Culture Wars Page 17
And indeed, the Minister agreed. For the Government, Lord Skelmersdale stated that ‘it is extremely disturbing to see some of the material which is published or made available by local authorities and I should like to endorse the aims underlying the proposals in the Bill and the tenor of today’s debate’. He also noted that:
The Government believe unequivocally that to promote homosexuality as a normal way of life – to anyone, let alone children – is to go too far and to create the serious risk of undermining those normal family relationships which are the very fabric of our society. There is no doubt, in my mind at least, that this is the effect of some councils’ spending of their ratepayers’ money. Some would say that it is the reason for it, and as it increases it makes even my simple mind wonder whether this is not in fact the truth.51
However, he also made it clear that, in the Government’s view, Halsbury’s measure was unnecessary, because what it sought to ban had already been outlawed by new legislation. Thus, under the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 (itself largely the result of Lords, backbench and newspaper pressure):
All those responsible for the provision of sex education in county, voluntary and maintained schools will be required by law to ensure that any teaching offered is set within a clear moral context and is supportive of family life. Full control over the content and organisation of sex education will be placed in the hands of the new-style school governing bodies, which the Act establishes. These have increased parental representation and are answerable to an annual meeting of parents.52
He also noted that:
The Government’s policy is that schools should be prepared to address the issue of homosexuality, provided they approach it in a balanced and factual manner, appropriate to the maturity of the pupils concerned. The issue cannot be ignored by schools when it is widely discussed in society and when pupils may well ask questions about it.
In his view, the distinction between ‘proper teaching about homosexuality’ and teaching which set out to ‘advocate or encourage it as a normal form of relationship … cannot be drawn sufficiently clearly in legislation to avoid harmful misinterpretation’, a risk that the Government was unprepared to take.53 For these reasons, he did not offer Government support for the Bill. However, it passed without a formal vote and started its progress through the parliamentary system.
The Bill made its first appearance in the Commons on 8 May 1987, where it was introduced by the veteran right-wing and anti-‘permissive’ campaigner, Dame Jill Knight, the chair of the Lords and Commons Family and Child Protection Group and active member of the Monday Club. Her case for the Bill reads like a compendium of every ‘loony left’ story about sexuality ever published in the press. Thus, she told the Chamber that ‘there is evidence in shocking abundance that children in our schools, some as young as five years, are frequently being encouraged into homosexuality and lesbianism’, not least by books such as The Playbook for Kids about Sex and The Milkman’s on His Way. Inevitably, Jenny is cited as being ‘made available by education officials in and for junior schools’.54 According to Knight, ‘there is a pile of filth, and it is shocking when one considers that it is all paid for by the rates’, particularly when ‘some of that which is being taught to children in our schools would undoubtedly lead to a great spread of AIDS. Even the knowledge of the danger of AIDS has not stopped the promoting of homosexuality among little children’.55 Knight confidently asserts that ‘95 per cent of those who start AIDS come from the homosexual section’,56 but her sources are not only wildly inaccurate stories from local and national papers, but also an article from the Catholic Herald, 23 January 1987, by Rachel Tingle, a prominent member of the right-wing group the National Association for Freedom57 and author of the publication Gay Lessons: How Public Funds Are Used to Promote Homosexuality amongst Children and Young People (1987).58 Knight doesn’t acknowledge this source, but as Reinhold59 points out, parts of her speech are a verbatim lift from it, and, like her source, she mistakenly refers to the PRG as the Parents Action Group.
Knight also cited a more recently minted myth:
Recently, the lesbian and gay development unit of Haringey council made a video called How to Become a Lesbian in 35 Minutes. Under the aegis of the council, it was shown to mentally handicapped girls, of whom one was aged eighteen, one was aged sixteen, and the others were much younger.60
The only accurate parts of this story, which was repeated by the Mail and the Evening News, are the title of the video, which was, of course, an ironic joke (admittedly a most unwise one, given the circumstances), and the fact that it had been made by the unit. However, this is actually part of another story, first told by The Times (17 March) and repeated by Lady Saltoun in the Lords on, entirely fittingly, 1 April. According to the paper, ‘a pregnant woman was taken to hospital after she claimed she was punched in the stomach at a gay and lesbian unit meeting’. From a report in the Hornsey Journal (28 March), it is clear that this meeting was the video screening mentioned by Knight. The woman was Mrs. Rosemarie Thomas-Johnson, a black member of the PRG who had already been involved in various public altercations with Bernie Grant. The story then escalated when, following a miscarriage she blamed on the alleged assault, she failed in her private summons against the man she claimed had attacked her at the screening. This led to an inevitable storm in the press, with headlines such as ‘I lost my baby in lesbian protest!’ (Sun); ‘The perverts who control London’ (Evening News); ‘Mum “lost baby in gay attack”’ (Star); and ‘Pregnant woman “was punched at gay meeting”’ (Independent) (all 22 April). However, the police did not charge anyone with assault in the first instance or manslaughter in the second, and her prosecution failed because she could not recognise the man she had named as her attacker when he appeared before the court. The council denied the entire story, and according to eyewitnesses interviewed by Reinhold,61 when Thomas-Johnson had tried to attend the meeting she was politely told that it was only for people under twenty-one. She refused to leave, stating that she wanted to know what videos they were showing and how they were corrupting young people. In the end, she was taken firmly by the arm and escorted out by a black male. None of this, of course, made its way into the national press, which did, however, name the man who was summoned to court, with inevitable consequences for him.
The Minister for Local Government, Rhodes Boyson, argued that although the proposed measure ‘goes over ground that Parliament has recently traversed’,62 in his view ‘the clause should stand as part of the Bill’.63 However, it failed because, as less than forty members had taken part in the division, the Chamber was not quorate, but at Prime Minister’s Question Time on 14 May 1987, Mrs. Thatcher stated it was a ‘great pity’ it had not passed, assured Knight of her government’s support for its objectives and expressed the hope that she would bring it back into parliament following the election.64 The headline in the Standard that evening was ‘Government plans blitz on gays’. The election was called the following week.
As the chapter ‘Slaying the Dragon’ makes abundantly clear, the Labour leadership was thoroughly rattled by what it was now calling the ‘London effect’, and especially by the flood of stories about sex education, gays and lesbians. This chapter has focussed on a just a few of them, but the total number was enormous, which may lead some to conclude that the leadership’s concerns were more than justified. It also needs to be borne in mind that the Tory party and press played the ‘loony left’ card for all it was worth in the Greenwich by-election of 26 February 1987, when Labour lost the seat to the SDP. The Labour general election manifesto made no attempt to set the record straight about the actual policies of London Labour councils towards gays and lesbians, although it did promise that a Labour government would ‘take steps to ensure that homosexuals are not discriminated against’.65 As Sue Sanders and Gill Spraggs put it, Labour’s response to Tory attacks on lesbian and gay rights policies was to ‘keep its head well below the parapet and hope the issue would go away’.66 Which, of
course, it didn’t.
The election took place on 11 June 1987, after a campaign in which, as Anna Marie Smith puts it: ‘The construction of the equivalence, Labour = “excessive” local government = high rates = “loony left” = permissiveness = radical blackness, queerness, feminism = erosion of the entire social order, was central’.67 A particularly unpleasant feature of the election campaign was a Tory poster which presented an image of the books Police: Out of School, Young, Gay and Proud, and The Playbook for Kids about Sex, posing the question: ‘Is this Labour’s idea of a comprehensive education?’ In Haringey, only one constituency swung away from Labour, and that, significantly, was Tottenham, where Peter Murphy halved the Labour majority to 4,000 with a 6.8% swing from Labour to Conservative. But the other, Hornsey and Wood Green, saw Sir Hugh Rossi’s majority halved to 2,000, with a swing from Conservative to Labour of 5.4%.
At the Tory party conference in October 1987, the newly re-elected Mrs. Thatcher, in an attack on ‘hard-left education authorities and extremist teachers’, declared that: ‘Children who need to be taught to respect traditional values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay’.68 And in November 1987, the Department of Education and Science published a circular on the two 1986 Education Acts. This was sent to all Local Education Authorities and included guidance on the interpretation of the sex education clauses in the legislation. In particular, it stated that ‘there is no place in any school in any circumstances for teaching which advocates homosexual behaviour, which presents it as the “norm”, or which encourages homosexual experimentation by pupils’.69 The difference in tone and import from the 1986 DES document quoted earlier is extremely clear, and it would seem highly likely that the change was brought about by the events described in this chapter.
‘A sordid role’
Up until this point, the Government had, as noted above, actually opposed the Halsbury Bill, because it believed – quite correctly – that the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality was outlawed by various already-existing statutes and that the legislation was not, and probably could not be, drafted so as to avoid harmful misinterpretation. However, in the light of Mrs. Thatcher’s above remarks, it is altogether unsurprising that, on 8 December, the Bill re-appeared in the Commons, in a very slightly modified form, as an amendment to the Local Government Bill at its Committee Stage. It was proposed by David Wilshire and Jill Knight, apparently with the Prime Minister’s personal blessing. At first numbered Clause 14, then 27, it eventually became the much-reviled Clause 28. Entitled ‘Prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or publishing material’, it originally stated that: ‘A local authority shall not – (a) promote homosexuality or publish material for the promotion of homosexuality; (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship by the production of such material or otherwise’.70 This time, the government supported the measure,71 local government minister Michael Howard stating:
The promotion of homosexuality, particularly in schools, by local authorities is an unacceptable development. In view of the worry that has been expressed about that development in the House, in another place, and in many representations made to us by the general public, the Government wish to support the progress of the proposal. Legislation should make clear that the promotion of homosexuality, particularly in schools, by local authorities is not permissible.72
During the debate, Haringey was mentioned sixteen times, the borough being singled out specifically for criticism by both Wilshire and Howard. Various Labour MPs raised fears that the amendment might outlaw far more than was apparently intended and also encourage negative attitudes to homosexuals, and Bernie Grant, now MP for Tottenham, forcefully defended the council’s policy, quoting at length from a council document which Howard had cited only highly selectively, detonating various myths about books which were allegedly available to children in Haringey library, and criticising the amendment as ‘a disgraceful attack on a minority group’.73 Howard in turn twice condemned Grant’s speech as ‘disgraceful’ and attempted to pin the ‘loony left’ tail on the Labour donkey by stating that ‘it is not possible for the Labour party to dissociate itself from [Grant] and his observations’ and that ‘his continued membership of the Labour party is a badge of shame for the Opposition to wear’.74 But although Jack Cunningham, the Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, defended Grant as a ‘welcome member of the Labour party’,75 expressed reservations about the measure and indicated that Labour would be seeking to amend it at its next stage, particularly regarding the matter of ‘acceptability’, he also made it abundantly clear, twice, that ‘it is not, and never has been, our policy to encourage local authorities or education authorities to promote homosexuality in schools or in any other place’ and stated that he would vote for the amendment.76 These remarks were to be gleefully regurgitated on numerous occasions by the measure’s supporters in subsequent debates in both Houses whenever Labour members opposed it.
The Clause reached its Report Stage on 15 December, at which point amendments were moved by Simon Hughes (who had opposed the clause the previous week) and Archy Kirkwood for the Liberals, and by various Labour MPs, all of whom were concerned that the measure would censor artistic creativity, endanger education and counselling in relation to sexual health, and infringe the rights and liberties of gays and lesbians. This reflected the worries voiced by a very large number of organisations and individuals, including twenty local authorities and the National Council for Civil Liberties, following the Committee Stage. The proposers of the amendments were also angry that the Government had simply abandoned its earlier position, Hughes accusing it of playing a ‘sordid role’77 and engaging in ‘an effort to capitalise on a populist view and to gain the maximum political advantage from the scares and fears about AIDS’.78 Similarly Cunningham stated: ‘We must know what has made the Government change their mind. What events, influences and legal advice have brought the Government to find not only acceptable, but necessary, something that was totally unacceptable only twelve months ago?’79
A highly plausible answer would surely include the ongoing flood of ‘loony left’ stories in the press, which would undoubtedly have led to a swelling of MPs postbags, and assiduous lobbying by the PRG. Evidence for the latter is provided by Dame Jill Knight, who pleaded on behalf of ‘parents such as those who contacted me when they wished to complain about the way in which their children were being dealt with in schools promoting homosexuality. Those parents were hit, spat upon, urinated on and one, who was pregnant, was punched very hard in the stomach’.80 Just as at the Committee stage, Wilshire cited the alleged availability of Jenny 81 and Howard claimed that:
The London borough of Haringey has published a leaflet containing an approved reading list. One book on the list calls for a ban on the wearing of wedding rings by teachers and on teachers talking to their pupils about their husbands and wives. Another book entitled Young, Gay and Proud is recommended as suitable reading for children aged 13 and older. The leaflet describes it as ‘very helpful to everyone’. It describes homosexual acts in considerable detail.82
However, these and similar assertions by no means went unchallenged by Labour members. Thus, Clive Soley pointed out that the stories quoted by the Clause’s supporters ‘were known to be and had been found to be lies by newspapers. Those lies have now been picked up by certain people who have used them to create hatred and fear’.83 Similarly, Chris Smith argued that:
It might help our debates on these sensitive and important matters if we based our arguments on facts rather than on general statements and assumptions which have appeared in the popular press and are immediately taken by some Conservative Members to be the truth, which they are not.84
Ken Livingstone, who had weathered numerous similar attacks as leader of the GLC, noted that:
Conservative Members are responding to a wave of hysteria and bigotry that has been whipped up by the popular pre
ss. It has been absolutely disgraceful. Some people have the misfortune to believe what they read in the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and the Sun. They have come to accept that in some areas children are being taught how to be lesbians. It is easy for those outside who live with the day-to-day prejudice against lesbians and gay men to laugh it off, but that pernicious lie has bitten deep into the popular conscience.
Citing specifically press stories about Jenny, he asked: ‘Should such nonsense be the basis of legislation?’,85 and Jeremy Corbyn followed a similar line, asking Tory MPs
to think for a moment before they vote. They know about the way in which the media have manipulated this issue, about the self-fulfilling prophecies and lies peddled by the Murdoch press and others, and about the fears about the alleged promotion of homosexuality in schools, of which there is not one shred of evidence.86
During the debate there were a number of interruptions by gays and lesbians in the public gallery, which gave the Sun the next day the opportunity to run the headline ‘Screaming gays bring Commons to a halt!’
A perfectly circular process
However, the dissenters’ warnings all fell on deaf ears, and the amendments were defeated. The role played by events in Haringey (and, more particularly, by the way in which these were represented by sections of the press) simply cannot be overestimated. As Peter Murphy wrote in a letter to the Hornsey Journal (8 January 1988) the clause
came about through the work and dedication of a few Tottenham parents who have fought magnificently to bring this to the attention to the Government and the nation as a whole … This shows that a small group of dedicated people can change the course of such an evil policy as proposed by Haringey Councillors.