Alan Turing

Debate between Crispin Blunt and John Leech

Wednesday 27th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) on securing this wholly appropriate debate during the centenary of one of the greatest Britons. I apologise if I cover a little of the same ground about Turing’s achievements. Such is their scale that, like my hon. Friend, I will be giving only headlines in the time available. I am also grateful to Alan Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges, for helping my officials and me to get it right. Any mistakes will be entirely mine.

The perspective of history can be a wonderful thing. Decades later, the profound legacy of a brilliant and original mind largely unknown to his contemporaries can be referenced by the President of the United States in Westminster Hall, as Alan Turing was by President Obama last year. Year by year, our understanding grows of how important his contribution has been to our society. It is an astonishing legacy of global importance. One can only feel awe at the brilliance of his intellect and admiration for the magnitude of his achievements. They throw into the sharpest relief the appalling way he was treated by his own contemporary society, a fate he shared with tens of thousands of other gay men of his era. However, the shame, anger and embarrassment properly felt by today’s society at the extreme contrast between his service and his oppression, recorded in the previous Prime Minister’s unprecedented formal apology, still leaves us wanting to find ways to atone and to recognise his awesome achievements. A number of hon. Members have expressed their desire to do so in different ways. I was delighted to learn that the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) has been able to do so by naming Alan Turing way. I am delighted that when the opportunity presented itself, it was Alan Turing whom he chose to honour.

Turing was one of the top mathematical minds of all time. He successfully applied his mathematical genius to numerous other scientific disciplines while throwing in the unique ability to combine successful practical application with brilliant theoretical understanding. Turing was a fellow of King’s college, Cambridge in 1935, and his time at Princeton from 1936 to 1938 has been appreciated properly by our American cousins. His 1936 paper invented the concept of the universal machine, which underpins the computing revolution. Turing’s success in America makes all the more impressive his decision to return to England in 1938. He understood the threat that his country faced and, critically, the contribution that he could make to our defence through encryption and code-breaking.

From 1939 to 1944, Turing was almost totally engaged in the mastery of the German enciphering machine Enigma and other cryptological investigations at Bletchley Park. Turing made a unique logical contribution to the decryption of Enigma and became the chief scientific figure, with a particular responsibility for reading U-boat communications. Turing’s contribution was undoubtedly crucial. I endorse the analysis of his importance made by my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart); the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) made similar points. I do not demur from any of them.

In March 1944, Turing’s principal focus moved to encryption and voice scrambling with the Foreign Office at Hanslope Park, enabling secure communications between the Heads of Government directing the war. That work contributed directly to his development of electronic computing at the National Physical Laboratory and the university of Manchester, including the design of the Pilot ACE, the first modern computer in this country, delivered in parallel with computer development in the United States.

In his free time, Turing became a notable marathon runner, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge mentioned. But for an injury, he would probably have been invited to be a member of the British team for the London-based Olympics in 1948. His personal time of two hours and 46 minutes was barely 11 minutes slower than that of that year’s gold medallist. That rather lesser-known achievement is particularly apposite, as we are holding this debate in a year when the Olympics return to London for the first time since 1948.

Alan Turing continued to serve his country at what had become GCHQ, but after his conviction for gross indecency, he was categorised as a security risk and excluded from doing the nationally important work that must have given him great satisfaction. It is difficult to imagine the devastation that he would have experienced as his country switched from seeing him as a profound national asset to seeing him as a serious liability. By today’s standards, the security policy applied to Alan Turing seems criminally stupid, but in the atmosphere of the time—there was the defection of Maclean and Burgess, and the McCarthy witch hunts in the United States of America—it was tragically unexceptional. The atmosphere in both countries is relevant, as Turing had been an emissary to the United States in November 1942, possibly charged with assisting the Americans to address their cipher challenges and the U-boat menace then threatening their coastline. He was probably also involved in the security of transatlantic communications between Roosevelt and Churchill. That Britain possessed such impressive skills was due not least to Turing’s own efforts. Given that such extraordinary abilities existed in one man, one can but imagine the hysterics of the security apparat on both sides of the Atlantic, reinforced by the profound, ignorant and accepted commonplace prejudice of the time.

In what were to prove the final years of his life, Alan Turing used his understanding of mathematics and interest in process to develop a new and ground-breaking theory, the mathematical theory of morphogenesis: the theory of growth and form in biology. His writing on this, published in 1951, is regarded as the founding paper of modern non-linear dynamical theory. My hon. Friend might have been able to elucidate that if he had the time, but I am certainly not able to do so. Some of the theories the publication contained about the occurrence of the Fibonacci sequence in sunflowers are now being tested on a huge scale in the Manchester Turing sunflower project.

Alan Turing’s achievements have rightly earned him the description of the father of computing and artificial intelligence. As my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South and others have said, we have no way of knowing what further advances he might have made had his life not been cut short. His achievements make him utterly unique and, as such, he warrants singling out in the way that we are doing in this debate.

That his exceptional public service should have been rewarded with what appears to us to be a grotesquely unjust conviction for gross indecency has led to the question of whether our sympathy should take the form of a retrospective, posthumous pardon. I will discuss that in more detail in a moment.

That the then offence was in private, consensual and revealed to the police by Turing himself, who had been a victim of real crime, reinforces the appalling unfairness he suffered. The only victim of Turing’s “crime” was Turing himself. The first point is that the law has been changed—indeed, it was first changed 45 years ago—but the conduct that led to Alan Turing’s conviction was only deemed to no longer be an offence after Edwina Currie’s amendment became law in 1994. When Alan Turing was arrested, he is said to have stated that he expected a

“Royal Commission to legalise it”.

It has taken a very long time. Progress over the past two decades has been immense, but more remains to be done.

In fulfilment of our coalition agreement, the Government introduced the disregard provisions in the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. They are designed to let individuals get on with their lives, free from having to disclose convictions for homosexual activity where it was consensual and the other person was over 16. There are certain other circumstances in which convictions for those offences have to be disclosed under vetting checks, even though the activity is no longer a criminal offence. The Act allows individuals who have such convictions or cautions to apply to the Home Office for them to be disregarded, thus removing their practical effects from their lives and allowing them to move forward without the burden that the records currently impose.

The provisions are specifically designed to give practical assistance to the living, whose daily lives and, indeed, employment prospects may be affected by the record of a conviction on the police national computer. Extending them to the deceased would be impractical and serve no purpose. In truth, we could be looking for records going back to the 1800s. In many cases, those records may not be held, or may not provide enough information to make sure that the person in question would qualify for a disregard. There is also the question of the impact that disregarding posthumous convictions would have. It would be an attempt to rewrite history. Would it involve changing officially held records? Should we destroy historical evidence of the unjust suffering that many underwent, which would hinder academic research? Those concerns apply to a general pardon of all those, living and dead, who have such convictions. That is why the Government followed the path of a disregard in the Protection of Freedoms Act.

That brings us to the question of a pardon, which was referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge and addressed in detail by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington (Mr Leech). Free pardons under the royal prerogative of mercy were formerly the usual means of recognising that there had been a miscarriage of justice and that the convicted person was innocent. Over the past century, however, developments in legislative avenues of appeal have significantly reduced the need to resort to the royal prerogative. Generally, applicants or, in the case of the deceased, their families, have the right to appeal to the relevant appeal court and can also ask the Criminal Cases Review Commission to review their case. The grant of pardons under the royal prerogative is now extremely rare.

It is the long-standing policy not to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy where a person was correctly convicted under the laws that existed at the time. The applicant must be technically and morally innocent, as my hon. Friend has said. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South has said that we should clear Alan Turing’s name. A pardon under the royal prerogative of mercy would not actually affect Alan Turing’s conviction; only a court can quash a conviction and, in that sense, clear someone’s name.

Much as we now feel it outrageous that Alan Turing’s behaviour was treated as a criminal offence, he was guilty of the contemporary offence. To grant him a pardon under the royal prerogative would change the basis on which such pardons are normally given.

If Alan Turing were pardoned, there would be tens of thousands of other people in respect of whom demands for like treatment could be made. Those persons could include about 16,000 living individuals with convictions for homosexuality, and many times that number of deceased victims. The living can benefit from the Home Office’s recent disregard provisions, but both they and the families of those who are deceased, or others on their behalf, could seek a pardon, too.

[Mr Leech]

Has the Department made any assessment of how many family members might apply for a pardon for their deceased relatives?

[Mr Blunt]

The Department’s problem is that it is extremely difficult to make a sensible analysis that could be relied on. The living can apply to have their convictions disregarded, but I would think that more than 100,000 people have been convicted of these crimes over two centuries, so the potential scale of applications is enormous.

There is also the question of justice. The sex offences of which Alan Turing was convicted are still capable of being offences in certain circumstances where the other party was under age or the sex was non-consensual. In such circumstances, a pardon would be not only inappropriate, but wrong. The records for some older cases would no longer be available, and the way such offences were recorded would make it difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether a pardon was in fact justified. It is to avoid that problem that the Government have gone down the route of a disregard by application.

It is also worth noting that the exercise of the royal prerogative of mercy has changed over time. Centuries ago it was exercised by the monarch in an unfettered way. In modern times, however, the exercise of the prerogative is not exercised by Her Majesty personally but on the advice and recommendation of a Secretary of State, and it is therefore subject to judicial oversight. Whenever someone makes qualitative judgments on such issues, the prospect of review of the reasonableness of a decision is opened up.