The Daily Mail has decided to attack Harriet Harman in relation to her involvement with the Liberty organisation when it was known as the National Council for Civil Liberties (it is still formally called that). Liberty (in the 1970s) allowed an organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange to affiliate with Liberty.
Personally I feel it is more than a little unfair to target Harriet Harman in this way, and I’m not exactly one of her fans.
In retrospect, it is clear that Liberty were very mistaken in being associated with PIE (and PAL). But their support was not unconditional – it is clear that their support was limited to suggesting that society should consider whether consensual sex between an adult and a child was necessarily damaging.
Or in other words whether a 16-year old woman who sleeps with her 5-year old boyfriend should be painted the same colour as a predator such as Jimmy Saville. However it seems that many of PIEs leaders were the kind of predator that would have gotten along well with Jimmy.
Liberty terminated their relationship with PIE by 1983 and the current head of Liberty issued an apology for the relationship: “It is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the 70s.”
So like many organisations, Liberty made a mistake in the 1970s and have apologised for it. But what about Harriet Harman?
Harriet Harman was the legal officer for Liberty at the time – she didn’t head the organisation and probably had no more than a small say in the direction of the organisation as a whole. If she knew about the connection to PIE, and objected, she would probably been told the liberal lefty equivalent of “shut up and soldier on”. Picking on Harriet Harman is unfair … it is the organisation that was at fault not her.
And indeed Patricia Hewitt‘s apology for Liberty’s association with PIE clearly indicates that Harriett Harman had very little say in whether Liberty accepted PIE’s affiliation or not; and indeed her work had nothing to do with PIE.
As always we can see the Daily Mail is conducting little more that a witch hunt against those who hold views not on the extreme right.