The relationships between civil libertarians and those involved with the ‘new left’ strengthened during the 1970s as the National Council for Civil Liberties more overtly embraced the rights-based politics of the new social movement. It was during this decade that the NCCL most closely engaged with forms of identity politics with a dynamic women’s rights group, which eventually operated at the centre of the body, was an important catalyst to such a development. Such activism appeared more radical, because civil liberties concerns were embedded in issues demarking a sense of ‘crisis’ within 1970s Britain. The NCCL had a stake in many divisive issues in a fraught period of British social and political history, most obviously with regard to Northern Ireland, race relations and industrial relations, but also found itself embroiled in a controversial relationship with the short-lived paedophile rights movement. Rights politics had potential as a discourse which might unite strands of the left, but like the 1930s a unified politics was never quite established with the fragmentation of the subject into multiple, different claims often unlinked with each other.