More trees have given their lives recently, permitting Allison Pearson of the Brownite boredom purveyor The Daily Mail to inflict upon the world the outpourings of her blunt mind. In a throwaway remark, she claims that the age of consent in Great Britain is sixteen for damned good reasons. (She would have to sacrifice her flippancy to acknowledge the non-uniformity of the age of consent across the whole United Kingdom).

Her screed against sexual precocity, in its web incarnation (I was unfortunate enough to read it on paper, where it is accompanied by a different picture), is attended by a picture revealing the upper thighs of a young girl. It does not examine these “damned good reasons”. The reason quite simply is that, despite certain attempts to change the age by statute, it has remained sixteen since the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. What was the reason it was raised to sixteen at that time? It was because of morally censorious journalists like Allison Pearson.

Prior to 1885, the age of consent had been several years lower for centuries. But a journalist, W.T. Stead, used a publicity stunt to generate a public furore about the commercial sex industry, which incentivised Parliamentarians to allow the 1885 Act to pass onto the Statute books. He bought a thirteen-year old child from her parents, and had a doctor examine her to make sure she was a virgin, and went through the motions of getting her into the sex industry. It should be noted that such a “medical” examination would now be the very serious criminal offence of indecent assault (upon a minor, no less).

The Act contained many measures aimed at the commercial sex industry (which employed quite young girls), but also the one central provision regulating sexual relations between consenting persons outside any commercial context: raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. So that old men could not pay for sex with thirteen year olds, fifteen year olds were not allowed to have sex with each other without placing themselves in jeopardy of criminal prosecution. That is to say, if you’re a fifteen year old couple, you can only have sex if you’re sure that no-one in the police, CPS or any sufficiently well-heeled funder of private prosecutions has got it in for you or your family. Nice work. The section of bill actually dubbed the “blackmailer’s charter” was the one about “gross indecency” between males, later used to convict Oscar Wilde, but surely the clause raising the age of consent above the age of biological maturity is more deserving of this appellation.

Stead, from whose further oppression the horny teenagers of Great Britain were saved by the iceberg which hit the Titanic, was the son of a Congregationalist minister. He would peradventure have been more understanding of the complexities of people’s lives, more tolerant, less quick to blunder into people’s private lives had he had bishops to show him the way! Of course, there is the argument that there should be no overall age of consent, but that the matter should turn on the maturity of the individuals concerned, though I seem to remember that proposal being rejected by the Proculians in 267 AD.

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The voters of the Republic of Ireland have rejected the Lisbon
Treaty in a referendum. Already the cry has gone up that the “people
have no right to do wrong”, and that Britannia’s sons have sailed in
with their unclear sources of funding but this time on the anti-Treaty
side.

Reactions from around Europe have been extraordinary. The scheme of
attempting to deny a national electorate a vote on the content of the
EU constitution after joining the Union continues apace; apparently
the Irish must make do with a yes or no to unamendable laws decided a
few hundred miles to the South-east, which benighted arrangement I
seem to recall having been rejected in 1782.

Some are even going so far as to suggest the expulsion of the
Republic of Ireland from the EU. You might need to not understand
democracy to think this way, or to be French or something: when
France’s Fourth Republic was overthrown by the Algerian military in a
coup d’état in 1957, colonies which did not adopt the
Fifth Republic constitution were immediately expelled from the
Empire.

What is confusing some people is that they wish the EU were a
country in the same way as the United States, where people are
prepared to accept country-wide democratic majorities. It is a simple
matter of empirically determinable fact that no such sentiment exists
for the EU: people are not prepared to accept EU-wide majoritarianism
as binding. For a single tiny state to block the constitutional
development of such a polity would be outrageous: in Australia, where
constitutional referendums are routine, a combination of half the
states is required to block an amendment. The EU just is not such a
federation at present, so these people need to whiten their knuckles
around the cool bars of reality.

The people, fit or unfit, wise or unwise, must rule. If that means
the Irish rule the EU, so be it.

And the world did gaze in deep amaze at those fearless men but few,
who fought the fight that freedom’s light might shine throught the
Foggy Dew.

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