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| Journalist Don Hale, the young editor of the Bury Messenger in 1984, was silenced by an official government order. |
As Hale, then 31, answered the door, a trio of plain-clothes detectives barged in, followed by a dozen police officers in uniform.
What happened next was, in Hale’s words, ‘like something out of totalitarian East Germany rather than Margaret Thatcher’s supposedly free Britain’.
The detectives identified themselves as Special Branch, the division of the police responsible for matters of national security.
‘They began to flash warrant cards and bark questions,’ says Hale. ‘It was as if they were interviewing a potential criminal rather than a law-abiding newspaper man.
‘The officers told me that I should abandon plans to print a story that was scheduled to run in our next edition. If I didn’t, they told me to expect a long jail sentence.’
Initially bewildered by their threatening tone, Hale soon worked out the purpose of the police visit.
The focus of their attention was an incendiary dossier he had been handed a few days earlier by long-serving Labour politician Barbara Castle. A powerful feminist and stalwart of the traditional Left, who served in Harold Wilson’s Cabinet, she was for years the MP for nearby Blackburn.
One of her lifelong interests, as a principled advocate for the vulnerable and powerless, was child protection. To that end, she had become concerned at the rising influence of the paedophile lobby, which was then infiltrating the political Establishment, developing links with senior public figures, including MPs, peers, civil servants and police officers.
Mrs Castle was particularly alarmed, Hale recalls, about the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which had become officially ‘affiliated’ with the influential National Council for Civil Liberties, run by future Labour frontbenchers Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Dromey. (more...)
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