I believe Katie Hopkins when she says that one third of 14 and 15-year-olds are sexually active. That was the case in her day and mine, so I have no doubt that it is the case today, too.
But it is not an argument for lowering the age of consent, any more than the existence of drink driving is an argument for the abolition of the drink driving laws.
Of course Adam Johnson's victim will have had more or less the body of a woman. That is precisely why we have an age of consent, to give people's minds the time of catch up with their bodies.
Hopkins, an avowed Brexiteer, also argues, as do many people who post comments below the line on articles relating to this issue, that there are lower ages of consent in several other EU member-states.
In fact, the situation is more complicated than that. There is probably nowhere that Johnson would have been off the hook, and certainly not the France and Germany that are usually cited.
But that is beside the point.
If sex between adults and 15-year-olds is indeed, under certain circumstances, less seriously criminal in some other EU jurisdictions, and if that is being held up as a reason to make it so here, then it is impossible to imagine a stronger argument for withdrawal from the EU.
The Loony Right is going to lose us the referendum and then we'll be in the EU for ever with no more right to complain about anything it ever did.
ReplyDeleteRoger Scruton used to say that to be a conservative was to recognise that you had inherited something worth conserving, but the Ukip/Hopkins tendency and its allies on the Tory Right hate the country they have inherited.
If the main argument for a vote to leave were the impact of TTIP on the NHS, we'd cruise to victory. But the people allowed to make the Brexit case in the media cannot use that argument because flogging the NHS to American health care corporations is exactly what they want.
And here is Hopkins - in the Daily Mail! - arguing the age of consent should be lowered to 14 because that is what it is in Germany. Yet she is supposed to be major voice for a leave vote.
The Radical Right always did want to abolish the age of consent altogether, and it always did behave as if that had already happened.
DeleteIt was in the Thatcher years that the usual one in three 14 and 15-year-olds, or thereabouts, went up to one in two. I'd expect something similar to happen under this lot.
They think that it is normal. Upper-class people tend to lose their virginities far earlier than everyone else.
Thanks to you, some of us knew about the links between New Labour and the Paedophile Information Exchange nearly a decade before the Daily Mail needed to distract from Patrick Rock.
DeleteAnd thanks to you, some of us knew about the Radical Right and paedophilia many years before the Met decided to stop investigating it and FUCKING APOLOGISE! When have the Met ever apologised for ANYTHING before?
And I am not going to stop.
DeleteFor years, I was lauded in corners of Twitter and the blogosphere for pointing out Harriet Harman's and Patricia Hewitt's links to the Paedophile Information Exchange, long before, as you say, the Daily Mail needed to distract attention from Patrick Rock. The entire media always knew.
Just as they always knew that Margaret Thatcher was surrounded by pederasts, the abolition of the age of consent having always been a key aim of a Radical Right that, on this as on drugs, practised what it preached.
But as soon as he mentioned any of that, which had been depicted as long ago as Our Friends in the North and the middle part of the original House of Cards trilogy, then Tom Watson slipped from conquering hero of the likes of Coffee House and Guido Fawkes, to an object of their unmitigated abuse.
That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North, which was broadcast in 1996.
Our Friends in the North is so integral to subsequent popular culture that one of its four stars is now James Bond, another was the first Doctor of this century's revival of Doctor Who, and neither of the others is exactly obscure.
That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed quite a major subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy.
To Play the King was broadcast as long ago as 1993, and no politician or commentator of the generation that is now in or approaching its pomp could possibly have seen anything less than every minute of that trilogy.
And Janner, a very right-wing Labour MP who handed over his seat to Hewitt, who handed it over to last year's Blairite candidate for Leader. I think I got that from you, too.
DeleteYou certainly could have done.
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