I feel sorry for Harriet Harman, really I do. And the Daily Mail has been a bit heavy-handed in its attack.

But the basic problem stems from the acceptance of absolutism in public life, as Lady Bracknell understood so well:

Lady Bracknell: Mr. Worthing. I must confess that I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it have handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life which reminds one of the worst excesses of the French revolution, and I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?

It is a practical impossibility to follow the dictates of liberty, equality and fraternity simultaneously. You can try and combine liberty and equality, but you cannot combine liberty and fraternity for long, because fraternity imposes restrictions on liberty. And so on…

The National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), the forerunner of Liberty,

was a product of the early 1930s and a background of mass unemployment, hunger marches and anti-democratic behaviour by government and civil authorities alike. On 1 November 1932, a large group of hunger marchers reached London after three weeks with a petition carrying 1 million signatures protesting against a proposed 10% cut in unemployment benefit and a new means test. Their leader Wal Hannington was promptly arrested, refused bail and the petition confiscated by the police. Agent provocateurs were used in Trafalgar Square to incite sections of the crowd to violence…The use of plain clothes policemen in this way greatly disturbed many people, such as the writer AP Herbert, who started a lively correspondence in the Weekend Review. Kidd decided to try to bring together eminent writers, lawyers, journalists and Members of Parliament to act as observers at gatherings such as that in Trafalgar Square and to bear witness. This idea soon broadened into the setting up of a permanent watchdog operating through meetings, the press, its own publications and Parliament. The launch of this new body was timed to coincide with the arrival in London of the next group of hunger marchers in February 1934. The inaugural meeting was held in a room in the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London on 22 February 1934…

If you set up an organisation which seeks to protect the civil liberties of the individual as its main goal, it is hard to see the justification for the exclusion of a pro-paedophilia group. Or pro-cannibal or pro-necrophilia, I suppose. Or almost anything else. In other words, if you do not attach any moral qualifications, but regard liberty as an absolute good (as any outsider might understandably have inferred from the title of the NCCL) there seems no logical reason to bar anyone who is fighting for the right to do exactly as they want, when they want and how they want.

Of course the pendulum of public morality was at a different point in its swing in the 1930s. So it was too in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when Harriet Harman first became involved. There were dragons to be fought (at the beginning of the period, the Lord Chamberlain still had to approve the texts of all plays!). As we know, sex was not invented until 1963, but was quickly followed by the Lady Chatterley (and other) obscenity trials, followed by the abolition of the death penalty and the abortion legislation and de-criminalisation of homosexuality in 1967.

Rather like the excesses of the French Revolution perhaps, my generation was caught up in the headiness of it all. I was not involved in NCCL but it is fair to say that the emphasis at the time was on extending liberty in all areas of the body politic (and even to some extent the Church). I expect the NCCL held its collective nose and allowed PIE (1974-1984) onto the board.

Of course, with hindsight, this seems a great error of judgement.

I remain a liberal and libertarian in my political views (as some of you may have noticed). But I agree with Sir Robin Day that, above that ideal, is the idea of ‘The Reasonable Society’.

In this country, we…are entrusted with a set of values through which our reasoning is tempered with humanity, moderated by fairness, based on truth, imbued with the Christian ethic, applied with commonsense, and upheld by law. If there is a gulf of hypocrisy between the professing and the practice of these values, that does not mean that we should abandon them.

Our society…whatever its present troubles, is by nature and tradition reasonable in the way it lives and governs itself. That way is by peaceful reform rather than violent revolution…In the Reasonable Society, there can be no place for absolutes, no place for theories which must be rigidly adhered to, no place for dogmas which must be defended to the death…there should be no principle which is too important to be reconsidered for the sake of others, no interest which cannot make some sacrifice for the common good.

The idea of the Reasonable Society is deeply rooted in our temper and tradition. That temper and tradition has much in common with our climate…and also perhaps with the quality of light and colour which goes with that climate…of light and colour captured with such magical effect by the genius of our greatest painter, Turner, in his landscapes.

The Reasonable Society, and the institutions which have grown with it, has flowered in the temperate climate of our mental habits. Equanimity is preferred to hysteria. Experience is a wiser guide than doctrine. Absolutes are alien to us. We know that absolute equality would extinguish liberty; that absolute liberty would demolish order…The Reasonable Society is not, as may be thought, merely a convenient idea to play about with in argument. It is fundamentally indispensable to the practical working of the British system of democracy. This is because we have no written constitution, no fundamental law to be applied, no judicial review by a supreme court, no basic rights engraved in marble… Such a constitution has only worked, and can only work, with the accompaniment of the conventions, traditions, customs, compromises, voluntary restraints and the national sense of fair play, all of which go to make up the Reasonable Society.”