Revealed: The civil servant in the Home Office’s PIE funding inquiry and his academic articles on boy love

 

A former top civil servant who later went on to write academic articles on the love between men and boys in  ancient Greece and in Benjamin’s Britten’s operas is at the centre of a Home Office inquiry into whether he sanctioned taxpayers’ cash to fund the Paedophile Information Exchange.

Clifford Hindley, who died some five years ago, was head of the Home Office’s Voluntary Services Unit from at least 1979 until 1983, which is now under investigation after a former civil servant has alleged there may have been a ” cover up ” over a grant  re-application from PIE.

 Reports in Exaro News and The People reveal today that the Home Office inquiry  under permanent secretary. Mark Sedwill is examining  recollections from the whistleblower that when he raised questions about why the Home Office should fund such an organisation Mr Hindley brushed  this aside and asked him to hand over the paperwork. This happened around 1979 and 1980.

This has raised the question  – as the whistleblower thinks it was a re-application  -whether the  Callaghan Labour and Thatcher Conservative governments actually funded PIE just at the time when the National Council for Civil Liberties was also supporting the organisation, Such a decision  would be far worse than the present row going on between the Daily Mail and Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, over her role at NCCL. It would mean that taxpayer’s cash has been given to fund paedophiles.

The whistleblower  originally contacted Tom Watson MP who passed him on to the Home Office.
Last night Tom Watson said: “It’s a remarkable state of affairs and the Home Secretary must make sure a ­report is presented as soon as possible.

“If the allegations are true, it shows how insidious an organisation PIE was that they could even convince the Home Office to give them taxpayers’ money.”

 Investigations by Exaro revealed that Mr Hindley, an assistant secretary in Whitehall, holds degrees in classics and philosophy from Oxford University and a degree in theology from Cambridge.

Exaro has also found articles  and book contributions written by  Clifford Hindley after he retired  for academic and music magazines – all entirely on same sex relationships between men and boys.

 His contribution to the Cambridge Companion on the composer Benjamin Britten is entirely on  emphasising the love relationships between boys and men in his operas – a view that is challenged by other experts on Britten. as too extreme.

 He has also written articles on the Greek historian and pupil of Socrates, Xenophon,  again entirely on love between men and youths – either in the army or in society.

Ian Pace, a lecturer in music at City University, where he is head of performance, and a researcher said: “It is very hard to deny that there are pederastic themes in some of Britten’s operas, most obviously The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice (mirroring such themes in the original literary works of Henry James and Thomas Mann respectively); and arguably also in Peter Grimes and Let’s Make an Opera (The Little Sweep). 

 “Some of Hindley’s writings on Britten certainly show a strong interest in such pederastic elements.”

An example is his description of the relationship between the ghost Quint and the boy Miles in  the Turn of the Screw.

 Hindley writes: “‘Quint is not a monster but one who opens fascinating new opportunities to the imaginative boy. Also fundamental is the fact that their relationship is one of homosexual love. It is presented as an emotional and mutually responsive relationship, in which the physical element is barely hinted at. It is nevertheless a bond of the kind rejected by conventional society’.”

The Home Office were not giving anything away about the inquiry – though it sounds as though documents – particularly from the Thatcher era – appear to be missing on anything to do with PIE.

At the moment a search is on to find out whether  a dead man files will disclose a highly damaging fact that the vile organisation the Paedophile Information Exchange was actually funded by the government.

24 thoughts on “Revealed: The civil servant in the Home Office’s PIE funding inquiry and his academic articles on boy love

  1. Reblogged this on Vox Political and commented:
    If this theory is borne out, then the Daily Mail’s vendetta against Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey and Patricia Hewitt will fade into insignificance; the suggestion here is that, through a senior civil servant, successive governments including that of Margaret Thatcher (who the Mail loves so stridently) funded the Paedophile Information Exchange using taxpayers’ money – a far, far more serious issue.

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    • @mike sivier. We have only scratched the surface on this..MI5 westland affair with sikorksy and nasty westland bods at EGH
      and THAT seized video tape with HO minister on it…

      And threats made by PB and his missus VB as patron of national children’s bureau at the time when peter righton was there

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      • What about the ” raid ” at home office when the Geoffrey dickens PIE dossier went missing
        With all the names of PIE members on it.

        And the fact that steven smith a PIE member worked at home office as heating engineer

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  2. How very telling: in fact Turn of the Screw is perhaps the most terrifying of all ghost stories exactly because of the sense of pure evil that is conveyed in the act of possession of the innnocent children by Quint – and the governess. To interpret that as a relationship of equality rather than exploitation could only be made by someone whose own moral judgement has been fatally corrupted.

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    • Hindley goes arguably even further than that, in ‘Why Does Miles Die? A Study of Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw”’, The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 1 (1990), pp. 1-17:

      ‘What is “the ceremony of innocence,” and is its drowning a bad thing? A ceremony is an artificial sequence of actions which may have a meaning assigned to it by convention and tradition but which has no intrinsic rightness or authority. Applied to a child, the phrase suggests that in infancy the child accepts everything it is told: its standards of behaviour are derivative. Whether in obedience or disobedience, it follows the judgments imposed upon it by adults. But this acceptance of conventional standards (for no other reason than that they are conventional) can last long into adulthood. In that sense, adults, too, can engage in the “ceremony of innocence.” They can have a kind of unquestioning naïveté about what is going on. They, too, can be described as “innocents”. Drowning the ceremony of innocence, therefore, while it may be taken to refer to a corruption of primal purity, may equally well signify the release of the convention-bound spirit into a world of more mature and sophisticated experience.’ (p. 5)

      ‘But once Quint’s influence is no longer seen as intrinsically evil, but (potentially, at least) as beneficial, then a solution to the problem suggests itself, one which arises out of the interpretation here offered of the phrase “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Read as a metaphor for the maturing of experience, the phrase need not carry the disquieting overtones of “corruption.” To replace the restrictions and limitations of childhood by the free and wide experience of the adult is more gain than loss. No doubt in this process each must make his or her own way, but (as Socrates said of philosophy) governesses, tutors, and the whole process of nurture and education should be the midwives to assist at the birth of the mature personality.’ (p. 9)

      ‘The term “tutelage” seems the best available. It has the added merit of implying a degree both of personal concern and of authority or control over the young person committed to one’s charge-a form of power which both the Governess and Quint in varying degrees seek to exercise over the boy. Let us then call the music associated with it the ‘”Tutelage” theme.’ (p. 10)

      ‘If the relationship of tutor or governess may deepen into love, we must now address the question which the partial lifting of taboos in recent years has allowed to feature more prominently in the discussion of this opera-the implicit homosexual relationship between Quint and Miles. No doubt the ban on all forms of homosexual relationships at the time the opera was written would have excluded any direct representation of “the love that dare not speak its name.” But given the inevitable reticence of language, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Mrs.Grose’s description in Act I, Scene 5, points to a sexual relationship. Quint, she says, was “free with everyone, with little Master Miles.” He “liked them pretty,” and “had his will, morning and night. ‘ (pp. 10-11)

      Hindley drew extensively, here and elsewhere, upon Kenneth Dover’s 1978 book Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), a book equally centered upon pederasty, for many of his ideas. This book was also favoured as amongst the top 20 works of non-fiction in Magpie.

      (more on all of these things at http://ianpace.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/clifford-hindley-pederasty-and-scholarship/ )

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      • @ian pace it always amazed me how these perverts would intelltualize their perversions .there were similar articles in PAN boylove magazine by Spartacus ..on and on they went with historic paedophiles
        Along with just pure fantasies they would write .eg some involving boys lusting after priests ..!!

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    • @theresa that their delusion ..in their addled head these youngsters bring it on themselves and encourage those ” vulnerable ” paedos.
      Time and time again I have read such tripe in their ” publications “

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  3. Reblogged this on Beastrabban’s Weblog and commented:
    This seems to add considerable weight to some of the rumours I’ve seen on other websites that 10 Downing Street had strong links to a paedophile network under Mrs Thatcher. If these allegations are true, then Mike over at Vox Political is correct in his comment that this will knock the Daily Mail’s accusations about Harriet Harman into the shade.

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  4. Why do I have the horrible feeling that this will run out to a decision that PIE misrepresented itself as a therapy source for paedophiles in order to get its hands the cash? And that the govt will probably even try to say something along the lines that they didn’t fully understand what PIE’s true nature was and that “lessons will be learned”?

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    • @darren PIE were passing themselves off as child sex liberation lot..claiming that children were sexual beings that needed “liberating” even in its early days they were seeking acceptance using any means such as infiltrating gay rights groups
      Eg CHE where in brighton conference some 22 CHE members supported PIE by condemining the imprisonment of PIE members eg Tom O Carrol

      Also CHE members were connected to abuses in crest hotel in north Wales care homes scandals

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  5. Reblogged this on Guy Debord's Cat and commented:
    I’m reblogging this from David Hencke’s blog. The Harman/Dromey/Hewitt/NCCL/PIE story is a massive distraction. The real culprits were protected by the Thatcher government and PIE’s Peter Righton even received funding from the Home Office. I have a blog in the pipeline about this issue.

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    • @buddyhell thanks
      Apart from the tricked video tape seized by customs which had senior tory cabinet minister abusing a boy
      There is this recent number ten aide thing which was kept quiet for weeks so that the DM could run its smokescreen

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      • Some people need to come into present day life, 30 years ago I and Scotland yard knew about Savil and one other still alive now left the country it was known then by Scotland yard that Savil and ? could not be named until they are dead because they both raise many millions for the BIG charities so much for the big charities who are suppose to put a stop to all child abuse but then charities are not allowed to be political other wise no grants and no charity, so let the kids continue to suffer and the pardophiles take their pick from poor little kids stolen and sold into the British Empire of kids for cash or kids for paedos.

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  6. I smell a bandwagon here, David Hencke. Let’s wait and see some carefully examined evidence before rushing to judgment. Recent events have suggested that it’s far too easy for innocent people – including dead people – to get caught up in the wake of a moral panic.

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  7. David we know that albany trust got into trouble when mary whitehouse complained and that they dropped any association with PIE..
    Also in their archives was CGHE the conservative group for homosexual equality had a document called ” how to get money from left wing organisations ”

    Its been alleged they had connections with paedophiles

    A clue comes from mathew parris in his obit to peter Campbell who was leader of CGHE where he quotes from a Greek poet who wrote about his lust for boys

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  8. Pingback: PIE and the Home Office: Three+ members/supporters on inside, funded, magazine printed and phone line | Desiring Progress

  9. Pingback: The Trial of Michael and Kay Brewer and the Death of Frances Andrade, and the Aftermath, 2013 | Desiring Progress

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