Wilde Thing
It may sometimes seem like we are living through an age of finger-pointing paranoia unprecedented since the Taliban-esque era of the post-Civil War Puritans; but we have been here more recently, and a couple of centuries closer than the seventeenth. Change ‘paedophile’ to ‘homosexual’ and place not a harmless, has-been pop culture court-jester in the dock, but the most rapacious wit of the English theatre at the height of his artistic powers. It’s 1895 and Oscar Wilde is on trial for gross indecency.
Here was the original opportunity for powerful people blessed with self-righteousness and possessing a vested interest in a specific outcome to cut someone down to size and wilfully break them whilst summarily trashing their reputation for generations to come. Yes, Wilde’s vain arrogance and notion of his genius elevating him above the kind of punishment anyone in a less privileged position would have expected to receive did him no favours, but he was damned and doomed the moment he made the suicidal decision to sue the Marquess of Queensbury for libel. The failure of Wilde’s prosecution against the father of his lover and the subsequent trial it led to has been covered by numerous books and documentaries in the 120 years since it was staged at the Old Bailey and it is not my intention to go into the finer details of this. However, when one peruses the process before, during and after the event, the parallels with developments over the past two to three years are uncomfortably familiar.
Queensbury was prepared to stick by his accusation of Wilde posing as a sodomite and the defence painted a portrait of Wilde as a decadent and depraved sexual predator addicted to corrupting minors, mostly rent boys the playwright himself referred to as ‘gentlemen’s grooms’, something the defence achieved with ease via the hiring of private detectives to tail a man not known for introvert tendencies. Revelations in the libel trial that led to its collapse then led to Wilde being arrested on charges of sodomy and gross indecency. The fact that Wilde had been forced to pay Queensbury’s legal costs for the failed libel case meant he was already broken financially; now it was time to break him completely.
It was hardly a challenge for the prosecution in Regina Vs Wilde to persuade some of the young men whose services Wilde had enjoyed to be called as witnesses; after all, their own role in the affair would have been cause for imprisonment should they have refused, a potent weapon for the law to threaten them with. Therefore, the Victorian netherworld of male prostitution was ‘trawled’ for those prepared to come forward, play the victim, and denounce Wilde. Although Wilde’s closest friends remained loyal, fears of guilt by association forced many to flee abroad and effectively abandon him to secure their own safety.
The mainstream media as it existed at the time was much the same as the mainstream media today, relishing the prospect of a household name being brought down by a sex scandal, and public opinion of the playwright they had celebrated with such gusto was dictated anew by salacious press coverage. Wilde’s plays suddenly disappeared from the theatres and even male chums who would previously have linked arms in public (a common practice often referred to in Dickens novels, for example) abruptly separated now that this innocent gesture of bonhomie had acquired a sinister taint. Interestingly, when Edward Carson QC – Queensbury’s barrister at the libel trial and later the ‘founding father’ of Protestant Ulster – asked the Solicitor General if Wilde could be spared a further trial when the jury failed to reach a verdict, Frank Lockwood expressed the opinion that there was too much political pressure to allow Wilde to walk away a free man. So, back in the dock went Wilde.
The words of the Judge at the final trial, the one that resulted in Wilde being sentenced to two years’ hard labour, certainly have a ring of uncanny relevance to them, when he described it as ‘the worst case I have ever tried’. Remember, courtrooms then were just as accustomed to hosting trials involving brutal, barbaric murders as they are now, but homosexual acts were regarded as beyond the pale. His sentence may only have been two years, but the hard labour aspect was bound to leave its mark on a man whose strength was with words. Wilde’s health deteriorated rapidly during his spells at Pentonville and Wandsworth, where he endured the physically crippling cruelty of the treadmill, and it took the intervention of a reforming MP to persuade the authorities to move Wilde to a prison prone to a less harsh regime where he could see out the remainder of his sentence.
He was eventually transferred to Reading Gaol, but the actual transfer, which involved travelling by train, included a moment on a station platform when he was recognised by a member of the public; it didn’t take long for a jeering, spitting crowd to surround the man who had become used to being surrounded by crowds of a more adoring nature. The Mob was doing its duty as Wilde was incarcerated in an enlightened institution where three small children imprisoned for poaching rabbits were amongst his fellow inmates.
The sad story of Wilde’s swift decline, with his life coming to a premature end in Paris just five years after his original arrest, had an equally devastating impact on his nearest and dearest. When the scandal had broken, Wilde’s wife Constance had gone into Swiss exile with her two young sons and changed the family name to Holland, denying her children contact with their father and fobbing them off with little white lies. But as her youngest son Vyvyan later recalled, the shadow of scandal that dogged the family reflected the disgrace that Wilde, his works and those who had been associated with him were now blackened by: ‘The thought that any moment an indiscreet remark or a chance encounter with someone from our former lives might betray us was a sword of Damocles constantly hanging above our heads’.
Holland made a prescient point in his 1954 autobiography, ‘Son of Oscar Wilde’, when he spoke of it being a cruel irony that ‘Oscar Wilde should have been singled out by fate to suffer for all the countless artists who, both before and since his day, have shared his weakness.’ It took many years (and the gradual passing of the generation that had gaoled him) for the suppression of Oscar Wilde’s works to be tentatively lifted. The restoration of his reputation as a great artist was then slowly followed by a changing moral climate that enabled the appalling punishment inflicted upon him to finally be recognised as such by a wider audience than merely his loyal devotees. But how long before a radio station can play ‘Leader of the Gang’ again? How long before a repeat channel will rerun ‘It’s A Knockout’ or ‘Jim’ll Fix It’? Probably when George Osborne relocates to a rented maisonette in Middlesbrough and can be sighted on a bench outside his local Aldi armed with a roll-up and a can of Special Brew.
When Jonathan King compared his arrest, trial and sentencing to that of Wilde, I remember my reaction at the time being guided by idle cynicism, coming to the conclusion that his claim was another extension of the inexhaustible ego the man had seemed to project down the cathode ray tube for most of my life. I now stand corrected. He was right and I was wrong. The Yewtree test-case that was the Jonathan King saga is evident with the benefit of hindsight to be a resumption of something that needed a new sexual bogeyman and a new age of puritanical (not to say hypocritical) morality to give it a fresh impetus. The headlines are the same in 2015 as they were in 1895; the forces of ‘justice’ are the same in 2015 as they were in 1895; the ruthless and vindictive determination to pursue and get a result at all costs is the same in 2015 as it was in 1895; the general public’s willing gullibility to accept the agenda is the same in 2015 as it was in 1895; and the fear of being seen to condone the crime and the man by voicing common sense and an alternative to the consensus is exactly the bloody same.
Nail your colours to the mast, o seekers of truth, but be prepared to have those colours diluted by rotten eggs, animal faeces, projectile saliva and the flame of a match. For now, we are firmly out in the cold. But, hey, at least it’s one of the few places left we can still smoke.
Petunia Winegum
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February 9, 2015 at 9:55 am -
A day or two after Jimmy Savile’s death the blogger known as “T. Stokes” made a reference to:
“Young persons counselor, Karen Porter, said last night: “many young boys in various care homes can sleep easier in their beds now that Jimmy Saville has gone”.
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=36860David Icke picked up on the blog and used it to justify his own diatribe but left out the Hate Crime aspect and lo, his Ickeolytes have made the rest become History. The name of the blog-site hosting this crap has all the irony of the best of Wilde’s wit.
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February 9, 2015 at 10:09 am -
A well written piece, Petunia, I enjoyed that.
edit, although not as much as just listening to Hodge the Dodge pontificating about tax evasion on the bbc news. The ironing, the ironing !-
February 9, 2015 at 5:40 pm -
I caught that too. The BBC banging on about HSBC – about the only bloody bank NOT to get bailed out by the tax-payer! Is that the problem for the BBC? Their journalists cannot stand for anything remaining outside the State sector and do their utmost to destroy it too? Meanwhile the same journalists lie and distort history and not only align themselves with bent TV cops helping crooked lawyer$ to fleece the tax-payer and screw the criminal justice system. Time for a burning if you ask me. I’d prefer Fox – at least they admit it when they make shit up and are caught out.
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February 9, 2015 at 10:20 am -
“If we can ta… if we can prosecute or have prosecuted the most untouchable, then everybody is fair game.”
http://audioboom.com/boos/2867220-mark-williams-thomas-on-bbc-radio-5-live-gary-glitter-csa-inquiry?utm_campaign=detailpage&utm_content=retweet&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter#t=5m0s
(6 minutes long)we have been here more recently
Perhaps this also involves elements of a situation that happened across the water in a different but not dissimilar field of endeavour not too long ago, thus making it even more embarrassing for all involved. -
February 9, 2015 at 10:38 am -
Fascinating, Petunia. I was aware of the generality but not the detail. It is the aspect of “moral outrage” which concerns me about the whole Yewtree debacle. People who do bad things and commit crimes should be prosecuted, to be sure. But once the behemoth starts to roll, and the hysteria sets in, the truth of things, or the context of things, becomes a casualty. It is a truism that if the human mind looks long enough for something, it will generally find what it wants to find, or believe it has. We seem to have revisited the febrile atmosphere of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”.
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February 9, 2015 at 2:33 pm -
“But once the behemoth starts to roll, and the hysteria sets in, the truth of things, or the context of things, becomes a casualty. It is a truism that if the human mind looks long enough for something, it will generally find what it wants to find, or believe it has. ”
Ain’t that the truth! Even the memory of a genuine abuse victim/accuser can be totally and utterly wrong. Strangely enough I was writing a piece about it last night, as an exercise (not wanting to watch some inane German Cop show). It’s another Blocked Dwaf True Story where the Truth has been altered to protect the contents of that rinsed out Lidls’ pasta sauce pot with “Raccoon Arms’ Legal Fund ” written on it that sits on the bar:
There was a time when German supermarkets would sell Bier to unsuspecting innocent 14 year olds. Back in the dark past, before it was scientifically proven that just the mere sight of a glamorous beer bottle label could fair turn the head of any impressionable child and automatically condemn that child to life long addiction.
At the tender age of 14 I stood outside a German village supermarket swigging on a bottle of beer. A school exchange pupil from deepest darkest norfolk transported to the deepest darkest part of Wendland. Transported to a traditional ‘round’ village in Polabia [Shame on you! “labia” refers to the river Elbe…mind you the German for ‘bum’ is ‘po’]. A village where until about 1800 they still spoke Polabian not German- so by Norfolk standards within living memory.
So there I stood, drinking beer in the sunshine, a 14 year old FAT Brit kid, with about 3 words of German-’Bier’,’Wodka’,’Schnaps’- to his name, ok 7 words if you count ‘Hände hoch Tommy!’(Battle Action be damned) & ‘Auf Wiedershen Pet’, a fat Brit Kid who had only taken German as an O level option because the just-out-of-teacher-training German teacher was gorgeous.Next to the supermarket was a wooden barrack type long shed. The village communal Laundry. Although no doubt every Hausfrau in the village had a ‘Miele’ washing machine in her Wash Cellar, Wendish wives prefered to wash sheets and other big stuff communally- probably a Slav thing. Communal sheet pressing while wearing clothes that looked like they were nicked off the set of some Dracula film- enter Transylvanian Peasants stage left. A couple of ‘old’ women of maybe 35-40 came out of the laundry to smoke the filterless caporals of the sort favoured by Einsatzkommandos and The Dirlewanger Brigade (being strong enough to cover the corpse stench), the dark blue smoke of now-illegal black tobacco wafting over to me in an asthma curing miasma. This was of course in those dark, unenlightened days before it was proven that the merest whiff of 2nd hand smoke would cause immature lungs to cease to work on the spot.
One of the women looked over to me and FROZE. I write that large because I want to impress upon you the look of ashen shock,of long suppressed trauma returned, that drained the blood from her face. A rabbit caught in the headlamps of my azure blue child eyes. In the years since i have seen that ‘look’ a few times, it is a look that only real, deep trauma or looking into certain death can produce and by trauma I don’t mean some DJ fondling your pert 15 year old ‘po’.
She ran mewing into the Laundry and emerged seconds later with the maybe 10 other women, all gesticulating and shouting at each other in a dialect that my one school term of “Vorwarts” German had about as much chance of deciphering as a ‘I take my pen and pencil case’ German Pupil of English would have had of understanding a gang of Cornish fishwives.
One of the other women signalled for me to come over and when they realised I couldn’t speak a word of either High or Low German , one of the younger women DEMANDED in English more broken than a Daily Mail headline “you from?” and with more venom than a cobra with PMS. I started replying that i was an English schoolboy on an exchange programme when she managed to make clear that what she was actually asking was more Genealogy than Geography, not which land I came from but from whose loins.
She also DEMANDED to see my passport.
To say the atmosphere was ‘hostile’ was an understatement, even not understanding a word it was clear to me that I could well be heading for a steam press interface situation.
It transpired that for many years the woman whom my countenance had so vexed, had been horrifically abused as a child, abused by a local lad. A lad who was my doppelgaenger…my twin. She had been sure I was him , despite some 2 decades having past. Once she calmed down and started to emerge, mentally, from 1960-something, she of course realised it couldn’t have possibly been me whom the village had ‘run out on a rail’- yeah the Old Ways took a long time to die in those parts-as did lynched rapists.Probably the first time I was really in fear for my life in my life. Despite realizing that it couldn’t possibly be me that raped her, the Woman was certain that I was the son and heir of that tarred and feathered one, come to reclaim my crown …or ring.
There is no doubt in my mind that she was a genuine abuse victim, that kind of reaction can’t be faked, that kind of TERROR ‘rit large agin. But here’s the thing, I later got to meet some of the rapist’s family and I very very much doubt that he looked anything like me…beyond perhaps those sparkling azure eyes…
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PS Pet, probably your best post so far and there have been some cracking ones.
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February 9, 2015 at 2:50 pm -
I may have mentioned it in past comments but there was a short story I read many moons ago about a woman arriving home, beaten up, and telling her husband she’s just been raped. Her husband gets his gun and his mates and they drive her (it was an American story) and tour the streets, looking for the bastard. “It’s him! It’s him!” she cries, pointing at a guy walking. They bundle him into the car, take him someplace quiet, tie him to a tree, and despite his cries of not having done anything, they cut off his offensive weaponry. Arriving home again, they all swear one another to secrecy and everyone feels good about themselves. He nurses his wife with love, and after some weeks she seems to be emerging out of the trauma, and he decides to take her to a nice restaurant where they had shared many happy times in the past, to get her back out into the world. She’s smiling and happy and the meal is going ever so well, but then suddenly she leans over and grabs his wrist, staring at a man on another table, “It’s him! It’s him!” she says……..
I think it was “The Revenge” although oddly this blogger doesn’t mention the emasculation but merely says they beat the man to a pulp.
http://www.booksquawk.com/2013/02/the-fifth-pan-book-of-horror-stories.html
The reviews is however good in this descriptive… “What was properly nasty about this story is the follow-up shock, which, again, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have seen coming. It doesn’t lessen its impact. I want to criticise this story on feminist grounds, but the truth is that it carries out the mission statement of a horror story to the letter. There is something feral going on in this tale, an instinctive, savage undercurrent. It has the atmosphere of a 1970s grindhouse movie… And that makes it ahead of its time.
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February 9, 2015 at 11:41 am -
Bernie Dreyfus meets Inspector Madoff in the guise of the Pied Piper to the music of the Sorceror’s Apprentice.
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February 9, 2015 at 12:10 pm -
How depressing – Plus ça change. I’d love to think I could live long enough to see the likes of DLT & RH etc. exonerated, but I guess that’s extremely unlikely as I’m not far off turning 60. I know it’s a bit childish and vindictive but it would cheer me up no end to discover that a few of those who brought these allegations have had some serious shit heaped on them.
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February 9, 2015 at 12:33 pm -
Thank you Petunia!
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February 9, 2015 at 12:45 pm -
Dear Petunia,
This is a very fine post.
Your admission of having been “guided by idle cynicism…” is, I think, quite important.
The cynic knows little of skepticism, I suspect; such ill-intentioned gullibility does no little harm.
I fear many of us, perhaps in younger days, have mistaken idle cynicism for intelligent skepticism.
Thank you for the reminder. -
February 9, 2015 at 12:47 pm -
Good piece. Cogently argued and thought provoking.
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February 9, 2015 at 12:52 pm -
A Pet Theory of mine own from 2013 that neatly fits in I think. Never underestimate the Conspiranoid mind of the Journalist.
Nick Davies is the pre-eminent investigative journalist in the UK today. he partly cut his journalistic teeth reporting on the Bryn Estyn Scandal – a boys home where a homosexual paedophile ring was alleged. Did Meirion Jones want to believe that he had uncovered the first ever heterosexual paedophile ring, and it was taking place at Duncroft, right under his own youthful nose? I think we should be told.
It would certainly explain why he never attempted to ask his Aunt a single question. Why would not ask his own Aunt a single question before launching this benighted scandal upon the nation, and destroying so much? Did he, like Rochelle Shepherd, believe the headmistress was running some kind of …….
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/searching-for-justice.html-
February 9, 2015 at 2:53 pm -
Would she be ordinary person Number 58 on this casting agency page?
http://www.ordinarypeople.co.uk/_d-base/PDF/OPBook%20Female.pdf-
February 9, 2015 at 2:59 pm -
Ask Meirion…
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February 9, 2015 at 3:01 pm -
Moor, the day before the Met/Exaro announced that they were taking some incredible claims seriously (Operation Midland) I had popped over to the Richard Webster-site to see what he had made of things. David Hecke had asked for my view on John Allen, a subject I know next to nothing about, and thought that Webster might shed some light. (I’m still not sure why I was asked about Allen, as he had no connection that I could see to the criticisms I was making of Exaro/Hencke).
Instead of reading about Bryn Estyn I had my eye caught by Webster’s critique of Nick Davies’ book, “Flat Earth News”, which I think I saw recommended here by someone & duly downloaded, but never got around to reading.
http://www.richardwebster.net/jersey1.htm
It’s well worth a read, I think. As it was written at the time the Jersey madness was screaming from the frontpages, it ties together the notions of journalistic credulity & bad police media-tactics.
The following day I was astonished to see history apparently repeating itself with the launch of a major operation to identify the possible names of possible murder victims, based on very little actual evidence. Can we look forward to the carbon-dating of Piltdown Man?One thing’s for sure – the police now have an excellent argument against cuts to the service, as who would dare go against whipped-up public-opinion as the evil-doers resposible for those “up to 11.7 million victims” are tracked down (very slowly) & brought to what these days passes for “justice”?
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February 9, 2015 at 3:18 pm -
Davies has been noticeable by his complete absence from Savilisation. This was the man who in 1998 said there were a million hidden paedo’s. You’d think at the very least he’d want to take a bow. Hard to believe now that he never did work for Rebekah Brooks.
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February 9, 2015 at 12:59 pm -
February 9, 2015 at 2:06 pm -
That picture you have used in the story is fantastic.
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February 9, 2015 at 3:23 pm -
Interesting, isn;t it? Marie Lloyd, Cocaine tooth drops and ‘Nigger make-up’.
My Grandfather reported having seen Marie L. at a music hall, just prior to his departure to destination unknown, which turned out to be Suvla Bay. So that would have been early 1915.
Her party piece was “She sits in the cabbages and peas…”
Something of the Cilla Black.
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February 9, 2015 at 5:34 pm -
I was hoping for the one where the doctor has his hand up the lady’s dress, curing her Hysteria.
The NHS aint wot it used to be….
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February 9, 2015 at 3:23 pm -
I have to 2nd that! Pet did say he had done some photoshopping in his time (of Ladybirds) and I hope we may get a link to his other works. Which Public HealthiSSt got rid off ‘Cocaine Toothdrops’? Anyone who has had a dental abscess knows that ibruprofen just doesn’t cut it!
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February 9, 2015 at 10:18 pm -
I’d happily post some of my ‘corrupted’ Ladybird book covers, including one our beloved landlady indicated you would particularly appreciate! Maybe on a quiet news day, I’ll expose my gallery to the world…
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February 9, 2015 at 11:50 pm -
“including one our beloved landlady indicated you would particularly appreciate”
ahhh no doubt a 1st edition of “Snow -no specific ethnicity and the 7 Persons Of Restricted Growth” .
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February 10, 2015 at 12:55 am -
Actually, it was this…
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February 10, 2015 at 1:11 am -
*snork*! But I must point out that neolithic Norfolkers never used dug out canoes…or any form of water transportation. What’s the point of having webbing between your toes otherwise?
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February 9, 2015 at 5:59 pm -
I think there is one difference Petunia; the Wilde case was born of conservatism, whereas the modern cases are born of radicalism.
The judicial system of Wilde’s case was not aiming to change laws, whereas the today’s cases often herald new legislature.
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February 9, 2015 at 6:54 pm -
Oscar Wilde forsaw many of the issues we are facing today. In “The Importance Of Being Earnest” we find that Cecily (who has invented a fake engagement and written fake correspondence from someone she has never met) keeps a diary (which is full of her inventions) rather relying on memory, because memory “usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened.” – we’ve seen so many examples of that in some recent trials.
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February 9, 2015 at 6:54 pm -
The Wilde case was born of Oscar Wilde being on the wrong side of the truth. He brought the libel case even though he knew Queensbury was not lying, even if he was being bloody unpleasant. The Victorians don’t forget, took the view that a man did whatever he liked in private, just so long as he didn’t scare the horses. Well, Oscar scared the horses shitless so they kicked the shit out of him. He was hiding in plain sight but he did his own Exposure. To say he was victimised by conservatism is not the whole picture. Nor is it true to say that savilisation is only born of radicalism. The one set-piece Parliament has had on the Child Abuse matter was boycotted by the politicians, but of the desultory dozen that were in the Chamber, the majority were actually “Conservative” types and old ones at that.
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/secret-seven-politics-of-paedophilia.htmlThe 2003 Nulabor Sex Laws were widely berated at the time as appallingly open to interpretation. What seems to have happened is that for about seven years the Establishment all understood one another and all rumbled along peaceably enough together (albeit many men were still going to prison unjustly). What seems to have happened now is that the CPS under Starmer began to “interpret” the laws the way he personally felt about them and the politicians have stood back and let him do it. In the case of Historical Allegations the most unjust practice is now that “the law” is so sacrosanct [irony] that only the laws of the past they like to apply are litigated historically. Oscar Wilde is a martyr because he could have been at it with Queensbury himself and still been breaking the law whilst Jimmy Savile is the most terrible monster because he might have have beaten the age by five weeks or five hours even (when he was in his car and told the copper he was waiting for the girl to be 16…
) The whole thing is riddled with inequity as well as iniquity.All of this may only be possible because the laws were so badly made in the first place but to suggest conservativism in British society doesn’t think that it would be a jolly good job if there was a bit less sex going on, then you’re kidding yourselves, and to forget that one of the biggest blocks to Womens Lib was the Labour Union Movement is to just ignore the facts of history. Conservatism has many faces.
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February 9, 2015 at 7:26 pm -
Conservatism with a small ‘c’; the status quo; not to be confused with the political mindset.
As I understand it, the court of the Wilde case was independent of State ambitions; whereas Yew tree seems all about Statecraft by other means. Hence we are living in radical times (with a small ‘r’), whereby the populace are driven to campaign hate as a tool for change, outside of the democratic process.
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February 9, 2015 at 8:43 pm -
A couple of days ago, I opined that some in the political establishment are using the hysteria to try to smear a rival party. With that in mind, it makes the Home Secretary’s decision to start a wide-ranging Public Inquiry as a repost to the smear allegations, along the lines of ‘put up or shut up’. In other words, if the smearers have any substantive evidence, they must come clean either to the Inquiry or to the Police. If they haven’t, the fact will become glaringly obvious to all. The Inquiry is wide-ranging to avoid any accusation of a cover-up by restricting the remit.
Another point in the favour of a wide-ranging Inquiry is that it’ll take years. Maybe even a decade or so. That effectively kicks the whole thing into the long grass for as long as it lasts. It’ll probably find all sorts of minor errors on the part of all sorts of institutions, which will all tighten their managements accordingly, but as we haven’t really heard any substantive evidence of serious wrongdoing (in the Westminster arena – scandals such as Rotherham are another matter), it’s unlikely that the Inquiry will uncover any. We’ve already had investigations into the ‘Dickens Dossier’ which showed fairly conclusively that it didn’t amount to much, and whatever was in it that might have been ‘of interest to the Police’ was passed to them. A full investigation of everything is likely to reach a very similar result, albeit rather more slowly.
Thus, I think the Inquiry is a good thing. It will properly investigate the real problems such as Rotherham et al, and it will force the hand of would-be political smearers.
It also occurs to me that it indicates that the political Left know they are about beaten. They have lost the intellectual arguments in a whole range of fields; ownership of the means of production, State welfare, education, and so on. Smearing their opponents is all they have left. The last desperate plays of a failed ideology.
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February 9, 2015 at 11:19 pm -
The legislation which snared Wilde in 1895 was created a decade earlier as an amendment to a government bill by a Liberal/radical MP called Henry Labouchere (who was otherwise quite a decent chap – I read Hesketh Pearson’s biography of him a while ago) – rather than being the work of some high Tory Victorian homophobic Sir Tufton Bufton. Wilde would indeed have been left alone if he hadn’t dragged the whole thing into the public arena so glaringly by suing Lord Queensberry. Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the marquis) egged Wilde on, wanting to see his father, who he detested, sent to jail for libel. Wilde allowed himself to be enmeshed even more in a fierce, ongoing Douglas family feud. Poor Oscar, in his hubris, thought he could outsmart all the “philistines”, after all, he was so much cleverer than them (though some think Wilde may have sought a martyrdom). He found out differently after his 3 trials. Oscar was such a kindly, generous man, it’s hard not to sympathize deeply with his fate – he didn’t exploit or abuse anybody.
Well, similarly, in our own time, it was old, authoritarian radical leftists, Blunkett and Straw, who created the string of absurd and sinister new adult “sex crimes” which now litter the statute book and are ruining more innocuous people, just like the Labouchere amendment did for 80 years. As we see with Labouchere’s law (1885 – 1967), once on the books it can take decades to get this stuff repealed or even amended.
Are people here familiar with New Labour’s Criminal justice and immigration act 2008 section 63 – 68 ? For here Blunkett and Straw (spurred on by a former Labour backbencher called Martin Salter) created another category of sex criminal unique to the UK in the western world – the “extreme” adult porn fiend. Largely aimed at BDSMers, it was piggybacked on a solitary murder case. It was “justified” by ridiculous home office comparisons of consensual adult material with child porn, and by lots of prodnosed moralizing – and hysteria, all bogus, about supposed real life abuse – eg people being killed in snuff films (largely in Guatemala apparently!) etc, with nothing factual to back up any of these claims. The lords actually nearly got it thrown out; it was only Labour whipping (oh, the irony!) which got it through in the upper house.
Many have been snared by this “dangerous pictures act” since 2009 (most people probably don’t realize the law exists), including a gay former aid to the London mayor – the police used the Harris tactic for him, telling the press he possibly possessed “child porn” – like Harris, he didn’t. The jury cleared that individual. The story got him on “Newsnight” – where the law came in for a lot of criticism (knowing the BBC, probably mainly because its target here was a gay person). The police/CPS also went after a hapless bus driver who had a clip on his phone of a woman cavorting with “Tony the tiger”. That prosecution was dropped, but the man’s life has been ruined in the process – it was automatically assumed by the great unwashed he was being investigated for child porn – as the ignorant believe only that can actually be illegal… not so after New Labour has had its hands on our legal system. No one can be sure what exactly is illegal under this law, as it is stuffed with subjective definitions. In many ways it extends the old, cobwebbed, and idiotic Obscene Publications act to the private sphere. It’s almost certainly legislation incompatible with the human rights act, but Straw signed it off as being compatible – though they wont release the alleged legal advice under the FIA on which this compatibility claim was supposedly based – probably because it doesn’t actually exist. Cameron has reacted to largely feminist Millie Tant screeching by extending this Labour law even further.
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February 23, 2015 at 9:17 am -
Brilliant article. Nothing changes when it comes to hysteria, corruption and the utterly immoral morally self-righteous.
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