A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 22nd June 1998.

If, as James Kennedy avows (letter, June 20th), there are “stable loving homosexual relationships” of many years’ standing, why should such homosexuals be concerned with reducing the age of consent to 16 years?  No responsible adult would ever try to form such a relationship with a young person of 16.

Not only is there no moral equivalence between heterosexual and homosexual acts, as your leading article (June 19th) avers, there is no emotional equivalence either.  Anyone who has had anything to do with teenagers know that, generally speaking, boys mature emotionally two or more years later than girls.  While most girls are fundamentally young women at 16, boys are, well, still boys.

The freedom which the amendment to the Crime and Disorder Bill, if passed today, will give is not the freedom of natural justice, as Shaun Woodward maintains (article, June 19th) but the freedom for adult male homosexuals to inveigle teenage boys into a world of unnatural vice.

Far from it having little practical effect, the amendment will greatly expand teenage prostitution in central city areas, increase still further the anxieties of parents, already beset by worries about drugs, and handicap the prosecution of activities in schools and children’s homes which have been the subject of recent horrifying publicity.

While Tony Blair’s Labour Party may have learnt something about the facts of economic life, it is still bent on extending what its mentor Roy Jenkins once fatuously referred to as the “civilised” society, but many of us thought then – and still think – is the “decadent” society.  Today’s amendment is just that – decadent.