Normal Courtyard Exercise

As an old lag, the word “nonce” is part of my culture. In that culture’s citadels, it is very much still in use. Nonces are given the suspended sentences that we were not. Nonces are given the cushiest jobs inside, they are housed in the newest or the most recently refurbished wings, they have gym when ours has been cancelled, and so on. Why?

Well, like you, I have never met a paedophile. I mean, we may have done, in the way that we may have met a Muggletonian. But we are wholly unaware of having done so, you and I both. I apologise to any Muggletonian reading this. Yet this country’s cultural and political elite cannot get out of bed, if that, without tripping over one or more nonces. And every single time, our betters had had no idea. Or so we are invariably expected to believe.

The truth is that like illegal drug use, the sexual abuse of children, especially but not exclusively adolescent males, is fundamental to cultural and political power in this country, both those practices themselves and the opportunities that they presented for blackmail. That in turn crosses over with the endemic sexual harassment and assault of male staff who are barely, if at all, into adulthood.

It has all come out about Margaret Thatcher’s friends. She knew about Cyril Smith when she arranged his knighthood. Jimmy Savile's knighthood was rejected four times by the relevant committee, until she absolutely insisted upon it for the man with whom she spent every New Year’s Eve, and on whose programmes she was so obsessed with appearing that her staff had to ration those appearances. Her closest lieutenant was Peter Morrison. Unlike the then Prince of Wales, she would have had sight of every file on Laurens van der Post.

Smith was a highly eccentric and largely absentee MP for a tiny minority party, but he was a Thatcherite avant la lettre, who had left the Labour Party when he had started to see cars outside council houses. Thatcher’s father was also a Liberal until all of that fell apart between the Wars, and he was never a member of the Conservative Party. He, she and Smith were politically indistinguishable.

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 went on to play 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. Of the generation that was now in its pomp, every politician and commentator saw every minute of that trilogy.

Moreover, anyone who came to political maturity in what were then the newly-former mining areas will have been made fully aware that the miners in the dock, all the way back in 1984 and 1985, routinely made reference to the proclivities of the Home Secretary of the day, Leon Brittan. Those proclivities were common knowledge from Fife and the Lothians, to County Durham and the southern part of Northumberland, to South Yorkshire, to Derbyshire, to South Wales, among other places. Nothing was carried in the papers or included in the court reports, but the pit villages never needed Twitter in order to circumvent that kind of censorship.

Yvette Cooper has a former mining constituency. Yet she thinks that those grooming gangs which were currently attracting attention should be investigated only by the Police. She may no longer be telling that to the veterans of the Battle of Orgreave, but she should still try it on the Hillsborough families, the victims of the spycops, and numerous others, including Doreen Lawrence, on whose reputation Keir Starmer had long traded. Ah, yes, Starmer. With no diplomatic background, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest friends has been made the British Ambassador to Washington while we allow ourselves to guffaw at Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson as if they mattered in the least. Who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

As Home Secretary, Cooper has the power to revoke the citizenship of anyone whom she thought ought to be eligible for another nationality, whether or not they were. Bangladesh has consistently and understandably refused to have anything to do with the London-born Shamima Begum. Undoubtedly with the full cooperation of its British counterparts, Canadian intelligence was trafficking British girls to Syria to join the side that we were aiding and abetting there while bombing it across the Sykes-Picot Line in Iraq, where our intervention had created it in the first place. The 15-year-old Begum was married almost immediately upon her arrival in that country, and pregnant almost immediately after that. “She wanted it” is not an argument that would normally be admitted under such circumstances.

All of this had the enthusiastic support of the Liberal Democrats, of the Labour Party until 2015, and of more than 90 per cent of Labour MPs, as well as the whole of the party’s staff, to the very end, if it is not still going on. Both economically and internationally, and the connection between the two has never been more glaring, Labour is now far to the right of the Conservatives. Begum ought to be tried by a jury that, unless it were unanimously convinced beyond reasonable doubt of her guilt, ought to deliver a verdict of not guilty, which should be an enduring verdict, affording lifelong protection from double jeopardy. In the event of such a conviction, then like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be blameless, but like a 15-year-old runner for county lines, she would not be the most to blame.

It bears repetition that even while bombing the IS that it had created in Iraq, NATO was so committed to the victory of IS in Syria, as in principle it remains, that via the NATO member state of Turkey, it trafficked British schoolgirls to Syria to hand over to IS. In at least one case, a 15-year-old was pregnant almost immediately, having been married so soon after her arrival that the arrangements had clearly been made in advance. Via the NATO member state of Turkey, IS fighters are now being brought in as part of NATO's side in Ukraine, where they carried out the suicide bombing of the Kerch Bridge under British direction. Russia has long been bringing in Assadists against them. IS is now part of the side that we are backing in Ukraine, while, yet again, everyone who knows anything at all about the subject is pointing out that our position is suicidally insane.

And do we know that our girls are not being smuggled into Ukraine, which is itself a global centre of sex trafficking, in order to be handed over to IS? Or our boys, come to that, to be sent to the front line? If you are brown and working-class, then at 15 you can be trafficked to IS. If you are black and working-class, then at 15 you can be strip-searched at school. If you are white and working-class, then at 15 you can very possibly be trafficked to something like the Azov Battalion. But if you were posh, and probably white although that is not quite the point, then at 15 you could in 2022 vote on who the Prime Minister should be, even if she did not remain the Prime Minister for very long.

The war in Afghanistan was in defence of the endemic abuse of boys, to which, whatever else may be said of the Taliban, they had been very actively opposed and not without success in seeking to eradicate, whereas the regime that we installed in their place actively colluded in it as surely as in the heroin trade. There is no minimum age for marriage either at federal level in the United States or at all in Saudi Arabia. Tom Alexandrovich is only the latest in a long line of child molesters to have fled from the United States and elsewhere to Israel, which also has a huge child rape problem of its own, especially in the precious West Bank settlements.

Underage groupies have always been integral to rock and roll. We all know what at least used to be endemic at public schools. Popular entertainers were known to sleep with underage girls at the youth conferences of the political parties back in the day. And so on. Reading about the role in grooming gangs of fast food outlets, minicab offices, and other such establishments, I am not alone in asking to be told something that I did not already know from towns and villages that were still overwhelmingly white, and which were literally or practically 100 per cent so in the 1990s, when it was effectively less illegal than underage drinking for men in their twenties, or even older, to have sex with girls of 15, 14, or even younger.

White men who commit certain offences are “lone wolves”, black men who do so are “gang members”, and brown men who do so are “homegrown Islamist terrorists”, yet the crimes are the same. Likewise, a certain type of organised crime syndicate is a “grooming gang” or a “rape gang” when the members are South Asian, or Muslim, or both, but a “paedophile ring” when they are not, and most emphatically when they are all white and non-Muslim. But again, they are the same thing.

Earlier this year, Radio Four broadcast a series on the Paedophile Information Exchange, a story known to readers of this blog throughout the 19 years of existence. If PIE was not a grooming gang and a rape gang, then what ever has been or could be? It was at the very heart of the Establishment, and this year, it will be 40 years since the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence.

The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no authority that is apparent to anyone. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now. And if there were to be an inquiry into the grooming gangs, then Victoria Gillick should be on it, along with Lisa McKenzie and the distinguished criminologists in the Workers Party of Britain, for a start. But we all know that British inquiries take years on end to exonerate the lifelong friends who had appointed them. Jess Phillips is on course to lose her seat to the Muslim candidate of the Workers Party, which has called for an inquiry into the grooming gangs. Yet who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

PIE’s Patricia Hewitt took over Greville Janner’s seat. Then she passed it on to Liz Kendall, so it is obviously a right-wing Labour fiefdom. Britain is internationally known for the prevalence of kiddy-fiddling, but even within that, the right-wing Labour machine is something else. Having inherited his father’s seat, a man whose proclivities were common knowledge for 70 years handed it on to a PIE lady, who served in Tony Blair’s Cabinet before handing it on to the most overtly right-wing candidate for the Labour Leadership since 1994. Kendall’s support for assisted suicide, though sincere in its desire to reduce spending on sickness and disability benefits by having the State kill off the sick and disabled, is also a useful positioning of herself as an alternative to the hitherto undisputed crown prince, Wes Streeting, of whom we should nevertheless still be very, very afraid.

Speaking of crowns and princes, Stephen Fry delivered Channel 4’s “Alternative Christmas Message” in 2023 despite having attended not only the Coronation, but also the King’s wedding. He was the alternative to what, exactly? And now, a K. He has never retracted his statement that, “It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy – but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy.” When Fry’s novel The Hippopotamus was filmed, then the central character had to be aged up to 16. But he is younger than that in the book. The Liar has never been filmed. Sir Stephen is very much in the line of Sir Jimmy Savile and his close protector, Sir Keir Starmer.

Digital ID would be administered by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle. One can almost admire his sheer gall in attacking Nigel Farage by comparing him to Savile. Like a serving Government Whip, Kyle was given his big break in politics by the Chief Whip whose Whips’ Office included both Kyle’s close friend, closest ally, and sometime lover, Ivor Caplin, and at the same time Dan Norris, who was also notably close to Caplin. Along with the subsequently adjudicated and disqualified electoral fraud Phil Woolas, such was the Whips’ Office that forced through the Iraq War. Caplin, Norris and Woolas were all made Ministers a few weeks later. Up behind them has come Kyle, among others. Would you trust him and his ilk with your children’s and grandchildren’s photographs and contact details? And Alastair Campbell had cut his teeth under Robert Maxwell. There is that Epstein connection again.

Was Rolf Harris a Pakistani? Was Chris Denning? Is Stuart Hall? Is Paul Gadd? There were and are Pakistani grooming gangs. But they were and are far from the only ones, and far from the most powerful. Boris Johnson was a pupil at a private school when Paedophile Action for Liberation, which later merged into PIE, said without challenge that it could shut down both the private school system and the youth criminal justice system by calling its members out on strike. As Prime Minister, Johnson described the money spent on investigating Medomsley Detention Centre as having been “spaffed up the wall”.  Clearly, he could not see the problem. He had been groomed.

Of the same generation is Starmer, late of Reigate Grammar School, the Sunday Times Independent School of the Year 2025. Yes, it was private when Starmer was there. In the words of Doughty Street Chambers, on its page about Starmer, now amusingly removed from public view: “He was Director of Public Prosecutions and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008-2013. As DPP, Keir was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales.” Therefore, Starmer would have been responsible for the decision not to charge Savile even if he had never set eyes on the file. But that is in any case inconceivable. We are talking about Jimmy Savile here. That Starmer took the decision not to charge Savile has been repeated all over the place, far beyond parliamentary privilege. Starmer has yet to sue anyone for having made that claim. Again, he could not see the problem. Again, he had been groomed. Who is a grooming gang, and who is not?

We need a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age, and the abolition of different rules for “positions of trust”. We need to ban abortion and contraception for those under 18 at least without parental knowledge and consent, just as they thankfully cannot now be given puberty blockers. What sort of parent would want to put his underage daughter on the Pill? There is only one possible reason for doing so. And we need to rule out the legal possibility of being a specifically sexual assailant below an age of consent that had been raised to 18, thereby correcting the anomaly that had existed since 2003.

In that year, a male heterosexual age of consent of 16 was created by default due to political horse-trading among the feminist and gay groups around Harriet Harman, of all people, which insisted that both sexes and all acts be treated in exactly the same way. Yet the age of criminal responsibility remains 10, meaning that boys can be prosecuted for rape, itself significantly redefined in 2003, six years before they can legally have consensual sex. And they are. Indeed, boys who allege abuse by women are routinely accused of rape.

We need the replacement of the existing categories of sexual assault with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, such that the sentences could be doubled. There should be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not. We need to specify that intoxication was a bar to sexual consent only insofar as it would have been a bar to driving. We need to end the blocking of progress into paid or voluntary work even though one had been acquitted. C5 notices should be outlawed.

And we need to make it a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. The Universal Basic Income, the Jobs Guarantee, and the dividends from public stakes in the FTSE 500 companies, distributed equally to everyone, would remove any conceivable excuse for prostituting oneself. This would of course include filmed or photographed prostitution. We need to define obscenity as material depicting acts that were themselves illegal or which was reasonably likely to incite or encourage such acts, with sentencing the same as for the illegal act in question in each case, and with the law enforced equally in relation to both sexes. If age verification really has halved British traffic to pornographic websites, then I have been told since time immemorial that that was impossible. By the political tendency that was now in government.

Many of us ended up as exasperated critics of Jeremy Corbyn’s last time. But we were not and are not his enemies. When it came to those, such as Margaret Hodge of Islington children’s homes infamy, then nothing struck more fear into their hearts than his popularity with young men. Alongside a collapse in male employment that had in any case largely happened by the time that they had come along, the defining experience of their own politics had been to have grown up under Governments, of all three parties, that had harvested young men in wars with a sheer pointlessness that had not been since 1918. Hence their attraction and attachment to a politician who had opposed every single one of those wars, just as he had opposed the collapse in that employment. Think on. Including, if you are reading this site as you have done in the past, Jeremy Corbyn.