How Is This News? - Part Two

It is perfectly possible to be convicted of possessing child pornography (indeed, by some quirk of computing, of "creating" the image or images) merely for having received a never-opened spam email containing it. It is also possible to be convicted of possessing it merely for having received it as unsolicited material through the post. Such convictions do in fact happen, because that is the law. Is anyone seriously suggesting that a person so convicted should be sent to prison? Or sent for "treatment" of any other kind, come to that? Yet they can be, and sometimes are. Again, that is the law.

Furthermore, the figures being cited as the number of "paedophiles" in this country include even those convicted of or cautioned for the slightest sexual contact with people who are actually older than they are, but who also happen to be under 16. It has always been possible for boys to be so convicted, although the extension of this law to girls a couple of years ago caused all hell to break loose in the feminist press, as if any such provision were unheard of.

But then, to those who were writing, the very existence of the male sex was and is little more than a rumour, with heterosexual activity actually unthinkable. Most unfortunately, that lobby has controlled great tracts of social policy continuously since the (Tory) early 1970s, and not least under Margaret Thatcher, who presided over a massive increase in that lobby's already very considerable power.

It should be made a criminal offence to commit any sort of sexual activity with any person under 18 who is more than three years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence of imprisonment for twice the number of years difference in age, or for life where that difference is five years or more, and/or where the younger party is under 12. Across the board, every crime should carry a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or of five years where that maximum sentence is life.

Meanwhile, it is high time to re-examine the links between the old Paedophile Information Exchange and the old National Council of Civil Liberties in its Hatty and Patty days, now that Hatty is trying to become Deputy Leader of the Labour Party while Patty's responsibilities include every social worker in England.

Such a re-examination would lead deep into the lobby described above, which has created the situation in which the only people (apart from the trophy of a faded celebrity like Jonathan King) who stand any realistic chance of being prosecuted for sex with underage post-pubescent boys are Catholic priests, providing the excuse for the wholly mendacious depiction of the world's pre-eminent pro-life, anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist, anti-war institution as involved in the rape of babies, and (as if it mattered) baby girls at that. In fact, the thoroughly reprehensible, and rightly criminal, behaviour in question is exactly the sort that the people who have run most things in this country for nearly forty years, and who now run pretty much everything, have been campaigning to make legally and socially acceptable throughout that period, conducting their own affairs (so to speak) exactly as if it already were.

Almost certainly, then, there will be no such re-examination. Will there?