Alan Turing (Statutory Pardon) Bill [HL]

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, I am proud to speak in support of the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and glad, too, of the chance it gives me to add my tribute to a man who had long been accepted as a genius of rare character and quality long before his dreadful death at the age of 42. As a past president of the British Academy, I am further glad to join my noble friend Lord Rees of Ludlow, a past president of the Royal Society, who has spoken of Turing with far greater authority than I could ever muster. Both of us might well have hoped that Alan would have graced either of these great learned bodies for many triumphal years. Indeed, he might have become one of the microscopic number to be elected, like the noble Lord, Lord Rees, himself, to both bodies. By 1951, as a newly elected FRS, Turing was already well on track.

In a very different Second Reading debate on 3 June, to which the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, has alluded, I spoke of the gay minority suffering cruel and vicious treatment not only in centuries long past, but in many societies even today. Alan Turing was, of course, one of that minority and he endured, as we have heard, especially from the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, prosecution and conviction and, instead of imprisonment, the “mercy” of treatment for his disorder. In consequence he was hounded and ostracised until he died by his own hand in June 1954, only three years before John Wolfenden successfully proposed the decriminalisation of the kind of acts for which Turing had been indicted. Unsurprisingly, I and no doubt many others have had Alan very much in mind during recent weeks. Indeed, his ghost seemed to stalk both Houses of Parliament during those debates.

Turing’s parents both belonged to families of some importance in Raj-era India, and this meant that their two sons, Alan and John, faced years of separation from them so that they could be educated in the UK. English boarding schools were not the best incubators of scientific talent, but Alan seems to have thrived at Sherborne, and in 1931 he entered the prized embrace of King’s College, Cambridge, becoming a fellow in 1935. By then he was a polymath in areas bordering both the British Academy and the Royal Society. How could he not, with such luminaries as Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes at hand? He was familiar with the work of two Austro-Hungarian thinkers, Johann von Neumann and Kurt Gödel. My noble friend Lord Rees has told us of the significance of the 1936 paper on the Entscheidungsproblem and the enormous influence that that was to have for many years. Incidentally, it led to the first quote used by the Oxford English Dictionary for its long entry on the Turing machine, a concept, as we have heard from the experts, which became not merely the foundation for computational science and theory, but for generative linguistics. Noam Chomsky, for example, made much of the Turing machine in his Syntactic Structures of 1957. By then, sadly, Turing was dead. However, the years between included lengthy, successful war years at Bletchley, about which we have heard from none other than the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, who knows more about the Bletchley days and Turing’s contribution there than anybody else in this House. None of us in this debate can do more than merely outline the vast amount which the world at large owes to this young man. No one can remotely guess how much more we would have owed to him if he had become an old man.

I end by noting something surely perverse, if constitutionally sound enough, about this Bill. It would grant Alan a pardon, when surely all of us would far prefer to receive a pardon from him.