Daily Mail NCCL and PIE General Commentary

Last winter the Daily Mail formally reported a 40 year old general story about the unwitting association by paid membership of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) now known as Liberty in the 1970s. Three people who went on to become Labour MPs, governing for 13 years, were working there and along with 999 other affiliates, were aware of the paid membership of the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), members of whom were jailed in the 1980s.

Since then the story has rolled around again in the past fortnight and one of the trio, Patricia Hewitt, has formally apologised. Husband and wife Harriet Harman and Jack Dromey have expressed regret, but not directly apologised and this seems to be the Daily Mail’s main hangup compared to the lack of support for any victim or survivor of the time. The Guardian’s opinion piece on that is here.

As of Saturday 1st March you have had to search for the Daily Mail article as its concentration on the past has backfired and nobody in the whole story has emerged with any moral high ground, despite how they might consider themselves. That latest story is here. To see everything else the Mail has reported, go to the main page and enter NCCL in the search box on the right under the main headline band on the right and the same initials in Google News should bring up anything the BBC and other agencies had to say.