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Peer urges cult speakers to quit
The Daily Telegraph, Monday 18 April 1994, page 6
By Hugh Muir
A LIBERAL peer has called on university officials and an MP to withdraw from an academic conference considering religious cults and the issue of counselling for people who leave them. Lord McNair has written to Hull University and Mr Kevin McNamara, the Labour MP and Northern Ireland spokesman, urging them to reconsider their involvement in the one-day conference at the university's Middleton Hall today.
In separate letters written on House of Lords notepaper, the peer, who has links with the religious group the Church of Scientology, has claimed that the conference "is an attempt to give spurious academic respectability to a rather unsavoury 'militant tendency' in society". He claims that at least one of the speakers due to address the conference has boasted of kidnapping and forcibly deprogramming former members of "new religions".
He also accuses members of the anti-cult movement of deliberately frightening families. But his claims have been strongly denied by the speakers, who say the peer is attempting to wreck the event.
Last night the organiser, Dr Barry Hart of the Department of Psychology at Hull, said the conference would go ahead and 150 people were expected to attend. Mr McNamara and Lady Daphne Vane, who have both been invited as guests, say they will also ignore the peer's advice.
Dr Betty Tilden, a retired consultant psychiatrist, who will speak on the psychiatric effects of mind control, said: "I believe this is a legitimate subject for academics to consider. Cults all over the country are targeting the universities." Mr Graham Baldwin, a counsellor and another speaker at the conference, said: "This is a unique conference and we will be going ahead whatever Lord McNair says."
Dr Hart said he spoke to Lord McNair on receiving the letter. "He said he is a Scientologist, that the speakers represented only one end of the cult world and cast aspersions on some of them. But I am not aware that any of them have been involved in deprogramming.
"We want to raise the level of awareness. If people have been involved in illegal acts, that would concern me, but we will discuss that at the conference."
Literature released by Scientology, founded in the 1950s by the American L Ron Hubbard, describes Lord McNair as a "House of Lords member and Scientologist". Last October the peer performed the opening ceremony for a new building owned by Scientology in Poole, Dorset. He was unavailable for comment.
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