Alan Turing (Statutory Pardon) Bill [HL]

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, this campaign has been going on a long time. I remember at Cambridge, from 1957 to 1961—1957 being the year of the Wolfenden report—that we had a campaign for the rehabilitation of Alan Turing. As somebody said to me just the other day, some campaigns take longer than others. We are familiar with that in the trade union movement. I am quite sure this one will come to fruition very soon.

As my noble friend Lady Warwick of Undercliffe has pointed out, the government line seems to be at once technical and legal but, in practice, an objection to “opening the floodgates”. The logic is clear that the law which we have at the moment does not apply posthumously and there are many thousands of people involved. If the Government wish to press that argument, the one thing which must be borne in mind is that under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 there is no equivalent legal provision in other fields. The floodgates argument is to do with this field.

Allowing deceased persons to apply under the disregarding procedure would somehow be the equivalent in reverse of what the Russians seem to have as a reasonable statute at the moment. Something like that might be the best long-term solution. I ask the Government and the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, to respond to a parallel method of achieving what we all want. That is to give national recognition in a quite dramatic way, which would be a pardon in practice and a huge change in people’s perception to his having been a national hero. That would constitute a collective and representative pardon.

I have considered over the past few days how, as my noble friend Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde put it in a striking way, this is a debt of honour. Michael Foot wrote rather a good book called Debts of Honour, and he was the sort of person who would immediately think in these long, historic terms about his great heroes—Shelley, Hazlitt and people like that. You could say the same in the field of science. If you look up Whitehall, Trafalgar Square and so on, you will see our national heroes; and even outside here, there is Marochetti’s statue of Richard I, the Lionheart, at the start of the first crusade. Well, that is fair enough—or not, as you might say. However, we could make our debt of honour to Alan Turing somehow representative of the need to put our heroes of science and creativity—Newton and so on—on the national plinth. Of course, there is a plinth going spare at the moment in Trafalgar Square. I add to this campaign one which I am sure Whitehall will take a bit of time to get used to. Nevertheless, it would be a striking gesture, and I put that forward in relation to the Bill.