Daily Mail
February 20, 2014
The full extent of the shocking links between three senior Labour figures and a vile group that tried to legalise sex with children can be exposed today.
The trio held key roles in a human rights organisation that supported the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange.
Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman, her husband, home affairs spokesman Jack Dromey, and former health secretary Patricia Hewitt were all leading officials in the National Council for Civil Liberties.
Astonishingly this Left-wing group granted ‘affiliate’ status to PIE and built close links with it.
The group of predatory paedophiles was calling for the age of consent to be cut to just four.
Police are now investigating PIE as part of Operation Fernbridge, launched in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.
A senior source on the investigation says there is evidence PIE members were abusing children ‘on an industrial scale’.
The Home Office is also probing shocking claims that the Labour government of the 1970s may have helped finance the paedophile group.
Civil servants are trawling through decades of files after an ‘insider’ claimed tens of thousands of pounds were funnelled to PIE in the form of annual grants to the network of child abusers while James Callaghan was in Downing Street.
A Daily Mail investigation has discovered that during the 1970s and 1980s:
* Miss Hewitt described PIE in glowing terms as ‘a campaigning/counselling group for adults attracted to children’;
* The NCCL lobbied Parliament for the age of sexual consent to be cut to ten – if the child consented and ‘understood the nature of the act’.
* It called for incest to be legalised in what one MP dubbed a ‘Lolita’s charter’;
* The NCCL claimed research shows young paedophile victims are often ‘consenting or even the initiators of the sexual acts involved’;
* It filed a submission to Parliament claiming that ‘childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult, result in no identifiable damage’.
* Miss Harman, as NCCL legal officer, tried to water down child pornography laws.
* NCCL lawyers acted for a PIE member who was quizzed by police over appalling behaviour.
The Mail has repeatedly sent detailed questions to Miss Harman, Miss Hewitt and Mr Dromey about their links to PIE and whether they now regret supporting such a vile group. Neither Miss Hewitt nor Mr Dromey replied.
A spokesman for Miss Harman said: ‘This story is untrue and ridiculous.’