Taking Liberties

That Tom O’Carroll was on a sub-committee of the National Council for Civil Liberties in its Hattie and Pattie days is not remotely news to anyone who knows, well, anything at all about the subject, really.

From the BBC to the Daily Mail, they have all known all of this for 30 years and more, a fact worth setting in the context that Harriet Harman entered Parliament as long ago as the Peckham by-election of 1982.

There was never anything speculative about any of this. It has never been a matter of rumour or conjecture. There has never been any gap in the paper trail. Nothing like that.

They all knew it. Until now, though, they have all chosen to ignore it.

As they are still ignoring, for example, the fact that O’Carroll’s Paedophilia: The Radical Case remains a set text in Criminology at Cambridge.

So much for Jack Dromey’s assertion that no one could possibly pay the slightest attention to O’Carroll. Dromey did, back in the day. The University of Cambridge still does, even now.

Come to that, I am not aware that O’Carroll has ever killed anyone. Whereas enormous numbers of people were killed by the Government in which Harman and Patricia Hewitt were Cabinet Ministers. There is no moral high ground here.

Within the Labour Party, Tom Watson is making the running, at least where public pronouncements are concerned.

He has been trying for some time, including at Prime Minister’s Questions, to expose the sensational complicity of the Thatcher Government in the case of Peter Righton and the waves leading out from it.

The media silence has been deafening.

But the Daily Mail, knowing that that biggest scandal in many decades was likely to come out this year, has got a retaliation in first.

Righton, Orgreave, Hillsborough, the Golden Temple, and who knows what else: 2014 is shaping up to be the year in which all public images of Margaret Thatcher are removed and destroyed. She died in the nick of time.

It also seems fitting that the reality, both of the New Left that became New Labour, and of the Thatcherism that the New Left named and to which New Labour was the capitulation, should become apparent in all its horror in this twentieth anniversary year of the death of John Smith.

Is Harman going to address Saturday’s Labour Special Conference? Seriously?

To describe Watson as “making the running” seems about right. With no shortage of more than credible candidates, the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party is effectively vacant.