UK: Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt linked to 1970s pro-pedophile lobby group

Article here. When I saw the headline, I thought, "No way, this is jumping the shark." But then I started reading. Excerpt:

'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.
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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.
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‘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.
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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.'