Merchant Shipping (Homosexual Conduct) Bill

Lord Lester of Herne Hill Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 6th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill (LD)]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, I congratulate John Glen MP on his success in the other place in navigating this Bill through all its stages with government and cross-party support. The Liberal Democrats warmly welcome the Bill and hope that it will rapidly become law. By repealing Sections 146(4) and 147(3) of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, it completes the removal of archaic and unjust provisions that penalised homosexual activity.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Leo Abse’s Private Member’s Bill which became the Sexual Offences Act 1967. It came 10 years after the Wolfenden report recommended reform. The Act abolished the crime of sexual love between two men over the age of 21 in private. It had crucial support from the then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, but the path of reform has been long and tortuous and has required intervention from the European Court of Human Rights and the European Union.

The 1967 Act did not apply to Northern Ireland. It required a judgment by the Strasbourg Court in Jeffrey Dudgeon’s case to persuade Parliament to abolish the offence in Northern Ireland. The 1994 Act repealed the clauses in the 1967 Act that made homosexual activity in the Armed Forces and on Merchant Navy vessels a criminal offence, but clauses were introduced in this House that provided that nothing in the 1994 Act would prevent homosexual activity constituting grounds for dismissal. The clauses were approved in Committee by a Division on 20 June 1994.

The Strasbourg court ruled in 2000 in the Smith and Grady case that the provisions of the 1994 Act violated the right to respect for private life under a policy that involved investigating whether personnel were homosexual or had engaged in homosexual activity. If so, they were discharged. EU employment equality directives and the Equality Act 2010 dealt with the problem, but the offending provisions remain, disfiguring the statute book. As the Minister in the other place, Andrew Jones MP, said, the Bill,

“addresses a historical wrong and the inadequacy of legislation to keep pace with our culture”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/1/17; col. 1240.]

When I became a Member of the House in November 1993, it was deeply homophobic. Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 was in force. Among other things, it forbade local authorities from,

“teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

Tony Blair’s Labour Government tried to repeal it, with strong Liberal Democrat support, but the Government were defeated on 7 February 2000 by a campaign led by Baroness Young. I spoke in favour of repeal. The House also rejected lowering the age of consent to that of heterosexual couples. Baroness Young was supported not only by Conservatives and some Labour Peers, but by religious groups, including the Salvation Army, the Christian Institute, the African and Caribbean Evangelical Alliance, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks—now the noble Lord, Lord Sacks—and Orthodox Jews, groups within the Catholic Church and the Church of England, and several retired Law Lords. She was also supported by the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the Daily Telegraph. They claimed that Section 28 protected children from predatory homosexuals and from advocates seeking to indoctrinate young people into homosexuality.

After the death of Baroness Young and with the appointment of a new liberal generation of life Peers, mainly by Tony Blair, organised opposition in the Lords was weakened. The House finally voted in favour of repeal in 2003, a year after I introduced my Civil Partnerships Bill, which led to the Blair Government’s Civil Partnership Act 2004.

David Cameron’s politically acrobatic record illustrates how times have changed for the better. In 2000, he opposed the repeal of Section 28 and accused Tony Blair of being against family values and of,

“moving heaven and earth to allow the promotion of homosexuality in our schools”.

In 2003, he voted against the repeal of Section 28. A year later, he supported civil partnerships for same-sex couples. In 2009 he apologised for having supported Section 28. In 2013 he supported same-sex marriage, but it is still not allowed in Northern Ireland.

In her important and timely book, The Enemy Within, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, recalled how her party had rabble-roused the party faithful at conferences and meetings against gay people and enacted legislation that stigmatised them from birth. She wrote that she was deeply ashamed of having been homophobic at a time when homophobia was a so-called “British value”. The noble Baroness and her colleagues were not alone. Homophobia was not and is not confined to the Conservative Party and it is driven, here and abroad, by the ideology of orthodox clerics and their adherents in the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. When this Bill becomes law it will rid the statute book of an ugly relic from a bigoted past, but it will not, of course, end the culture of intolerance of gay love.