Mick Hartley

Jo Bartosch in The Critic:

Was David Icke right — are politicians unfeeling space lizards in human suits? Last week, when MPs on the Women and Equalities Select Committee (WESC) were told repeatedly that children are being groomed into dangerous sexual practices by unregulated Relationships and Sex Education providers (SRE), they didn’t so much as blink. During the hearing led by Labour’s Kate Osborne MP, members (with the honourable exception of Conservative Mark Jenkinson MP) barely contained their derision for the campaigners who were attempting to warn them.

The first to address the WESC was Safe Schools Alliance spokeswoman, Tanya Carter. She carefully explained to Carolyn Harris MP, who is also Deputy Leader of Welsh Labour, that there is no central register for people who deliver SRE. This apparently was a surprise to Harris. Alongside Lottie Moore of Policy Exchange and Lucy Marsh of the Family Education Trust, Carter further enlightened Harris that parents often have to fight to view the materials being taught to their children by private providers who are chosen by schools and paid for from their budgets. 

Carter explained that both unscientific notions about gender identity and a pornography inspired “sex positive” approach were being pushed in classrooms across the UK. This stigma-banishing doctrine holds that so long as consent is given, sexual partners can be tortured and beaten, and moral judgement must only be reserved for judgement itself. On occasion egregious examples have burst through onto the pages of newspapers, such as when children were taught by a drag queen there were 73 genders and another when girls were informed that prostitution is a “rewarding job”. 

Safe Schools Alliance (SSA) asked that their analysis of international “sexuality education” be circulated ahead of the meeting. When Osborne was asked whether she’d found the time to read it, she snapped, “You’re here to answer questions, not ask them.”

The report, which Osborne declined to confirm that she had read, carefully traces current trends in British classrooms to WHO and UNESCO. Disturbingly, WHO guidance says that children aged four and under should be taught about “enjoyment and pleasure when touching one’s own body, early childhood masturbation”. SSA argues that UNESCO and WHO advocate for “children’s sexual rights” in line with the tenets of Queer Theory. The concept of age appropriateness has been replaced with “developmental” appropriateness, and the concerns of families are high-handedly dismissed as an impediment to children’s sexual liberation. What has been revealed by SSA is a global sex education agenda that would’ve been warmly welcomed by the Paedophile Information Exchange….

Osborne and Harris looked at the campaigners who were there to warn them about failures in child safeguarding as if they were the immaculately conceived spawn of Mary Whitehouse and preacher Billy Graham….

Yet this year alone reports by the New Social Covenant Unit, Policy Exchange and Civitas, have sought to raise the alarm about dangerous and inappropriate RSE being delivered in schools. Arguably, the window of opportunity where directing sexualised content to children is recognised as harmful is closing; a generation are now entering the workforce who have been brought-up in a pornography saturated world.

But Labour MPs like Kate Osborne and Carolyn Harris just sneer…