Quite Contrary

The very BBC is now running a two-part documentary that may as well be called Mary Whitehouse Was Right All Along (Or At Least More Right Than Wrong), and the very Guardian is reviewing it favourably. 

The second part will already be on iPlayer, but I am old-fashioned enough to watch it on BBC Two at nine o'clock next Tuesday evening. That will take us through the 1970s and 1980s, when Mrs Whitehouse pioneered opposition to the Paedophile Information Exchange and to child pornography. Was she wrong? We have already had hints, with her prescient remarks about the general impact of pornography on women and children. Was she wrong about that, either?

As for Mrs Whitehouse's having been right-wing, well, she was a post-War Tory without being a party member, but she enlisted Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge and Trevor Huddleston. She and Margaret Thatcher used each other in order to appeal to their respective bases, which did of course overlap quite a bit, but Thatcherism's free market ideology meant that little ever came of that ostensible alliance.

It was good to hear the admission of Hugh Carleton Greene's sheer vileness out of his own mouth. Everyone now knows what he was covering up, and that went on for a very long time. It is inconceivable that the decision not to charge someone as famous and as well-connected as Jimmy Savile was taken by anyone other than the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer. 

To stand as a Labour candidate at the next General Election would be to endorse that decision, raising serious questions about your own sexual interest in children. Any Labour candidate here at North West Durham would be asked those questions by me online, in print, on the airwaves, and on the stump.