Past: Labour's Harriet Harman, pictured in 1982, when she was cutting her political teeth
At first sight, it might be a harmless parish magazine or the newsletter of a respectable society of bird-watching enthusiasts.
Called The Magpie, the now-yellowing A5-size pamphlet was distributed in the late Seventies to members of an organisation called the PIE. The inside cover carries a workmanlike ‘editor’s letter’ highlighting ‘our third annual AGM, which is to be held in London in the summer’, and inviting readers to seek election to ‘our Executive Committee’.
Page three advertises a memorial service for recently deceased PIE member Alan Doggett, who worked as the conductor of the London Boys’ Choir, and was apparently to be remembered for his ‘friendliness, integrity and loyalty’. There follows a selection of short news stories, a letters page and several long feature articles, which are scholarly in tone and peppered with academic jargon.
But it doesn’t take long for any right-minded person who flicks through The Magpie — dispatched quarterly in plain brown envelopes to up to 1,000 members — to realise that behind its matter-of-fact tone and appearance, something is terribly, terribly, amiss.
For the initials PIE stand for Paedophile Information Exchange. This turns out to be the name of a far-Left lobby group which spent much of the Seventies and early Eighties publicly calling for the legalisation of child sex — and the age of consent to be lowered to four.
Today, PIE has been widely forgotten. But at the time, it achieved prominence for circulating articles by tame psychologists and cod scientists promoting the ‘rights’ of paedophiles.
Take, for example, a long article by Dr Edward Brongersma, a Dutch politician and academic who was renowned for his ultra-liberal views on sexual morality.
‘A sexual relationship between a child and an adult does not harm the child and may be even beneficial,’ he argues, ‘providing that the adult partner is considerate, loving and affectionate.’
Take also an article in which a PIE member called Keith Spence, who had recently moved to Stockholm, writes of his (unsuccessful) efforts to abuse ‘heart-shatteringly beautiful’ children at the local swimming pool.
‘If you think England is frustrating for paedophiles, you should try living in Sweden for a bit,’ he complains.
Towards the back of the journal are adverts for a book called Towards A Better Perspective For Boy-Lovers, and admiring reviews of magazines with names such as Male International, Kim, and Boys Express.
Today, almost 35 years later, the contents of The Magpie seem so vile and amoral, and the activities of a lobby group dedicated to advancing the human rights of predatory paedophiles so disgusting, that it’s incredible either was allowed legally to exist at all.
However, it now seems that the Paedophile Information Exchange wasn’t just tolerated by the liberal authorities of the time. There is growing evidence that the era’s Left-wing establishment saw it as a socially acceptable pressure group and actively encouraged its ugly campaigns and sinister public meetings.
Claims: Patricia Hewitt, former health secretary and former member of the National Council for Civil Liberties.
Indeed, it emerged this week that the Labour government of the Seventies may even have helped finance the organisation and its morally bankrupt publication The Magpie.
On Sunday, the Home Office announced that it had ordered a ‘thorough, independent investigation’ into shocking allegations that the Paedophile Information Exchange received public funds while James Callaghan was in Downing Street.
It will examine whether tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money was funnelled to it via the Voluntary Services Unit [VSU], a department of the Home Office that gave annual grants to charities and non-profit-making lobby groups.
The probe comes after a whistle-blower had claimed the payments were signed off, over several years, by a senior civil servant who worked under Labour’s then Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees.
Dig beneath the surface of this ugly scandal, however, and you will soon discover that Lord Rees — who died in 2006 — is a long way from being the only prominent Labourite whose good name may be tarnished by it.
For it also raises tricky questions for three of the most senior Labour figures of recent times: deputy leader Harriet Harman, former Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, and shadow housing minister Jack Dromey, a former party treasurer and Harman’s husband.
Turn the clock back to the Seventies and this trio had strangely close links to the Paedophile Information Exchange. And the long-defunct organisation’s sudden return to the news pages may very well bring those links back to haunt them.
Disturbing: Labour Deputy Harriet Harman with her shadow minister husband Jack Dromey
Harman, Hewitt and Dromey first encountered the PIE when they were cutting their political teeth as young officials in the National Council for Civil Liberties [NCCL].
This tub-thumping human rights organisation — these days known as Liberty — was far more radical than its modern equivalent, and was actively forging alliances with a host of ultra-liberal pressure groups.
One such group was the PIE. In 1975, it somehow succeeded in convincing the NCCL to grant it official ‘affiliate’ status.
The move was a signal victory for radical Left-wing activists, who had for years lobbied for more ‘enlightened’ attitudes towards sex between adults and children.
It was also, of course, a PR coup for those who sought to promote paedophilia.
‘The PIE somehow managed to convince feminists and the gay rights lobby that they had shared values and that we all belonged in the same club,’ recalls one feminist writer whose magazine was lobbied for support by the PIE after the Exchange won NCCL affiliation.
‘Anyone who spoke out against them feared being called a “homophobe”, which in Left-wing circles at the time was about the biggest insult anyone could throw at you. So they were invited into the liberal establishment.’
A PIE ‘information’ leaflet published at the time, called Paedophilia: Some Questions And Answers, shows how the organisation had managed to ally its cause to the gay rights movement.
‘Homosexuals are now widely regarded as ordinary, healthy people — a minority, but no more “ill” than the minority who are left-handed,’ it read. ‘There is no reason why paedophilia should not win similar acceptance.’
The NCCL — then under the chairmanship of Henry Hodge, the Left-wing solicitor who would go on to marry Labour MP Margaret Hodge — appears to have bought this argument hook, line and sinker.
‘The PIE was also being picketed by the National Front, so a lot of people also supported them on the basis that our enemy’s enemy had to be our friend,’ says the writer. ‘It seems terrifyingly simplistic now, obviously, but that was the political context.’
Over the ensuing years, the NCCL — which had Hewitt as its General Secretary from 1974-83 — provided valuable support to the paedophile lobby as it pursued a string of legal and political campaigns designed to advance its twisted agenda.
In 1975, for example, the NCCL conference was addressed by the PIE chairman, Keith Hose. Delegates passed a motion declaring that ‘awareness and acceptance of the sexuality of children is an essential part of the liberation of the young homosexual’.
In 1976, with Jack Dromey on its executive (he served from 1970-79), the NCCL filed a submission to a parliamentary committee claiming that a proposed Bill to protect children from sex abusers would lead to ‘damaging and absurd prosecutions’.
‘Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage,’ it read. ‘The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.’
Political: Harriet Harman (centre) and Patricia Hewitt (to her right), at a press conference held by the National Council for Civil Liberties in 1990.
The statement might have been cut-and-pasted from the propaganda book of the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Two years later, in 1978, Harriet Harman, then a newly qualified solicitor, became the NCCL’s legal officer. She promptly wrote its official response to Parliament’s Protection of Children Bill, which sought to ban child pornography.
Her letter claimed that such a law would ‘increase censorship’, and argued that a pornographic picture of a naked child should not be considered indecent unless it could be proven that the subject had suffered.
‘Our amendment [to the proposed law] places the onus of proof on the prosecution to show that the child was actually harmed,’ she wrote.
Such statements, from officials in what was (and is) a respected human rights organisation, may go some way towards explaining how the Labour-run Home Office of the era might have allowed public grants to be directed towards the PIE.
The NCCL presided over by Harman, Hewitt, Hodge and Dromey had, after all, helped foster an environment where woolly liberalism trumped child protection.
To many on the Left, promoting the ‘rights’ of paedophiles came to be regarded as a legitimate act of political subversion.
Sources close to the Home Office investigation, which was announced this week, say the whistle-blower who sparked it first came forward in the late Seventies. However, his concerns were ignored by officials working for Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees.
Previous roles: Harriet Harman pictured aged 32 with the shadow home Secretary, Mr Roy Hattersley, when she was a solicitor for the National Council for Civil Liberties.
I understand that the civil servant suspected of approving the Voluntary Services Unit grants to the Paedophile Information Exchange in the Seventies died in 2006.
Officials are now trying to establish the nature of this man’s relationship with the late Steven Adrian Smith, a former chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange who was employed as a security guard in the basement of the Home Office during the same era.
If the two men were working in cahoots, it will surely fuel suspicions that an establishment paedophile ring had been allowed to take root in the department.
After all, it emerged earlier this year that Geoffrey Dickens, a Tory MP who campaigned against paedophilia, had approached the then-Home Secretary Leon Brittan in 1983 with allegations concerning widespread abuse of children, some of it by prominent individuals, in children’s care homes.
Nothing appears ever to have come of Dickens’s claims.
As for the Paedophile Information Exchange, its fortunes began to wane in 1981 when secretary Tom O’Carroll — a press officer for the Open University — was jailed for conspiring to corrupt public morals by publishing ‘contact’ advertisements (which put readers in touch with vendors of child porn) in an edition of The Magpie.
Apology: Leader of Liberty - formerly the NCCL - Shami Chakrabarti has offered a public apology for the scandal
Even after O’Carroll’s fall from grace, Patricia Hewitt was willing to stick up for the organisation. In a 1982 essay entitled The Police And Civil Liberties, she offered a thundering critique of his trial.
‘Conspiring to corrupt public morals is an offence incapable of definition or precise proof,’ she wrote, arguing that O’Carroll’s involvement in distributing child porn had ‘overshadowed the deplorable nature of the conspiracy charge used by the prosecution’.
But sympathy in the National Council for Civil Liberties for the PIE’s aims was fading. In 1983, its affiliation was formally withdrawn. And the PIE disbanded in 1984.
The ensuing years saw its reputation permanently sunk, following the convictions of dozens of prominent members for child sex offences.
Among them was Charles Napier, its treasurer, who was jailed in 1995 for indecently assaulting a 14-year-old boy.
Also disgraced was Peter Righton, a key government adviser on children’s homes, and a PIE founder, who was jailed in 1992 for possessing child porn. He died in 2006, never prosecuted for abusing boys in his care — though he openly admitted doing so.
As for Harman, Hewitt and Dromey, they went on to climb successfully the greasy ladder of politics.
Despite the public revulsion against paedophilia, none of the trio would ever properly apologise for the NCCL’s historic links to the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Indeed, a spokesman for Harman said yesterday that despite her employment by the NCCL during its formal affiliation, ‘the very suggestion that Harriet was in any way supportive of the PIE or its aims is untrue and misleading’.
It has been left to Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty — who, born in 1969, had nothing to do with the affair — to offer the only public apology.
‘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 Seventies,’ she told me yesterday.
‘The most important lesson learned by Liberty over the subsequent 30 years was to become a well-governed modern human rights movement in which protecting the vulnerable, especially children, will always come first.’
With fresh light about to be shed on this dark passage in history, it’s a message that other — perhaps more guilty — parties would be well advised to heed.
Harriet Harman and the Labour Party are in favour of Paedophilia. Harman has campaigned for child pornogrophy for years, it was only a couple of years ago that Harman said it should be allowed for naked children to appear in top shelf magazines, Harman said porn should be made legal, as long as the child has not be touched, and the people of England have been voting for the paedo Labour party for years.
The real reason for this is quite simple. Muslims are allowed to marry a child of 6 years old, and Muslims can have intercourse with a child as soon as she becomes 9 years old, they can have intercourse with the child who is younger than 9, but if the child is hurt, then the Muslim piece of s**t must pay money to that child or the child's family for as long as they live.
Right now in schools, children as young as 4 years old are being taught how to have intercourse, taught how to have foreplay, and taught how to masterbate. In Germany, a book has been released telling fathers they should stimulate their daughters clitoris from birth to 6/7 years old, the book explains that fathers don't pay any attention to their daughters clitoris. We are now living in a sick perverted world, and it's all because of the Muslim race, this is what they do to their children, the Muslim father will thigh the child, this means he will put his penis between the child's legs, and bring him self to orgasm, they are a totally sick race of people, and these very same people are now living amongst us, and taking over our countries.
This is the reason the Labour party let millions of Muslims come to Great Britain, the Labour paedo party know everything the Muslims stand for and what they do to children. This could never have happened if Labour had not been voted in, and many many times warnings have gone out about the Labour party but no one took any notice, and now look what's happening.
Muslims are taking over Great Britain, the White people are now the minority in their own country, the rest of Europe is just the same, it's also happening all over America. Canada. Australia. Muslim Obama, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, is flooding the States with Muslims, they are taking over everywhere, and they will apply Sharia law as soon as they take over.
Child porn will become rife everywhere, and there will be nothing anyone can do about it, because as soon as the Muslims take over, it will be the end to everything we know. Child sex will become the norm, just as the Labour party had intended, because this will allow paedophiles to do anything they like with the children, this is no joke people this is fact.
The Labour party love the Paeophiles and they love the Muslims, the reason why all this teaching of sex is happening in the schools, and fathers being told to play with their daughters private parts, is to get them ready for a Muslim take over. This is what Muslims do, and the Labour party can't wait to make child porn legal, and we are being slowly brainwashed, our children and our grandchildren are being brainwashed right now in the class room., and the books being sold telling fathers what to do with their daughters, are also being being brainwashed, and it's up to us to put a stop to it.
It is said that Gordon Brown had intercourse years ago with a nine years old child, but he wasn't on his own, all this was covered up. Tony Blair put a gagging order on this case and many more for 100 years. Harriet Harman, want's paedophiles to adopt children now, this is again, because in Islam, there are no paedphiles. Wake up people, the Labour Party are nothing bunch a sick bunch of paedophiles, and if you vote for them at the next election then i'm afraid your no different than them.
BERLIN, July 30, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Booklets from a subsidiary of the German government’s Ministry for Family Affairs encourage parents to sexually massage their children as young as 1 to 3 years of age. Two 40-page booklets entitled "Love, Body and Playing Doctor" by the German Federal Health Education Center (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung - BZgA) are aimed at parents - the first addressing children from 1-3 and the other children from 4-6 years of age."Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex," reads the booklet regarding 1-3 year olds. The authors rationalize, "The child touches all parts of their father’s body, sometimes arousing him. The father should do the same."
To express concerns to German authorities:
In Canada:
German Embassy
1 Waverley Street
Ottawa, ON, K2P 0T8
Tel.: 613-232-1101 Fax: 613-594-9330
Email: germanembassyottawa@on.aibn.com
In the US:
German Embassy
4645 Reservoir Road NW
Washington, DC, 20007-1998
(202) 298-4000
The embassy can be e-mailed from its website: http://www.globescope.biz/germany/reg/index.cfm
To express concerns to German authorities:
President of the Federal Republic of Germany
11010 Berlin
Germany
Telefon: +49 30 20 00-0
Fax: +49 030 20 00-19 99
E-Mail: Bundespraesident.Horst.Koehler@bpra.bund.de
Chancellor
Angela Merkel
Willy-Brandt-Straße 1
10557 Berlin
Germany
Telefon: +49 180 272-0000
Fax: +49 1888 272-2555
E-Mail: InternetPost@bundesregierung.de
In Canada:
German Embassy
1 Waverley Street
Ottawa, ON, K2P 0T8
Tel.: 613-232-1101 Fax: 613-594-9330
Email: germanembassyottawa@on.aibn.com
In the US:
German Embassy
4645 Reservoir Road NW
Washington, DC, 20007-1998
(202) 298-4000
The embassy can be e-mailed from its website: http://www.globescope.biz/germany/reg/index.cfm
To express concerns to German authorities:
President of the Federal Republic of Germany
11010 Berlin
Germany
Telefon: +49 30 20 00-0
Fax: +49 030 20 00-19 99
E-Mail: Bundespraesident.Horst.Koehler@bpra.bund.de
Chancellor
Angela Merkel
Willy-Brandt-Straße 1
10557 Berlin
Germany
Telefon: +49 180 272-0000
Fax: +49 1888 272-2555
E-Mail: InternetPost@bundesregierung.de
And last but not least is a very short video on Thighing.
