Harman 'regrets' NCCL's link to PIE
Labour deputy leader says
affiliate status granted by former employer to paedophile lobbyists was
'immaterial' to her work
-
Latest“Harman has given an interview to ITV News’s political editor Tom Bradby. She once more expressed regret but refused to apologise. She said:I’m not…” Andrew Sparrow with the latest
- 'Harman should have tackled smears sooner'
Harriet Harman 'regrets' former employer's link to paedophile lobbyists
Labour deputy leader says affiliate status granted by National Council for Civil Liberties to group was 'immaterial' to her work
Harriet Harman's
statement follows a Newsnight interview in which she declined to express
regret and criticised the Daily Mail. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA
Harriet Harman
has embarked on an abrupt change of tack and expressed regret that her
former employers at the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL)
granted affiliate status to a paedophile lobbying group in the 1970s.
Less than 12 hours after the Labour party's deputy leader told BBC's Newsnight that she was the victim of a smear campaign by the Daily Mail over the NCCL's links to the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), Harman's office issued a statement expressing regret about the links.
But Harman insisted that the affiliate status, granted in 1975, three years before she joined the NCCL as legal officer, was "immaterial" to her work.
An aide to Harman told the BBC's deputy political editor, James Landale: "She regrets the existence of PIE and of course she regrets any organisation's involvement with them, including the National Council for Civil Liberties. But they were immaterial to her work. She does not regret joining the NCCL. By the time she arrived [PIE] were very much under the radar."
The statement from Harman's office came after she was widely criticised for an interview on BBC2's Newsnight on Monday night in which she declined to express any regret and instead attacked the Daily Mail for publishing "titivating" pictures of young girls in bikinis.
Harman appeared on Newsnight after the Daily Mail ran a series of front-page stories highlighting the way in which the NCCL granted the PIE affiliate status in 1975. Harman joined the NCCL as legal officer in 1978. But her husband, Jack Dromey, now shadow police minister, was on its executive at the time and Harman's close ally the former Labour cabinet minister Patricia Hewitt was the NCCL chief executive.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the NCCL's successor organisation Liberty, responded to the Daily Mail allegations by apologising for its links with the PIE. But Harman told Newsnight: "It is not the case that my work, when I was at NCCL, was influenced by PIE, was apologising for paedophilia or colluding with paedophilia. That is an unfair inference and a smear."
Sources close to Harman insisted she would not be apologising to the Daily Mail, whose campaign has prompted hate mail from far right groups.
The sources also pointed out that Dromey confronted the PIE after he became executive chair of the NCCL in March 1976. He moved against the group at the NCCL AGM the following month and ensured the heavy defeat of a "bonkers" motion that would have condemned the harassment of paedophile campaign groups.
The PIE was then largely marginalised in the NCCL, leaving Harman to focus on her work on bans on marches, CND, Peter Hain and the anti-apartheid campaign and the royal commission on policing. A PIE supporter did have a letter published in NCCL magazine in 1981. But this was critical of the NCCL.
On Monday Harman said that while "the editor and proprietor of the Daily Mail are entitled to their political views and they are of course entitled to oppose what I stand for", they were "not entitled to use their newspaper to smear me with innuendo because they disagree with me politically and hate my values".
After calls from the tabloid for the Labour leadership to speak out on the issue, Harman was backed by Ed Miliband, who praised her "huge decency and integrity" and said he did not "set any store by these allegations".
Harman's attack on the Daily Mail echoes Miliband's decision to publicly tackle claims made by the newspaper last year when it branded his Marxist academic father, Ralph Miliband, the "man who hated Britain".
In a series of articles, the Mail had accused the three senior Labour figures of working for an organisation with a relaxed attitude to paedophilia, as it claimed the NCCL proposed legalising incest and wanted to lower the age of consent to as low as 10 in a 1976 submission to MPs. The Mail accused Harman of signing a document in favour of watering down child pornography legislation in 1978.
Harman said the Mail was trying to make her "guilty by way of association", while Dromey, also a Labour MP, said the paper's allegations were "beneath contempt" as he had been at the forefront of public condemnations of the PIE and their "despicable views".
Harman said she had supported the equalisation of the age of consent for gay sex, but never campaigned for the age of consent to be lowered to 10. She also rejected the idea that she opposed the law on incest, saying the document referred to by the Mail was written before she started to work at the organisation.
On the allegation that she was seeking to water down a proposed ban on child pornography, Harman said the NCCL had argued for measures to stop the criminalisation of pictures used for sex education or those taken by parents of their children on the beach or in the bath. She said anyone could apply to join the NCCL on payment of a fee and the PIE was just one of nearly 1,000 affiliated organisations.
"I was aware that because NCCL opposed censorship and supported gay rights, paedophiles had sought to exploit that and use NCCL as a vehicle to make their arguments. But by the time I came to work for NCCL this vile organisation had already been vigorously challenged within the organisation," she said.
In a separate statement, Dromey said he personally "took on" the PIE when he was chairman of the NCCL in 1976 and defeated a "loathsome motion" on the "so-called rights of paedophiles".
"As a lifelong opponent of evil men who abuse children, the accusations of the Daily Mail are untrue and beneath contempt," he said.
Labour sources said Miliband had also looked into the claims made by the Mail and "regards them as complete nonsense". Hewitt has not commented on the story.
Speaking to Newsnight, Harman rejected the "ugly insinuation" that her work was influenced by PIE. She said the group had been "challenged and pushed aside" in 1976 and all the "anxiety and controversy" about it was over by the time she arrived.
Harman said PIE was a front for "very bad people" and should not have existed but refused to say it was a mistake for the NCCL to take affiliation fees from the group. She accused the Mail of being a greater supporter of "indecency", claiming it was not above producing photos of "very young girls" in bikinis.
A spokesman for the Daily Mail criticised the MPs for failing to say sorry and claimed the "belated statements of Ms Harman and her husband – full of pedantry and obfuscation – failed to answer the Mail's central points and deny allegations the Mail has not made … as for smears, it is a newspaper's job to ask awkward and controversial questions – questions that in this instance are still awaiting a satisfactory answer," he added.
Last year Chakrabarti, who joined the organisation in 2001, issued an apology about the links between the NCCL and the PIE. In December, she said in a statement: "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."
copy http://www.theguardian.com/politics
Less than 12 hours after the Labour party's deputy leader told BBC's Newsnight that she was the victim of a smear campaign by the Daily Mail over the NCCL's links to the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), Harman's office issued a statement expressing regret about the links.
But Harman insisted that the affiliate status, granted in 1975, three years before she joined the NCCL as legal officer, was "immaterial" to her work.
An aide to Harman told the BBC's deputy political editor, James Landale: "She regrets the existence of PIE and of course she regrets any organisation's involvement with them, including the National Council for Civil Liberties. But they were immaterial to her work. She does not regret joining the NCCL. By the time she arrived [PIE] were very much under the radar."
The statement from Harman's office came after she was widely criticised for an interview on BBC2's Newsnight on Monday night in which she declined to express any regret and instead attacked the Daily Mail for publishing "titivating" pictures of young girls in bikinis.
Harman appeared on Newsnight after the Daily Mail ran a series of front-page stories highlighting the way in which the NCCL granted the PIE affiliate status in 1975. Harman joined the NCCL as legal officer in 1978. But her husband, Jack Dromey, now shadow police minister, was on its executive at the time and Harman's close ally the former Labour cabinet minister Patricia Hewitt was the NCCL chief executive.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the NCCL's successor organisation Liberty, responded to the Daily Mail allegations by apologising for its links with the PIE. But Harman told Newsnight: "It is not the case that my work, when I was at NCCL, was influenced by PIE, was apologising for paedophilia or colluding with paedophilia. That is an unfair inference and a smear."
Sources close to Harman insisted she would not be apologising to the Daily Mail, whose campaign has prompted hate mail from far right groups.
The sources also pointed out that Dromey confronted the PIE after he became executive chair of the NCCL in March 1976. He moved against the group at the NCCL AGM the following month and ensured the heavy defeat of a "bonkers" motion that would have condemned the harassment of paedophile campaign groups.
The PIE was then largely marginalised in the NCCL, leaving Harman to focus on her work on bans on marches, CND, Peter Hain and the anti-apartheid campaign and the royal commission on policing. A PIE supporter did have a letter published in NCCL magazine in 1981. But this was critical of the NCCL.
On Monday Harman said that while "the editor and proprietor of the Daily Mail are entitled to their political views and they are of course entitled to oppose what I stand for", they were "not entitled to use their newspaper to smear me with innuendo because they disagree with me politically and hate my values".
After calls from the tabloid for the Labour leadership to speak out on the issue, Harman was backed by Ed Miliband, who praised her "huge decency and integrity" and said he did not "set any store by these allegations".
Harman's attack on the Daily Mail echoes Miliband's decision to publicly tackle claims made by the newspaper last year when it branded his Marxist academic father, Ralph Miliband, the "man who hated Britain".
In a series of articles, the Mail had accused the three senior Labour figures of working for an organisation with a relaxed attitude to paedophilia, as it claimed the NCCL proposed legalising incest and wanted to lower the age of consent to as low as 10 in a 1976 submission to MPs. The Mail accused Harman of signing a document in favour of watering down child pornography legislation in 1978.
Harman said the Mail was trying to make her "guilty by way of association", while Dromey, also a Labour MP, said the paper's allegations were "beneath contempt" as he had been at the forefront of public condemnations of the PIE and their "despicable views".
Harman said she had supported the equalisation of the age of consent for gay sex, but never campaigned for the age of consent to be lowered to 10. She also rejected the idea that she opposed the law on incest, saying the document referred to by the Mail was written before she started to work at the organisation.
On the allegation that she was seeking to water down a proposed ban on child pornography, Harman said the NCCL had argued for measures to stop the criminalisation of pictures used for sex education or those taken by parents of their children on the beach or in the bath. She said anyone could apply to join the NCCL on payment of a fee and the PIE was just one of nearly 1,000 affiliated organisations.
"I was aware that because NCCL opposed censorship and supported gay rights, paedophiles had sought to exploit that and use NCCL as a vehicle to make their arguments. But by the time I came to work for NCCL this vile organisation had already been vigorously challenged within the organisation," she said.
In a separate statement, Dromey said he personally "took on" the PIE when he was chairman of the NCCL in 1976 and defeated a "loathsome motion" on the "so-called rights of paedophiles".
"As a lifelong opponent of evil men who abuse children, the accusations of the Daily Mail are untrue and beneath contempt," he said.
Labour sources said Miliband had also looked into the claims made by the Mail and "regards them as complete nonsense". Hewitt has not commented on the story.
Speaking to Newsnight, Harman rejected the "ugly insinuation" that her work was influenced by PIE. She said the group had been "challenged and pushed aside" in 1976 and all the "anxiety and controversy" about it was over by the time she arrived.
Harman said PIE was a front for "very bad people" and should not have existed but refused to say it was a mistake for the NCCL to take affiliation fees from the group. She accused the Mail of being a greater supporter of "indecency", claiming it was not above producing photos of "very young girls" in bikinis.
A spokesman for the Daily Mail criticised the MPs for failing to say sorry and claimed the "belated statements of Ms Harman and her husband – full of pedantry and obfuscation – failed to answer the Mail's central points and deny allegations the Mail has not made … as for smears, it is a newspaper's job to ask awkward and controversial questions – questions that in this instance are still awaiting a satisfactory answer," he added.
Last year Chakrabarti, who joined the organisation in 2001, issued an apology about the links between the NCCL and the PIE. In December, she said in a statement: "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."
copy http://www.theguardian.com/politics
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