Today we have legal tolerance, and, indeed, encouragement of men, clothed or naked, in women’s toilets and In woman and children’s changing rooms and anyone who complains is likely to be prosecuted for breaching trans rights.
As I read, I thought of how the normalization of confusing children about gender will be viewed years from now. How could telling a boy that he is a girl and feminizing or changing his name, letting his hair grow and insisting he be allowed in girls' toilets and all be good for him? How could convincing a boy or girl to mutilate themselves to look like the opposite sex be good for anyone? How could the government decree that men, whether they've mutilated themselves or not, must be treated like women? Questions and more questions...
Yes, just as we look back in horror at some aspects of the 1970s and attitudes towards sex, I think that in future decades people will scarcely believe it possible that we behaved in this way about sex and gender!
Legislation and CRB checks are all very well but perverts will find a way: they’re a resourceful bunch. If you’ve ever wondered what the long term goal of progressives and identity ideologues is, wonder no more.
On the NMC website look for those who have been struck off for misconduct/conviction, there’s an active link in the right hand column that says what the sanction is.
Likewise on the MPTS website look for those doctors who have been “erased”, if you click on the name of the doctor then it takes you to another page. If it says Decision Published, then go down the page to an active link box named Decision.
You may be surprised how many are for sexual misconduct of various types including images of children.
As all doctors and nurses are required to have advanced DBS clearances this shows the deficiency in that system.
It's pretty telling, I think, that a sensible individual like yourself - whom I've seen and heard, if I'm not mistaken, contrasting the mores and mentality of the nineteen-seventies extremely favourably with the mores and mentality of the twenty-twenties in literally dozens of different respects - should suddenly be found chiming in with the consensus sapienti of our actually far from sapient present day and condemning, before the bar of our "low, dishonest decade", this much finer one from half a century ago. I fear that the lesson we need to learn from this is that the most potent weapon in the arsenal of globalist totalitarianism - far more potent than the "anti-racist" line of hokum or even the antiquated old hokum about "capitalist exploitation" and "workers' right" - is the relentless feminist demonization of male sexuality which is where all this tosh you've written ultimately comes from, whether you're aware of it or not. You've been a model of sanity and strong-mindedness in resisting the first two strains of bullshit but clearly you've completely folded before this last one.
As I say, you're a smart man and possessed, moreover, of an actual intellectual conscience so I'm sure if you'll just stop for a moment and think about what you've written here you'll realize it's just not worthy of you. Nigh-impossible though it is to call, at this point, even intelligent people back to sanity on these questions, let me point out the following nonetheless:
No sexual offence of any kind has ever been proven against Jimmy Saville. The whole decade-and-a-half-long orgy of hysteria and morbid ideation about the man consists entirely and exclusively of forensically untested claims, allegations and anecdotes. I don't have such a morbid obsession with the case myself as to be able to say that I've looked into all these claims and found every one to be false. But I do feel that I can contend with confidence that the overwhelming majority of the grand guignol horror stories that have been told about the man in the past fifteen years are as false as the grotesque ramblings of Carl Beech, which formed the sole basis for the horrendously expensive and recklessly abusive "Operation Midland", a fairly representative example of the improvement in the mores of British society brought about by the Saville "revelations".
Rolf Harris's trial and conviction, as far as I can make out, was a ridiculous shambles of foregone conclusions and ludicrous lumping together of incidents of entirely different natures, often lying decades apart, which took place at the very crescendo of the post-Saville hysteria and, this being the case, could only possibly have had the result it did. Again, I've no doubt that Harris was guilty of lapsing into the sort of sad indignities that men in middle and old age have been known to lapse into throughout human history and may well have made a last pathetic grasp for the fullness and joy of life by letting himself become infatuated with teenage girls when he was in his forties and fifties. But the systematic attempts made, at his trial, to induce confusion in the jury's minds between such pitiable little episodes as these and vaguely adumbrated acts of actual child abuse, wildly extemporized out of fifty-year-old women's vague recollections of Harris's having brushed their bottom with the back of their hand as he presented them with a prize forty years before - these attempts, I would argue, are more morally repellent than anything that Harris himself is likely ever to have done.
As to Huw Edwards, I imagine you'll have been able to glean by now that, far from sharing the outrage supposedly felt by most of the right - including the wishy-washy "faux right" represented by outfits like Unherd - that Edwards was not given a much heavier punishment, I fail to see what it was that the man deserved to be punished for at all. The deliberate obfuscation that seems to exist in English law of the difference between "making" an obscene image of a child and "receiving" one (even in, as seems to have been Edwards's case, quite unsolicitedly) really stinks, morally, to high heaven and clearly permits the infliction of the most terrible injustices. And above and beyond this specious nonsense, I can't see that Edwards did anything really wrong - as opposed, once again, to merely pathetic and despicable - at all. I find I can generate no great sympathy in my heart for the seventeen-year-old male prostitute who manfully mastered his "feelings of being groomed" enough to accept a total of thirty-five thousand pounds from Edwards for photos of his penis.
To sum up, then, sir, I would strongly urge you to worry less about protecting your "left flank" here - i.e. stressing and straining to avoid giving the impression of someone who's lagging too many steps behind in the insane, screeching, blood-thirsting witch-hunt, that's taken hold of our society almost in its entirety in recent years, after anyone whose sexual desires may have strayed too close to the dread realm of the "inappropriate" - and worry more about protecting your "right" one: i.e. doing all you can to DISTANCE yourself from this ever-louder chorus of cant and nonsense about what a dreadful and deplorable thing it was, and still is, for a forty-year-old Likely Lad to feel titillated by the thought of a sixteen-year-old in a gym-slip.
I'm not a boomer, I'm not yet 40, but I was opposed to all the "safeguarding" and CRB introduction by Blair. It increased the amount of paperwork and difficulties for people running groups for children and so there are fewer than would otherwise be the case. Further, it embedded in the minds of the public that every adult with a child (especially a man) was a potential abuser. Further, with CRBs mere allegations which are unsubstantiated will go on a CRB possibly harming a man's career for life.
I'm not sure we (born before 1950?) do forget it, rather I regard it as common usage rather than abusage. Your essay seems to me to contain a lot of prejudicial language, which I'd have thought inappropriate for a historian - though perhaps you are wearing a different hat today..
Applying current codes of behaviour to past events may have some value in debating those current ideas, but IMO doesn't help understanding the past, when people were living under different codes. You end up being amazed and appalled by past events, rather than seeing them as clues to understand the thinking of people at the time. It would be more interesting to me to understand why and how people's attitudes have changed.
Alexander Baron (who I do not know) has sent you some links about Jimmy Savile. These websites are very detailed. The following links about Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris provide a more concise summary correcting the misinformation you are spreading about these two individuals.
I hope you will do the decent thing and issue an apology and correction for the misleading assumptions you made without apparently undertaking any research of your own on the matter.
Thank you. I would very much appreciate an open minded critical assessment of these findings. Some of the information in the Savile document relating to the Duncroft School complainants is slightly incorrect as a result of more recent revelations, but this does not affect the overall conclusions. If you have any evidence or information to refute these findings this would be most helpful.
I can't disagree with the historical background, but you are totally mistaken about both Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris, and very likely about Huw Edwards. I've just made a video about Edwards; he was an older man who lost the plot. Savile and Rolf were innocent. Rolf's only so-called victim was a much younger female, a friend of his daughter, with whom he'd had a consensual if foolish affair. She turned against Rolf when she found out he had another mistress but waited a decade and a half for her revenge. As for Savile - teenage girls have been known to commit suicide for all manner of reasons. I knew one who did, but I will say no more about that. Here are some links to set the record straight:
One of our local secondary schools had a uniform change a few years ago, and to be honest I consider the girls’ uniform to be very very dodgy. Certainly it would have raised eyebrows in the late 60’s and early 70’s when I was at school. It looks like a throwback to St Trinians but worse. What is more concerning is that it’s a Catholic school.
This can be a two way street. As an 8 or 9 year old boy back in the 50s I was propositioned by two girls on different occasions and they were only a couple of years older than me! And I did witness a local scout master indulging in so called play fighting with my best mate at the time. The former went to prison for molesting small boys.
I once had an arts radio show and I interviewed the show photographer for “Top Of Thé Pops,” when it was produced in Manchester.
After the show all the acts would go on to a pub in Rusholme and lots of the young girls from the audience would also be invited.
All sorts of tawdry stuff happened in the pub but the landlord had some standards: to this day, a ‘manly,’ male singer of international fame is barred because he was caught interfering with a 13 year old girl.
You mentioned DJ John Peel (née Ravenscroft) who enjoyed both dressing as a school girl and lusting after them. The British establishment's official 'bad boy' act the Rolling Stones had all sorts of songs about raping slaves and underage runaways ('brown sugar', 'Stray Cat Blues') that were considered the height of musical cool in the early 70's, while Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant would appear on stage many nights wearing the blouses of girls he'd ''slept with' the previous night. At this point in our history all this was celebrated as sophisticated and hip. We live in a totally different and far more paranoid era today, also greatly complicated by gender confusion and homosexuality being celebrated with 'pride' and societal innocence...
I think it was also prevalent in the 1960s. Songs such as “Young Girl”, (get out of my life… ending with “better run girl, you’re much too young girl.”)
Today we have legal tolerance, and, indeed, encouragement of men, clothed or naked, in women’s toilets and In woman and children’s changing rooms and anyone who complains is likely to be prosecuted for breaching trans rights.
Yes, it certainly makes it easier for perverted men to gain access to little girls.
As I read, I thought of how the normalization of confusing children about gender will be viewed years from now. How could telling a boy that he is a girl and feminizing or changing his name, letting his hair grow and insisting he be allowed in girls' toilets and all be good for him? How could convincing a boy or girl to mutilate themselves to look like the opposite sex be good for anyone? How could the government decree that men, whether they've mutilated themselves or not, must be treated like women? Questions and more questions...
Yes, just as we look back in horror at some aspects of the 1970s and attitudes towards sex, I think that in future decades people will scarcely believe it possible that we behaved in this way about sex and gender!
Don’t forget Grease, although the characters are meant to be 16, what was the age of consent in the USA in the 1950’s?
You mentioned Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan, there’s also Ruddigore.
Good points!
Legislation and CRB checks are all very well but perverts will find a way: they’re a resourceful bunch. If you’ve ever wondered what the long term goal of progressives and identity ideologues is, wonder no more.
Yes, we can never weed out all characters of this kind, but I think we can do our best to keep them away from kids.
If you want proof of this all you have to do is visit the following websites
https://www.nmc.org.uk/concerns-nurses-midwives/hearings/hearings-sanctions/
https://www.mpts-uk.org/hearings-and-decisions/medical-practitioners-tribunals
On the NMC website look for those who have been struck off for misconduct/conviction, there’s an active link in the right hand column that says what the sanction is.
Likewise on the MPTS website look for those doctors who have been “erased”, if you click on the name of the doctor then it takes you to another page. If it says Decision Published, then go down the page to an active link box named Decision.
You may be surprised how many are for sexual misconduct of various types including images of children.
As all doctors and nurses are required to have advanced DBS clearances this shows the deficiency in that system.
Very interesting read.
It's pretty telling, I think, that a sensible individual like yourself - whom I've seen and heard, if I'm not mistaken, contrasting the mores and mentality of the nineteen-seventies extremely favourably with the mores and mentality of the twenty-twenties in literally dozens of different respects - should suddenly be found chiming in with the consensus sapienti of our actually far from sapient present day and condemning, before the bar of our "low, dishonest decade", this much finer one from half a century ago. I fear that the lesson we need to learn from this is that the most potent weapon in the arsenal of globalist totalitarianism - far more potent than the "anti-racist" line of hokum or even the antiquated old hokum about "capitalist exploitation" and "workers' right" - is the relentless feminist demonization of male sexuality which is where all this tosh you've written ultimately comes from, whether you're aware of it or not. You've been a model of sanity and strong-mindedness in resisting the first two strains of bullshit but clearly you've completely folded before this last one.
As I say, you're a smart man and possessed, moreover, of an actual intellectual conscience so I'm sure if you'll just stop for a moment and think about what you've written here you'll realize it's just not worthy of you. Nigh-impossible though it is to call, at this point, even intelligent people back to sanity on these questions, let me point out the following nonetheless:
No sexual offence of any kind has ever been proven against Jimmy Saville. The whole decade-and-a-half-long orgy of hysteria and morbid ideation about the man consists entirely and exclusively of forensically untested claims, allegations and anecdotes. I don't have such a morbid obsession with the case myself as to be able to say that I've looked into all these claims and found every one to be false. But I do feel that I can contend with confidence that the overwhelming majority of the grand guignol horror stories that have been told about the man in the past fifteen years are as false as the grotesque ramblings of Carl Beech, which formed the sole basis for the horrendously expensive and recklessly abusive "Operation Midland", a fairly representative example of the improvement in the mores of British society brought about by the Saville "revelations".
Rolf Harris's trial and conviction, as far as I can make out, was a ridiculous shambles of foregone conclusions and ludicrous lumping together of incidents of entirely different natures, often lying decades apart, which took place at the very crescendo of the post-Saville hysteria and, this being the case, could only possibly have had the result it did. Again, I've no doubt that Harris was guilty of lapsing into the sort of sad indignities that men in middle and old age have been known to lapse into throughout human history and may well have made a last pathetic grasp for the fullness and joy of life by letting himself become infatuated with teenage girls when he was in his forties and fifties. But the systematic attempts made, at his trial, to induce confusion in the jury's minds between such pitiable little episodes as these and vaguely adumbrated acts of actual child abuse, wildly extemporized out of fifty-year-old women's vague recollections of Harris's having brushed their bottom with the back of their hand as he presented them with a prize forty years before - these attempts, I would argue, are more morally repellent than anything that Harris himself is likely ever to have done.
As to Huw Edwards, I imagine you'll have been able to glean by now that, far from sharing the outrage supposedly felt by most of the right - including the wishy-washy "faux right" represented by outfits like Unherd - that Edwards was not given a much heavier punishment, I fail to see what it was that the man deserved to be punished for at all. The deliberate obfuscation that seems to exist in English law of the difference between "making" an obscene image of a child and "receiving" one (even in, as seems to have been Edwards's case, quite unsolicitedly) really stinks, morally, to high heaven and clearly permits the infliction of the most terrible injustices. And above and beyond this specious nonsense, I can't see that Edwards did anything really wrong - as opposed, once again, to merely pathetic and despicable - at all. I find I can generate no great sympathy in my heart for the seventeen-year-old male prostitute who manfully mastered his "feelings of being groomed" enough to accept a total of thirty-five thousand pounds from Edwards for photos of his penis.
To sum up, then, sir, I would strongly urge you to worry less about protecting your "left flank" here - i.e. stressing and straining to avoid giving the impression of someone who's lagging too many steps behind in the insane, screeching, blood-thirsting witch-hunt, that's taken hold of our society almost in its entirety in recent years, after anyone whose sexual desires may have strayed too close to the dread realm of the "inappropriate" - and worry more about protecting your "right" one: i.e. doing all you can to DISTANCE yourself from this ever-louder chorus of cant and nonsense about what a dreadful and deplorable thing it was, and still is, for a forty-year-old Likely Lad to feel titillated by the thought of a sixteen-year-old in a gym-slip.
I'm not a boomer, I'm not yet 40, but I was opposed to all the "safeguarding" and CRB introduction by Blair. It increased the amount of paperwork and difficulties for people running groups for children and so there are fewer than would otherwise be the case. Further, it embedded in the minds of the public that every adult with a child (especially a man) was a potential abuser. Further, with CRBs mere allegations which are unsubstantiated will go on a CRB possibly harming a man's career for life.
I'm not sure we (born before 1950?) do forget it, rather I regard it as common usage rather than abusage. Your essay seems to me to contain a lot of prejudicial language, which I'd have thought inappropriate for a historian - though perhaps you are wearing a different hat today..
Applying current codes of behaviour to past events may have some value in debating those current ideas, but IMO doesn't help understanding the past, when people were living under different codes. You end up being amazed and appalled by past events, rather than seeing them as clues to understand the thinking of people at the time. It would be more interesting to me to understand why and how people's attitudes have changed.
Further to my reply to Simon below here’s one I have just found
https://www.mpts-uk.org/-/media/mpts-rod-files/dr-alexander-knight-03-sep-24.pdf
This doctor was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment, probably because he didn’t plead guilty or show remorse.
https://www.mpts-uk.org/-/media/mpts-rod-files/dr-huw-glover-05-sep-24.pdf
https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/ftpoutcomes/2024/september-2024/reasons-apana-agey-ftpcsm-87836-20240906.pdf
These are a disgrace to my former profession as a nurse practitioner.
Alexander Baron (who I do not know) has sent you some links about Jimmy Savile. These websites are very detailed. The following links about Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris provide a more concise summary correcting the misinformation you are spreading about these two individuals.
http://bit.ly/2dybGYs
http://bit.ly/2mMrQza
https://bit.ly/3OqfbPk
I hope you will do the decent thing and issue an apology and correction for the misleading assumptions you made without apparently undertaking any research of your own on the matter.
I have my own opinions on the matter, but will certainly look at these links.
Thank you. I would very much appreciate an open minded critical assessment of these findings. Some of the information in the Savile document relating to the Duncroft School complainants is slightly incorrect as a result of more recent revelations, but this does not affect the overall conclusions. If you have any evidence or information to refute these findings this would be most helpful.
Of course, indecent exposure does not matter if you get higher up, like Mountbatten and Heath, two notorious pre boomer deviants.
Is there actual evidence about Edward Heath? I have heard many rumours, of course.
I can't disagree with the historical background, but you are totally mistaken about both Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris, and very likely about Huw Edwards. I've just made a video about Edwards; he was an older man who lost the plot. Savile and Rolf were innocent. Rolf's only so-called victim was a much younger female, a friend of his daughter, with whom he'd had a consensual if foolish affair. She turned against Rolf when she found out he had another mistress but waited a decade and a half for her revenge. As for Savile - teenage girls have been known to commit suicide for all manner of reasons. I knew one who did, but I will say no more about that. Here are some links to set the record straight:
https://annaraccoon.com/
https://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.com/
https://old.bitchute.com/video/hfBYZ68rTTEs/
https://rolfharris.site/rolf-harris-press-2023-5-23.pdf
https://rolfharris.site/rolf-harris-letter-2017-12-12.pdf
I shall certainly look at these.
One of our local secondary schools had a uniform change a few years ago, and to be honest I consider the girls’ uniform to be very very dodgy. Certainly it would have raised eyebrows in the late 60’s and early 70’s when I was at school. It looks like a throwback to St Trinians but worse. What is more concerning is that it’s a Catholic school.
This can be a two way street. As an 8 or 9 year old boy back in the 50s I was propositioned by two girls on different occasions and they were only a couple of years older than me! And I did witness a local scout master indulging in so called play fighting with my best mate at the time. The former went to prison for molesting small boys.
I once had an arts radio show and I interviewed the show photographer for “Top Of Thé Pops,” when it was produced in Manchester.
After the show all the acts would go on to a pub in Rusholme and lots of the young girls from the audience would also be invited.
All sorts of tawdry stuff happened in the pub but the landlord had some standards: to this day, a ‘manly,’ male singer of international fame is barred because he was caught interfering with a 13 year old girl.
He was not the only one to be barred.
Sad to say, this was pretty much par for the course in the 1970s.
You mentioned DJ John Peel (née Ravenscroft) who enjoyed both dressing as a school girl and lusting after them. The British establishment's official 'bad boy' act the Rolling Stones had all sorts of songs about raping slaves and underage runaways ('brown sugar', 'Stray Cat Blues') that were considered the height of musical cool in the early 70's, while Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant would appear on stage many nights wearing the blouses of girls he'd ''slept with' the previous night. At this point in our history all this was celebrated as sophisticated and hip. We live in a totally different and far more paranoid era today, also greatly complicated by gender confusion and homosexuality being celebrated with 'pride' and societal innocence...
Indeed. You might say “It’s not unusual.”
I think it was also prevalent in the 1960s. Songs such as “Young Girl”, (get out of my life… ending with “better run girl, you’re much too young girl.”)
Eek.
…With all the Mum’s at home humming along…