an employer and was able to gain information about ILGA that had not yet filtered down to the ‘naïve and stupid’ who kept signing the cheques to ILGA. It also helped that through my employer, I had to sit in for some of the PIE trial in the mid-1980’s, and this may also have made me more clued up than most about organised nonces and their modus operandi and more willing to act.

Although ILGA expelled NAMBLA and similar organisations in 1994/95, they have consistently been refused renewal of it’s UN observer credentials partially because they, ILGA, cannot verify that NAMBLA and groups like them are not either involved or infiltrating under other guises.

If I, an ordinary bod, who’s not from the sort of gilded intelligentsia that made up the upper echelons of NCCL, can spot and deal with a problem of ‘nonce infiltrators’ and their exploitation of sexual libertarianism and of sexual freedom and LGBT groups, why on earth didn’t those mentioned in the Daily Mail report do the same, or better, do more?

The core of the problem afflicting Labour and the NCCL is much, much more than a few naïve people not realising what they are supporting, but people who must have known that PIE were not a counselling group trying to divert people from paedophilia, which would have been much more morally acceptable, but who were quite plainly a paedophilia advocacy group.

Where was the moral fibre of all these Labour party supporters, members and parliamentarians when confronted with the quite obvious intentions of the PIE-men? They should have done more and they should have said more. They should have had the moral courage to say, adult sexual freedom can be something that a case can be made for, but no case can be made for paedophilia. The cream of the NCCL and the Labour party are, in the case of Harman and Hewitt, products of the sort of privileged education and upbringing that is not available to many people. People such as these who have such great advantages and great gifts, should not have let organised noncery anywhere within a thousand miles of their organisation. The NCCL was organised and together enough to have a policy of not representing racists or fascists, so why were they not organised or together enough to deal with the entryists of PIE?

It will make many people wonder about how much influence those who held appalling and outlandish views completely unrelated to the valid issue of consensual adult sexuality, had on the Labour Party?  How much else that is murky is to be uncovered in Britain’s Labour Party?  I have a feeling that this story will run and run.