Paul Staines’s achievement was to secure his story’s coverage on the BBC. Unless the BBC has reported something, then it might as well never have happened.
For years and years, front page stories in, above all, The Mail on Sunday, although with valiant contributions elsewhere (by no means only on the Right), would have forced Blair from office long, long before he eventually went. But the BBC ignored them completely. So it was as if they didn’t exist. And Blair duly stayed on, and on, and on.
The Daily Telegraph story about Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange was, and is, easily enough to drive her from public life, especially once people started doing follow up stories. People like, say, the BBC.
But if you start looking into the university-based cultural, rather than economic, Hard Left of the 1970s, then all sorts of names crop up. Where are they now? Where, indeed… Like illegal drug use and so many other things, sex between men and teenage boys, in particular, is routinely depicted in the media, and always in a positive light.
By protecting Harman, Auntie is protecting her own.
Come from that background, and we now know for a fact that you can get away with having campaigned to legalise child pornography. Could you, one wonders, get away with murder? Is someone already doing so?
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I'm a senior ex-Cabinet minister, and I once killed my wife. But I did it in my Westminster Office, so the police can't do anything about it.
ReplyDeleteNot after today, no.
ReplyDeleteWhen did Harman campaign to legalise child pornography? The Telegraph article doesn't say she did.
ReplyDeleteThe NCCL, run by Harman and Patricia Hewitt (subsequently responsible for every social worker in England), was hand in glove with the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, which had the same address, committee, the works as the Paedophile Information Exchange.
ReplyDeleteIf the Telegraph article were nothing more than what Harman's defenders on here claim that it was, then it would never have been published. How would it be news? The fuss that you are all making proves that you understand perfectly well what the real story is.
The Beeb should have run this story years ago. That it is still not doing so even after a national newspaper article is despicable, but wholly unsurprising.
How would it be news?
ReplyDeleteOh, come on. The Telegraph will do everything it can to run a damaging story about a Labour politician, no matter how flimsy. The fact that this was never followed up (never mind the BBC - it was never even followed up by the Mail and the Express) shows just how flimsy the story is.
But what you are suggesting is not a flimsy story. It is a total non-story. It would not have damaged Harman one jot. The truth, on the other hand...
ReplyDeleteThe Mail (especially) and the Express are the Telegraph's rivals.
ReplyDeleteIndeed so.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the Beeb's excuse?
The Mail and Express are indeed the Telegraph's rivals, but that's not a reason not to cover a story - they do it all the time, and they feel no obligation to acknowledge their source if they think the story is good enough.
ReplyDeleteFor that matter, as a news provider, the BBC is the Telegraph's rival too, which may help to explain why the Telegraph spends so much of its time attacking the BBC.
Rubbish. They are not in any sense in competition with each other.
ReplyDeleteNot in any sense? That's a completely absurd claim. They are both news/content providers.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't mean that they are in competition. If they were, then the BBC would need to be privatised. But they aren't. So it doesn't.
ReplyDeleteDavid, do you believe that photos of naked or partially undressed children are always, without exception, pornographic?
ReplyDeleteNo, but that's not what this is about. No one would bother running a story about that.
ReplyDeleteConeste is probably on the staff of either the BBC or its in house newspaper, the Guardian. He/she therefore objects to the fact that other "news/content providers" dare to exist at all. That is why the BBC, and the Guardian, ignore stories like this.
ReplyDeleteWhat I want to know is: how did these emails come to be made public? One assumes that this would be deserving of a police raid - unlike the Damian Green affair, of course. Is Paul Staines reading the PM's emails?
ReplyDeleteAs I wrote on Sunday, the hand of David Cameron seems to hover ever so slightly out of shot. McBride may be pro-Brown. But Draper is a diehard Blairite. And like all diehard Blairites from Blair himself down, he wants Cameron to replace the hated Brown as Prime Minister. Who, exactly, forwarded these emails to Staines?
ReplyDeleteCameron will go to any lengths to purge his party even of such moral and social conservatives, and of such patriots, as it still contains. Twice divorced, only an occasional churchgoer, and no more than a lowerer of the term limit on abortion, Dorries is no Ann Widdecombe. But Widdy is retiring, and therefore does not need to be rubbed out. Dorries is staying on, is about as conservative as any Tory MP will be in the next Parliament, and therefore cries out to be destroyed.
All that is necessary is to dress up her destruction in things that everyone either knew anyway or could have guessed about Cameron and Osborne.
Here in North-West Durham, we look forward to a New Labour candidate who is Damian McBride without the brain. Oh, fortuitous Y chromosome, that that candidate will not be Derek Draper.
I'm not sure I'd put Draper down as a Blairite exactly. A few years ago he seemed to be aware of what the deal was - see my video of him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcLI5OGXjpM
ReplyDelete