When is a scandal not a scandal?

When it involves metropolitan left-wingers, says the Daily Mail. For a week, it has been exposing how Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt – or “Hat and Pat” as the London left of the early 1980s knew them – committed the National Council for Civil Liberties to the cause of helping the Paedophile Information Exchange.

The Mail showed that while at the NCCL (now Liberty)
* Hewitt described PIE in glowing terms as ‘a campaigning/counselling group for adults attracted to children’;
* The NCCL lobbied Parliament for the age of sexual consent to be cut to ten – if the child consented and ‘understood the nature of the act’.
* It called for incest to be legalised in what one MP dubbed a ‘Lolita’s charter’;
* The NCCL claimed research shows young paedophile victims are often ‘consenting or even the initiators of the sexual acts involved’;
* It filed a submission to Parliament claiming that ‘childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult, result in no identifiable damage’.