Here he foreshadowed, without specifying them, ‘several measures, sponsored by Private Members, but aided by the Government’, which he hoped soon to see on the Statute Book, and reminded his audience that ‘to enlarge the area of individual choice, socially, politically and economically, not just for a few but for the whole community, is very much what democratic socialism is about’. After a powerful statement of the moral case for a stronger Race Relations Act (‘For a Labour Government to fall down on this would be a betrayal without excuse of everything for which the Labour Party has ever stood’) he repeated that the government’s objective must be ‘not merely to govern well, important thought this is, but also to change and improve society’. On that basis the party could ‘repair the damage of this spring and lay the foundations of another period of Labour power’.113
This was a remarkable personal manifesto, serious, thoughtful and statesmanlike, which if it was not an immediate challenge to Wilson, unmistakably announced Jenkins’ emergence as a potential future leader. In the meantime, however, the two measures for which his tenure at the Home Office is primarily remembered were almost simultaneously approaching completion. One, the legalisation of homosexuality, stands as an historic milestone in the enlargement of human rights, now almost universally accepted; the other, allowing easier access to legal abortion, remains a contentious and emotive issue – though not, thankfully, as divisive in Britain as in America. Both were on Jenkins’ 1959 shopping list of reforms which a determined Home Secretary should be able to deliver. But both were too controversial and too marginal to most voters’ concerns to be appropriate for government legislation.
There is an established convention that issues of personal morality are decided by MPs voting according to their consciences on a free vote, usually on a Private Members’ Bill. But this is a tortuous and uncertain process, as Jenkins had discovered with reference to Obscene Publications in the 1950s. Even with a clear majority in both Houses in favour, reform requires, first, a Member who is willing to take up a controversial subject winning one of the top three or four places in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills; and, second, a sympathetic government ready to give enough parliamentary time to get the Bill through. Thus Jenkins’ reforming ambition was wholly dependent on finding Members ready to sponsor the necessary Bills; and then on his ability to persuade a sceptical Cabinet to give them time. The first problem was partly solved when David Steel won third place in the Private Members’ ballot. Steel was a young Liberal who had won a Scottish Borders seat at a by-election in 1965 and managed to hold it at the General Election in 1966. His first idea was to promote a Scottish Borders development Bill; but the Scottish Secretary, Willie Ross, was against it, so that was a non-starter. Jenkins initially hoped that Steel would take up the homosexuality bill which Lord Arran had already carried through the House of Lords. But Steel chose – partly because Arran’s Bill did not apply to Scotland – to take on abortion instead, picking up another measure successfully carried through the Lords by Lord Silkin. The Labour MP Leo Abse then undertook to introduce a homosexuality Bill under the Ten-Minute Rule.
Steel’s Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill aimed to tackle the scandal by which dozens of poor, desperate women were dying every year at the hands of unscrupulous and inexpert back-street abortionists, who were estimated to be performing anything between 40,000 and 200,000 illegal operations a year: the numbers are necessarily inexact. The Bill allowed foetuses up to twenty-eight weeks to be legally aborted, with the approval of two doctors, to preserve the physical or mental health of the mother, or at any stage to save the life of the mother or if the child was likely to be severely handicapped. It did not, as its critics insisted, sanction ‘abortion on demand’; nevertheless it was a highly sensitive issue, which the twenty-eight-year-old Steel handled with remarkable maturity and skill. Jenkins gave his strong personal support, arguing that the existing law was ‘uncertain . . . harsh and archaic, and . . . consistently flouted by those who have the means to do so. It is, therefore, very much a question of one law for the rich and one for the poor’.114, fn16 The Bill passed its Second Reading in the Commons by a deceptively comfortable majority – 223:29 – in July 1966. But its opponents – led by Norman St John Stevas (Jenkins’ old ally in the obscenity battle, but a leading Roman Catholic) – fought it line by line in committee in early 1967 and it was clearly going to fail to get through its Report Stage unless the government granted it more time. In Cabinet Lord Longford (Lord Privy Seal and another prominent Catholic), the Scottish Secretary Willie Ross and the Minister of Housing, Anthony Greenwood (worried about the Catholic vote in Lancashire), argued that it would be politically dangerous for the government to take sides on the issue;fn17 but Jenkins maintained that it did not breach the government’s neutrality to allow the Commons to decide on a free vote, while the question would come back year after year unless it was dealt with.117 It was agreed to grant an all-night session on 29 June; but when that was not enough he had to ask for another, eventually set for 13 July. Crossman thought he was ‘throwing his weight around a bit . . . trying to decide the allocation of parliamentary time’, but nevertheless promised Steel that the House would sit until the bill had completed all its stages.118 Still the opponents did not give up, so the supporters of the Bill had to be sure to have 100 Members on hand all night to keep the debate alive and vote whenever necessary. Jenkins himself voted in every division. But finally, just before noon on 14 July, the Bill was given its Third Reading by 167 votes to 83. Jenkins paid tribute to Steel’s coolness under often emotional attack. ‘I think that the hon. Member, as a young Member of the House with a marginal constituency and without a great party machine behind him, has shown exceptional courage in carrying on with the Bill in these circumstances.’119 Though Jenkins and Steel actually had few direct dealings during the passage of the Bill, this was the foundation of an important relationship of mutual respect, which would bear fruit fourteen years later. After a brief scare in the Lords, the Bill received the Royal Assent on 26 October.
Abse’s Sexual Offences Bill – to decriminalise homosexual acts ‘between consenting adults in private’ – had a closely parallel passage, though it commanded even less enthusiasm within the government. Back in 1961 Wilson had warned that supporting the recommendation of the Wolfenden Report would cost Labour six million votes.120 Both the senior working-class ministers, Brown and Callaghan, were deeply opposed to changing the law; and even Crossman feared that it was ‘twenty years ahead of public opinion’.121, fn18 But from the moment he succeeded Soskice, Jenkins pressed for government time and assistance to be given to a Private Members’ Bill introduced by the Tory MP Humphrey Berkeley which in February 1966 was given a Second Reading by 164 votes to 107, despite crusty old Tories like Sir Cyril Osborne and Sir Cyril Black inveighing furiously against pansies and national decadence. Again Jenkins himself spoke powerfully, on a personal basis, in favour of tolerance, while insisting that ‘full penalties’ would be retained ‘for any offence touching the corruption of youth’.122 Unfortunately Berkeley lost his seat at the General Election with an above-average swing against him, which seemed to bear out the fears of those who thought the issue best left alone; on the other hand Labour’s big majority, with a large influx of younger, university-educated new Members, made it easier to press ahead without regard to the electoral consequences. (In fact an NOP poll in 1965 had shown 63 per cent support for legalisation, and the opponents were not so geographically concentrated as the Catholic opponents of abortion.)123 No MP successful in the Private Members’ ballot was willing to take up Berkeley’s Bill. But in July Leo Abse – the eccentric amateur Freudian MP for Jenkins’ native Pontypool – had been given leave by a substantial majority (244:100) to introduce a Ten-Minute Rule Bill; and in October Jenkins argued in Cabinet that ‘we shall be under considerable criticism, mainly from our own supporters, if we fail to provide a little time for Mr Abse’s Bill to make progress’. If nothing was done it would bec
ome increasingly difficult to enforce a law that both Houses of Parliament had twice pronounced against. Partly on the basis that it was better to get an unpopular measure out of the way well before the next election, Wilson reluctantly summed up in support of granting half a day for a Second Reading, with no promise of support through further stages.124 Just before Christmas, however, the bill passed that stage unopposed on a technicality when its opponents were caught napping by an early closure.
Abse’s flamboyant (though heterosexual) showmanship was the exact opposite of Steel’s soft-spoken seriousness. ‘He wasn’t exactly the person I would have chosen to be the sponsor of the Bill,’ Jenkins told a historian of the legislation many years later, ‘but given that he didn’t do it badly at all.’125 Abse antagonised many supporters of his Bill by his equally passionate opposition to the abortion Bill. (On the other hand, St John Stevas, the leading opponent of the abortion Bill, was a strong supporter of legalising homosexuality: the two measures drew on overlapping but not identical support.) But he cleverly wrong-footed his opponents by unexpectedly conceding that homosexuality should remain an offence in the merchant navy, after which they had no other amendments ready, so the committee stage went through in an hour. The diehard opponents were not many – no more than a couple of dozen – but they were persistent, delaying the Bill by tabling innumerable new amendments; while with many working-class Labour members unwilling to be seen to be supporting a ‘Buggers’ Charter’, Abse had some difficulty keeping up the quorum needed to defeat them through an all-night filibuster on the Report Stage and Third Reading on 3–4 July 1967.126 The Bill was eventually carried by ninety-nine votes (plus two tellers) against fourteen.
On both these measures Jenkins was criticised for lending the government’s authority and government time to get the legislation through. Sir Charles Taylor, the Tory Member for Eastbourne, for instance, typified the opponents’ apoplectic outrage at the homosexuality Bill:
One would have thought that the Home Secretary had enough on his plate to deal with crime . . . without taking the time of the House to deal with a Bill which nobody ever really wanted. I am glad to say that nobody in my constituency wanted it . . . The Government are completely out of step with the people, who do not believe in buggery.127
Jenkins had no difficulty mocking Sir Charles’ narrow-mindedness (‘untypical even of his constituents’) and repeatedly insisted that the government was doing no more than making it possible for the clear majority opinion of the House to be expressed without being blocked by small minorities. While recognising that same-sex attraction was not a matter of choice, but a fact of life for a significant number of the population, however, he was still careful to emphasise that the Bill was not intended to promote homosexuality:
It would be a mistake to think that we are giving a vote of confidence or congratulation to homosexuality. Those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of loneliness, guilt and shame. The crucial question, which we are nearly at the end of answering decisively, is, should we add to those disadvantages the full rigour of the criminal law?
Unlike Hogg, who somewhat churlishly called it ‘a small measure which will have very little effect on our social life’, Jenkins celebrated the Bill as ‘an important and civilising measure’.128
Of course Jenkins was not solely responsible for these Bills; Steel and Abse who sponsored them; Crossman and the Government Chief Whip, John Silkin, who controlled the parliamentary timetable; Wilson, who appointed Jenkins to the Home Office knowing his agenda and then allowed him to pursue it; the 200-odd mainly but not exclusively Labour and Liberal Members who voted for them, and the greater number in all parties who abstained – all were equally essential. But these reforms would not have happened when they did – well ahead of most other European countries – without Jenkins’ drive and determination; and down the years he received the largest share of odium from those who continued to abhor them, as well as the credit from those who approved or were quietly grateful. He accepted that the detailed provisions of the Abortion Act would require periodic modification: the time-limit was reduced from twenty-eight weeks to twenty-four in 1990. He probably did not envisage the positive flaunting of gay and lesbian culture that would explode a generation on, let alone the legalisation of same-sex marriage. But he never resiled from the belief that both these Bills were socially beneficent measures and he never apologised for having assisted their passage. Just two years later, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a quite minor speech opening a Labour party bazaar at Abingdon (five miles from East Hendred), he demurred from the phrase ‘the permissive society’, widely used to describe these and other liberalising developments of the decade. ‘What I prefer to ask is whether the changes recently made . . . have made us a more civilised society. And to that I unhesitatingly answer yes.’129 The newspapers immediately paraphrased his words into a soundbite – ‘The permissive society is the civilised society’ – which was not quite what he said. But ‘I never made a very strenuous attempt at correction,’ he wrote years later, ‘because it was not all that far from my meaning.’130
In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, among others, regularly blamed Jenkins for the breakdown of families, disrespect for authority and decline of social responsibility which they believed flowed from the liberalisation of the 1960s – ignoring the contribution of their own economic policies. ‘Thus was sown the wind,’ Tebbit charged in 1985, ‘and we are now reaping the whirlwind.’131 But Jenkins always pointed out that Mrs Thatcher voted for both the abortion Bill and the homosexuality Bill, though she did oppose Lord Gardiner’s relaxation of the divorce law (Tebbit was not yet in the House) and that her governments with their huge Tory majorities never made any attempt to repeal any of them. The Thatcher government did pass the infamous Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which outlawed the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality; but no prosecution was ever brought and it was repealed in 2003. Since 1967 no one has ever seriously suggested recriminalising homosexuality between consenting adults.
Cummings, Daily Express, 8.8.69 (British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent)
Another overdue reform that Jenkins was not quite able to see onto the Statute Book before he left the Home Office was the repeal of the Lord Chamberlain’s power of censorship of live theatre. This was an absurd anachronism under which playwrights had chafed for years: it was brought to a head in 1965 by the banning of a production of Edward Bond’s Saved at the Royal Court. Frank Soskice had maintained that the system ‘continued to work by and large remarkably well’ and claimed that a more logical system might be harder to operate.132 Jenkins immediately set up an inquiry, which reported predictably in favour of abolishing the Lord Chamberlain’s role; and in July 1967 – just a few days after the abortion and homosexuality Bills had gone through – he pressed the Home Affairs Committee of the Cabinet for a bill to implement its recommendation. (‘Roy Jenkins is getting more imperious every day,’ Crossman grumbled.)133 He resisted those – headed by the Lord Chamberlain himself, Lord Cobbold – who recognised the anachronism but wanted to see his role taken over by a board of theatre censors analogous to the Film Censorship Board, arguing instead that plays should be treated in the same way as books under the Obscene Publications Act and the ordinary law of libel. The Cabinet initially agreed, until the Prime Minister began to worry about the representation of living people on stage. He claimed to be thinking of the Queen or foreign leaders; but it was not coincidental that a play was just about to open at Joan Littlewood’s theatre in Stratford East based on the Private Eye spoof, Mrs Wilson’s Diary. The Lord Chamberlain declared the script ‘so cheap and gratuitously nasty, and so completely worthless that it is not recommended for licence’.134 Wilson, Brown and Callaghan all read it, and eight scenes were cut before the play was allowed to open in September 1967; it quickly transferred to the West End, where it ran for another eight months.
When Crossman warned him against defying the Prime Minister an
d the Palace, Jenkins allegedly replied (this is Crossman’s paraphrase, probably not his actual words): ‘I’m not prepared, as a liberal and radical Home Secretary, to have my reputation ruined by being ordered to impose worse conditions on the live theatre than they are getting now under the Lord Chamberlain.’ He ‘made it quite clear that he was thinking of the threat of resignation in order to get his way’.135 Fortuitously the veteran Labour MP and former minister George Strauss won a place in the Private Members’ ballot and planned to introduce a Bill concentrated the government’s mind. Jenkins proposed to assist Strauss with the drafting of his Bill; the Cabinet could then decide at Second Reading whether to take it over as a government Bill. With reference to the representation of living people he argued that political satire was simply too popular to ban: no one had enjoyed the ridicule of Harold Macmillan by That Was The Week That Was more than the Labour party, and you could not logically enforce tighter restrictions on the stage than were applied to television.136 When Callaghan took over at the Home Office he agreed; Strauss’s Bill thereafter proceeded unopposed and received the Royal Assent in July 1968. Thus the Lord Chamberlain was finally consigned to history, and the hippy musical Hair – with its few seconds of dimly lit nudity – opened in London a few weeks later.fn19
There were other extensions of personal freedom foreshadowed in The Future of Socialism and The Labour Case that Jenkins did not manage to deal with in 1965–7. One was the licensing laws; another was Sunday Observance – a Bill sponsored by Lord Willis passed the House of Lords in 1966, but never made progress in the Commons; a third was drugs. Jenkins was studying the case for making a distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ drugs and legalising the recreational use of cannabis, but had not yet made up his mind when he was moved on; Callaghan took a much less liberal view and immediately shelved the issue. Jenkins later wished he had dealt with it while he had the chance. He still took an interest in the continuing propensity of the police to seize serious books like William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, published by ‘obviously reputable publishers’, and as minister responsible for the Met was embarrassed when they made themselves ridiculous by raiding an exhibition of pictures by Aubrey Beardsley.137 He was not responsible for the closure of the hugely popular ‘pirate’ radio stations which broadcast illegally from ships moored just off the coast, since broadcasting came under the remit of the Postmaster-General, Ted Short. But he was responsible for the unpopular experiment with ‘double summer time’, which ran for three years from 1968 to 1971; his old ally A.P. Herbert led a spirited campaign against what he called ‘Jenkins Time’, which he predicted would prove lethal for the government.138 Here again, as with the Kenyan Asians legislation, Jenkins was lucky to have moved on before its unpopularity came home to roost.
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