Culture Wars

by James Curran

  13. As Mrs Thatcher put it in her speech to the Scottish Tories on 13 May 1983:

  The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom. (www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105314)

  And again, in an article in Newsweek, 27 April 1992:

  I set out to destroy socialism because I felt it was at odds with the character of the people. We were the first country in the world to roll back the frontiers of socialism, then roll forward the frontiers of freedom. We reclaimed our heritage; we are renewing it and carrying it forward. (www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111359)

  6

  ‘A wave of hysteria and bigotry’

  Sexual politics and the ‘loony left’

  Julian Petley

  Introduction

  In this chapter, I want to examine how a specific set of ‘loony left’ stories, namely stories about how certain London councils and local education authorities were allegedly trying to ‘promote’ homosexuality in the schools for which they were responsible, were mobilised by Conservative politicians and newspapers in order to try to damage Labour’s chances in the London local government and Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) elections of 8 May 1986 and the general election of 11 June 1987. How successful this initiative was in its own terms is debatable, but three points may be made with absolute confidence. First, these stories formed part of a more general assault by moral campaigners, many of whom were active Tories, against the forces of what they termed ‘permissiveness’. Second, such stories played a major role in the Labour leadership’s decision to distance itself considerably from the London-based municipal left in order to try to limit what it perceived as the fall-out from what came to be known as the ‘London effect’. And third, these stories led directly to the creation of the measure which would become the highly controversial Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which outlawed the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities and in state schools. Thus, the story told in this chapter is not simply one of a campaign against Labour at both the local and national levels by the Conservative party and press, but it is also an analysis of the role that the press can play in the creation and successful passage of legislation. This is not, of course, to argue that ‘it’s all got up by the press’, but, rather, to point to the ways in which newspapers and politicians interact on occasion in pursuit of common policy aims. Defenders of the idea of the Fourth Estate might argue that this is just as it should be, as long as both sides are acting in the public interest, but the overwhelming bias to the right of Britain’s national press means that only certain kinds of policies can benefit from this alliance, which in turn suggests that it is not the public interest which is being served in such instances, but rather the interests of certain sections of the public and of specific shades of the political spectrum.

  Setting the scene

  The London local elections of May 1986 were a watershed for Labour’s initiatives on lesbian and gay rights, with various councils making manifesto commitments on the subject, some involving sex education in schools. Contemporaneously, the government had decided to take a tougher line on what many of its members and supporters – not least in the press – regarded as far too ‘permissive’ an approach to sex education, against which they had been campaigning, increasingly vociferously, ever since the Tories came to power.

  At this time, the heat was on education at the national level. First, teachers were involved in a long-running pay dispute. Then, on 21 May, Kenneth Baker took over from Sir Keith Joseph as Secretary of State for Education and was soon to become a newspaper hero, promising radically to reduce local government responsibility for education (which he did first in the Education Act (No. 2) 1986 and then in the Education Reform Act 1988). The educational inspectorate had recently released their annual report on education, and this had highlighted a deterioration in teachers’ ability to understand and cater for students’ needs, as well as the negative effects of budget cuts. However, many newspapers had very different explanations for the poor state of education, and they rapidly enrolled sex education in their battle against the local education authorities. Thus, in its 7 May editorial, the Mail complained that:

  Education in Britain is a disaster area …. As education has slipped into the hands of the teachers’ unions and the local authorities we have seen it visibly deteriorate. Examination performance is down while political indoctrination is up. In place of discipline and skill in basics we now have peace studies and anti-racism. Text books, we are told, are in short supply; but not the glossy books which teach boys to behave like girls, or show children in bed with gay ‘parents’.

  On local election day itself, The Times editorialised on behalf of parents ‘who do not want equal-value indoctrination of homosexuality’ and against the very notion of heterosexism, whilst a whole page of comment in Today urged voters to ‘root out’ of local government the ‘extremists’ who have infiltrated the ranks of ‘decent’ Labour people and are ‘squandering’ rate-payers’ money on ‘an unpleasant assortment of unworthy causes’ such as ‘a £9,800 grant by Hackney Council towards an open day for gays and lesbians’ and ‘a £120,000 Lesbian and Gay unit set up by Haringey’. On 1 May, under the headline ‘Love books Bernie wants to be banned’, the Standard told its readers that ‘normal sexual relationships between men and women are under attack in the borough of Haringey run by Labour leader Bernie Grant. The Labour Party’s women’s manifesto for the borough elections which take place next week wants heterosexual books banned from libraries’. No such proposal was in fact ever advanced, and, as in the case of most articles on this subject, there is an elementary confusion between anti-heterosexism and hostility towards heterosexuality itself.

  The May 1986 local elections in London thus presented a perfect opportunity for the Tory press and party at both national and local level to mount a concerted scaremongering campaign against local Labour initiatives on gay and lesbian rights, and to represent ‘loony left’ boroughs as microcosms of Britain under a Labour government. This campaign was able to build effectively on the demonologies which had already been created around similar policies pursued earlier by the GLC, and during the 1982 Bermondsey by-election which Peter Tatchell fought (and lost) for Labour, described by Gay News (March 1982) as ‘the most homophobic by-election of our times’.1

  Journalists and politicians were also able to draw on another already-existing construction: that of AIDS as a ‘gay plague’. It was thus argued that councils pursuing rights for gays and lesbians were effectively encouraging people, and especially young people, into sexual ‘deviance’ and thereby exposing themselves to the danger of contracting AIDS. Inevitably, British national newspapers had been at the forefront of this construction in the first place.2

  During the local elections, one book achieved totemic significance in the Tory campaign: Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, an English translation of a Danish book about a little girl who lives with her father and his male partner. This continued to play a key role in Tory demonology long after the elections, being made to stand for everything that was anathema to the opponents of London Labour councils’ alleged policies on sex education. Starting with a story on 2 May in the Islington Gazette, a paper which decisively negated the tendency for the local press to take a more balanced approach than the nationals to council matters, the myth was created that this book was homosexual propaganda and was widely available in London schools. The Tory peer Baroness Cox3 raised the matter in the Lords on 7 May 1986, and this was but the first of its many parliamentary appearances. But for all the lurid stories splashed across the newspapers, the truth was that ILEA did not consider the book suitable for general use in primary schools and thus decreed that it should not be available to pupils. Indeed, the Authority had only one copy, whi
ch was held at a teachers’ centre and could be used only with older pupils, and even then only in exceptional circumstances after their parents had been consulted.4 However, this did not stop Baker, according to the Mail (16 September) ‘demanding its immediate withdrawal’, or the Telegraph (19 September) stating that Jenny was ‘widely stocked in schools and libraries’, or the Mail (22 September) reporting that it ‘was being circulated by the Inner London Education Authority’.5

  ‘Putting the gay in Haringey’

  Labour’s local election manifesto in Haringey, a London borough outside the ILEA area and thus with sole responsibility for education, committed the council to upholding the right of educational workers to be ‘openly lesbian or gay at work’ as well as to supporting students ‘realising their own gayness’; it also committed the council to beginning ‘the process of ensuring lesbianism and gayness are treated positively on the curriculum’. In all, there were five mentions of ‘positive images’ in the manifesto. For this, the council would be subjected to what Les Levidow has described as ‘Britain’s best organised, most intense manifestation of homophobia’6 . In what follows, I have inevitably been able to present only a fraction of the negative press coverage which the borough received between 1986 and 1988.

  Haringey is divided into two constituencies: Hornsey/Wood Green and Tottenham, each with its own Conservative Party Association. The former was represented in Parliament by the relatively moderate Conservative Sir Hugh Rossi. Tottenham, however, had been a Labour stronghold since the war, and in 1987 it elected as its MP Bernie Grant, who, as leader of Haringey council from 1985, had come in for vitriolic abuse from the Tory party and press, and had been nicknamed ‘Barmy Bernie’. At the time of the events described in this chapter, the Tottenham Conservative Association was dominated by hard-line Thatcherites, and its chairman, Peter Murphy, a local councillor, ardent Roman Catholic and overt homophobe, was a major player in the events detailed here. Largely white and working-class, Tottenham was precisely the kind of area which Thatcher considered crucial to her electoral success, and this is one reason why the anti-Labour battle was so bitterly fought there by the Tory party and its press allies.

  In response to Labour’s manifesto, the Tottenham Conservatives focused heavily on the lesbian and gay issue – in particular on AIDS and positive images. Slogans abounded such as ‘We do not believe in prejudicing young minds. AIDS is a killer’, ‘You do not want your child educated to be a homosexual or lesbian’, and ‘A child of 3 being taught that homosexualism [sic] is normal is turning the world upside down’. One of their leaflets claimed that: ‘This is the order from the Homosexual Unit [sic] – “children must be educated from nursery to secondary in a manner designed to ‘promote’ Lesbians and Homosexuals”’, and another presented as ‘quotes’ from the Labour manifesto: ‘Heterosexual is pernicious’ and ‘We will campaign against normal sex’.7 The campaign also utilised press articles, for example reprinting one from the Express (14 April 1986) headed ‘Storm over “Barmy” Bernie’s new gay teach-ins’. Not to be outdone, the Hornsey Journal (9 May), at that time an extremely anti-council paper which, like the Islington Gazette, clearly negated the tendency for local papers to take a more balanced approach than the nationals to council matters, ran a screaming front page headline: ‘Lesbians to adopt kids. Schools to get lessons about homosexuals. HarinGAY!’ Murphy was quoted as saying that: ‘No person who believes in God can vote Labour now. It is an attack on ordinary family life as a prelude to revolution’, whilst the paper’s editorial shrilled: ‘We are on the edge of an abyss. We call on all decent, ordinary people to have an “uprising” of their own – at the ballot box’. Indeed, so keen was the paper to influence the election result that it actually brought forward its publication date by a day, and it played a key role in the events described in this chapter, giving full rein to the council’s critics, providing the national press with ample ‘loony left’ fodder in its columns, and frequently misrepresenting or simply failing to report Council policy.

  However, in spite of the campaign waged by the Journal and much of the national press, at the local election the Tories in Haringey lost seven of their twenty-two seats, with Labour gaining six of them. Significantly, though, Labour lost four seats in Tottenham. But it now had forty-two seats, and the Conservatives only sixteen on the local authority.

  Positive images

  Just before the election, the council had formed a Lesbian and Gay Unit within the Community Affairs Department, which had a staff of seven and a budget of £100,000. One of its first acts was to write to all local head-teachers advising them of Labour’s manifesto commitment that ‘we will encourage [equal opportunities practice] by establishing a fund for curriculum projects from nursery through to further education which are specifically designed to be anti-racist, anti-sexist and to promote positive images of lesbians and gays, and of people with disabilities’.8 Local objectors to the council’s gender policies then formed themselves into the Campaign for Normal Family Life (CNFL), which operated out of the Tottenham Conservative Association’s offices. One of their leaflets stated: ‘Protesting against plans to introduce homosexual education throughout Haringey. Our demands are: Completely abolish the present policy. A return to normal family values. An end to ridiculous words such as sexist and racist and a return to normality’.9 In September, supporters of the council’s gay and lesbian initiatives founded the counter-movement Positive Images.

  As already noted, the topic of sex education was already firmly in the Tories’ sights and high on the press agenda. In June 1986, following the lead given by Viscount Buckmaster in the Lords in May (see below), Baker introduced a new clause into the Education (No. 2) Bill requiring local authorities to ensure that sex education would encourage pupils ‘to have due regard to moral considerations and the value of family life’. This was, in fact, very much in line with the government’s 1985 White Paper, Better Schools, and the 1986 schools inspectorate document, Health Education from 5 to 16. However, the latter also noted that: ‘Teachers need to remember that many children come from backgrounds that do not correspond to this ideal [of family life], and great sensitivity is needed to avoid causing personal hurt and giving unwitting offence’. It concluded:

  Given the openness with which homosexuality is treated in society now it is almost bound to arise as an issue in one area or another of a school’s curriculum. Information about and discussion of homosexuality, whether it involves a whole class or an individual, needs to acknowledge that experiencing strong feelings of attraction to members of the same sex is a phase passed through by many young people, but that for a significant number of people these feelings persist into adult life. Therefore it needs to be dealt with objectively and seriously, bearing in mind that, while there has been a marked shift away from the general condemnation of homosexuality, many individuals and groups within society hold sincerely to the view that it is morally objectionable. This is difficult territory for teachers to traverse and for some schools to accept that homosexuality may be a normal feature of relationships would be a breach of the religious faith upon which they are founded. Consequently, LEAs, voluntary bodies, governors, heads and senior staff in schools have important responsibilities in devising guidance and supporting teachers dealing with this sensitive issue.10

  However, the measured tones of the inspectorate conspicuously failed to find an echo in the pages of the Hornsey Journal and much of the national press in their reporting of Haringey, in which the battle between the opponents and proponents of positive images was becoming decidedly more heated. The Sunday Telegraph (6 July 1986) ran an article headed ‘Putting the gay in Haringey’ which announced that:

  Courses on homosexuality are to be introduced into the 78 schools of one London borough by the end of the year despite fierce protests from parents. Head teachers in Haringey have been instructed by the Left-wing council to develop courses designed to ‘promote positive images of lesbians and gays’. Nursery and primary school
s are not exempt from this order. Conservative councillors condemned the plan last week as an attempt to ‘turn the world upside down by making the abnormal appear normal and the normal seem abnormal’. They accused the ruling Labour group of ‘dangerous social engineering’.

  This highly inaccurate account of the council’s positive images policies was faithfully repeated in the next day’s Telegraph under the headline ‘Outrage over homosexual classes plan’. The article began: ‘Courses on Homosexuality and Lesbianism for all pupils from nursery schools to further education have been proposed by the London Borough of Haringey, led by Mr. Bernie Grant, which has decreed that “heterosexism is pernicious”. The plan has outraged parents’. The article also included a quote from Peter Murphy stating that ‘I am raising the issue, as a Catholic, with Cardinal Hume. It represents an open attack on family life’. A Sun article, 7 July, headed ‘Bernie kids get lessons in gay love’, stated that:

  Courses to teach children about homosexuality and lesbianism are to be started in schools run by Barmy Bernie Grant’s Left-wing council. And Haringey council may even extend the scheme to nursery and primary schools. Head teachers have been ordered to start the courses to counter the ‘pernicious effects’ of straight sexual relations. The scheme, decided by the North London council’s women group, is official policy. They call for the promotion of positive images and practices of lesbianism and gays.

  The Mail followed suit on 9 July, calling the plan ‘Upside down idiocy’ and commenting that:

  The courses on homosexuality and lesbianism for all pupils from nursery schools to further education no doubt will be followed by lessons propounding the theories that thuggery can be fun, stealing is the right of the unemployed, if you’re black you can’t be bad and heterosexism is pernicious.