An evil, twisted zealot and his Labour Party pals
THE occasion was a Christmas drinks party for Barrow and Furness Labour Party. But there was nothing festive about the mood.
Local Labour MP John Woodcock, an outspoken critic of the new party leader Jeremy Corbyn, came under attack from members.
One of those Corbyn supporters was a man who had joined Labour in the wave of popular enthusiasm for the hard-Left Corbyn.
It now transpires that this whitehaired pensioner was the notorious paedophile Tom O’Carroll who has twice served time in jail for his repugnant activities.
Last night, Mr Woodcock commented: ‘He had signed up because of Corbyn and seemed plausible.’
But anyone aware of the activities of the odious O’Carroll (now aged 70) over the past many decades, will know that his behaviour has been anything but ‘plausible’.
He first came to the public notice as a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in the 1970s.
The group advocated sex with children aged as young as four, although O’Carroll’s own view was that the age of ten was acceptable and that penetrative sex should be allowed with 12-year-olds.
The vile organisation was affiliated from 1975 to 1983 with the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), which, over the years, has had as key officials people such as Harriet Harman, who went on to become Labour deputy leader, and her Labour MP husband Jack Dromey.
To this day, Ms Harman refuses to apologise for NCCL’s links to PIE, even though it put a recruitment advert for new members in PIE’s house magazine.
Patricia Hewitt was general secretary of NCCL from 1974 to 1983, and the late husband of veteran Labour backbencher Margaret Hodge was chairman. Labour MP Diane Abbott also worked for the NCCL between 1978-80. She is now in the shadow cabinet and a key ally of Corbyn, with whom she once had a relationship.
Among PIE’s most unpleasant activities, it published a bulletin which contained a ‘Contact Page’ in which members placed adverts giving details of where they lived and their sexual perversions.
In 1981, O’Carroll was arrested and charged with conspiring to corrupt public morals after police had seized more than a quarter of a ton of indecent images.
Some showed pictures of a man abusing a one-year-old boy.
The NCCL was outraged by the charges, which it felt were politically motivated. It kept a file on the case – including briefing papers critical of the prosecution.
O’Carroll was, however, convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.
The Thatcher government duly shut
‘Advocated sex with children as young as ten’
‘Singled out Beckham’s young sons’
down the PIE, which had been receiving money from taxpayers despite having campaigned for the legalisation of incest.
O’Carroll, a former Open University information officer, is unrepentant about his sexual desire for boys and has written his sexual ‘manifesto’, a book called Paedophilia: The Radical Case. In it, he argued some sexual relationships between an adult and a child should be ‘normalised’.
He argued that each stage of the sexual relationship could be ‘negotiated with “hints and signals”, which indicates to the other what is acceptable or not’.
There was speculation that the dedication in the book, ‘To A and Z, with love’, referred to boys he had sex with.
In 2010 he wrote a detailed review of the pop singer Michael Jackson’s relationships with young boys.
In a chilling interview last year about PIE’s agenda, he was asked why it had backed sex with fouryear- olds. O’Carroll replied: ‘The age of four came into it because children by that age are normally verbal and normally can say whether they are liking a particular kind of activity or not.’
As for sex with a child aged ten, as long as there was no penetration, he said: ‘The emphasis is on consenting, willing, free and uncoerced involvement of the child.’
Pressed on whether a ten-year- old could consent to sex with an adult he said: ‘Yes. I do. I don’t see that is a problem communicating their consent. It’s a matter as it is with adult consent. It’s for the people involved.’
Born in Coventry into a stable, loving, family, he read history at Lancaster University, undertook postgraduate studies in education at Cambridge and, while in prison, got a degree in philosophy from the Open University.
Having taken a job as a teacher, he was sacked after his ‘declared’ love for a 13-year-old male pupil. He was dismissed again, in 1974, while doing voluntary work at a boys’ club after his past caught up with him.
O’Carroll’s last job – as a subeditor with the Gulf Times, an English-language newspaper in Qatar – ended in 2001 after the News of the World obtained a longlens shot of him cavorting naked with a nude ten-year-old boy in the showers by a swimming pool.
In 2006 he was arrested again – this time for keeping and distributing child porn.
His co- defendant was a former Anglican minister and school chaplain who had the largest collection of paedophile pornography ever found by the police. The BBC reported: ‘Children, mainly boys and some as young as six, had been filmed and photographed being raped and tortured.’
O’Carroll was jailed for two-anda-half years and placed on the Sex Offenders Register for ten years
Since he left prison, he’s lived in Barrow, Cumbria, and he has writ- ten a rambling blog. In 2014 he wrote: ‘I have been at odds with the dominant narrative of sexual morality over the last several decades, especially as regards children’s sexual self- determination and paedophilia.
‘My aim here is to present a discourse of resistance.
‘That probably sounds grim, but humour and cheerfulness are my weapons of choice, along with reason and research.’
Last September, when he became a fully- fledged member of the Labour Party, he wrote disturbingly about the role of child mascots at sporting events.
He said they ‘must look the part... be lean, well-proportioned, athletic and good-looking’, with ‘every suggestion’ that they have ‘ been favoured by the gods.’
He singled out David Beckham’s then 13-year- old son Romeo. ‘Or perhaps a younger boy like him – his ten-year-old brother Cruz.’
Despite being in favour of relaxing under-age sex laws, O’Carroll wants stricter controls for the Press. He attended a rally of the virulently anti-Press body Hacked Off in the Houses of Parliament last year to lobby MPs for state involvement in media regulation. The meeting was chaired by the actor John Cleese.
How exquisitely ironic that one of the key figures in Hacked Off is Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson, who yesterday reacted to the revelation about O’Carroll’s Labour membership by saying he was ‘not welcome’ in the party.