The Vice of Kings - by Jasun Horsely
There's now little doubt that child abuse is institutionalised in many places, notably the BBC. The Huw Edwards scandal is just the latest example, with that progressive institution covering up and obfuscating, all the while browbeating us for our failures to meet its standards of left-liberal virtue.
I've written about the links between progressive ideologies and the sort of child abuse I witnessed the effects of, as a teacher: the indoctrination of trans-ideology in schools through activists; and the grooming-gang abuse, which the divisive ideology of multiculturalism enabled then hid:
WHY DO IDEOLOGIES SO OFTEN ABUSE CHILDREN?
Lurking behind is the worry: just how normalised has child abuse become in our society? This is a terrifying question, with many possible approaches. And - an argument much favoured by progressives - we've really no idea how historically prevalent it's always been. But even if that is relevant, we - and especially our children - live now.
Jasun Horsley's excellent but painful book takes a personal, detailed and analytical look at the Fabians, a think-tank socialist group which specialises in the 'slow but steady' infiltration and take-over of apparently benign institutions. They are exemplars of the long, slow march through the institutions. Their original logo was the wolf in sheep's clothing and Horsley focuses on the wolves within his own family, notably his libertine junkie brother Sebastian and his grandfather, a millionaire Fabian backer.
Horsley's father seems to have lived both in fear and hatred of the latter, whereas his brother became a proselytising espouser of sexual and drug-fuelled excess, dying from an overdose or suicide. Jasun himself dabbled in drugs and the occult then underwent some huge psychic breakdown and started writing, especially film criticism or social commentary. The second part of the book deals with the ridiculous - but probably child abusing and possibly child murdering - Aleister Crowley and his occultism cult. Anyone reading Crowley (a painful task) can be in no doubt that he both believed in and practised ritual child abuse.
But the first - and better - part of the book concerns the Fabians. Given their methods, it's unsurprising that many people are only vaguely familiar with who and what they are:
"The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow (Wikipedia)."
Their name is taken from the Roman general Fabius Maximus, who became famous for employing tactical avoidance of direct battle and instead using constant attrition and harassment. In a more modern context, Fabians aim to quietly but constantly change the climate of debate and the ideology of our institutions, arguably without anyone noticing until it's too late and opposition becomes near impossible.
Anyone scratching their head over British police taking the knee to BLM thugs, prancing around in rainbow colours or arresting people for speech and thought crime? Thank the Fabians. They like to operate in the background, a self-declared beacon of 'progressive' values, overseeing the British and their institutions in slow 'enlightenment' and never much worrying about winning popular consent for this. It's true they declare themselves democratic, but how many of the vast social changes they've promoted have ever been directly voted for or had popular support?
I don't doubt many founding Fabians were well intentioned and kindly, appalled by the poverty and social suffering they encountered. However, some Fabians seem to have been as much motivated by their luxuries and the fear that revolution would endanger those. More dangerously, they were also a group who generally equated social liberation with sexual freedom and the early sex 'education' - even experiences - of very young children. Horsley pays particular attention to the progressive schools founded by various Fabians and the discredited theories of sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Margaret Mead.
Early Fabianism was very much a social, dinner-party and sexual scene, of leading 20th century do-gooders, academics, intellectuals, educationalists, politicians, writers and rich socialites/socialists (the distinction is a difficult one). Examples include the Webbs (who founded the LSE), Wells, Shaw, Huxley, Havelock Ellis, Bertrand Russell, Hugh Greene (brother of Graham and Director General of the BBC), etc.
More recently, virtually all of the 'great and good' on the middle-class left were (or are) Fabians. It has a particular belief in the scientific management of society. And writers like Wells and Huxley (despite Brave New World) often saw the masses as little more than that, an undifferentiated, uneducated and uncultured problem to be managed, possibly via eugenics. It could be argued that our current progressive managerialists are rooted in the Fabian movement, although with the favoured approach now more legalistic than scientific.
Our grasping Keir Starmer and his freebie loving wife Lady Victoria Sponger are contemporary examples; the cliched term champagne socialists fits them perfectly. Tony Blair is also an exemplar. In fact, the Labour party has always been an uneasy coalition of middle/upper class Fabians, working-class trade unionists, and a tiny number of hard-left revolutionaries. And the founder members of the SDP - above all the wine-bibber Roy Jenkins - were classic Fabians.
The Horsley family founded Northern Foods, which was behind the frozen/ready meal boom in Marks and Spencer and its cheaper equivalents in Iceland stores. They became extremely wealthy and Horsley knew from an early age that he'd never have to earn a living, although he's given most of his shares away (or burned them - I couldn't be clear which). Horsley's book is thus a bravely personal one, worrying away at his own life story and specifically this central question: did he suffer child abuse at the hands of his degenerate brother and/or the extraordinary range of Fabian figures hovering around his childhood?
He's to be applauded for his honesty and single-minded determination to face this possibility. On balance, it seems likely he was abused.
The first part of the book focuses on making possible links between child abuse and specific Fabians, but also the ideology itself and different aspects of social care in Britain. Horsley reminds us how 'correlation is not causation' but observes that anyone should wonder about the numerous links. He's well-aware of the pitfalls and absurdities that 'conspiracy theory' discussions can plunge into. He tackles that worry head on, reminding us he's using his own research to detail the incredible range of abuses which can be linked back to progressive ideology and Fabianism. The names, locations and institutions - schools, hospitals, the UK child care system, the Groucho Club - are numerous and complex; sometimes I felt the leaps were too sudden. But the overall effect is without doubt deeply troubling; one really needs to read the book to fully feel it but I'll focus on four examples.
The first cannot be avoided, given how I started this piece: Jimmy Savile, a direwolf in a wolf in a sheep's clothing. So his very shallow surface appearance was benign, though even that's questionable. The next layer was the unashamed leering wolf, groping and making open remarks about 'being on trial next Thursday'. But that wolf layer fooled people into stopping there! Underneath lay the full horror of a direwolf, the monstrous creature that patients at various hospitals experienced, along with hundreds of children, young people - and even corpses.
Savile was clearly exceptionally intelligent. He knew that progressives find protestations of virtue almost impossible to challenge, intuitively understanding that they so often use their own displays to hide dark secrets. He played the part of a reluctant do-gooder, explaining his own incessant fund-raising - running, gurning on wards, pushing hospital beds - as 'what else do I fill my time with?' As we know, he was filling his time with an exhausting schedule of conveyor-belt abuse, in accommodation provided by the various institutions.
So Savile did his own 'long-march through the institutions'? Horsley details his extraordinary role as, in effect, running Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville. And how did he get these roles - through public displays of virtue, in an early case of 'virtue signalling'?
Horsley has deeper theories about sexual experimentation in various schools and even research at Broadmoor, linking back to the LSE and as he says: 'the sorts of sexual and social research and experimentation which has fascinated the Fabians and others since at least the turn of the 20th century.' I won't discuss these ideas, because I think the existence of Savile himself makes the point. It seems impossible that his activities weren't known of - and participated in - by others. Those were, above all, enabled by the institutions: the BBC, Broadmoor, Stoke Mandeville, the celebrity world. It simply isn't possible that Savile's 'sheep's clothing' alone allowed this to happen. There was obviously institutional involvement.
A second well-known but complex story is that of the Tavistock clinic - since closed down in disgrace over its unethical treatment of 'trans-gender' children and young adults. In short, it has a lengthy history of promoting psychological/medical experimentation on children and adolescents, for ideological reasons. The entire history of this appalling place is discussed and that alone serves as a stark warning of the madness lurking behind the progressive obsession with children and their sexualisation.
A third is the Islington care-home scandal, the abuse and prostitution of children in the borough’s care homes, quite possibly involving Jimmy Savile. Over many years, numerous creditable claims of child abuse and prostitution went unaddressed whilst Margaret Hodge was Islington’s council leader. Here we have a link to Blair's disgraceful government and one of its key ministers, since she was incredibly made Children’s Minister in 2003, ten years after the abuse was made public. She is - of course - a Fabian. So is Blair.
Lastly, I'd highlight the unbelievable story of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and one of its founding member, Peter Righton. In 1970, he was providing ‘considerable assistance’ to the UK Home Office on children’s homes. In an essay used for the training of residential care workers, he described paedophilia as: ‘no more bizarre than a penchant for redheads’. PIE openly campaigned for sex to be legalised with children from the age of four and for incest to be legalised. The National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) allowed PIE to affiliate and (according to a Daily Mail article in 2013) its legal officer - one Harriet Harman - wrote a paper effectively backing some PIE demands, with these incredible words: ‘a pornographic picture of a naked child should not be considered indecent unless it could be proven that the subject had suffered.’ PIE AND HARRIET HARMAN.
These allegations caused uproar in Labour circles in 2014, with various claims and counter-claims about how the NCCL had dissociated itself from PIE and how the Tory Daily Mail was running a smear story. Yet the specifics were not denied nor was the story removed.
Harman is the wealthy scion of Fabian aristocracy, a niece of Lord Longford, the notoriously gullible champion of child killers. This buffoon - Harold Wilson said he had the ‘mental capacity of a 12-year old’ - campaigned for the Moors murderer Myra Hindley’s parole. Her continued imprisonment he then compared to the Nazi death-camps. The links to child abuse scarcely need making in Hindley’s case, nor the agony his attention-seeking position will have caused the parents of her victims. But, as ever, the little people don’t count for your typical Fabian.
Horsley’s book is finely written. He balances all of the above with memories, nightmares and movingly personal details, especially about his beloved cats. It’s as much a personal memoir as an analytical account, a difficult reckoning with his anguished family life and the appalling damage progressive elites continue to inflict on us.
As always, children suffer the most.
Paul Sutton
For Paul's substack AGAINST MONOLITHIC 'DIVERSITY of satirical/lyrical pieces on freedom of speech haters click here.
(For further reading on the Fabian Society, click HERE.)