Culture Wars

by James Curran

  As the Clause made its way steadily onto the statute books, all the myths exposed in this chapter, and many more besides, were paraded with quite mind-numbing regularity by its supporters. A great deal of well-informed debunking by Labour and Liberal MPs and peers, and a massive campaign of protest by a very wide range of individuals and organisations, including the Arts Council, proved to be of no avail whatsoever. Neil Kinnock publicly condemned the clause on 29 December 1988, but it was all too little too late.

  Nor, indeed, had the opponents of positive images finished their work.

  Members of Positive Images sometimes met at Reading Matters bookshop in Haringey, which also served as the contact address for the group. It was an independent bookshop but at that time received council grants to enable it to participate in activities such as providing stalls at school book fairs. Because it stocked gay literature, among other kinds of reading material, it had long been a target for the Tottenham Tories, and also for the PRG. Indeed, during the 1987 election campaign, the aggressive behaviour of members of the latter was such as to cause them to be banned from the shop. Nothing more happened until February 1988, when the Haringey Tories tabled a motion demanding that the Council ‘immediately cease all Grant Aids to Reading Matters Bookshop and any other homosexual group’.87 A few days later, the shop began to receive visits from journalists, one from the Sunday Express saying that he had received a package of books containing Young, Gay and Proud, School’s Out and Gay Communism from a group calling themselves ‘Concerned Residents of Haringey’.88 Then, on 28 February, the Sunday Telegraph ran a front page story on the bookshop headed ‘“Tintin” sells riot and anarchy on the rates’. The article began:

  Children as young as five are being encouraged to read anarchist cartoon books and homosexual propaganda by a children’s bookshop funded by a left-wing Labour council. Reading Matters bookshop, in Tottenham, stocks a cartoon book that celebrates the murder of PC Keith Blakelock, who was hacked to death a few hundred yards from the shop during the Broadwater Farm riots.

  The article asserted that the shop also stocked Jenny and The Playbook for Kids about Sex, claimed that it was ‘dependent on funds from Haringey council’, was ‘run particularly for children’, and regarded by Tory Councillors as the ‘centre of a ‘sinister left-wing network’ in the Borough. It also mentioned that the shop was the contact address for Positive Images, which ‘promotes the introduction of lessons on homosexuality’, and was set up ‘not only by Left wingers from the Labour Party but also by activists from the Communist Party, the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party and from the Revolutionary Communist Party’. The paper had presented its story to Michael Howard, who was quoted as duly responding:

  This is appalling. Parents of children who are exposed to this kind of activity need to be able to point to a law which makes it illegal. They soon will be able to do just that. Clause 28 of the Local Government Bill will prevent this kind of abuse.

  As in the case of so many articles examined in this chapter, most of the contents of this story are inaccurate, innuendo-laden and calculated to provoke and inflame.89 Reading Matters was not a children’s bookshop – it was a general-interest community bookshop, which, like most bookshops, had a children’s section, although this one was multi-cultural and catered for the variety of different languages spoken within the borough. The cartoon book, The Scum, was not a children’s book, but a paper produced by print workers angry at their treatment by the police during the Wapping dispute. Whilst the shop was indeed a contact address for Positive Images, it also performed the same function for many other local groups. As noted above, it did receive grants from the Council for certain educational activities, but it was by no means fully funded by it.

  The following week, the story was picked up by the Mail, Sun and Star, although, like the Sunday Telegraph, none bothered to contact the shop in order to check the facts of the case. Indeed, the Mail compounded the errors in the original by calling The Scum ‘a junior guide to subversion … on display with books like Postman Pat’ in an article headed ‘Tintin in “sick” book on riot PC’s killing’. On 29 February, in a debate on the Local Government Bill, Baroness Blatch, responding to Lord McIntosh of Haringey’s point that the Education Act already prevented local authorities from ‘promoting’ any subject in a classroom, stated that ‘a way round that has been found by funding with ratepayers’ money organisations such as the Reading Matters bookshop, which does all the promotion that the positive images policy would have done within the local authority’.90 By this time, the hate mail and bomb threats had started, and people, including two Tory councillors, had been coming into the shop and hurling insults at the staff. However, the minds of the supporters of Section 28 were on other things. Thus, on 1 March, in response to a question about whether an amendment could be introduced to the Local Government Bill to prevent Haringey Council giving a grant to Reading Matters, Mrs. Thatcher stated that:

  Many people would be utterly revolted that any such thing [The Scum] should be on sale, let alone on sale from a bookshop which received a grant from a local authority … What is certain is that measures in the Local Government Bill will strengthen the ban on party political propaganda at public expense and will require local authorities to take proper account of the publicity code of practice that will shortly be placed before Parliament for approval.91

  This gave the Mail (2 March) the opportunity to run a story headed ‘Maggie in attack on Tintin hate book’, which repeated the line that The Scum was a ‘junior guide to subversion’.

  On 8 March, Dame Jill Knight asked the Prime Minister about ‘the reports last week that Haringey council was funding a bookshop selling anarchist literature to five-year-olds’, receiving the response that the requisite department was looking into the matter ‘with a view to taking action’.92

  On 9 March, Clause 28 finished its progress through Parliament. A few days later, Reading Matters’ windows were smashed.

  The magic of reiteration

  This is not the place to trace the further history of Clause 28, nor its consequences.93 But the subsequent debates94 were characterised by exactly the same process that is so apparent in the debates cited above, namely one whereby myths about the alleged ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by ‘loony left’ boroughs, and Haringey in particular, were propagated locally, amplified by sections of the local and national press, made their way into Parliament, thereby giving rise to yet more press coverage and thence forming the basis for legislation. In such a situation, myths and falsehoods are created which, although ludicrous or demonstrably untrue, or both, are almost impossible to contest and dispel – not least because they are recycled, rehashed and embellished by the press on a daily basis. The myths thus become entirely self-perpetuating. As Anna Marie Smith points out apropos the parliamentary debates:

  Later speakers cite the same ‘evidence’ as if its legitimacy and significance were already well-known. In the final debates, the simple act of speaking the names of five local authorities, Camden, Haringey, Lambeth, Brent and Ealing, is deemed sufficient to evoke the figure of the ‘promoter’ of homosexuality.95

  The press articles and parliamentary debates discussed in this chapter constitute classic examples of what Stuart Hall et al. have called a signification spiral, defined as ‘a way of signifying events which also intrinsically escalates their threat … The activity or event with which the signification deals is escalated – made to seem more threatening – within the course of the signification itself’. One of the processes involved in the spiral they define as convergence, which occurs when

  two or more activities are linked in the process of signification so as to implicitly or explicitly draw parallels between them … Another, connected, form of convergence is listing a whole series of social problems and speaking of them as ‘part of a deeper, underlying problem’ – the ‘tip of an iceberg’, especially when such a link is forged on the basis of implied common denominators. In both cases, the net eff
ect is amplification, not in the real events being described, but in their ‘threat potential’ for society.96

  Thus, sex education which is based on a liberal, non-judgmental attitude to homosexuality and lesbianism is represented as encouraging young people to experiment sexually or even to ‘become’ homosexual or lesbian. In the case of men, it is alleged that this can lead to the spread of AIDS, and anything which discourages sex as being regarded as anything other than a means of procreation is represented as endangering the very continuation of life itself (as in Margaret Attwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale). Thus, in a series of discursive steps, we move from sex education in a North London borough to the end of the world.

  The process analysed here also provides an excellent example of what has been called the ‘magic of reiteration’.97 In the case of ‘loony left’ stories about sex education, the ‘magic’ is made all the more powerful by the fact that the myths speak to deep-seated anxieties about sexuality, the family, childhood, the breakdown of the social order, and ‘the end of life as we know it’ and that they do so in terms which are at once both apocalyptic and ‘commonsensical’. With regard to the latter, the opponents of Positive Images in the press and Parliament had the overwhelming ideological advantage of working entirely within what Hall calls ‘the dominant circle of ideas’ and ‘ruling conceptions of the world’. These are ‘the horizon-of the taken for granted’ and set

  the limit to what will appear as rational, reasonable, credible, indeed say-able or thinkable, within the given vocabularies of motive and action available to us. Their dominance lies precisely in the power they have to contain within their limits, to frame within their circumference of thought, the reasoning and calculation of other social groups.98

  They thus come to exercise ‘symbolic dominance’ over competing accounts of the world. It goes without saying that the mainstream media play an absolutely crucial role in this process – particularly when they are as ideologically homogenous and combative as is the bulk of the national press in the UK. Any individuals or groups attempting to assert alternative ideological strategies are thus at a very considerable disadvantage from the start because they are engaged in a massively unequal struggle. In such circumstances, any ideological challenge, if it is to have the remotest chance of success, has to have an extremely clear idea of exactly what it wants to achieve and needs to employ a highly sophisticated political strategy in order to try to do so. As noted earlier, it can be argued that Positive Images failed on both counts.

  Such a political strategy will involve, among other things, making allies with more mainstream political and ideological forces and enlisting the aid of those media which are not totally opposed from the outset to the cause in question. Positive Images certainly found willing and energetic allies in the left and gay press, but, inevitably, these publications spoke only to the already-persuaded. However, the liberal and/or Labour-supporting press was quite another matter, as it fully reflected the concerns felt by the Labour leadership over the ‘London effect’, and especially the gay issue, as noted above and explored in more detail in the ‘Slaying the Dragon’ chapter. Thus, for example, an editorial in the New Statesman (13 March 1987) argued that, although many ‘loony left’ stories are baseless or tenuous, they nevertheless ‘fit a stereotype’ and ‘are immeasurably aided by ultra-leftists who have taken civil rights for minorities to a position where their impossibly extreme application becomes a test of socialist principles and personal integrity’. In the same edition, John Lloyd and John Rentoul argued that the gay issue ‘has become a badge of leftism’ and that ‘the hard left and the Trotskyist groups have taken it up with an uncompromising moralism which brands as homophobic those who do not agree that it should be at the front of all campaigning’. And in the Guardian (January 14 1988), Polly Toynbee averred that ‘gay rights as a cause was dead once it had been purloined by the left from the liberal establishment’, arguing that ‘moderate non-political people need to get back into these organisations, seize them from the extremists, remove them from the grip of the left-wing authorities and start to campaign effectively’. Such sentiments were routine in publications such as these.

  On the other hand, as I have tried to illustrate in this chapter, there were those on the Labour side in Parliament, who, along with Liberals such as Simon Hughes, were fully prepared to call out the positive images press stories as either wholly untrue or highly inaccurate, and it is particularly significant that one of these was Jeremy Corbyn, who, as Labour leader, has demonstrated that his public criticism of the Tory press is not the electoral liability that many of his predecessors feared. Indeed, in his speech to the Labour conference in 2017, reported in the Guardian (27 September) he openly goaded Mail editor Paul Dacre by saying:

  The day before the election, one paper devoted fourteen pages to attacking the Labour party. And our vote went up nearly 10%. Never have so many trees died in vain. The British people saw right through it. So this is a message to the Daily Mail’s editor: next time, please could you make it 28 pages?

  Furthermore, it can be argued convincingly that in December 1987 Labour made a crucial tactical error by allowing itself, as explained above, to be pushed by the Tory government and press into supporting the embryonic Clause 28, thus allying itself with the most reactionary forces in Parliament whilst profoundly alienating many members of precisely that liberal establishment so lauded by Toynbee.

  At the time, while the policy pursued by the Labour leadership and its allies in the liberal media may have seemed advisable, indeed necessary, given the daily press onslaught and the Tories’ absolute determination to tar the party as a whole with the ‘loony’ brush, there are two major objections to such a stance. The first is pragmatic, and argues that the ‘London effect’ was in fact nothing like as widespread or pronounced as the leadership feared. This argument could also pray in aid Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1931 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 in order to point out that political leaders who are the targets of vicious press campaigns do not necessarily suffer crushing defeats at the ballot box. But the second objection is a principled one, and involves the extent to which politicians in a representative democracy should allow themselves to be swayed by partisan newspapers. This applies equally to those who supported Section 28 on both the Labour and Tory sides, whatever their various motives. As this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, the stories which led to the creation of Section 28 were either wholly untrue or wildly inaccurate and massively one-sided. Whether these were invented by the newspapers themselves, or whether those newspapers were amplifying stories which they had been told by their sources, is irrelevant, since, in the latter case, normal professional journalistic practice should have required that such stories were checked for their veracity before being published. However, the adage ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good story’ is nowhere more assiduously observed than in Britain’s highly partisan national press, and particularly when the pack is in full cry in pursuit of a left-wing fox. Whether journalists should behave in this fashion is, of course, a matter for debate, but equally important is the question of the extent to which politicians should allow themselves to be swayed in policy matters by such newspapers – let alone to exploit partisan newspaper stories for their own political ends.

  The complaint is frequently heard today in Britain that newspapers exert too much power over the political agenda, but, if indeed they do, then that is largely because politicians allow them to do so – either because of ideological and political affinities, or for fear of what newspapers might do to them if they endorse policies with which those papers disagree. Either way, the result threatens to be what Bruce Page has called ‘a dance of death for democracy’.99 In her Reith Lectures, Onora O’Neill argued that ‘the press has acquired unaccountable power that others cannot match’,100 and writing about his book Who Runs This Place? (in which the chapter on the press is entitled ‘Unelected Legislators’) in the Independent (13 April 2004), Anthony Sampso
n stated that ‘Parliament without a press is now unimaginable, but a press without an effective Parliament is an invitation to demagogy and rule by unaccountable new elites’. More recently, Lord Justice Leveson concluded that relationships between the press and politicians had become ‘too close to give sufficient grounds for confidence that fear and favour have not been operative factors’, and argued that this had given rise to ‘legitimate perceptions and concerns that politicians and the press have traded power and influence in ways which are contrary to the public interest and out of public sight’.101 I would argue that the events analysed in this chapter fully bear out all these words of warning.

  Notes

  1. For accounts of the press role in this campaign see M. Hollingsworth, The Press and Political Dissent: a Question of Censorship (London: Pluto Press, 1986), pp. 140–69; P. Tatchell, The Battle for Bermondsey (London: Heretic Press, 1983).

  2. K. Wellings, ‘Perceptions of risk – media treatment of AIDS’, in P. Aggleton and H. Homans (eds), Social Aspects of AIDS, (London: The Falmer Press, 1988), pp. 83–105; V. Berridge, AIDS in the UK: the Making of Policy 1981–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  3. Cox was and continues to be a ubiquitous campaigner against numerous progressive and liberal causes, particularly in education. In 1976, she and her fellow authors Keith Jacka and John Marks published a vitriolic attack on left-wing lecturers and students at the institution in which they worked, Rape of Reason: the Corruption of the Polytechnic of North London (London: Churchill Press, 1975) and she was a member of the Hillgate Group and the Conservative Philosophy Group, both of which included Roger Scruton. She also contributed to attacks on current educational practice in works published by the CIA-backed Institute for the Study of Conflict, and was director of the Centre for Policy Studies and chair of its Education Study Group. Such indefatigable ideological labour brought her to the attention of Mrs. Thatcher, who recommender her for a peerage in 1982, and her ongoing campaigning on the education front caused The Times, 5 May 1988 to note: ‘All the most formidable and mysteriously named little groupings are to be found on the right [and] Lady Cox seems to be on the steering committee of almost every one of them’ (quoted in D. Callaghan, Conservative Party Education Policies 1976–1997: The Influence of Politics and Personality (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. 2006), p. 32). However, her strong anti-EU sentiments caused her to rebel over the Maastricht Treaty, and, in May 2004, she and three other Conservative peers signed a letter published by the UK Independence Party urging voters to support it in the elections to the European Parliament. The then Conservative leader, Michael Howard, immediately withdrew the party whip, and she subsequently sat as a crossbencher, increasingly devoting herself to campaigning against sharia law. In February 2009, she and UKIP peer Lord Pearson invited Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders to show the anti-radical-Islam film Fitna to the House of Lords. However, Wilders was prevented from entering the UK on the instructions of Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. For a general overview of Cox’s career see http://powerbase.info/index.php/Caroline_Cox#cite_note-20, and for a hagiography, which entirely ignores her role in the creation of Section 28, see A. Boyd, Baroness Cox: a Voice for the Voiceless (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1998).