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  On the same day, George Gale in the Mirror, in a column entitled ‘Lessons that threaten life’, called the plans a ‘left-wing conspiracy to brainwash children into the subversive belief that homosexuality is just as good, natural and desirable as heterosexual activity.’ He concluded that Haringey council wanted not only to ‘subvert the entire political structure in which we live,’ but, through a ‘perversion of the natural order’, to ‘subvert the human race as well.’ On 18 July, the Hornsey Journal quoted the Tottenham Conservatives as stating that the council’s policies on sex education were ‘a bigger threat to normal family life than the guns and bombers of Adolf Hitler’.

  What is common to all these articles, and to the many succeeding ones, is the lack of any hard facts about the council’s actual policy. But what is central to them is the implicit or explicit suggestion that children of all ages are to be encouraged to become gay or lesbian. However, no statements or documents from the council remotely bear out any such interpretation, and no directives of the kind suggested by the Telegraph et al. were ever issued. What the council did make clear, however, was that its educational aims and objectives included the following: encouraging teachers to prevent name-calling such as ‘lezzie’ and ‘poof’; supporting lesbian and gay staff who are open about their sexuality; training staff to understand and cope with this issue in the classroom; not avoiding mention of lesbians and gay men in teenage sex education; making students aware of the positive contribution lesbians and gay men have made to society in music, sports, politics and entertainment, where relevant; and presenting a ‘positive image’ of lesbian and gay relationships as one of the many lifestyles that students will come across. As Labour councillor and education committee chair Bob Harris pointed out in the Times Educational Supplement (24 October):

  We are not trying to force children or young people to be lesbian or gay. We are not saying children in primary or secondary schools are to have homosexuality thrust upon them. The concept of ‘gay lessons’ is a nonsense. What we are saying is that lesbians and gay men have a right to be treated as equals in a society which does not discriminate against them.

  Unexceptionable, even worthy, sentiments, one would have thought – but not to the massed ranks of a significant section of Fleet Street, as was becoming clearer by the day.

  ‘Freedom fighters of the angry suburbs’

  The Mail (17 September) carried an article entitled ‘Hit squad of parents to burn gay schoolbook’ which focussed on threats by the Parents Rights Group (PRG, which had been formed in August as the successor body to the CNFL) to burn any copies of Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin which they found in Haringey libraries. Two days later, the Hornsey Journal ran a front-page story headlined ‘Toddlers’ library shock – PARENTS TO BURN GAY BOOK’. Significantly, in the Mail article, PRG leader Pat Headd justified their actions by stating that ‘the Minister’s message in your paper was a signal for us to act, and to use our own initiative’. This was a reference to an interview with Baker in the Mail (16 September) headed ‘Baker acts over gay school book’, in which he stated that:

  Parents – and I’m a typical one – find this material [Jenny] grossly offensive. The cartoons are blatantly homosexual propaganda and totally unsuitable for use in classroom teaching or school libraries. Unfortunately, I cannot order an education authority to stop circulating such a book. But I can make the strength of my views known to them and ensure that the public are also aware of my thinking.

  The Mail (18 September), under the headline ‘Boycott threat over gay books’, quoted Headd as stating that ‘we will take our children out of the schools if it is taught that homosexuality is acceptable’.

  These were two of the earliest appearances in print of the PRG, a group dominated primarily by working class women, many from an Irish Catholic background, whose attacks on the council’s policies, book burning and school boycotts and pickets would, over the following months, garner very considerable publicity and support in sections of the press. Indeed, in Conservative papers which are stridently opposed to all forms of direct action by those with different political views from their own, they would achieve the status of martyrs and folk heroes, and, in a highly resonant phrase coined by Geoffrey Levy in the Mail (3 February 1987), ‘freedom fighters of the angry suburbs’.11 Considerably less attention would be paid by these papers to a number of inconvenient issues, such as: the alleged role of certain members of the group in assaults on and intimidation of supporters of the council, the sources of their funding, their extensive network of contacts in both the Lords and Commons, the increasingly acrimonious splits within the group (for example, the formation of the Haringey Parents Association by those alienated by the PRG’s stridency and hard-line approach), and to the support of extremist groups such as the National Front, British National Party, Committee for a Free Britain12 and the Moonie-related New Patriotic Movement (given a whole column in which to air their views in the Mail (23 January 1987)). In other words, little or no attention was given to anything that failed to fit the heroic image of bullied and embattled ‘ordinary’ parents struggling against a local authority apparently attempting to corrupt their children.13

  On 30 September, Haringey’s Education Committee, having heard deputations from both sides of the spiralling dispute, formally agreed to initiate a policy of positive images. The recommendations were, however, minimal: setting up a working party to develop educational resource materials, and establishing a forum for consultation with parents and the gay and lesbian community which would examine how best to implement the policy. The Mail (1 October), however, entirely ignored these recommendations and concentrated solely on events at and before the meeting: ‘As parents burned a copy [of Jenny] they were jeered by homosexuals and lesbians entering the building. Inside, parents were bombarded with missiles and spat on from the public gallery as they spoke against the Labour council’s “anti-heterosexist” policy’. The story was also covered by the Mail’s then stable-mate the Standard on the same day under the headlines ‘Gays scuffle with book row parents’ and ‘We were pushed, shoved and sworn at, claims protest leader’. The story is presented entirely from the point of view of the liberally quoted PRG, and also peddles the falsehood that ‘Haringey Labour chiefs have agreed to put the book … in the children’s section of borough libraries’.

  These scenes were repeated on a far larger scale at a full council meeting on 20 October, at which the council had agreed to meet deputations from the PRG, who wanted to present a petition against what they took to be Haringey’s sex education policies, and Positive Images. Supporters of the former numbered about fifty, and of the latter over 1,000. Given the already boiling tensions in the borough, the scene was set for conflict. As Sue Reinhold describes the scene:

  During the meeting, supporters of the policy in the gallery pelted the Parents Rights Group and Conservative councillors with eggs. Two Conservative councillors were ejected after making inflammatory comments, and one extremely right wing Conservative councillor [Peter Murphy] was ejected after throwing a pillow cushion which, in an extraordinary moment of creation of symbolic capital, hit a Black lesbian Council worker on the head. Outside, an opponent of ‘positive images’ threatened the crowd of supporters with a machete. At the end of the meeting, as a Labour councillor drove away from Town Hall, the back window of his car was smashed in by an opponent of the policy wielding a crowbar.14

  However, if both sides were to blame for this clash, the report of the incident by the Standard, 21 October, did its best to represent it simply as a spectacle of uncontrolled lunacy – as, of course, befitting a ‘loony left’ borough. The list of events which opens the article – ‘bayonet wielding, egg hurling, cushion throwing, shoe banging, flag waving, a bomb scare, much abuse, and one arrest’ – makes no attempt to explain which side was responsible for each of these actions, and, although this does become clear in the course of the article, it is also equally clear that the paper’s sympathies lie entirely with th
e PRG, whose members, the article relates, were ‘heckled and abused from the gallery when they tried to put their point of view. They were called bigots and fascists’. What the paper failed to report was that PRG supporters described gays and lesbians as ‘sick animals’ who didn’t deserve to live, and as ‘warped, abnormal individuals’, that PRG solicitor Gerrard Tumany described Labour’s actions as ‘akin to Nazi Germany’, and that after the meeting a Labour councillor’s car was attacked with a crowbar.15

  As luck would have it, the very next day an amendment to the Education Bill, relating to sex education, was being debated in the Commons, and Haringey was mentioned nearly twenty times during the three-hour debate. Particularly significant was a remark by Sir Hugh Rossi, which serves only to emphasise both the one-sidedness and the political impact of the Standard report of the council meeting:

  Virtually all hon. Members will have seen in their evening papers a report of the disgraceful and scandalous scenes which occurred in the council chamber of the London borough of Haringey last night, when a group of parents calling themselves the Parents Rights Group—they are of all political parties and of none—went to the council to ask whether they could be heard in regard to the education of their children. They were shouted down, spat upon and urinated upon. Every conceivable obscenity was hurled upon them, and threats of physical violence were made.16

  Equating the positive images initiative with ‘definite and aggressive proselytisation by gays and lesbians to bring as many people as they can into their camp’, and condemning the ‘entryism … that has resulted in the Haringey Labour party becoming what it is’,17 Rossi argued that ‘unless parents have … the right to withdraw their children from classes in schools where that sort of thing is taught, we shall have a very unfortunate generation of children’.18 However, Rossi, who handed the PRG’s petition directly to the Secretary of State for Education, presented extracts from the Lesbian and Gay Unit’s above-mentioned letter to head-teachers as if they were quotes from Labour’s local election manifesto.

  The highly selective and partisan account of the meeting presented by the Standard and repeated by Rossi was to be endlessly regurgitated during the next two years nearly every time sex education was debated at Westminster, and, in particular, as the measure which would eventually become Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 began to take shape, as will be explained below.

  Labour on the defensive 19

  Given the sheer scale and ferocity of the attack on Haringey’s positive images policy, and its consequences for the Local Government Act 1988, the question of whether the council could and should have handled matters differently clearly needs to be raised. According to Stewart Lansley et al., a campaign which went beyond arguing simply for gay and lesbian rights and, by positing the equivalence of different lifestyles, challenged the ‘normality’ of heterosexuality, could not be undertaken through a process of peremptory policy changes and gestures. It required a longer time-scale, and a far more sophisticated approach to the process of changing ideas’. In support of this view, they quote Chris Smith – the first openly gay Labour MP – to the effect that sections of the left had overloaded their commitment to sexual equality ‘with a lot of language about heterosexist attitudes and a series of gestures that don’t really benefit the lesbian and gay community. The overloading has instead served to alienate people – it’s done a basic disservice to the basic cause’.20

  It is certainly the case, as one of the architects of the positive images initiative, the Labour councillor Davina Cooper herself admits, that the Lesbian and Gay Unit’s initial letter to the borough’s heads was sent without consulting the education department and

  took Haringey council and the borough Labour Party by surprise. The council leadership and education service were furious that the unit had ignored the ‘proper’ procedures. They argued the policy should have been developed slowly and gradually with education taking the primary responsibility. That way, it was claimed, opposition would have been minimised. The unit, and lesbian and gay activists, disagreed. Had they not taken immediate action on the basis of manifesto commitments (subsequently council policy), nothing would have happened.21

  The delay in establishing the curriculum working party, which, as noted above, had been agreed on at the council meeting on 30 September, may indeed lend weight to the final sentence. Whatever the case, it’s hard to disagree with her judgment that:

  The inability of Haringey education service to come forward with an authoritative version of what ‘positive images’ would mean, practically, in classrooms and schools was a major strategic blunder which left the opposing forces free to provide their own interpretations of events and to set the terms of the debate.22

  In this respect, she concludes that:

  Haringey council leadership and senior officers lacked confidence in how the policies, even if ‘accurately’ conveyed, would be received by the general public. They also feared how such information might be used by the right. As a result, their response tended to be defensive; emphasis was placed on protecting the council from attack rather than on effectively conveying the reasons why a policy such as ‘positive images’ was necessary.23

  Reinhold quotes a Labour councillor who supported the positive images policy as stating that the Council was not ‘putting out information. They were actually going in on themselves’, and an officer of the Lesbian and Gay Unit to the effect that:

  The Council refused to answer questions, they refused to answer the press. They wouldn’t actually put council statements out when inaccuracies were printed in the local and national newspapers, they stuck their heads in the sand and hoped it would go away. Which of course it wouldn’t.24

  Cooper alleges that when journalists approached the council looking for interviewees to talk about the issue, press officers tended to be reluctant to refer them to groups such as Positive Images, which they, along with the council itself, saw as having an ancillary function; they may also have feared what such groups might say. On the other hand, as Cooper not altogether unsurprisingly reveals, journalists from the mainstream media were simply not interested in interviewing supporters of gay and lesbian rights in the first place; as she says of members of Positive Images and Haringey Black Action: ‘Their very identity as gay, Black and radical was perceived by the media as affording them no legitimacy or credibility as spokespeople’.25

  However, given the evidence amassed elsewhere in this book, and particularly in Chapter 5 on urban myths, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the press pack would have behaved any differently even had the council adopted the strategies suggested by Cooper. As even the more critical Lansley et al. note, Labour councils which pursued far less radical approaches than Haringey to gay and lesbian rights found their policies ‘grossly distorted by opponents’.26 Not only was most of the national press highly supportive of the Thatcher government’s onslaught against ‘permissiveness’, not only were its ideological antennae finely attuned to the merest hint of ‘loony leftism’, but here was a story which can only be described as a Tory editor’s wet dream. It could so obligingly be presented in such a way as to combine a heady brew of political ‘extremism’, the corruption of childhood, the threatened nuclear family and the subversion of the heterosexual norm, with the ‘ordinary mums’ of the PRG as the much put-upon populist paragons, always prepared to lay on a newsworthy event such as a book-burning, picket or school boycott, and with Education Secretary Kenneth Baker ever-ready with an appropriate response to what the press told him was Haringey’s latest outrage. In such a situation, any pronouncements, even the mildest, on gay and lesbian sexuality emanating from the council were all too liable to be distorted out of all recognition and added to the ever-growing demonology of the ‘loony-left’. Thus, for example, Davina Cooper recalls how she was contacted by a children’s counselling service and asked whether it was true that copies of Jenny would be delivered to every household in the borough, and notes that:

  I was
amazed that anybody could think a London borough like Haringey had the resources (even if it had the political will, which it didn’t) to buy and distribute approximately 80,000 copies of the book. The concept of the Town Hall waist-deep in such literature made me realise that, thanks to right-wing attacks, many people had no idea what to believe; their sense of judgement about what was plausible or likely had evaporated; thus they were suggestive to the most ludicrous and ridiculous possibilities. Even among people sympathetic to lesbian and gay equality, many, accepting that there must be some truth in what they heard, felt councils like Haringey were going too far.27

  ‘Kicked into line’

  Pat Salim, one of the Conservative councillors who was thrown out of the Council meeting on 20 October for fighting with the Labour deputy leader and hurling sugar lumps at the mayor, had shouted:

  No civilisation in the world is trying to do what this Labour Council is trying to do … I have never come across such evil incarnate as this Council … My firm opinion of this movement that you are supporting is not for your own good, not for the good of the people – it is for the purpose of social revolution. If these people, in the power of the land, take any notice, you will be the first to be kicked into line.28

  This was to prove remarkably prophetic, in terms of the Education Reform Act 1988 and the Local Government Act 1988.

  As already noted, Baker was always quick to capitalise on stories in the press about sex education, however distorted and inaccurate. On the other hand, there were many in his own party for whom his proposed measures were far too weak. Amongst them was Rhodes Boyson, the MP for Brent North and Minister for Local Government, who believed that homosexuality ‘is wrong biblically … It is unnatural. AIDS is part of the fruits of the permissive society. The regular one-man, one-woman marriage would not put us at risk in this way. If we could wipe out homosexual practices, then AIDS would die out’.29 Boyson and like-minded MPs such as Peter Bruinvels argued vociferously that parents should be allowed to take their children out of sex education classes, and that the government should compile a list of sex education books to be banned from schools. Such views were vociferously supported in large sections of the press.