On the evening of Friday, 31 March 2000, BBC News Scotland made the announcement that the Electoral Reform Society had abandoned its plans to conduct a referendum for Brian Souter. In the newsroom, Jack Irvine swivelled his hefty body round in his chair to face the ERS spokesman, Ken Ritchie; then, in unconcealed rage called the ERS “spineless” and “gutless”. Ritchie, visibly shocked at Irvine’s language, expressed deep misgivings about the true motives behind Souter’s campaign. Ritchie had phoned society members asking them if they wanted to get involved, and they hadn’t. The Herald admitted they had also written to the ERS pleading for them not to go ahead. Ritchie tried to explain the complexities of balloting and wording sensitive issues such as this. He said it was not the Electoral Reform Society that took the decision not to conduct the referendum for ‘Keep the Clause’ but their professional balloters who didn’t want to compromise their integrity. The ERS felt no one could form a final opinion over repealing Section 28 until they had seen the guidelines that replaced it. Columnist and politician, Jim Sillars in The Scottish Sun hit out at Labour for pandering to “fanatical minorities” and the ERS for showing itself “to be engaged in humbug. It’s excuse for not holding a ballot on Section 28… pathetic”. The commentary appeared under a clip of a newspaper headline: “Souter blames gay dirty tricks”. The Record accused the ERS of a major blunder. “The guidelines in Scotland are a totally separate issue and will not replace Section 28. In its place will go a clause promising to promote stable family life”.
The next day, The Scottish Daily Mail vented their anger on its front page: “SILENCED”. The editorial stormed: “The majority voice has been snuffed out. Silenced”. They reported how “a spokesman for Cardinal Winning”, whom they described as “the leader of Scotland’s Catholic community” had called it a “massive disappointment”. The Mail tore into the ERS committee. “Liberal society with Tory share cheat at the helm”, they spat at the society’s chairman, former Tory MP Keith Best who was sentenced to four months in prison for making multiple applications for British Telecom shares. “As a lobby group for voting reform, the majority of ERS members are from left wing and liberal political backgrounds, with many Liberal Democrats on its ruling council”. (Not something that bothered them before the ERS made its announcement not to support Souter’s referendum. This was something The Herald took up, quoting a pro-repealer who wrote: “Last week the Keep the Clause people were extolling the society’s reputation and boasting about its credibility, and clearly the society has looked at what it was getting into and decided to have nothing to do with it. That says much more about the Keep the Clause campaign’s referendum plan than it does about the Society”). Jack Irvine told Scotland on Sunday: “If we had realised the kind of people they were we would never have got involved with them. They have presented an image of propriety and fair dealing and it turns out their chairman is a spiv”. The ERS’s gay committee member wasn’t spared. “Stephen Twigg’s views on Section 28 were made clear last month when he joined a pro-repeal march organised by homosexual groups. The Labour MP and ERS council member has made no secret of his homosexuality since he ousted Michael Portillo from the Enfield Southgate seat at the last election”. In fact, Stephen Twigg had always been entirely open about his sexuality. The Scottish Mail finally called on Anne Allen from the Church of Scotland’s Board of Social Responsibility to add her extreme disappointment.
The Scottish Sun’s support for Souter’s campaign, under editor Bruce Waddell, was unwavering. “Clear. Concise. Democratic. What are they scared of? Are the people of this country so stupid to call this toss the wrong way…? Anti-repeal supporters were looking for a simple answer. Like: Yes, delighted. What time suits you? What they got was another affront to the democratic process”. Anyone would have thought the public had been deprived of its right to vote at the next general election. The reason ‘Keep the Clause’ campaigners were so vociferous in their fight to have a referendum was because they saw it is as their only chance of victory. The only political party to support them was the Conservative Party, which had been wiped out in the last election in Scotland and stood no chance of gaining any majority. None the less, “furious Mr Souter” said: “From our feedback it’s clear that the people of Scotland want a referendum. We will just have to find a way to give them the referendum they want”.
The Daily Record, under its editor, Martin Clarke, launched an attack on the ERS, its executive director, Owen Thomas and gay committee member, MP Stephen Twigg. “ERS chiefs sabotaged poll… The Record can reveal it was the 15-strong ruling council which vetoed the plan… The name of the Electoral Reform Society has become a byword around the world for integrity, fair play and democracy. But not any more. Today, the men and women of that august organisation should hang their heads in shame at their craven decision not to organise the postal petition over Section 28… The Society’s commercial polling arm bottled out after it discovered what a hot potato the issue has become in Scotland… Mr Thomas also fails to grasp the most essential point of all which is that most parents are not impressed with the concept of non-statutory ‘guidelines’ anyway. They want a law and are quite happy with the one they’ve got, thank you… In the meantime, Mr Thomas’s excuses are so flimsy that the inevitable suspicion arises that somehow his organisation has been nobbled. We know, for instance, that one openly gay Labour MP, Stephen Twigg, sits on the society’s ruling council…” Stephen Twigg told The Record: “I do not have to speak to you and I do not take kindly to being slagged off in your editorials”. A “spokesman” for ‘Keep the Clause’ told The Record: “I have seldom come across such a gutless, spineless organisation. We can smell the fear coming through from every line of their letter”. The Herald’s editorial mocked: “After celebrities who backed but did not back the Keep the Clause and the ERS contracts that were signed but were not signed, Mr Souter’s PR company has enough egg on its face to make a meal of it”.
Stewart Lamont, cloaking his homophobia in light commentary, opened his regular column in The Herald with a joke: “A minister goes into public lavatory in the centre of Glasgow, one of the type which is entered by a flight of stairs down from street level. He recognised the lavatory attendant as one of his parishioners and greets him cheerily. ‘How are things with you, Geordie?’ ‘Nae verrra great, minister,’ replies the man, grimly. ‘This job used to be a pleasure when it was real gentlemen that used to come in here. Noo it’s a’ different. If it’s no the gays coming in here to meet, occupying the cubicles, then it’s they drug addicts, using the place to inject themselves, and selling their stuff to each other. You know, minister, when I get someone in here for a right good s***e it’s like a breath of fresh air”. Stewart Lamont wrote how he “felt a bit like a lavatory attendant this week”, forced to listen to “debates about decriminalising drugs and abolishing the ban on promoting homosexuality in schools…” Lamont believed: “A majority in our society still believe that neither homosexuality nor drugs deserves to be promoted, so why not take their opinions into account in public policy while leaving people freedom to deviate in private? That way we show tolerance towards others but still demand high standards of ourselves, an approach which seems to me rather close to the teaching of Jesus. Of course, some may say that it’s a double-standard, and in a way it is, because it has the double virtue of toleration and pragmatism, common sense and compassion”.
Jesus. Lamont conveniently overlooked the Biblical references to Jesus enjoying the company of men; John’s gospel referring no less than eight times to himself as the ‘one whom Jesus loved’, also called the ‘beloved disciple’, and, of course, the fact he never married.
In national editions of The Daily Mail, homophobia took the form of a review that had already appeared some months before, giving Daniel Jeffreys from New York another airing, this time, in a double-page feature under the bold headline: “HETEROPHOBIA” which described the Oscar-winning film American Beauty. The film was attacked as a “sinister attack on heterosexuality” by gays. The feature promised to reveal; “how Hollywood is demonising heterosexual life as part of a disturbing new pro-gay agenda”. It explored the preposterous idea that “some time in the past ten years, a new theory gained currency among gays, especially in the entertainment business. This held that heterosexuality was a curse to be denigrated and mocked wherever possible and that gays could never win the power they craved in society without undermining heterosexuals whenever possible”.
In a sinister development, Outcast, a gay political website, was suddenly closed. It followed a legal landmark case only days before when a university lecturer was paid almost a quarter of a million pounds in damages and legal costs by the Internet Service Provider, Demon, owned by Scottish Telecom, in an out-of-court settlement over material carried on the site. Outcast was a respected and nationally distributed gay political magazine run by volunteers with a circulation of around 10,000. It boasted contributions from many people who were sympathetic to gay equality: Ken Livingstone MP, Peter Tatchell and writer Mark Simpson. The ISP NetBenefit wanted an assurance from a solicitor acting for Outcast that they would not print anything libellous. “Obviously, no solicitor can give a guarantee like that”, said editor Chris Morris who had previously taken Britain to the European court over its unequal age of consent law. The ISP admitted closing the site “following a complaint”.
On Sunday, 2 April 2000, a trusted friend of pro-Section 28 campaigners appeared in Scotland on Sunday, (still under the editorship of John McGurk), to reveal how Brian Souter had spent £50,000 commissioning a computer firm to build “an up-to-the minute computer database of every voter in Scotland”. He had commissioned a computer firm to build a database of almost four million Scots who were registered to vote. “The database - compiled from electoral records held by local councils - was finished on Friday and took the firm just five days to complete”.
On the BBC’s Frost on Sunday, Donald Dewar stood by his commitment to abolish Section 28 and challenged the pressure on him to define ‘stable relationships’ claiming that family life could not be defined as ‘heterosexual marriage’ because 50 per cent of Scottish children were born out of wedlock. The Scottish Daily Mail sniffed: “In fact the correct figure is 40 per cent”.
Scotland was filled with uncertainty, even in the more liberal Sunday Herald. Broadcaster and journalist Iain Macwhirter asked: “Keep the Clause has been a bad joke. So why has this flaky organisation been allowed to run civic Scotland ragged this winter?” Derek Ogg QC asked in the same paper: “This is a major issue for Scotland. What if they decide abortion is next? Or capital punishment? Scotland will become a playground for millionaires who realise they can buy a change in the law”. Iain Macwhirter warned: “Recently a number of political journalists have been discovering that discrete inquiries are being made about their own private lives. ‘What’s he like? Is he married? Is he divorced? Is he gay?’ Even newspaper editors are being threatened by sinister figures on the fringes of Scottish media life. In the small pond of Scottish pubic life, this kind of thing can rapidly become poisonous. Some gay journalists are seriously thinking about leaving the country altogether. The referendum would have been - might still be - one of the ugliest political campaigns in mainland Britain since the Smethwick by-election in the 1960s. Naked prejudice would have returned to mainstream politics. In Smethwick, they chanted: ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’. I dread to think what they would have found this time to rhyme with ‘poof’ and ‘queer’. The lies about gay sex lessons being taught in schools would have been - may still be - spread anew by this unholy alliance of egotistical businessmen, tabloid newspapers and the Roman Catholic Church. Homosexual teenagers would be victimised, gay teachers targeted, political opponents vilified”.
In another worrying development, the Christian Institute revealed it was ready to sue Phace West, the Glasgow-based group that produced a useful guide to safer sex, Gay Sex Now. The Christian Institute believed Glasgow Council was illegally promoting homosexuality by paying around £50,000 a year to Phace West, which they claimed offered advice on homosexual practices to youngsters as young as 12. Lawyers acting for the Christian Institute had been instructed to stop the council from making any further payments and intended demanding Phace West paid back money it had been granted over a period of five years. Simon Calvert, of the Christian Institute, told The Scottish Mail on Sunday: “We are keen to see Section 28 is properly enforced. It has served as a deterrent and it is perfectly proper to see the law is applied”. The Big Issue in Scotland asked Colin Hart, the Christian Institute’s director for evidence that Phace West had been giving adult material to children. Hart was quoted saying: “I don’t have evidence. Some youth workers go into schools but I’ve never said they give the materials to 12-year-olds”. In response to claims of misrepresentation, he added: “They’ve put their stuff in the public domain. We’re putting our view. People are misrepresented all the time”.
First, Strathclyde Police was forced to investigate after ‘a complaint from a member of the public’. Then, The Scottish News of the World rubbished the guide under its headline: “THIS CRUDE ADVICE IS ON A GAY WEBSITE… AND YOU PAID FOR IT”. In fact, all local authorities had a duty to supply appropriate safer sex information to communities. Placing the information on a website was more time-consuming than financially draining. The tabloid got Tory MSP Nick Johnston to condemn the site as “disgraceful and shameful… leaving little to the imagination”. The fact that the campaign entitled: Healthy Gay Scotland had been providing accurate and effective sexual health advice was laudable and exactly what a Tory Government policy statement in 1995 had prescribed.
After concentrating their efforts on the website set up by Phace West, The Scottish Daily Mail had to report in anguish: “‘Pornographic’ gay website will not face prosecution”. They reminded readers that “the group, which receives £180,000 of taxpayers’ money annually, has made material available to children as young as 12 with its easily accessible website. The site, with explicit photographs of naked men having sex with each other, was set up by Big-les, the youth branch of Glasgow-based Phace West”. The paper was alarmed that “the procurator fiscal in Glasgow, after talks with the Crown Office, has decided against any prosecution”. The Christian Institute’s Colin Hart declared they would now consider a private prosecution against Phace West - an organisation set up to provide sex education to a specific minority group - “to close it down” but expressed a concern over “political interference”. Tory education spokesman Brian Monteith agreed with the Christian Institute over the “pornography which is passed off as health advice”, and also imagined “heavy handed political interference”. In a thinly veiled reference to Section 28, the Catholic Church asked what sanctions were in place to stop the material, reaching children.
There were similarities with what the Catholic Church was saying at this time and what it said in the Vatican after Hitler seized power in Germany. In 1932, many erotic and gay publications were available in Germany. With the Obscene Publications Youth Protection Act of 1926 and further directives issued by the Prussian Minister of the Interior, Göring, in 1933, all publications that were liable to produce an erotic effect on beholders, young or old, were removed from display in kiosks, magazine stands, hire libraries and bookshops. Those that carried such publications were kept under close surveillance and police authorities no longer had to co-operate with art committees. Pope Pius XI congratulated the type and manner, the resolution and purposefulness with which Göring had persued such strong measures.
Part 32 – Boycott Stagecoach!
garry@garryotton.com
