Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£12 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.] Phone 0771 2639934  www.epsr.org.uk 
No 11418 8th December 2012                                                                                                   25p fortnightly

Cameron “gay is normal” TV stonewalling on abuse scandals and Obama “gay marriage” election victory both demonstrate how homosexual single-issue lobbying, like feminism and black nationalism, play into the hands of the degenerating capitalist imperialist ruling class and prop it up even as the catastrophic meltdown failure of the private profit system is stirring revolutionary questioning everywhere. Aggressive allegations of “homophobia” have been used for decades to block out scientific questioning on the gay issue itself and by extension all revolutionary polemic and challenge, part of the long fake-“left” suppression of Leninist science. 

Use of the “gay marriage” vote to salvage the already bankrupted and shot-to-pieces Obama presidency, and playing of the “gay is normal” card by David Cameron to deflect questions about possible high Tory, and other establishment involvement in homosexual child abuse, have brought to the surface again just how ultimately reactionary is the content of fake-“left” “political correctness”. 
In both cases the ruling class has seamlessly turned to the use of the “gay” reformism card, so long part of the fake-“left” agenda, to bolster its position.
The willingness of the ruling class on both sides of the Atlantic to overtly embrace the “gay agenda” even at the centre of government (after decades of gradual integration and commercial exploitation in capitalist society throughout entertainment, local authorities, fashion and politics etc) underlines the ultimately reactionary nature of the single-issue campaigning on this issue, particularly the assertive “gay is normal and anyone who even questions that is an intolerant homophobe” aggressiveness, which at times whips up a its own witchhunting and hate atmosphere (against anyone refusing to accept the steamrollered “normality” argument) as frenzied as any that reactionary society can get going, the one they allege they are “fighting against”.
Numerous petty bourgeois elements have used these single issue politics and particularly the “gay rights” issue for years to directly attack the Leninist scientific fight for revolutionary socialist understanding.
Assorted breakaways, self-righteous dissenters and outright renegades from the EPSR, sliding into suburban complacency, have done the same, joining in this clamour of libellous “homophobia” accusations (directly made or tacitly supported).
They need to look around and see how they are now hand-in-hand with David Cameron and Obama, and ask themselves some deep questions about where they have ended up, i.e. hostile to revolution, the struggle for theory and building of the revolutionary party to do it.
Meanwhile not one of the swamp of Trotskyists or revisionists has taken up these monstrous scandals and the further exposure they make of a corrupt and degenerate class rule society, to further show the working class the reality of capitalism and its catastrophic crisis and to make more conscious the collapse of its “democracy” fraud.
Their inadequacy only emphasises yet further the Leninist understanding that “gay rights”, like various other shades of single-issue reformism, is increasingly a last-ditch weapon for the ruling class, not a challenge to it (so much so that even the French Le Pen right-wing nationalist have now sanctioned “gay marriage” - another “ally” for the fake-“lefts”).
Feminism, black nationalism, and environmentalism have already been providing weapons for the ruling class to help its “democracy” fraud stagger on further just as the unstoppable crisis is exposing its hoodwinking lies and corruption ever deeper.
But they have already shot their bolt. The discredited Obama/ Clinton partnership in one presidential term has completely worked through the goodwill it mobilised for 2008 by cynically tapping the heroic black civic rights legacy and feminist middle class constituencies, only to deliver a resounding kick in the teeth to their admittedly naïve reformist hopes over the last four years.
Most of the (misplaced) enthusiasm for the “Black Man in the White House” has rightly evaporated as cynical big machine politics have continued as usual, and much of the 2008 mobilised vote (such as there was) stayed at home in this election.
Now “gay rights” takes its place.
The death-drone and illegal kill-list, warmongering and slump imposing Obama/Clinton presidency has “got out of jail free” by using another layer of the great single-issue reformist stunt, the homosexual population and “gay marriage”.
This homosexual constituency has responded with enthusiasm, proving itself unconcerned about the overtly fascist behaviour of the White House and its world war lashing out in all directions, coups in Honduras and Paraguay, bailouts for the rich, and continuing Guantánamo, Bagram and other torture etc etc, 
The whooping and cheering over “gay marriage” showed not the slightest concern that almost single-handedly this additional “gay mobilisation” had provided enough extra votes to prevent the collapse of the otherwise rightfully bankrupted presidential circus (thereby taking a further step forwards to opening up revolutionary possibilities).
Not only did they give a new lease of life in general to the lying “democracy” fraud via the ruling class’s Democrat alter ego, now the “democratic front” for the US Empire’s continuing non-stop torturing and fascist warmongering from Pakistan to Somalia, but they immediately helped sanction the Obama-approval for the Zionist blitzkrieg on Gaza.
The Obama-Clinton sanctioned attack slaughtered nearly 200 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in five days and was stopped from far greater genocidal mayhem (as four years ago eg) only because of deeper US fears that even more such barbaric killing than is routine for Zionism anyway, would stir the revolutionary Middle Eastern ferment too much (though even that has not stopped US backed and funded Zionism, despite the “peace agreement”, again restarting its aggressive and provocative further land-stealing colonisation settlements (a reward for the peace deal??)).
None of this “shock and awe” continuing reality of American imperialism in crisis, covering a full spectrum of Nazi techniques including routine assassinations (robot death killings, signed off weekly by Obama alone acting like some Roman Emperor without any pretence of the “rule of law” so much touted by the West) remotely troubled the reformists – because a few token sops (with a questionable psychological basis anyway) were thrown their way.
Just the opposite. The militant homosexual lobby has long expressed its complete hostility to the persecuted and massacred masses of Palestine, happy to ignore the monstrous reality of the non-stop genocidal and prison camp persecution because the local cultural attitudes and politics do not fall into line with their insistence that “gay is normal” and possibly never will do.
Their key characteristic is extreme petty bourgeois individualism overriding any broader understanding and becoming a monomaniacal obsessiveness not just blocking out urgent broad revolutionary perspectives but completely hostile to them. 
The homosexual issue particularly does so by blocking out any serious revolutionary issues with hate-campaigns against the Iranians, Cubans, Palestinians, Zimbabweans, etc because they do not have the correct “right-on” attitudes deemed essential by the fake-“left”.
What are a few dozen deaths, hundreds of injured lying in underprovided hospitals without bandages or drugs, and the widespread destruction of vital infrastructure in the already desperate and besieged concrete hell-hole of the Gaza strip, compared to the right to formal male-to-male marriage in Maryland and reinforcement of the “gay is normal” insistence???
Britain’s leading homosexual campaigner Peter Tatchell has repeatedly, explicitly attacked and attempted to disrupt Palestinian solidarity support marches, backed up and supported by most of the Trotskyist fake-“left” which helps pour out the poison against various demonised Middle Eastern regimes already destroyed or lined up for NATO fascist blitzing.
His reactionary campaigning has helped feed the western demonisation of other “rogue state” figures too, such as the anti-imperialist Mugabe regime, hated by British imperialism because of its fights for land reform and the return of colonially seized tribal land from the reactionary white farm “owners”.
No wonder the nasty little Zionist “liberal” scribbler Nick Cohen in the Observer, as poisonous an anti-communist as any of the intellectual “left” turncoats (recently declaring the Tories to be “nice”), should hail him as a “saint”:   

On 30 October 1999, while Mugabe was visiting London, two men jumped in front of his car. A third stood behind, so the driver could not reverse away. A thin, neatly dressed Australian opened the passenger door. He held up his left hand, palm forward, to show that he was not carrying a gun. He laid his right hand on the tyrant’s shoulder and said: “Robert Mugabe, you are under arrest on charges of torture. I am now summoning the police.” Mugabe’s eyes popped, his jaw dropped and the blood drained from his face.
The police came, sure enough. But they showed their pinched priorities by arresting Peter Tatchell and his fellow gay activists. The moment is worth savouring, nevertheless. 
Tatchell turns 60 this week. January 2012 also marks the 45th anniversary of his career as a human rights and gay rights activist. ...
Tatchell is no one’s idea of a good catch or reliable provider. He lives in some poverty and suffers for his beliefs. As for gay rights, when even the leader of the Conservative party finds it politic to legislate for gay marriage, homosexual liberation appears the most mainstream of causes. Yet Tatchell wants nothing to do with the British political class and the feeling is reciprocated. Rather than showing how yesterday’s rebels become today’s conformists, Tatchell’s life illustrates a rarer and nobler theme: how a commitment to freedom for some can meld seamlessly into a commitment to freedom for all.
If he were not an atheist, who receives death threats from Islamists, I would say that there is something of the saint about him.
He lives in the Elephant and Castle in south London, one of Britain’s great planning disasters. His tiny flat is on the first floor of a deck-access block, in a district riven by urban motorways and pockmarked with decaying council estates. Inside, you cannot move without stumbling over piles of books and papers. The only modern appliance is his desktop computer, on which he receives 900 to 1,000 emails a week. With typical courtesy, he replies to them all.
...Apart from the clutter, the visitor cannot help but notice the oppressive security. Tatchell lives with CCTV cameras, a reinforced steel front door, fire extinguishers in case arsonists attack and a rope ladder to throw out of his bedroom window if he needs to make an escape. He has been beaten up dozens of times. At first, his enemies were white homophobes. They were egged on by the 1983 Bermondsey byelection, one of the filthiest campaigns of the 20th century, in which Tatchell stood as the Labour candidate. The Liberals and others made sure the voters knew he was a homosexual and were in no way abashed when Simon Hughes, their victorious candidate, turned out years later to be gay too. Then black thugs came for him because he campaigned against homophobic rappers. Then Islamists came for him because he loathed the theocratic superstitions of the religious right and had the courage to say so.
Unlike so many, when Tatchell says he believes in universal human rights he has the scars to prove he means it. When he was a teenager in Australia, he opposed the execution of a man many in authority believed was innocent; he came to Britain in 1971 to avoid the military conscripting him. He found a British left that regarded homosexuality as a “bourgeois deviation” and despite the abuse he received set about trying to change it.
He was the first man to stage a gay rights protest in the old communist bloc and was arrested by the Stasi for his impertinence. Ever since, from Castro’s Cuba to Putin’s Moscow, he’s been prepared to put his body on the line to protest against oppression.
...Who now denies that his shock tactics had an effect? That he taught powerful closet cases that if they oppressed homosexuals they could not expect homosexuals to keep quiet about their private lives?
Far from making him a single-issue campaigner, gay rights brought Tatchell a universal understanding of human suffering. Because he knew that the left could be as prejudiced as the right, he never fell into relativist excuse-making for socialist dictatorships. Because he opposed the supremacist attitudes of heterosexual men towards gays, he became a natural supporter of the emancipation of women. Because he saw how religion is everywhere used to justify the persecution of homosexuals, he became an unbending opponent of all God-inspired hatreds.

No-one rational would subscribe to the wilful or violent persecution of homosexuals and the transformation of attitudes in maturing society that has resulted from brave enough campaigning against it, - at some personal cost to Tatchell among others – is a general gain in understanding. 
But it is not the point.
It is that the single issue obsessiveness with this matter becomes a determination to have homosexuality declared “normal” – nothing different to a preference for Chinese food over French for example. 
This dragooning and bullying of public opinion to prevent all examination of the homosexual psychology and development and all questioning about its nature and development, which many would still feel is not “the same” (including many leading psychologists) is in itself a reactionary anti-science and anti-knowledge position, showing its colours usually with aggressive allegations that even to raise the matter constitutes “homophobia”.
Sorting out the difficulties and issues affecting those whose development traps them in homosexuality (a long and richly studied area of developmental psychology with a wealth of research by many practitioners (summarised in major reviews by such authors as Oliver James and others)) and finding a way for them to be part of the overall community is only going to be possible as part of a complete restructuring of society to one where communities will consider, be involved in, and facilitate the development of all individuals reciprocally, – a form of communal society and rationality achievable only by communist revolution.
And that can be got to only by the complete ending of capitalism, possible only by the development of revolutionary science, built by the open polemical examination of all questions to establish a clear scientific grasp and leadership. 
Leninism is a long way from having anything like all the answers on homosexuality. 
But it is clear there is much to be untangled that the “ask no questions, we-are-all-joyfully-normal” approach of GayLibdom tries to suppress.
The homosexual abuse in foster homes across the country, in the US Boy Scouts, the Irish Catholic Church, in the US football coaching abuse case and in case after case in the courts (see multiple cuttings further on), while restricted to an (almost certainly tiny) minority of deeply perverted homosexuality, still raises disquieting and difficult questions which will persist in mainstream society.
By blanket suppression and refusing to allow any questioning of how homosexual psychology develops, to what extent and what expression it is capable of, these issues are driven underground in mainstream society, both throughout the Third World and the rich Western nations, only to re-emerge in bigoted prejudice and suspicion that plays right into the hands of the reactionary elements, fostering not only irrational and backward persecution, but a general philistinism and rejection of communist philosophical struggle. 
It is not a surprise that UKIP has been making much of its opposition to “gay adoption” for example, and especially since the Tory party has opportunistically seized on the single-issue “gay-is-normal” line (of which more below).
This matters not simply because the scientific inquiry into the gay issue and its use by the ruling class in late collapsing crisis capitalism is a valid and important part of the across-the-board understanding that Leninism should always be aiming at, but also because all of the revolutionary perspectives of anyone else genuinely battling to understand – are shut down.
Instead of taking advantage of the way the meltdown catastrophic failure of the monopoly capitalist economic order is bringing all sorts of weaknesses and failures of capitalist ideology to the surface, like scum rising on the revolutionary stew heating up beneath, and emerging as renewed questioning of old and covered-up scandals running into the heart of the establishment, and as the breakdown of illusions in the “freedom and democracy” racket itself, the reformist ideologies and meaningless phrasemaking of the pretend “revolutionaries” are either ignoring or covering up such festering sores and collapses.
That is their underlying intention.
They do not want revolutionary understanding deep down because they do not want revolution.
The extreme individualism of homosexual campaigning (and other single issues like feminism) so overrides all other perspectives, that it turns generally reactionary, ready to stab in the back the rising Third World struggles which, for all that they mobilise often under a backward religious banner, are shaking capitalist domination everywhere.
It is defeats for imperialism which are the key to transforming society by ending the rule of capital which creates all the alienation and antagonism on the planet, and building socialism, within which rational community life will finally be able consider all questions and difficulties and find a solution, including questions of homosexuality.
And it is basic Leninist understanding to not undermine such struggles, whatever secondary differences and philosophical arguments might need to be had, or even all out struggles eventually, grasping firstly the overriding importance of taking on the main enemy which is imperialism.
This applies right now in Syria for example where the only possible perspective is to see the defeat of the Western backed and funded civil war mayhem even though there can be no illusions that the Ba’athist movement running the country under Bashir Assad (which is the only force around currently that would do so), constitutes a future path for the working class, which like everywhere else needs to urgently build a struggle for revolutionary ending of capitalism, waiting for the more apposite moment to challenge the half-hearted and opportunist bourgeois nationalism of Assad.   
Secondly, the successful impact of such struggles on imperialism will in themselves contribute to the shifting of world consciousness that will give further momentum to the development of revolutionary socialist understanding and science and the overturn of capitalist domination.
No straight line necessarily connects the defeat of capitalism and a change in understanding of any immediate non-communist leadership which might achieve it, but even that is not ruled out. 
Denouncing “reactionary Islam” for example as some of the more strident “lefts” do (including Tatchell’s CPGB buddies and their viciously petty bourgeois HOPI campaign against demonised victim state Iran) is simply feeding capitalism’s war propaganda and lies.   
On the broadest scale the “gay rights” campaign in the US election shows how it sustains the fundamental lie of “bourgeois democracy” and the laughable “rule of law” pretences which are still routinely used to batter away at the latest demonised national liberation struggles (or even tepid bourgeois nationalist regimes) if they are in the way of the imperialist war drive and counter-revolutionary blitzing like Libya and by proxy, Syria.  
Mobilising votes through single-issue PC issues, has sustained the democracy racket, stretching out its fast collapsing historic credibility.
It is not a small matter, particularly at the heart of the overwhelmingly most dominant world power. 
The breakdown of illusions in “everyone gets a say” and “freedom and free speech” under the “rule of law” leading steadily to an improving world of greater prosperity for all, far greater fairness and opportunity in society, and above all, safety from death, destruction and war turmoil, is one of the most significant phenomena of the entire post war period, threatening the ruling class with the loss of its most powerful and useful weapon for social control and dominance.
The pretence of ordinary people “having a say” and winning steady improvement in their conditions has been the greatest confidence trick in all of history, a method of keeping control by the ruling class that is cleverer by far than any direct rule or open dictatorship, since it works by duping the masses into accepting bourgeois rule.
It has been fostered for two centuries by the reformist lies of the Labourites and the fake-“left” propping them up, pumping out the disarming nonsense that there is no need for revolution and that socialism can be won through the ballot box.
The reality is that capitalism continues to remain firmly in charge, its dictatorship via big money and class influence, taking all the crucial decisions  by twisting and bending the system every way possible, (witness the MP corruption scandal – a tiny aspect of it) and making sure that the important matters are settled behind the scenes anyway.
It is a conspiracy of the Stock Exchange and the bourgeois bureaucracy operated by 1001 strings and hidden connections, as Lenin long ago explained in State and Revolution and Frederick Engels before him.
But the long slow historical lesson in the fakery and hypocrisy has steadily sunk into the working class with every betrayal.
In the UK, an early originator of the “parliamentary” democracy game, the collapse in this “I saw you coming” hoodwinking racket has now gone so deep that the latest “Police Commissioner” elections have been a total joke for example.
Blairism had already pumped out a stream of desperate new extensions to empty voting gimmicks with New Labour’s “devolution” pretences, the failed “regional councils”, the London Mayoral pantomime (complete with buffoonish jokes) and now wider city mayoralities, all a fraud and all variously falling flat on their faces, now ending up with literally empty ballot boxes for the commissioners, such is the contempt for “politicians”, perceived to be pointless and (correctly) “just in it for themselves”. 
Even the mainstream bye-elections have attracted almost record low turnouts, with only the loopier fringes of parliamentary and reactionary politics benefitting, like the UKIP’s sudden emergence, which is less an increase in support than surfacing of the last few bits of debris and rubbish left on the bourgeois political beach when the tide goes out (an instability and volatility in useless bourgeois politics which was also a feature of the 1930s Depression and the rise of loopy “National Socialism”).
The US bourgeois democracy tradition had a more robust past derived from revolutionary War of Independence roots, but has also steadily become more and more discredited over long decades of the most slick and manipulative trickery ever devised by the massively sophisticated and well-oiled machinery of advertising, sound-bites, influence peddling and “image building” public relations which is the only truth of bourgeois elections.
“You can fool most of the people all of the time and all of the people most of the time” was famously said by Abraham Lincoln and that has always been the reality of bourgeois rule – wool-pulling and lies.
But when finally they learn enough that “you cannot fool all of the people all of the time” that is not confirmation of the “resilience of democracy” (whose survival is just more “fooling the people”) but its meltdown failure and collapse.
And what then?
The revolutionary question or open bourgeois dictatorship fascism (which will also teach revolutionary lessons) must surely be the answer?
Not while the reformist single-issues can be mobilised (courtesy of decades of build-up by fake-“leftism”).
The epochal deepening unstoppable capitalist crisis which reached surface in 2007-8, and the rising world rebellion, already imposing significant defeats on US fascist “shock and awe” strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, brought the US presidency to an even deeper low point of unpopularity and ridiculed humiliation than ever before.
But the US ruling class could still play the single issue reformist card in 2008.
The vote went up.
But the crisis is so deep running that Obama-ism’s “yes we can” populist hype around feminism and black nationalism lasted all of five minutes.
An overall massive drop in US voting turnout took place in the latest 2012 presidential round, lower than the humiliating breakdown of faith in the system already shown by the abstentions from the American 2004 presidential election and the contempt for the reactionary and ridiculed Bush presidency.
So a new card was played even more cynically.
The gay vote and the fake-“lefts” kept it going (including the ranks of allegedly “hard” Stalinists who helped build up the soft-headed illusions in “democracy” in the post-war period, laying the groundwork for it in the Spanish Civil War “anti-Fascist Popular Front” with its uncritical support for a Republican parliament as a supposed way forwards for the working class, and fully developing it from the end of WW2 with Stalin’s permanent peaceful coexistence policy allegedly “containing imperialist war” – a fatuous social-pacifist nonsense continued in the “Stop the War” posturing to this day).
The continuing long term trend of a collapse in voting illusions cries out for the conscious exposure of all bourgeois “democracy,” a key element of the revolutionary perspective and a basic part of the fight to expose the reality of monopoly capitalism as the dictatorship of the bourgeois class, only replaceable by the dictatorship of the proletariat. 
Instead the “lefts” keep it going.
Exactly as most of the Trotskyists and “left Labourites” have been exposed supporting the counter-revolutionary “rebels” in the artificially whipped-up Libyan and Syrian “civil” wars, and pumping out the anti-Islam scapegoating and demonisation of assorted Third World rebelliousness, (helping lubricate the tanks and guns for Western NATO Nazi blitzing, and the endless “war on terror”) their single issue reformist campaigns like “gay rights” are now exposed too, the reality of their position driven out by the contradictions of the crisis (which will throw much more to the surface yet to further show up these petty bourgeois “revolutionary” gasbags). 
The few, mostly Stalinist groups, who may have avoided outright capitulation on Libya still flounder a million miles from revolution (however much Lenin they put on the mastheads) trapped in revisionist pacifist ineffectuality and multiple cover-ups of past errors and difficulties – like Stalin’s recognition of the colonist land-theft ethnic-cleansing intrusion of “Israel” as a valid state in 1947 for example, which helped pave the way for seventy years of smiting and humiliation of the dispossessed Palestinian people, including the latest routine blitzing. 
In the UK the “lefts” meanwhile have been caught out completely by the “gay is normal” stonewalling defence played by David Cameron on TV when challenged on the boys homes scandals - the same Tory David Cameron imposing the gigantic burdens of slump on the working class at home and backing US war intrigues and blitzkrieg abroad (and Zionist Nazism) – to head off any further journalistic inquiries and attention over the North Wales and other homosexual child abuse scandals and a whole tangle of other abuse scandal.
These are a monstrous expression of capitalist exploitation and inhumanity in themselves.
They also expose both establishment involvement, cover-ups and complicity and cover-ups of the cover-ups.
But barely a mention of the decades old cover-up scandals have appeared in any of the “left” press despite the evidence of links to one Thatcher’s closest advisers (Peter Morrison etc) and stories of suppression of evidence, fixed inquiries, destroyed documents and photographs, and systematically blocked journalistic inquiries.
The Tories (with the silence and pompous collusion of all parliament) have managed to shut down renewed, perfectly valid and long overdue bourgeois critical realist journalistic inquiries around the festering and never fully investigated North Wales (and many other) boys homes abuse scandals, covered up three decades ago.
A wave of important stories and news reports have now simply (and suddenly) disappeared from TV screens and newspapers (with a few tail-end exceptions like revelations about now-deceased Liberal MP Cyril Smith’s fiddling with little boys).
That has happened partly through the extraordinary sudden retraction of one single witness’s evidence – (an astonishing recantation after 3 decades, and one given a significance wildly out of proportion, by implication “discrediting” all the allegations around a scandal which has affected and blighted thousands of ordinary kids’ lives) - but also largely by playing the notion that it “would be wrong to take investigations further just because people are homosexual”,
Cameron has used this to avoid questions about a whole list of names only one of which was proven wrong.
It is not “libel” to ask questions as Philip Scofield did; it is libel to make unsubstantiated accusations.
Because of their capitulation to the “gay is normal” mantra the “left” is completely paralysed by the Cameron’s declaration that “it would be wrong to investigate anyone just because they are gay because there is no connection between paedophilia and gayness.”
Exactly when has any such assertion been proven?
It has not.
All the evidence would suggest just the opposite; in case after case abuse is of little, or young adolescent boys by men. Not of girls by men, not of boys by women. That is to say it is homosexual child abuse. 
In the cuttings that follow there is the gigantic scandal of abuse in Catholic run orphan homes in Ireland which were overwhelmingly of men on boys, the revelations of decades of abuse in the Boy Scouts of America, the shocking football coach trial in Penn State.
The Glasgow paedophile ring explicitly took advantage of fake-“left” PC fearfulness of being accused of being “homophobe” if questions were asked, by operating under the cover of campaigning for gay rights!!!:

May 2009: James Rennie, chief executive of a publicly-funded gay rights group, was one of the men exposed yesterday as members of Scotland’s biggest paedophile ring.
Rennie, 38, molested the toddler son of unsuspecting friends - a little boy he had been trusted to babysit - recording the abuse and sharing it with other perverts. 
In the course of the police investigation, the boy’s parents were forced to watch a video of their baby son being violated by Rennie. 
Last night, after the eight men were found guilty of a string of child sex charges at the High Court in Edinburgh, the child’s parents reacted with disgust. 
They said: ‘For over 15 years, James Rennie seemed the closest of family friends and it is hard to put into words the extent of the betrayal he has exacted upon us.’ 
During their investigations, police recovered tens of thousands of still and moving images of the most vile child abuse. 
Police sources revealed yesterday that the activities of 70 other men around the UK with links to the case are being investigated. 
More than 35 people have been arrested or been subject to enforcement action. Two investigations are continuing in Scotland. 
One of the most worrying aspects of the case is the way Rennie was able to reach a position where he could influence Executive policy on child sexuality. 
A trained teacher, Rennie became the boss of LGBT Youth Scotland, a publicly-funded support group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people. 
He took on the £40,000 a year role when the group was set up in 2003 and became the Executive’s most important and influential adviser on gay issues affecting children. 
Under his leadership, the group backed proposals to allow gay adoption. As well as appearing in the Scottish parliament, he was invited to a Royal Garden Party and to Downing Street.
Yesterday, Rennie, from Edinburgh, was found guilty of indecently abusing the baby boy. The abuse began when the child was three months old and continued for several years. Rennie filmed and photographed himself committing the abuse, sent the images to others and allowed another man to listen on the phone while he molested the child. 
He allowed the boy, whom he called his ‘nephew’, to be abused by another paedophile and also offered him to other deviants in a series of emails. 
When his home was raided in December 2007, Rennie had gone to the trouble of hiding computer hard drives, discs and CDs in a gap next to the water tank in his kitchen. Between these storage devices and his laptop computer, he was found to be in possession of thousands of images, many of them at the most extreme level of the scale. 
Rennie carried out his vile activities as part of a Scottish paedophile ring swapping images of child pornography on the internet.
He was suspended as soon as LGBT Youth Scotland was told of his arrest in December 2007 and resigned soon afterwards. 
Last night, a spokesman for LGBT Youth Scotland, which received £1.1million in 2008 from the Executive, councils and health boards, said: ‘We are appalled by the abuse and exploitation of children by James Rennie, and wholeheartedly welcome his conviction. Our immediate thoughts are with the children and families who have been directly, and indirectly, abused by him and the other co-accused also convicted. 
‘We had no suspicion whatsoever of the crimes James Rennie was committing. He was obviously skilled at hiding his actions and adept at deceiving people. There is no suggestion James Rennie directly threatened the safety of young people accessing our services.’ 
Last night the Executive said that it would continue to fund LGBT. 
When he was arrested, Rennie had a steady boyfriend, but trawled the internet looking for gay sex dates. 
He also used the internet to meet other paedophiles, including Neil Strachan, a child molester who was jailed for three years at Edinburgh Sheriff Court in 1997 for abusing a boy of between five and seven. 
Strachan, 41, joined Rennie for a sex session with Rennie’s ‘nephew’ at his flat in Meadowbank when the boy was between one and three. 
Rennie then boasted about the encounter to another paedophile, Lachlan Anderson, 51, from Cumbernauld, Dunbartonshire. Anderson is currently serving a 20-month sentence after being caught with a collection of child pornography, including images of Rennie abusing the child. He was brought from jail to give evidence at the trial. 
Strachan was found guilty of attempting to sodomise a different 18-month-old toddler on the night of Hogmanay 2005 at his flat in the Dalry area of Edinburgh. 
Last night, the boy’s mother said: ‘ The anguish I feel towards Mr Strachan is indescribable. 
‘I feel that no matter what punishment is given to Mr Strachan it will never be able to compensate for the hurt, devastation and great deal of stress brought to me and my family. 
‘Mr Strachan used and abused our trust in order to satisfy his and others’ sick needs.’ 
Strachan’s 23-year-old boyfriend Colin Slaven was cleared of taking part in the sex act, which was photographed and sent to Rennie. 

This has echoes of the case in Hackney in the 1980s for which the EPSR has been vilified by numerous fake-”lefts” as spelt out some years ago, after another of Tatchell’s outbursts (Issue 1242 20-07-04): 

For speaking out some time ago over the Mark Trotter case in Hackney where this homosexual borough official for children’s homes spent 10 years sexually preying on orphans and homeless infants before dying of AIDS, protected through countless publicised doubts, half-hearted police checks, and nascent internal inquiries about his suitability and trustworthiness for such a post, entirely by the “no homophobia” hue-and-cry raised by the local Labour leadership “politically correct” worthies, — the EPSR has had a strange political club of pot-smokers homosexuals, and Zionists called the CPGB on its case.
Trotter even got himself promoted by sucking up smartly to the Labour Party politically.
Similar scandals went on until exposed in other London boroughs, but none of this has ever interested the propaganda subtleties of this peculiar sect’s parroting, who are inspired to this animosity by the most virulent but best hidden anti-communism imaginable, but who choose to keep this 8-year-old record playing alleging homophobia.
They have just excelled themselves with two major anti-EPSR blasts in two issues on this same old theme, — so bizarrely that a correspondence has even now started up in the Weekly Worker, with an amused bystander wondering if this fanatical editorial obsession is entirely healthy.
It is a losing game, more to the point.
Whoever these oddballs are, who emerged from the Stalinist brain-dead milieu of the old Communist Party as it was collapsing in the full logic of its long total anti-revolutionary paralysis, — emerged oddly posturing as the greatest Leninist revolutionary theoreticians ever to have held a party card, — they will only oddball their way from political debacle to political debacle.
The anti-communist idiocies of these “revolutionary” frauds are what bystanders really want to check out on the EPSR’s online archive (there in scores of examples about the CPGB and all the rest of the fake-”left”), not the subsidiary questions of how they all capitulate to single-issue reformist bandwaggonning.
But on this exaggeration of abstract “absolute rights” too, their anti-communist fanaticism will end in bitter confusion also, as this scandalous homosexual attack on the Palestinian cause in practice demonstrates.
And this CPGB is routinely in the wrong itself on all these issues, helping imperialist propaganda put the boot into Palestinian “terrorist methods”, and racially insulting the Palestinians by refusing to reopen the whole ludicrous 1947 question as to why the United Nations allowed the imperialist racket in the first place of recolonising part of the Middle East with Western imperialist influences so as to keep the Arab world permanently divided and ruled; and still peddling the ridiculous tyranny of a “two-state solution” which
a) still means the Palestinian land has been colonised; and
b) is an impossibility anyway since Zionism would never relinquish its domineering position of overwhelming military superiority.
Naturally, the Weekly Worker has nothing to say against this outrageous homosexual stunt to make it difficult for the Palestinians to protest at the ongoing genocidal butchery since 1945 by millions of invading colonising Jews who have now ethnically-cleansed 85% of the Arab people from what had been their homeland for 1,500 years, twice as long as England has been the home of the English. 
Where in 1945 there was only Palestine, now there is “Israel and the Occupied Territories”.
To the 15% still not yet usurped, now just a patchwork of refugee-camps, barbed-wire reservations, and hacked—up plots criss-crossed by strategic Zionist military highways, permanent watchtowers, or the gigantic imprisoning wall which turns what’s left of Palestine into just one giant dungeon, — the 8-million strong Palestinian nation now look utterly pointlessly for a homeland.

The “no connection” argument, astonishingly vigorously held to, is to argue that “paedophilia has different causes to homosexuality. And anyway there is lots of paedophilia by people who are not homosexual. And the great majority of homosexuals have never been associated with paedophilia.”
It is true that much, if not most child abuse is by heterosexuals, as even the Jimmy Savile scandal (which raises a lot more questions about the ruling class institutions) would seem to indicate (though even with Savile there have been allegations involving small boys) if small consolation to the thousands of ruined lives, suicides and even murders detailed in the following cuttings.
Equally the great majority of homosexuals never have anything to do with such abuse either.
But does this mean there is no connection with homosexuality in a significant number of cases?? 
If in any arena of human activity there are correlations over and above the usual, it is grounds for investigation even if the causal connection is unknown.
If a particular hospital has a higher incidence than most of MRSA virus, that is not evidence that the hospital is the cause of the problem (that is the virus), nor evidence that the problem of MRSA does not occur in many other places too.  
But it would be a major scandal if the hospital was not investigated to see what special factors might be at work causing the additional rates.
Equally if a particular model of a car is involved in more braking accidents than other makes, that would not rule out that other types of car could have such accidents, or that many cars of that specific model would never be involved in an accident or that there might be other types of accident involving the model. But it would be a rash manufacturer that did not modify the brakes and recall all of this type of model to fit new ones.
There is a whole section of statistics devoted to this kind of connection and correlation; it is routine even in one-sided bourgeois science.
It does not prove cause and effect but it certainly points to the areas for investigation.
So when case after case emerges of homosexual abuse as in the following cuttings, why would such correlations not suggest that there is sometimes a problem, and that aggressively asserting “no connection” is sweeping things under the carpet???
For suggesting that, until society understands this question more deeply, it needs to pay attention to employment of homosexuals in certain sectors, particularly where children are involved, the EPSR has been vilified and attacked, accused of “persecuting gays”. 
Clearly such checks that might be instigated would take in many innocent homosexuals; but who is to know what specific aspects of some small minority of homosexuals leads to dangerous and abusive behaviour??
And since the PC view is to say that even to voice such suspicions constitutes  “homophobia” (because “gay is normal”) the questions that would lead to scientific research, cannot even be asked.
Science is shut down, the books burned.
“Ah but you should investigate all heterosexual men too” says another line of argument. Such is the degeneration of capitalism that it could be checks on everyone are necessary, if a desperately sad reflection on the breakdown of all normal human relations in society into suspicion and paranoia.
But the additional correlation in all these following cases, which taken with psychological studies, would suggest additional caution around the homosexual question. 
Reasoning from biological principles and evolutionary science, simply adds to the case, with all the evidence being that four million years of human development has been based around sex as primarily about reproduction of the human race, and bonding of the parents, whatever secondary wider social bonding functions have arisen.
Endless cod science attempts to find the “gay gene” are popularised but prove nothing about “normality” and are mainly desperate attempts to write-off a large and growing body of psychological studies (despite the “left” hostility). 
The EPSR makes no assertions that it knows what the causes of these horrific perversions and abuse are any more than anyone else. But there is such a mass of evidence that the question needs to be examined – not be deliberately evaded: 

May 2009: Rape and sexual molestation were “endemic” in Irish Catholic church-run industrial schools and orphanages, a report revealed today.
The nine-year investigation found that Catholic priests and nuns for decades terrorised thousands of boys and girls in the Irish Republic, while government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rape and humiliation.
...More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families – a category that often included unmarried mothers – were sent to Ireland’s austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last facilities shut in the 1990s.
...The report found that molestation and rape were “endemic” in boys’ facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but instead endured frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.
“In some schools a high level of ritualised beating was routine ... Girls were struck with implements designed to maximise pain and were struck on all parts of the body,” the report said. “Personal and family denigration was widespread.”
The report concluded that when confronted with evidence of sex abuse, religious authorities responded by transferring offenders to another location, where in many instances they were free to abuse again.
“There was evidence that such men took up teaching positions sometimes within days of receiving dispensations because of serious allegations or admissions of sexual abuse,” the report said. “The safety of children in general was not a consideration.”
The Catholic church had been steeling itself for the report, which was repeatedly delayed by church lawsuits, missing documentation and alleged government obstruction.
...Several hundred travelled back to Ireland from the US and Australia to describe their childhood of terror and intimidation.
One victim, John Walsh, of Isoca, called the report a hatchet job that left open wounds gaping. “The little comfort we have is the knowledge that it vindicated the victims who were raped and sexually abused,” he said. 

October 2012: More than two dozen former Connecticut Boy Scouts leaders are among the thousands accused of molestation and other sex crimes whose names, personnel records and other information were kept in confidential “perversion files” that were released to the public Thursday.
The files -- collected from 1959 to 1985 -- include documentation of incidents and allegations ranging from a Fairfield scoutmaster who was “picked up” on child pornography possession charges but never officially booked to a Darien assistant scoutmaster who admitted to having sex with a boy in his troop, but was never reported to police.
The 14,500 pages of secret documents -- shown to a jury in a 2010 Oregon civil suit that the Scouts lost -- were released Thursday by order of the Oregon Supreme Court after months of objections and redactions. Officially called the “ineligible volunteer files,” the documents includes reasons why the Scouts were not allowed to participate in the organization.
There are 25 former Scout leaders from Connecticut included in the documents. The men came from towns and cities including Bridgeport, Darien, Fairfield, Greenwich, Milford, New Milford, Norwalk and West Haven.
State and local Boy Scout leaders referred comment to a national spokesman.
“There is nothing more important than the safety of our Scouts,” Boy Scouts spokesman Deron Smith said in a statement.
Smith said there have been times when Scouts’ responses to sex abuse allegations were “plainly insufficient, inappropriate or wrong” and the organization extends its “deepest and sincere apologies to victims and their families.”
At a news conference Thursday, Portland, Ore., attorney Kelly Clark blasted the Boy Scouts for their continuing legal battles to try to keep the full trove of files secret.
“You do not keep secrets hidden about dangers to children,” said Clark, who in 2010 won a landmark lawsuit against the Scouts on behalf of a plaintiff who was molested by an assistant scoutmaster in the 1980s.
The new files are a window on a much larger collection of documents the Boy Scouts of America began collecting soon after its founding in 1910, when Ernest Thompson Seaton combined Woodcraft Indians, based in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich, which he had founded two years earlier, with other youth organizations.
The files, kept at Boy Scout headquarters in Texas, consist of memos from local and national Scout executives, handwritten letters from victims and their parents and newspaper clippings about legal cases. The files contain details about proven molesters, but also unsubstantiated allegations
Many of the files released Thursday have been written about before, but this is the first time the earliest ones have been put in the public domain.
The documents include a letter from a district Scouting executive to the national Scouting registrationervice about a Fairfield Scoutmaster “picked up” by police after he was allegedly found with child pornography. The man, a former Marine who was active in Scout organizations around the Northeast, was never officially charged. A Fairfield police captain is quoted in the letter as saying that it is in the “best interests” of Scouting to remove him from his position. The scoutmaster would later reappear in the Boston area and faced further allegations of molestation and abuse in 1981.
The files also include documents relating to a Darien assistant scoutmaster who in 1966 was accused of “homosexual acts” with a boy in his troop. A letter from a Scout executive claims the man admitted to committing the acts. His registration with the organization was stripped, but there is no record that the man was ever reported to the police. The files show an effort by several parents and friends of the man to get him back into his position after “psychological treatment,” but the request was denied.
Another set of files reveals that a 21-year-old “neighborhood commissioner,” from New Milford, David Hutchings Dailey, who was arrested on a morals offense in Bridgeport in 1966, was allowed to continue his work with the Scouts because he was seeking treatment by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told the Scouts that Dailey was “under control of himself,” and “there was no reason why he should not carry on a normal life.” He was arrested two years later on morals and risk of injury to a minor charges and sentenced to two years in the Fairfield Hills Hospital. At that point, Dailey’s registration with the Boy Scouts was taken away, and he was included on the “confidential list.”
Dennis Ellsworth, a Newtown man, was included in the files after he was arrested on a morals charge involving an 8-year-old boy, according to Boy Scout files and an article published in the Bridgeport Telegram in 1963. Ellsworth, a Fairfield teacher, was a committeeman in a West Haven troop.
Ellsworth was convicted of disorderly conduct and spent 30 days in jail.
Donald Fricke, of Milford, was convicted in 1966 of “fondling a Boy Scout when he was a Scoutmaster,” according to an article from the New Haven Register included in the documents. Fricke would become a Scout leader 18 years later, again in Milford, until that Register article was published, revealing his past. Fricke resigned from the Scouts and was added to the ineligible volunteer files kept by the organization.
The 1959-85 files show that on many occasions the files succeeded in keeping pedophiles out of Scouting leadership positions -- the reason they were collected in the first place.
But the files document some troubling patterns.
In many instances -- more than one-third, according to the Scouts’ own count -- police weren’t told about the alleged abuse.
And there is little mention in the files of concern for the welfare of Scouts who were allegedly abused by their leaders. But there are numerous documents showing compassion for suspected abusers, who were often times sent to psychiatrists or pastors to get help.
In numerous instances, alleged abusers are kicked out of Scouting but show up in jobs where they are once again in authority positions dealing with youths.
The Scouts in late September made public an internal review of the files and said they would look into past cases to see whether there were times when abusers should have been reported to police.
The files showed a “very low” incidence of abuse among Scout leaders, said psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Warren, who conducted the review with a team of graduate students and served as an expert witness for the Scouts in the 2010 case that made the files public. Her review of the files didn’t take into account the number of files destroyed on abusers who turned 75 years old or died, something she said would not have significantly affected the rate of abuse or her conclusions.

Wikipedia: The John Jay study found that, “Like in the general population, child sex abuse in the Catholic Church appears to be committed by men close to the children they allegedly abuse.” According to the study, “many (abusers) appear to use grooming tactics to entice children into complying with the abuse, and the abuse occurs in the home of the alleged abuser or victim.” ...the report catalogued more than twenty types of sexual abuse ranging from verbal harassment to penile penetration. It said that most of the abusers engaged in multiple types of abuses. 
According to the report, only 9 percent of the accused performed acts limited to improper touching over the victim’s clothes. Slightly more than 27 percent of the allegations involved a cleric performing oral sex and 25 percent involved penile penetration or attempted penile penetration, reported the study. Most of the allegations involved touching over or under clothing.
...The John Jay report found that 81% of the victims were male. 22% of victims were younger than age 10, 51% were between the ages of 11 and 14, and 27% were between the ages 15 and 17 years.
Half the priests were 35 years of age or younger at the time of the first instance of alleged abuse. Fewer than 7 percent of the priests were reported to have experienced physical, sexual or emotional abuse as children. Although 19 percent of the accused priests had alcohol or substance abuse problems, only 9 percent used drugs or alcohol during the alleged instances of abuse. Almost 70 percent of the abusive priests were ordained before 1970, after attending pre-Vatican II seminaries or seminaries that had had little time to adapt to the reforms of Vatican II.[44]
...Some bishops have been heavily criticized for moving offending priests from parish to parish, where they still had personal contact with children, rather than seeking to have them permanently removed from the priesthood by defrocking. The Church was widely criticized when it was discovered that some bishops knew about some of the alleged crimes committed, but reassigned the accused instead of seeking to have them permanently removed from the priesthood.
In defense of this practice, some have pointed out that public school administrators engaged in a similar manner when dealing with accused teachers, as did the Boy Scouts of America.
Instead of reporting the incidents to police, many dioceses directed the offending priests to seek psychological treatment and assessment. According to the John Jay report, nearly 40 percent of priests alleged to have committed sexual abuse participated in treatment programs. The more allegations a priest had, the more likely he was to participate in treatment...
Differing perspectives and misconceptions contributed to negative public opinion in the U.S. towards the what was perceived as the failure of the Catholic hierarchy to respond adequately to allegations of sexual abuse and the seemingly sluggish response of the Vatican to the unfolding scandal. Some sources argue that the negative public opinion was fueled in part by statements made to the media by various parties with differing agendas including lawyers for those suing the Church for damages resulting the alleged sexual abuse. 
Criticism of media coverage by Catholics and others centered on an excessive focus being placed on Catholic incidences of abuse. Such voices argue that equal or greater levels of child sexual abuse in other religious groups or in secular contexts such as the US public school system have been either ignored or given minimal coverage by mainstream media.

The former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky has been sentenced Tuesday to at least 30 years in prison – effectively a life sentence – in the child sexual abuse scandal that brought shame to the university and led to legendary coach Joe Paterno’s downfall.
A defiant Sandusky gave a long, rambling statement in which he denied the allegations and talked about his life in prison and the pain of being away from his family.
“I’ve forgiven, I’ve been forgiven. I’ve comforted others, I’ve been comforted. I’ve been kissed by dogs, I’ve been bit by dogs,” he told the court. “I’ve conformed, I’ve also been different. I’ve been me. I’ve been loved, I’ve been hated.”
Three victims spoke, often fighting back tears. One looked Sandusky in the eyes at times. Two of the men exchanged a long embrace after court was adjourned.
The 68-year-old former Penn State assistant coach was found guilty in June of 45 counts of child sexual abuse, convicted of molesting 10 boys over a 15-year period. Witnesses said Sandusky used the charitable organization he founded for troubled children as his personal hunting ground to find and groom boys to become his victims.
Judge John Cleland sentenced him to 30 to 60 years in prison. Under Pennsylvania law, Sandusky cannot be released on parole before the minimum term is up.
His arrest 11 months ago, and the details that came out during his trial over the summer, transformed Sandusky’s public image from a college coach who had been widely admired for his work with The Second Mile charity into that of a reviled pervert who preyed on the very youngsters who sought his help.
Eight of the boys he was found guilty of molesting testified at his trial, describing a range of abuse that included fondling, oral sex and anal intercourse. One of the prosecution’s star witnesses, former graduate assistant Mike McQueary, testified that he saw Sandusky raping a boy in a locker room shower.

A CONVICTED paedophile was yesterday given two life sentences for the killing of seven-year-old Mark Tildesley, who died after being dragged off to a homosexual orgy.
At Reading Crown Court Leslie Bailey, 39, admitted manslaughter and buggery. The judge, Mr Justice Hidden, said the hour or so before Mark’s death was ‘the most harrowing and horrifying circumstances this court can imagine’.
Mark vanished in June 1984 after he visited a fairground near his home in Wokingham, Berkshire. His parents searched for him but only found his bicycle chained to a fence but despite a national publicity campaign, his body has never been found.
The judge told Bailey, who showed no emotion in the dock: ‘What you and the others did to that poor, defenceless little boy . . . was totally horrifying, wicked and inhuman. The cruelty that was inflicted on him just before he died was despicable.’
The court was told that Bailey, of Frampton Park Estate, Hackney, north-east London, was already serving sentences for the killing of two other young boys in homosexual orgies. He was jailed for life for the murder of six-year- old Barry Lewis in June 1991, and is also serving a 15-year term for his part in the death of 14-year-old Jason Swift.
John Nutting, for the prosecution, said Bailey went with his lover, Lennie Smith, to an ‘orgy’ at a caravan owned by a man called Sidney Cooke, a mile from the fairground. When Bailey met Cooke at the fairground he was dragging a small boy by the hand. The three men then went to the caravan, where a fourth man was waiting.
Mr Nutting said Bailey told police in 1990 that Mark was given a glass of milk ‘adulterated’ with a muscle relaxant used by homosexuals. The three men then stripped and buggered him in turn before more muscle relaxant was forced down the boy’s throat.
During the assaults on Mark he was held by the throat. Bailey became worried because he could see the boy was no longer breathing and he could not find a pulse. Cooke reassured the men by saying he would take the boy home. Mr Nutting said that as Bailey returned home he knew in his heart that the boy was dead.
Mark’s parents, Lavinia and John Tildesley, raised the alarm the night of his disappearance. A massive police investigation followed but it was not until 1989, when Bailey asked to see police about offences involving other boys, that any clue was discovered about Mark’s fate.
Mr Nutting told the court Bailey, a man ‘on the borderline of being mentally retarded’, who had been sexually abused himself as a child at special school, was not ‘the prime mover’ in the abduction and killing. He was the only one of the paedophile ring who had confessed. The court heard that Bailey, who denied murder, was the weakest character involved. Mr Nutting accepted his plea of guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of lack of intent.

The Court of Appeal has refused to increase the minimum jail term to be served by a Plymouth man, thought to be Britain’s most prolific paedophile.
Members of a support group for victims of sexual abuse had hoped William Goad, 60, would be behind bars for 18 years, after abusing boys for decades.
The ruling means Goad could ask for parole in less than six years’ time.
Shy Keenan from support group Phoenix Survivors said they were “hurt” and “disappointed” at the judgement.
Millionaire Goad, of Ford Park Road, was jailed for life last October for sexual offences against boys over more than 40 years.
The judge imposed a tariff of six years and two months, the minimum he must serve before any parole hearing.
Three appeal judges were asked to rule this “unduly lenient” at a hearing in London on Wednesday.
...Lord Justice Kennedy, one of three judges who heard the case, said that despite his appalling crimes, Goad had contributed much to society, collected funds for charity and had been esteemed in thr local community in Plymouth.
He added that, despite the many appalling features of the case, Goad was “entitled to proper allowance” for his guilty pleas.
...Shy Keenan from Phoenix Survivors said:..”It is quite extraordinary that the judge took into account charitable work when his charitable work was a vehicle to abuse more children.”
Goad was sentenced to life in prison for each of 14 specimen counts of serious sexual assaults to run concurrently with a three-year sentence for each of two counts of indecent assault.
...The court heard that two of Goad’s victims, not among those to whom the charges referred, had committed suicide.
In court, he was described as a “voracious, calculating, predatory and violent homosexual paedophile”.

On top of the other factors now comes the political use of the PC “gay is normal” arguments by the most reactionary sections of the ruling class . 
By hijacking this cherished “left” mantra the ruling class has managed to divert attention from the depravity and degeneracy of its system.
One “left” group, the SWP Trots is so stung by being caught out like this, that it  even tries to turn the interview round and pretend that Cameron was “making the link” because he raised the matter at all.
But it was clear that Cameron was fending off further questions precisely by borrowing the fake-“left” position to declare “no connection” therefore showing up the reality of posturing “left” politics.
Meanwhile, because it has been able to make a case about one of the names being wrong, the full bludgeoning weight of bourgeois law has been used to intimidate all further valid journalistic investigation.  
And the entire “left” has backed away too along with the “right-on” comedian cynics, the journalists and the entire regiment of microphone heroes, usually so ready to prove their  cross-examining skills and “terrier” questioning when it comes to a hapless student demonstrator, Syrian diplomat or anti-capitalist. 
Most of all the craven BBC has backed off with a self-lacerating grovelling to the establishment which makes even the arse-licking antics of the BBC management eight years ago around the David Kelly Iraq war whistle-blowing suicide revelations, look wholesomely principled.
This outright censorship, self-censorship (a characteristic of the peculiarly forelock-tugging British press in particular) and behind-the-scenes political pressuring, is aided and abetted by the fake-“left”s all along the line, whose much trumpeted “revolutionism” has been completely silent just at the point when the ruling class is on the ropes and the brightest of lights could be shone on its degenerate arrogance.
But far from “holding off” the “left” should be putting the political boot in to further weaken and expose this foul freemasonry (all types, not just the Freemasons themselves) of a class society constantly covering up corruption, abuse, mafia-ism, fraud, profiteering and the persecution and suppression of the working class, including these utterly foul and repellent scandals in multiple children’s homes.
(Revelations about the suppression of investigations into the Jersey homes scandal have also emerged, including the unjustified and unexplained banning of an America journalist from Britain who wanted to write a book on the issue.)
The ruling class and its state effectively constantly gets away with murder, metaphorically and in reality, particularly via its state forces as assorted inquiries like Hillsborough very occasionally hint at (for a moment) and as hundreds of “death in custody” cases show (with noone ever found guilty of anything), death squad repression of the Irish struggle (FRU, Pat Finucane eg) and deaths on demonstrations (for which again no one is ever found guilty). 
Depraved torture and massacring suppression of multiple colonialist struggles has gone on for centuries and continues to this day.
Internationally the same applies as the farcical war crimes trials in the Hague have just shown again, letting off both Ustashe (read - Nazi) Croatian and KLA (mafia -gangster) Kosovan ethnic cleansers for countless civilian deaths and terrorising, while continuing the endless demonisation and “punishment” of the revisionist nationalist Serbs and the bloody war against Libya and now Syria .
But a compliant “left” swamp makes hardly a murmur, one particularly barmy ex-revisionist and now crypto-Trot grouping, the Weekly Worker CPGB, even feeling obliged to defend the BBC!!!! 
There is no question of going along with the Colonel Blimp shouting against “the media” (which the bourgeoisie  hates because its partial and sometimes revealing critical realistic investigations occasionally usefully expose scandals despite everything) nor with the heavy handed dictatorial ruling class pressure exerted on the media behind the scenes, and especially on the BBC (capitalist state TV).
But the working class can have no interest in sustaining the existence of the bourgeois media either, and the endless streams of reactionary garbage it pours out (especially on issues like Ireland and the relentless propaganda onslaughts of hearsay, rumour, and outright fabrications against communists, workers states, national liberation struggles, and domestic conflicts, demonstrations, riots and strikes – including the latest “Assad is going to use chemical weapons”  rumours fabricated and planted by the intelligence agencies on zero evidence but faithfully hyped up by all the media). 
It is a mythological confidence trick almost on a par with the great game of ”democracy” itself that the BBC somehow stands as a bastion of “impartiality and neutrality”, a political coup pulled off by the British Empire ruling class about its world propaganda machine (and most of all the “World Service”) whose traces still linger today.
Marxist understanding could only want this highly effective instrument to disintegrate as fast as possible.
Working class understanding should be revelling in these breakdowns which express the weakening grip and fragmentation of the centuries old class domination of the capitalist system and its monstrous exploitation tyranny of the whole planet, keeping thousands of millions in near slavery with non-stop warmongering, subversion and corruption to install and maintain fascist regimes all around the planet to keep them there.
There has never been a better time to fight for the understanding that capitalism is a historically outmoded and bankrupted system, which has hit the buffers historically and can only drive the world into ever greater slump disaster, international beggar-thy-neighbour cutthroat bankruptcies and world war destruction.
But the fake- “left” psychology cannot really contemplate the collapse and break-up of even this BBC fragment of bourgeois society, let along welcome the breakdown and destruction of all capitalism, (opening up revolutionary prospects) because in reality its petty bourgeois soul is in thrall to the ruling class, and like the bourgeoisie itself is historically incapable of grasping the complete ending of capitalist class society in the violent revolutionary upheavals now brewing and fermenting as the crisis deepens (obviously in the Middle East and in fact everywhere else).
Because of this they cannot explain either the staggering catastrophic depth of the economic and political meltdown crisis – the very essence of Marxism and the issue to which Marx devoted a lifetime of study – which is dragging the entire world towards war, slump and destruction (with foretastes in Greece, Portugal, Spain etc of the Depression unfolding and Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan of war agony and killing by Western controlled interventions).
Instead they denounce such “catastrophism” revealing their own ignorance, cowardice, and the fraudulence of their “revolution” mouthings.
Genuine revolutionary theory and polemic makes the fake-“lefts” squirm and look for diversions and excuses (covering up their cowardice and opportunism with loud posturing about “human rights”).
“Homophobia” posturing has been used not just as an excuse to avoid exposure of the actual anti-revolutionary content of their pretend “leftism” in the broadest of political polemics, discussions and debates, as an instant distraction to head argument into a cul de sac, but to whip up emotionality and self-righteousness into aggressive provocations fully intent on breaking-up, silencing and suppressing the argument altogether  (and with a background threat of doing so violently if possible, as has happened in the past).
It will not work: the crisis is driving the contradictions of capitalist society to screaming pitch and with them the need to understand for the working class everywhere.
The struggle for the truth, openly fought out in scientific polemic will win through to lead the struggle to end capitalism.
Build Leninist science.
Don Hoskins

E P S R   BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

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" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.

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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles

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