God and Mrs Thatcher (32 page)

The Church, like the government, initially dragged its feet over AIDS. As is so often the case, the initial impetus came not from the
leadership but from the grassroots, and the inspiration from abroad, in this case, America. The rector of St Botolph’s Church, Aldgate, Rev. Malcolm Johnson, took it upon himself to go on a tour of the US talking to ministers who worked with AIDS victims. On his return he coordinated a conference of clergy at King’s College, London, chaired by the Bishop of Edinburgh, who admitted afterwards that until that moment he had assumed that ‘rimming and frottage’ were a firm of West Country solicitors.
21
Robert Runcie later headed out on a fact-finding mission to San Francisco, while the Bishop of California came to Britain to advise the Bishop of London. Christian Aid worker and Synod lay member Barnaby Miln soon became the leading Anglican spokesperson on AIDS, organising an awareness day and red ribbon symbol, which was later adopted by the World Health Organization. Miln, though, had a knack for upsetting traditional Anglicans. He was openly gay (his partner was Derek Pattinson, the Secretary General of the Synod) and he did not hold back from reminding the Church that its credibility on AIDS was compromised by its own ambiguous position on homosexuality.

The bishops both reassured worshippers and urged Christian compassion. Writing in his diocesan newsletter in 1987, David Sheppard reminded his laity that it was the Christian approach to deal with people ‘where they are, not where we might like them to be’.
22
He too highlighted the example of Africa, where the Church’s outspokenness against homosexuality had not halted the spread of the disease. Any fears about drinking from the chalice were made clear in an information leaflet circulated to the parishes, although communicants at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge were allowed to dip the bread into the wine. The Venerable Basil March, Archdeacon of Northampton, helpfully suggested that all brides and grooms might like to take an HIV test before marriage: ‘It would be a little like having a car MOT,’ he reassuringly clarified.
23
Inevitably, there were some Christians predisposed to a more condemnatory attitude. Rev. Robert Simpson from
Humberside informed
The Sun
that he thought homosexuals should be banned from taking Holy Communion, adding that should his eighteen-year-old son develop AIDS, he would take him to a mountain and shoot him. ‘Sometimes I think he would like to shoot me whether I had AIDS or not,’ was his son’s nonchalant reply.
24

The General Synod held a debate on AIDS in 1987 and, rather than fuelling the hysteria, it showed the Church at its most measured. Runcie asserted that it was a pastoral rather than a moral concern; the bedside of a dying man was not a place to grapple with the theology of sexuality, he said. Few Anglicans believed that chastity was the answer while many drew upon biblical comparisons with leprosy to legitimise AIDS as a case of human suffering rather than God’s wrath. The Catholic Church tried a different tack: encouraging abstinence. ‘You deserve to know that you can live and love with real immunity from AIDS,’ read the instruction from the Catholic bishops, ‘it means standing out against many attitudes and much pressure from others.’
25
The Vatican hosted a conference with over 1,000 delegates from over eighty-six countries, although no AIDS organisations were invited and with addresses such as ‘Is AIDS a divine punishment?’ few were convinced that it would lead to constructive action, especially given the Catholic Church’s position on condom use. By far the most outspoken and critical religious leader in Britain was the Chief Rabbi. Of the government’s awareness campaign the normally pro-Conservative Chief Rabbi was forceful in his condemnation: ‘It is like sending people into a contaminated atmosphere, but providing them with gas masks and protective clothing.’
26

The government’s AIDS campaign, however, was arguably one of Thatcher’s greatest achievements; 95 per cent of people polled agreed that the government had taken the right approach to the crisis. By this calculation it was the most popular initiative that Margaret Thatcher ever enacted. This was in stark contrast to America, where gay protestors resorted to heckling Ronald Reagan at a rally in New Orleans out
of sheer frustration at the level of condemnation and inaction. The success of the British government’s campaign is borne out in the statistics. New diagnoses of HIV, which were 3,000 in 1985, were down a third within three years and remained relatively low compared to the rest of Europe and the US. The encouragement of condom use also had the knock-on effect of triggering an overall drop of STDs from 50,000 in 1985 to 18,000 in 1988, and by the mid-1990s this had declined to an all-time twentieth-century low.
27

It is hard to imagine that Margaret Thatcher ever claimed her crown as a pioneering and influential leader in the fight against venereal disease, but there is much truth in it. Crudely speaking, Thatcher was much more successful in bringing down STD rates than she ever was in bringing down state expenditure. Moreover, this had been achieved not through restriction but education, nor through moralism but through medicine combined with a large dose of that old reliable political tactic: fear. AIDS changed the way that the state and the public talked about sex. The ban of advertisements for condoms was lifted and oral sex was mentioned on TV for the first time. Britain’s sexual revolution had been nudged a little further in the liberal direction as a result.

JUST WHEN IT
appeared that the Conservative government was encouraging a new culture of sexual openness, it passed a bill that sought directly to curb it. Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which outlawed the promotion of homosexuality in schools, was one of those pieces of legislation that didn’t mean anything legally (no successful prosecutions were ever made), but would aquire monumental symbolic significance. Section 28 would be a galvanising moment for the homosexual community in a similar way that the publication of Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic
Verses
would later be for Britain’s Muslim community.

The source of the initial hysteria was a series of children’s books normalising homosexual relationships (
Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin
being the most notorious), which were apparently corrupting the schoolchildren in the Labour-held boroughs of Haringey and Ealing. There was no evidence that any child had actually read these titles or that a single school had used the material (they had been found in a public library), but, importantly, journalists at the
Daily Mail
had. Hacks had been sent out on dirt-digging tours of Labour councils to find mud that would stick; homosexuality and the innocent child proved to be a particularly potent mix. Newspaper scare stories quickly snowballed into a parliamentary campaign led by Conservative backbenchers against the supposed glamorisation of homosexuality.

After an initial attempt in which the necessary forty MPs were not present to pass it, an amendment banning the promotion of homosexuality in schools was successfully tagged onto the Local Government Act in 1988. The whole premise of the clause was farcical; it only applied to local councils and not to schools, and, with the government about to grant head teachers autonomy in matters of sex education, Section 28 was pretty much redundant as soon as it was passed. What was meant by promoting homosexuality was not entirely clear either, as one teacher legitimately questioned: ‘Am I encouraging [homosexuality] if I do not make clear that all homosexuals will rot in hell fire?’
28
An additional clause had been inserted so as not to compromise the government’s AIDS education programme, which further muddied the waters; arguably nothing had done more to make homosexuality mainstream than the AIDS campaign.

The Cabinet was divided but Thatcher endorsed the proposals, both before the 1987 election and even more forcefully afterwards, at the Conservative Party conference that year, when she repeated scare stories of children being taught ‘that they have an inalienable right to be gay’. It would not happen under her watch, Thatcher pledged, as the Tory faithful clapped in hysterical jubilation. Yet Margaret Thatcher
was not personally committed to Section 28; had it not gathered pace so close to an election she might not have supported it and, had it failed, she would probably have done nothing to salvage it. It was, however, a convenient sop to her Conservative backbenchers: ‘a piece of red meat’ to satisfy the ‘wolves’, according to one commentator.
29
Section 28 also pushed some key Thatcherite buttons: the rights of parents; the apparent promotion of ‘deviancy’ at ratepayers’ expense; and supposed mismanagement of public funds; all key messages that would also conveniently discredit the Labour Party.

In March 1987, just before the election, Labour’s press secretary, Patricia Hewitt wrote privately to MP Frank Dobson confirming that the ‘gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear amongst the pensioners’.
30
The Labour Party was worried. Neil Kinnock had just rid the party of its radical elements and had no desire to address the ‘gay and lesbians issue’. Arguably more of a problem for the left than it was for the right, homosexual rights exposed the contrasting outlooks and priorities between old working-class voters and the new liberal left. The head of the Labour Campaign for Gay Rights, for example, remembers being instructed by one ex-Labour MP that she should concentrate on ‘building the New Jerusalem and not Sodom and Gomorrah’.
31
These tensions over homosexuality had first been exposed in the Bermondsey by-election in 1983 when Michael Foot and the outgoing Labour MP, Bob Mellish, had been unforthcoming in their support for the new candidate Peter Tatchell (who consistently refused to answer questions on his sexuality), as Liberal Simon Hughes pressed to victory with his overtly homophobic ‘straight choice’ campaign. When the debate on Section 28 reached the Commons after the election, shadow Local Government minister Jack Cunningham clarified that it was not the duty of the local authority to ‘promote homosexuality’ and nor was it Labour policy either.
32
It was only after mounting pressure within his party that Neil Kinnock forcefully came out against it, which he tactfully framed as an unfair attack on the civil rights of a minority.

As a piece of legislation, Section 28 was not worth the parliamentary roll it was written on; as a political ploy to discredit the Labour Party, it was invaluable. History, though, is often a series of unintended consequences, and Section 28 was no different. Nothing did more to promote homosexuality than passing a law
banning the promotion of homosexuality
and nothing made homosexuality more of a public issue than a law seeking to privatise it. It laid down the gauntlet to the gay community, who responded with due wrath. It marked the end of a quiet but tolerated minority and the beginnings of a sustained campaign for full equality. Nineteen eighty-seven would be the last time that homosexuality would be used as a political pawn by the mainstream parties at election time. From the late 1980s, homosexual pressure groups concentrated their efforts on unmasking prejudice within the media, harassment and inaction at the hands of the police, and the hypocrisy within the Established Church.

When Section 28 was announced, the Church issued a memorandum for Anglican schools advising that heterosexuality must be taught as the ‘norm’ and that any ‘attempts by extremists to persuade [children] that homosexuality is preferable’ must be challenged. It tempered this by advising teachers to avoid words that ‘make homosexuals feel inferior’ for ‘the aim should be to help pupils accept themselves for who they are’.
33
In the Parliamentary debate, however, more than one Conservative seemed to imply that a bill on homosexuality would not be necessary if the Church had provided a lead. ‘I am not entirely sure that the Church of England is unanimous in its opposition to sin, nor am I entirely sure that it is unanimous in its definition of sin,’ remarked Tory peer Baroness Blatch.
34
Anglican ambiguity was confirmed when the Lords Spiritual entered the division lobby with two bishops supporting the clause and four voting against. Speaking in opposition to Section 28, the Archbishop of York positioned it as a matter of civil liberties, while the Bishop of Manchester labelled it as an infringement on local government autonomy. These positions, although perfectly rational,
hardly reassured traditional Anglicans, and it was left to lay Catholic peer and moral campaigner, Lord Longford, to forward the unequivocal view that homosexuality was forbidden in Christian teaching.

Section 28 had revealed the extent to which the political debate in Britain was still conceptualised around the idea of the traditional family, and the ease with which those outside this ‘norm’ were cast as deviants. Of greater interest from the Conservative government’s perspective were not homosexuals but single mothers, who would come to symbolise the Thatcherite notion of the amoral citizen dependent on the state. Single mothers made up 14 per cent of families in 1986, a rise of 6 per cent since 1971.
35
In 1988, American sociologist Charles Murray added academic clarity to an idea already ingrained in Conservative circles when he spoke at the party conference on the causal link between single mothers, spiralling crime and state expenditure. Echoing sentiments which Keith Joseph had vocalised back in the 1970s, Murray maintained that the state, by financially supporting lone-parenthood, had in effect contributed to the destruction of the family and turned single-motherhood into an ambition for young teenagers, leading to the ballooning social security budget and the breakdown in law and order. The title of Charles Murray’s 1990 pamphlet for the Institute of Economic Affairs,
The Emerging British Underclass,
hinted at the class-bias of his analysis, even though a significant proportion of single mothers (whether divorced, widowed or unmarried) were middle class. What Murray called the ‘freeing’ of single mothers from an over-reliance on the state would later translate into a policy of getting them into work; very few seemed to point out that long-term male unemployment was then a greater drain on the public purse and one of the chief causes of familial breakdown. Moreover, it was difficult to see how more women working was a solution: female employment had increased by 77 per cent since 1961 and by the 1980s Britain had the highest female-employment activity rate in Europe.