Paedophile Dunn’s link with Fairbairn
MP had senior role in group founded by child sex activist
SIR Nicholas Fairbairn was a senior figure in a gay rights group founded by a man who set up a notorious paedophile network.
The Scottish Daily Mail can reveal the former Solicitor General was honorary vice-president of the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG), an early gay rights organisation.
It was established by the late Ian Dunn, a town planner with the local authority in Edinburgh and a Labour activist, who also fought for homosexual equality – and co-founded the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE).
PIE fought to legalise adult sexual relations with children and was affiliated to the Left-wing National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), whose leading members included Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman, her MP hus-
‘Called for curbs on Press freedom’
band Jack Dromey and former health minister Patricia Hewitt.
The Daily Mail’s exposure earlier this year of their links with PIE in the 1970s and 1980s raised deeply uncomfortable questions for Labour. Miss Hewitt was forced to apologise over the NCCL’s connections with the group.
Research has now uncovered Sir Nicholas’s membership of SMG, as honorary vice-president, in the early 1970s.
Ironically, when he was later appointed Solicitor General, he opposed attempts by the gay rights movement to reduce the age of consent for gay sex.
The MP was also criticised for describing gay sex as ‘perverse’ when compared with ‘normal’ heterosexual sex.
Records at the National Library of Scotland show another of Dunn’s groups, linked to SMG, was the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group, which hosted a workshop at which an author called Roger Moody made a defence of paedophilia. Researchers believe that while these groups were legitimate gay rights organisations, they were effectively infiltrated by paedophile apologists such as Dunn.
Anti-abuse campaigner Ian Pace, a lecturer at City University in London, believes Fairbairn may have been ‘covering his tracks’ by publicly adopting an anti-gay stance.
He added: ‘Sir Nicholas Fairbairn was honorary vice-president of the SMG from 1970 to 1974. One of the founding members of the group was Dunn.
‘There is ample evidence that active paedophiles and paedophile organisations surreptitiously infiltrated a range of organisations – for civil liberties, gay rights, mental health and beyond, not to mention a multitude of professions including teaching, social work and politics.’
Fairbairn also called for curbs on Press freedom in 1990 following the storm over the so- called ‘magic circle’ of judges, sheriffs and advocates who were allegedly conspiring to ensure that homosexual criminals were given soft-touch treatment by the courts. The claims were dismissed in an official inquiry.
As the Mail reported yesterday, Susie Henderson’s father Robert, a friend of Fairbairn’s, was a pivotal figure in the scandal as he was responsible for making the allegations, possibly to generate a smoke- screen t o cover his own paedophilia.
Fairbairn was forced to quit Mrs Thatcher’s Government following the case of Carol X, a Glasgow prostitute who was gang-raped but was judged by the Crown to be too traumatised to testify against her three attackers, meaning court proceedings were dropped.
The Lord Advocate, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, QC, wanted all future decisions to drop proceedings against murder or rape suspects to rest with him.
The day before Lord Mackay was due to make a statement about the case in parliament, Fairbairn spoke about it to the Press. After the breach of protocol, he was forced to resign as Solicitor General in January 1982.