By Friday, 7 April 2000, with mounting debts running into tens of thousands of pounds, the Scottish School Boards’ Association looked like they were in trouble. Even The Record struggled to view it from a positive angle. It began after Mrs Ann Hill handed her draft business plan for the next three years to the Board’s executive. Despite the plan listing an accumulated loss of £72,000, Mrs Hill still intended to claim £9,500 on top of her baseline salary of £38,000 a year with £4,620 to be added to her assistant’s salary! She earned £10,000 for 100 days work back in 1995. Now, her salary had jumped to £38,000 for working 200 days a year, giving herself and her assistant a £1,200 a month rise for providing services that no longer existed! These fees were for managing the Furbie Foundation whose main backers were ScottishPower and the Bank of Scotland and aimed to refurbish old computers in schools. Five of them had been installed in the 32-pupil Mouswald Primary School near Dumfries, where coincidentally, Mrs Hill’s children attended. But with Tony Blair promising new computers for all schools, Furbie ceased trading, more or less, back in December 1999, yet it appeared Mrs Hill had been accepting payments of £3,000 a month since January 2000. The press grumbled that Mrs Hill was on holiday in Cyprus and “not available for comment”. John Bonington, an SSBA executive board member from Fife wrote to The Herald. “Despite asking, the Executive Board has never received proper reports and accounts of the Furbie scheme’s actual operation over the last year. The full written report of the conduct of, and implications arising from, the Furbie venture which we expected tabled at our meeting in December of 1999 was not forthcoming, and continues to be unavailable to us”. Ann Hill told The Scotsman, after receiving £1,200 a month salaries bonus for administration of the fund, she regarded the payment as a one-off fee rolled into her salary of £38,000, rather than individual monthly payments. She was suspended from duties.
The chief executive of the SSBA, Ann Hill and president David Hutcheson, both directors of the Furbie Foundation, now faced bankruptcy. The Furbie Foundation’s third director was David Urquhart, a serving officer with Lothian and Borders police. The accounts showed the Furbie Foundation owing the Scottish School Boards’ Association £24,000. Despite outrage from executive member John Bonington; treasurer Alan Smith and association secretary Frank Farrell suddenly reinstated Ann Hill on the eve of elections to its new executive board. Her duties, however, were restricted to an SSBA-organised profit-making international conference, Parents in Education Around the World. The SSBA hoped between 200 and 300 participants from 20 countries would pay up to £520 a head to attend.
Ann Hill was later cleared of any financial impropriety by an independent enquiry but became embroiled in further trouble when a £40,000 donation Ann Hill had asked Brian Souter for in January 2000 was withdrawn. The cash-strapped SSBA badly needed Souter’s money. According to Jack Irvine, the matter was “under review”.
Alan Smith, the SSBA’s trusted ally of ‘Keep the Clause’ told The Scottish Daily Mail that President David Hutchison’s future was in doubt and that an emergency meeting had been called to discuss his future. The Mail reported: “He will face calls for his resignation and may be forced out over what has been seen as his ‘concilliatory’ attitude to the Executive over Section 28. Mr Hutchison has always been uncomfortable with his association’s opposition to the repeal of Section 28, but members believe his close ties to Labour may also have influenced his views”. Hutcheson gave evidence to the Executive’s committee on the Ethical Standards in Public Life (Scotland) Bill but faced a vote of no confidence after he was accused of playing down the SSBA’s opposition to the repeal of Section 28. He later denied a split in the association saying he supported the introduction of safeguards.
Ann Hill now appeared on the front of The Scotsman’s education supplement with Jack Irvine, standing in front of his enormous ‘Keep the Clause’ poster under the caption “I am not prejudiced”. Journalist Helen Silvis spoke to an apparently remorseful Ann Hill. “A brief silence as the question sinks in, then the down to earth voice begins to answer. But in the middle of a thought the steady tones crack, the voice tails off and tears well up…” Ann Hill begged: “There’s not been a day in the last six weeks that I haven’t cried”.
Eventually, Executive Scottish School Boards’ Association member Derek Robertson quit his post. He had not been happy about what had been going on and told journalists that he wasn’t sure he would have been able to stay silent and keep a collective responsibility. He revealed how some school boards and local authorities were awaiting the new executive’s recommended changes to roles, standing orders, and operational procedures before deciding to stay members. Accounts showed a near £30,000 loss in the year to December 1999. This would be further exacerbated by the withdrawal of the Scottish Executive’s grant for their quarterly newsletter.
Following new elections, Alan Smith became the SSBA’s new chairperson and Ann Hill became its executive chairperson. The SSBA, promising to stay non-political and non-sectarian gained charitable status and increased its membership.
The Pink Paper reported: “It’s now exactly two months since The Sun launched a phoneline poll asking readers to vote on whether they wanted to retain Section 28. Usually, the paper publishes the results of such polls within days. Funnily enough, we are still waiting”.
The Working Group on Sex Education in Scottish Schools, a group of parents, teachers and church representatives had been set up by the Executive to look at the guidelines replacing Section 28 with the intention of preparing summary guidelines for teachers and a package of information on sex education in schools for parents. The Scottish Daily Mail cried: “Gay law fury as Galbraith group backs the repeal”. Brian Monteith for the Tories warned in The Mail: “The infamous gay book for schools ‘Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin’ could easily be used by schools if the working group failed to recommend changes to the law. Nothing short of the specific legal right of parents to remove their children from sex education classes and granting greater powers to school boards in deciding the content of sex education materials will suffice”. The Catholic Church’s representative on the group, John Oates “objected to the report and asked for his objections to be publicly noted. He said it was wrong for the Executive to repeal Section 28 without putting anything in its place which placed proper emphasis on the importance of marriage”. The report duly noted Mr Oates’s concerns. The Scottish Mail’s editorial bemoaned that the working party had noted without comment the objection from the Catholic Education Commission on the omission of a reference to marriage and “the Executive’s refusal to give any support or promotion to marriage at a time when family life is under concerted attack from all quarters in our morally disintegrating society”. The Herald’s editorial called it “sweet reason darkened by sour prejudice”.
The Herald ran a report on The Society for the Defence of Tradition, Family, Property, (TFP). Formed in 1989, TFP was funded by private individuals and had 1000 part-time members in Scotland; 4,000 across the UK. Their director Philip Moran linked homosexuality with paedophilia. 20,000 leaflets went out requesting donations of up to £25; enclosed were postcards that people were urged to send to the First Minister Donald Dewar. The letter stated: “If we do not stand fast for traditional moral values, you, your children and the Scottish people will suffer the dire consequences, both morally and socially. Homosexual acts are an unnatural vice and a moral disorder - they are sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance”. Moran was dismissive of any consequences of his actions: “Of course, some will be upset by the truth, but sometimes the truth hurts”, he was reported saying. The ‘Sexfinder General’, Tom Connelly, while not willing to say “anything in support of TFP… couldn’t wholly condemn them either…” because he “simply didn’t know enough about them”. The Herald found Jack Irvine taking much the same line: “He also refused to support or condemn TFP”. The Herald suggested in its editorial that TFP “would be in deep legal water if, say, the word black replaced homosexual in the odious leaflet it has been distributing in Scotland… Unlike other newspapers (that seem to be leaving Section 28 behind in their damaging wake, having found new targets to replace a discredited campaign) we believe in full, fair, and open debate”. But how true was that? The paper expected every submission for their letters pages to be prepared to include their name and address for publication which was always likely to be weighted heavily in favour of militant religionists who were less shy of their predilection. In the pervading climate, The Herald supported the government throughout the debate in its editorial stance, yet reflected the opinions of both sides of the argument in its Letters to the Editor pages. E J Hart from Helensburgh wrote: “As a 14-year-old schoolboy newspaper deliverer in 1940 when one of the advantages was to have wee free keeks at the Glasgow Herald, and its stablemate the Bulletin much taken by the ladies as a more compactly sized pictorial journal (never a tabloid, oh dear, no). I have followed its fortunes ever since, save for war service… In all these six decades I have never experienced such opprobrium as has appeared in the Letters to the Editor page these seemingly interminable weeks…” The batch of religionists who wrote regular columns in the paper expressing naked homophobia in The Herald under its religious editor, were stirred by the Section 28 debate, but with more gays in Scotland than bums on pews, and without one outspoken liberal with an unembarrassed grasp of sexual politics; was it balanced?
The Sunday Herald, a lot more confident about sexual issues with a younger editor, supported Catholic Church liberal Father Fitzsimmons who put himself on a collision course with Cardinal Winning when he said: “Most priests don’t want to risk putting their heads above the parapet but I can’t stand by and say nothing while we have Winning supporting the retention of Section 28. It is the most malicious piece of legislation ever placed on a statute book and it has no place in a civilised country. We should imagine the words ‘promotion of homosexuality’ being replaced with ‘promotion of Catholicism’ or ‘promotion of Judaism’.”
The Sunday Herald was happy to give a voice to anyone who dared challenge the Catholic Church’s position on sex and sexuality. Mark Miller, one of the world’s highest paid comic book writers had just finished a DC comic book, The Authority featuring gay superhero Apollo kissing Midnighter on the cheek. The Scottish Sun declared “fury at world’s 1st homosexual comic heroes”. The Catholic Church tore into the comic as an insidious attempt to present homosexual role models to adolescents. “This kind of material will serve to increase the justified anxiety among parents over the whole issue of lifting Section 28”, a spokesman said, although quite how Section 28 would have done this wasn’t explained. Mrs Ann Allen from the Kirk’s Board of Social Responsibility declared in The Record: “Children need to be protected from this sex-mad society and to introduce such issues into comic books is very unhealthy”. There was, nonetheless, a ripple of surprise when it was revealed Mark Miller was a lay priest! He told The Sunday Herald: “I’m shocked by the behaviour of the Church. It has been horrible and homophobic – medieval, backward and Stalinist. They seem to delight in victimising homosexuals. I can’t believe my own Church is acting like this. It was pathetic the way they turned on me”. In a separate story The Sunday Herald featured We Are Church, a pressure group that challenged Cardinal Winning’s conservative stance within the Catholic Church. Ronnie Convery, Director of Communications at the Archdiocese of Glasgow fumed: “We Are Church is a small pressure group which has had almost no influence in England and Wales and will have even less influence here. This group betrays a faulty understating of the nature of the Catholic Church. The Church is not democratic. It does not claim to be democratic. Morality is not settled by a show of hands in the Catholic Church”.
The Scottish Daily Mail hit back in support of Cardinal Winning over what it described as the “bitter personal attacks over his defence of family values”. The bold headline declared: “Church leader targeted by gay activists over family values”, suggesting: “Cardinal Winning has been targeted by a succession of gay rights campaigners and liberal politicians who accused him of promoting a Right-wing extremist agenda”. Winning was slapped on the back for having “angered a wide-range of politically correct groups”. The Scottish Mail, after having described Father John Fitzsimmons as “a maverick priest”, brushed him aside. Cardinal Winning huffed: “Critics won’t silence me”. Shortly after, Father Fitzsimmons was summoned to a disciplinary meeting with his bishop, which was understood to have been at the behest of the papal nuncio, Archbishop Pablo Puente, the Pope’s ambassador to Britain. He was forced to issue a public apology to Cardinal Winning or face suspension.
In The Scottish Mail on Sunday, Fidelma Cook interviewed a gay law professor’s lover and his “bid for ‘marital’ rights”. Break-ups are a messy business in anyone’s books, and here was The Scottish Mail on Sunday savouring every detail of Regius Professor of Law at Glasgow University, Joe Thomson and Alastair Murdoch’s untimely split. Soon after meeting Joe in a “trendy Glasgow wine bar” Alastair’s name was mentioned on invitations to parties and he was rubbing shoulders with a string of celebrities. “Scotland’s leading expert on divorce law is embroiled in an extraordinary battle with his former gay lover that could lead to full legal rights for partners in same-sex ‘marriages’”, reported the Sunday tabloid. Alastair Murdoch confessed, “the Lord Chancellor told me and my gay lover we should have the same rights as married couples. Now my lover has married a woman and left me penniless… We sat in Derry Irvine’s drawing room (the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine) a few years ago discussing that very point. Both Joe and Derry agreed that the law had to change and would. I vividly remember Derry saying something had to be done to change the law to give us rights”. Fidelma Cook added that Lord Irvine, with his responsibility for divorce law, “appears to underline the Government’s determination to greatly increase gay rights”. Instead of reporting how insignificant social division might be to gays, Alistair Murdoch had unwittingly handed The Mail the perfect opportunity to expose gays hobnobbing with ‘influential friends.’ “It was Joe’s idea to offer (Lord Irvine) a Doctorate of Law and he wanted to get it in before Labour got in power. I seconded it. Nine months later, as Lord Chancellor, he came up to Glasgow with Alison to receive it. We had a very merry time”. The Mail elaborated: “A whirlwind round of parties and entertaining. There were formal dinners and receptions of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, opening nights at the ballet and the opera and holidays in the Caribbean. Their friends and acquaintances included Princess Margaret’s daughter, Sarah Chatto, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, the Lord Justice General of Scotland; designer Jasper Conran; playwright Peter McDougal; BBC Scotland Controller John McCormick; former president of the Scottish Tories, Professor Ross Harper; and artists John Cunningham and George Devlin. Lord Irvine and his wife Alison… became close friends”.
A letter from Bob Harper from Anstruther in Fife appeared in The Scottish Daily Mail adding to the growing clamour against ‘gay cliques’ working behind the scenes to undermine Brian Souter. After sniping at the “Scottish arm of the so-called independent body of the Electoral Reform Society” he warned Souter that “he must ensure there is no external manipulation of the stock market by Government or the minority groups that are forcing the repeal of Section 28 on to the public in Scotland without first consulting them as to their own wishes on the subject”.
Along with a debate on the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill in the House of Lords, which was set to equalise the age of consent at 16, on Tuesday, 11 April 2000, there was a reading of the Local Government Bill in the House of Commons, which contained proposals to repeal Section 28 in England and Wales. In 1999, the Lords threw out the Sexual Offences Bill, equalising the age of consent, at its second reading. If they did the same again, it would become law in just over a month by way of the Parliament Act because the House of Commons had passed it twice. Tory frontbencher, Baroness Blatch insisted in the Lords: “Children’s rights have given way to gay rights”.
As for the Local Government Act, the elected Government in the House of Commons could have put back proposals to repeal Section 28 after the unelected House of Lords took them out. But because the measure had originated in the Lords, the Parliament Act could not be evoked on this occasion, so Section 28’s repeal in England and Wales looked increasingly unlikely.
The Daily Record assured readers that repeal of Section 28 for England and Wales would be defeated when it was returned to the House of Lords and observed: “If that happens, it is believed Tony Blair will drop the issue until after the next election, putting pressure on Holyrood to follow suit”. MPs objecting to the repeal of Section 28 in the House of Commons were advised they could take the day off. But The Record scoffed: “the ploy to keep the rebels away looked likely to fail - with two MPs set to abstain and another indicating he was virtually certain to vote against the Government”. Urging MPs to stay away was made to appear necessary by a Government “keen to diffuse a backbench rebellion”. One MP told The Record: “The problem is that someone decided they were going to make the abolition of Section 28 a crusade” and “we have lost the support of a large section of the electorate and… the support of Scotland’s leading Catholic cleric”. Efforts to contact MPs and MSPs, sending copies of Gay Sex Now along with Christian Institute propaganda had paid off. The Record named one of the rebels as 61-year-old Glasgow Baillieston Labour MP Jimmy Wray who told them: “It is my Christian belief that we should bring families up to teach them right from wrong. I fear for my children and I certainly don’t want anyone to teach them that filth that’s being thrown around. I have been wondering just exactly what they are going to put in its place because we don’t want some of the literature in schools that we’ve seen. One quite clearly stated, ‘Gay Sex Now’. There was all the filth on some of it, scheming and all the things you can do. Also there were pictures of people committing homosexual acts. I don’t think in this day and age that we should be showing that… That’s an insult to parents and certainly does away with family values. If that is going to open the floodgates by taking Section 28 away then it certainly won’t be getting any support from me. And a lot of other people in the party feel the same way… I don’t want to know what homosexuals are doing in their home. I think that you’ve got to keep these values. Toilets are for public convenience not for people standing up then advertising cottaging… I don’t give a damn what response I get from the rest of the party. My morality is something that nobody is going to take away”. Wray had recently made front-page news after being awarded damages against Associated Newspapers for branding him a serial wife-beater. He was pictured toasting victory with his third wife Laura and condemned his former wife Catherine’s “evil” actions for making the claim in The Mail on Sunday. She had said he had held a knife to her neck and alleged she had received medical treatment for abuse suffered at his hands during their troubled marriage, which ended in divorce in 1998. Wray countered that she was an insecure drunk. When Jimmy Wray sounded off in one of the tabloids behind the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign of his worries for his son, “wee Frankie”, The Herald’s editorial was cutting. “Do not fret, Mr Wray. You will not be required to write a parental note requesting that your boy be excused compulsory lesson in homosexuality”.
The Scottish Mail reported the Scottish Conservatives’ bid to “give parents say over sex lessons” in the Scottish Executive. Tory education spokesman Brian Monteith intended to ensure parents had the legal right to withdraw their children from any class they disapproved of since children could only be taken out of a class for religious reasons. The Mail reported: “The move gained the backing of senior members of the Scottish School Boards Association… Alan Smith, chairman of the school board of St Andrew’s Secondary in Paisley, said: ‘This would be an excellent idea which would go a long way to reassuring parents and allaying their fears over repeal”. The story was accompanied by another piece of scaremongering with the headline: “School heads are asked to give out gay newsletter”. In Connect, a gay newsletter distributed in Berkshire in the south of England were items such as a report on a gay pub in Reading which The Mail declared “has a website featuring pictures of naked gays, and another urging readers to join the Mr Gay UK contest”. The programme had been broadcast on national TV.
The Scottish Sun reported how a “store manager axed for being HIV positive won £250,000 compensation…” in an out-of-court settlement, while The Scottish Mail advised: “The case of 34-year-old Mark Hedley is expected to be the first in a wave of Aids-related claims which could cost businesses millions”. Aldi, the German supermarket chain told the young manager, to stay away from work because his HIV status would be bad for business. The Scottish Sun immediately followed the story with a report: “Health chiefs in Lanarkshire yesterday blamed gay men for the biggest increase in HIV infection ever in the county”. Half the new cases estimated appeared to have been caused by sex between men. Ten new cases overall. Health boards had already been condemned by churches and politicians for handing out condoms in Lanarkshire’s Strathclyde Park, a gay cruising area. Despite research having shown how the social stigma of homosexuality helped fuel the spread of HIV, North Lanarkshire Council SNP leader, Richard Lyle told The Herald: “…That does not mean giving out free condoms at what should be a tourist venue and family facility is the answer. I still believe that this may have the effect of encouraging homosexual activity at the park and this is wrong”.
After it emerged that gay rights lobby group, Stonewall was planning to base one of their team on a part time basis in Glasgow, The Record launched a blistering attack. “FURY OVER £1m LOTTERY GRANT FOR GAY GROUP”, its headline screamed. (There had been almost 2,000 lottery grants awarded in the twelve months previous, and out of a total of £246m, only £2.8m had gone to lesbian, gay or bisexual projects). Stonewall - which only “claims to have a staff of nine” - was attacked by reporter Simon Houston. He reminded readers of Stonewall’s last show in London: “The star performer was Elton John - who shocked observers by performing a raunchy stage routine with male dancers dressed as cub Scouts”. A picture of Elton dancing with them illustrated his point and was shown alongside Stonewall’s director: “Activist: Mason…” (Angela Mason). The National Lotteries Charities Board spokesman Robert Blow apparently “admitted” that Stonewall’s grant was “a bit of a whopper”. Lottery chiefs were portrayed as defending the award and attention was drawn to “healthy annual donations” already donated by the “increasing” number of gay businesses. The Record listed: “Richard Bransons Virgin group, NatWest bank and the huge American financial institution, JP Morgan”. ‘Keep the Clause’ wanted to know whether the board “would be just as happy to award £900,000 to a group which promotes traditional family values” and Dr Adrian Rogers of Family Focus warned anyone not wanting to promote homosexual behaviour had to stop buying lottery tickets. The Herald used quotes from Dr Adrian Rogers and Valerie Ritches, director of Family and Youth Concern. Ritches thought it “scandalous” and said: “If the lottery board had their heads screwed on they would give it to helping the lot of families. The family unit in Britain is breaking down and is in desperate need of support”. A letter went out from Stonewall to its supporters begging donations to “match the bigots £ for £… They’re rich and they’re wrong”.
In Moniaive, a small town in Dumfrieshire, 54-year-old Marcelle Bremner had her shop busted in a dawn raid by local police for displaying two male dolls in her window. Marcelle Bremner used to backcomb Dusty Springfield’s bouffant before she went to live in a flat above the vacant shop and filled the window with Barbie-dolls. Police hammered on Bremner’s door in a raid in the early hours of a Saturday morning insisting she removed a potentially illegal display of two Ken dolls. This followed a complaint from a member of the public of a “lewd and libidinous” display of “a graphic nature”. Scotland on Sunday found “two Ken dolls, sitting suspiciously close to each other, staring out quite blatantly at passers-by, and wearing only Bermuda shorts”. The Scottish Mail found them “naked but for their Bermuda shorts… sat in a shop window shamelessly flaunting their bronzed and perfectly sculpted bodies before passers-by…” and giving “more than a hint of the close nature of their relationship… Moral outrage followed swiftly and police were despatched to restore public decency”. A WPC ordered Bremner: “Get those Ken dolls dressed. I don’t want to see those two men beside each other!” Scotland on Sunday’s Shan Ross wrote: “The display, which is housed in the double-fronted windows of Bremner’s former clothes shop is festooned in pink and surrounded by Barbie memorabilia and every possible pink boudoir item imaginable”. A spokeswoman for Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary said in a prepared statement that they would not be charging Mrs Bremner but it was also suggested she might want to reconsider how she displayed them.
It was Easter. The ‘Sexfinder General’, Monsignor Tom Connelly delivered a scathing attack on Cadbury’s ‘Squegg’, a chocolate square egg, insisting only round chocolate eggs could symbolise rolling the stone from Jesus’s tomb. A square one “made a mockery of the whole tradition”. The Scottish Mail on Sunday referred to the egg as “shades of a new dark age”. The eggs were milk, not dark, and besides, the name Easter was a corruption of Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of Dawn and a symbol of fertility and rebirth long before Christians hijacked the tradition. The Mail bemoaned the fact only half of Brits knew what Easter was supposed to be about anyway. “Possibly not since the early Dark Ages - before Pope Gregory sent missionaries to bring the word of God to these shores at the end of the 6th Century - has our society been so ignorant about basic Christianity. This must be disturbing…” Their editorial warned: “In schools, the teaching of Christianity is being sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism. Where religious instruction was once based on the Bible and its meaning, it now imparts a pick-and-mix smattering of the word’s religions, loosely defined”. The editorial lambasted churches for tamely giving in to the “politically correct”, while in truth, it was no longer able to control its ‘flock’: The public were turning away from organised religion in droves.
Next: Part 35 - "The 'Keep the Clause' Meeting".
garry@garryotton.com
