Section 28 Repeal: 20th Anniversary

Debate between Ben Bradshaw and Virendra Sharma

Wednesday 29th November 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the 20th anniversary of the repeal of section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988.

I can’t tell you how glad we are to see you, Mr Sharma. Thank you for stepping into the breach.

[Mr Virendra Sharma (in the Chair)]

It doesn’t normally happen.

[Mr Bradshaw]

When I became the first openly gay person in Britain to be selected to fight a parliamentary seat more than 27 years ago, my Conservative opponent described being gay as a “sterile, disease-ridden… occupation” and warned that Exeter’s children would be in danger if I won. During that election campaign, the tabloids ran one of their favourite kinds of story at that time, full of concocted outrage about a secondary school teacher in Exeter who was undergoing a sex change. The school was managing the situation perfectly well, but that did not stop my opponent calling for that teacher to be sacked.

When I talk to young people today about that recent history, they look at me aghast. The late 1960s and 1970s, following the decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967, had seen steady improvements in the lives of LGBT people. Prejudice and discrimination persisted, of course, but it was a time of hope and optimism that gave the 18-year-old me the confidence to come out to my friends and family, but there were already stirrings of a backlash as LGBT people began to ask for the same human rights and protections as everyone else. When a tabloid discovered that a school had a book in its library that portrayed parents of the same sex, which by then was the reality for some children, all hell broke loose. Self-appointed family values campaigners, Conservative politicians and much of the media fell over themselves in outrage. They said that that innocuous book promoted homosexuality

“as a normal and acceptable way of life”.

In her 1987 party conference speech, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claimed that

“children are being cheated of a sound start in life”

due to being

“taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.”

During that 1980s moral panic, public attitudes towards LGBT people, which had been improving for decades, went into reverse. In 1983, the proportion of the public who thought that sex between adults of the same sex was always wrong had fallen to 50%, but by 1987 it had gone back up to 64%. The result was section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which banned the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities and the portrayal of it as a “pretended family relationship”.

Section 28 was never actually used to prosecute anyone, but its chilling effect created a culture of shame and silence, and blighted the experience of a generation of young LGBT people. To my party’s shame, Labour did not oppose section 28 at the time, but by 1997, under Tony Blair, we had a manifesto commitment to repeal it.