The social liberal reforms introduced by the Labour Party in the mid-1960s encountered increasingly determined opposition from the Conservative right in the 1980s. In the midst of the turmoil of the 1970s, a section of the Conservative Party aimed to provide an alternative to the post-war liberal consensus on moral questions. It was a contradictory melange of the radical and the reactionary, which the historian of sexuality Jeffrey Weeks described as ‘a revival of evangelical moralism, fired by an apprehension of basic changes, but made despairing by the legislative reforms’.1 This moralism was allied to a stated desire to reverse much of the post-war welfare state legislation which had, allegedly, caused the decay that had afflicted the country since the 1960s. Despite having voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion while in opposition in the 1960s, in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and her government used Private Members’ Bills in much the same way as the Labour government had done in the 1960s, this time to put socially conservative legislation on the statute book. Rejection of the permissive society and the adoption of more austere ‘Victorian values’ were an essential element of the New Right's politics and found backing and succour among the right-wing print media and from the long-standing moral watchdog, Mary Whitehouse.
Espousing the nostrums of family values and an aversion to the promotion of minority rights (most infamously in the case of Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act), the Conservative government of the 1980s set out to return Britain to the 1950s. David Marquand described this as revenge for ‘the so-called permissive society’. He noted the irony of figures who recoiled at the ‘mixture of sexual indulgence, cultural nihilism and half-baked Marxism’ of the swinging sixties but who supported market liberalism's belief in individualism: ‘in market liberalism, after all, the consumer is king, driven solely by the desire to maximise pleasure and minimise pain’.2
Personal morality was the area where Thatcherism arguably failed: it was unable to push back the reforms of the 1960s. At a time when the Conservatives were entrenching their economic philosophy in British society, Labour was to make the winning argument in the area of social policy. This chapter explores Labour's liberalism in the 1980s. For the purpose of the chapter, ‘liberalism’ is defined as meaning ‘social liberalism’ or ‘moral liberalism’: support for individual freedoms and opposition to discrimination and ‘prejudice’. It also stands for a degree of moral relativism. Two litmus tests of its liberalism were the party's support for gay and lesbian people and its reaction to the issue of video censorship. The reason why these two issues are selected here is that they demonstrate different aspects of liberalism: the liberty to express one's sexuality and the liberty to watch what one wants in the privacy of one's own home. These two aspects of liberalism were not the same and they were both heavily contested in the decade.
An abiding theme in Labour's politics was its rejection of the Conservative Party's moral puritanism. In spite of pressure to tack away from liberal nostrums that were associated with the ‘loony left’ and were seemingly unpopular with parts of the electorate, Labour maintained a strong sense of social liberalism, which had long existed within the wider movement. If it is true that the right won the economic argument and the left won the social and cultural argument (see the Introduction to this volume), then Labour's ability to withstand populist pressure from sections of the press and public opinion contributed to a new common sense about minority rights and respect for alternative ways of living. In many ways, the Parliamentary Labour Party reacted to some of these issues because of pressure from external forces such as the Gay Liberation Front, or Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association promoting censorship. In the 1960s, while Labour's social reforms set the political agenda, there was also public opposition to the abolition of capital punishment. Nevertheless, the party had persisted with its penal policy when it would have been easier to concede for electoral gain. In the same way, in the 1980s Labour continued with its defence of socially liberal policies when, again, it could have abandoned them.
This chapter covers a time when the defence and improvement of the lesbian and gay community was employed as a political stick with which to beat Labour. What follows is not an uncritical analysis; it highlights the tensions and contradictions in Labour's liberalism. The party was prone to stumble over the path that it wished to take in pursuit of a more liberal country. Such missteps reflected the internal battles within the party, some of which were the result of poor decision making. In spite of this, during one of its darkest periods of its history Labour projected a pronounced commitment to minority rights and matters of personal freedom and liberty. Many of these issues about morality were framed in terms of the rights of the individual – the freedom of people to express their sexuality and the freedom of people to watch whatever they wished in the privacy of their own home. In this view, the state did not belong in a person's bedroom, or in the living room where they watched television.
The chapter also highlights how a party which, in the 1950s and 1960s, had facilitated a relaxation of censorship laws in Britain was unsure how to react to the great ‘video nasties’ furore of the mid-1980s and provided little constructive criticism of the legislation when it was presented. It represents the classic dilemma faced by the Labour Party in having to appeal to both the (perceived) liberal-minded middle classes and the more socially conservative working class which it was set up to serve. Despite the upheaval that was taking place within, the Labour Party was to demonstrate that it could still be a reforming force. Labour was to maintain its commitment to minority rights at a time when such sentiments were viewed with downright hostility, particularly in the eyes of the tabloid newspapers. In spite of the divisions within the party, Labour found unity in the promotion of social liberalism.
Labour's liberal credentials were burnished in the 1960s administrations of Harold Wilson and were closely associated with Roy Jenkins. The reforms ushered in during Jenkins's tenure, such as the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, led to his reputation as ‘the most influential Home Secretary of the Twentieth Century’.3 Jenkins had made the case a decade earlier for what became 1960s social liberalism, as had Tony Crosland in his 1956 book The Future of Socialism.4 Both Jenkins's and Crosland's social liberalism was to influence a later generation of Labour politicians, including the future leader of the Greater London Council (GLC), Ken Livingstone, whose liberal initiatives will feature below.5 Frank Dobson, however, has contended that while it would be churlish to take too much away from Jenkins, the groundwork for much of the 1960s legislation was laid by others such as Barbara Castle and Lena Jeger. Dobson complained to this author about ‘the infantilism of a great deal of political commentary which has got to attribute each topic to a particular individual whereas very little in politics or life is like that’.6 Labour's approach to social liberalism was complex in any case. Figures such as George Brown, James Callaghan and Harold Wilson were uncomfortable with it. Moreover, David Owen, Leo Abse and even Jenkins himself viewed homosexuality as an affliction, with the latter saying it was ‘a very real disability for those who suffer it’.7 In spite of the ‘benevolent condescension’ of these and other Labour MPs, homosexuality, if not completely accepted, was brought out of the closet.8 For the Daily Mirror, the move put Britain ‘in step with the liberal approach adopted by the Dutch fifty-six years ago’.9 To quote historian Stephen Brooke, ‘it was Parliament that changed the framework of sexual life in Britain’ and it was a Labour government which facilitated it, despite disdain among its own supporters.10 The Conservative MP Sir Cyril Osborne said that Labour would suffer for putting ‘buggery in front of steel nationalisation’. While historian Martin Pugh notes that Labour as a party ‘was far from happy about the “permissive society” ’, 74 per cent of its MPs voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality.11
Dominic Sandbrook argues that the ‘permissive society’ was not the great cultural revolution that Arthur Marwick believes it to have been; rather, it was ‘the result of very different, decades-old pressures’. The development of social liberalism by Jenkins, Crosland and others suggests that he is correct.12 Brooke notes that Labour's socialism has always included a streak of sexual radicalism and stretched right back, even before the Labour Party was founded, to the radical politics of the early nineteenth century. Radicalism had always gone ‘hand in hand with ideas of sexual reform’. For Labour, its social-liberal antecedents can be traced back to the works of Robert Owen, William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Olive Schreiner.13
The Sexual Discrimination Act of 1975 saw the establishment of the Equal Opportunities Commission to assist with the outlawing of discrimination on the grounds of gender or marital status. However, while decriminalisation had helped to remove the misconception that homosexuals were criminals, the age of consent for gay men (at twenty-one) remained older than it was for heterosexuals. The slow pace of change to full equality had led to the formation in 1970 of the Gay Liberation Front, which in 1975 tried to exert pressure on Parliament, through the Campaign for Homosexual Reform, to equalise the age of consent (and to enact decriminalisation in Northern Ireland and Scotland, where homosexuality was still illegal).14 This resulted in the formation in the same year of the Gay Labour Caucus, later to become the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights.15 If Britain was changing tentatively in some respects and faster in others, this was reflected in the Labour Party. As Roy Hattersley attested, ‘if the Wilson government had done nothing else, its existence would have been justified by the opportunity it provided for Parliament to create a more enlightened society’.16
It was this society which was challenged by the Conservative Government over a decade later. While the creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981 saw the Labour Party lose members known for their liberal reforming instincts, the party's commitment to social liberalism remained, even though the man most commonly associated with the great reforms of the 1960s, Roy Jenkins, now led the SDP. Labour MP Austin Mitchell observed that the loss of the Social Democrats did not affect the social liberalism of the Labour Party at all. For him, it only reinforced the need to defeat the more militant left and govern from the centre.17 Paradoxically, voters who identified with the Social Democrats were not necessarily inclined to be socially liberal themselves. Ivor Crewe and Anthony King noted that, on capital punishment and censorship, SDP supporters were sometimes closer to the Conservatives.18 While the SDP aspired to govern from the ‘radical centre’, this was not necessarily the position of some of its voters on moral questions.
Labour's pursuit of racial and sexual equality was continued with added zeal in the 1980s. In 1983 under Michael Foot, and again in 1987 under Neil Kinnock, there were specific commitments to improving gender and racial equality, gay rights and a more humane approach to immigration control. Foot was strongly sympathetic to the cause of gay rights, having been a ‘fervent’ supporter of the Roy Jenkins reforms, aided and abetted by his wife, Jill Craigie, a strong influence on Foot's social liberalism, particularly his feminism.19 For his biographer Kenneth O. Morgan, Foot resembled Voltaire. He ‘devoted a very long life to the pursuit of the highest ideals of free thought, tolerance and civil liberty’. Foot's libertarianism echoed Crosland's description of the attributes which socialists should demonstrate.20
In March 1982 the National Executive Committee published The Rights of Gay Men and Women, which raised the issue of discrimination in employment. As the Labour Campaign for Gay Rights activist Peter Purton observed, it was only a discussion paper and yet it received the immediate opprobrium of the pro-Conservative press and failed to become party policy at the 1982 party conference.21 This commitment to the freedom of the individual was emphasised in Renewal, the essay collection written by the shadow cabinet. Labour's shadow solicitor general Peter Archer viewed support for gay rights as intrinsic to Labour's values: ‘The socialist is descended from a long line who claimed the right to be different.’22
At times, Labour could find itself paralysed by events. This was evident in the confusion over support for the candidacy of Peter Tatchell in the Bermondsey by-election of 24 February 1983. The horrific and unedifying campaigning that took place on the part of an independent candidate, John O’Grady, was made all the more embarrassing in that he was a former Labour Party council leader who had received support from the seat's previous MP, Robert Mellish. An infamous example was O’Grady's riding through the constituency on a horse and cart singing lewd songs referring to Tatchell's sexuality (‘Tatchell is an Aussie, he lives in a council flat, He wears his trousers back to front ’cos he doesn't know this from that’).23 Tatchell's (and Labour's) campaign was further undermined by references to his campaigning for gay rights and the SDP–Liberal Alliance's literature which referenced their candidate, Simon Hughes, as ‘the straight choice’.24 Outright homophobia appeared in election pamphlets distributed throughout the constituency, including one which asked ‘Which Queen would you vote for?’25
While Labour was in the midst of one of its darkest moments following the SDP split and the battle for supremacy between left and right, what was striking was the reservation of the Labour leadership in defending its candidate. Foot had initially denounced the candidature of Tatchell and subsequently offered only lukewarm endorsement. This was mainly due to Foot's hostility to the kind of extra-parliamentary campaigning championed by Tatchell in London Labour Briefing (and later reprinted in the Guardian), including one accusatory phrase which must have particularly rankled with Foot: ‘we now seem stuck in a rut of legalism and obsessive parliamentarianism’.26 When asked about this twenty years later by Roy Hattersley, Foot remarked that ‘it had been put to me that he was the sort of person who opposes Parliament itself. And I had my duties to the Party which I wanted to keep in one piece. A few days later he came to see me and it became clear that he had a real concern for the Party as well as himself.’27 Tatchell himself publicly disavowed any links to radical leftism, such as were espoused by Tariq Ali, asserting that his ‘source of political inspiration is Alfred Salter and George Lansbury’.28
Although this must be viewed through the prism of the internal battles against Militant (Tatchell, while not a member of Militant, was viewed as coming from the radical left, and thus was, erroneously, linked to it), the reluctance of the party leadership to allow Tatchell's sexuality to become a matter of public knowledge underlined the gradualist approach that the Labour Party still had towards the matter of gay rights.29 Tatchell later told Hattersley that during the campaign he ‘clearly believed that the Labour high-command expected that, when asked if he was gay, he should categorically refuse to discuss the subject’.30 This was perhaps in reaction to what James Curran referred to as the tabloid press's attempt to ‘discredit him by whipping up atavistic prejudices against him as a deviant’.31 As Alwyn Turner notes, as Tatchell had yet to come out publicly as homosexual, the tabloid press resorted to ‘innuendo to avoid libel actions, while leaving readers in no doubt about their subtext’.32 Tatchell himself made a point of trying to separate his own sexuality from his support for gay rights, and in doing so earned criticism from rights activists, to go along with the commentary of the tabloids.33 While Tatchell tried to emphasise the local nature of the election, his sexuality was raised by others when he tried to keep the matter private.34
Foot's performance at this by-election showed that he was, for all of his undoubted compassion, unsuited for a role that required a great deal of nuance and subtlety. While he never once condemned, or commented on, the matter of Tatchell's sexuality, his handling of the affair allowed it to fester. In the face of a relentlessly hostile campaign (not least on the part of the Liberals), Labour and Tatchell lost the Bermondsey by-election by 10,000 votes. Tatchell did not return to fight for the seat a second time at the general election a few months later.
Labour's experience at Bermondsey, with a former Labour councillor attacking the candidate's sexuality, was chastening and perhaps, sadly, not surprising. Attitudes in Britain viewed homosexuality in a negative light. In the same year, 1983, 62 per cent of respondents to a British Social Attitudes Survey viewed homosexuality as always/mostly wrong – and within Labour this too was evident.35 Even Leo Abse, the man who had championed the decriminalisation of homosexuality, could write, less than twenty years after his Bill had been passed, that, as a result of an increase in one-parent families, ‘homosexuality and bisexuality is likely to increase as more boys are brought up with no male roles in which to identify’.36 Abse further suggested that ‘the youngster could lose his way and grow up uncertain in his identity’ as a consequence of ‘the triumphant liberation of women from their domestic thraldom’ causing the roles of parents to become ‘smudged’.37
While Tatchell's sexuality may have been considered a reason for voters to choose an alternative candidate, this did not deter Labour from making a clear commitment to sexual equality in its 1983 manifesto: ‘We are concerned that homosexuals are unfairly treated. We will take steps to ensure that they are not unfairly discriminated against.’38 This was the first time that such a commitment had been specifically made in relation to the gay and lesbian community, something which was absent from the manifesto of the SDP–Liberal Alliance. Indeed, a former Labour-turned-SDP MP, James Wellbeloved, condemned the Labour-run GLC's spending on ‘lavish subsidies to organisations ranging from gay rights to supporters of the IRA bombers’.39 Such sentiments and dubious couplings were an indicator of how matters would be played out over the rest of the 1980s.
Neil Kinnock became Labour leader after the election defeat in 1983 and, together with his new deputy, Roy Hattersley, attempted to extricate Labour from continued electoral defeat. While Kinnock's energies were used to tackle the matter of Militant and the consequences of the miners’ strike, his enthusiasm was at times mercilessly mocked by unsympathetic newspaper columnists, and the satirical TV programme Spitting Image suggested that the primary reason for his commitment to minorities was as a means of winning votes. Kinnock's attitude to gay rights has been questioned due to a comment made after the Bermondsey by-election when he was asked if the treatment of Peter Tatchell had amounted to a witch-hunt. His ill-considered reply was ‘I'm not in favour of witch hunts, but I do not mistake bloody witches for fairies!’40 Crass as the comment was, Kinnock supported gay rights; the previous year he had called for a Royal Commission on the gay age of consent.41
Between 1983 and 1987, Kinnock's Labour Party contended with criticism both inside Westminster and in the press that it was overly concerned with minority issues. On 9 December 1983 Jo Richardson, a supporter of Tony Benn, presented a Sex Equality Bill which attempted to outlaw discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sexuality.42 The Bill was defeated by 198 votes to 119, with Kinnock supporting the measure alongside other MPs ranging from new MPs such as Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn to veterans like Denis Healey and Michael Foot.43 Some of the attitudes expressed showed how difficult it would have been to get the Bill passed, with the Conservative MP Ivan Lawrence declaring:
Clauses 3 and 92 on homosexuality will incur the fury of many of our constituents who do not want their children to be taught by people who parade their homosexuality and think that it is a matter for exhibition and pride. How many Members want their children to be taught by a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange?44
In spite of these attacks, Labour MPs were not deterred from defending the efforts of councils to promote equality and, in turn, gay rights. Three years later, during a debate on 5 December 1986, Tony Banks, MP for Newham North-West, asked ‘why when a local council tried to do something about discrimination against gay and lesbians was there an enormous reaction from Conservative MPs?’45 This prompted the shadow local government spokesman, Jack Straw, to suggest that while the Conservative Party was attacking those councils that were helping to promote equality, some of its members were themselves gay and ‘they deserve the same tolerance as Labour councillors trying to help gay and lesbian people’. This suggestion provoked a furious response from the government benches. A Conservative spokesman stated that the party chairman, Norman Tebbit, ‘knows homosexuals and has a high regard for some of them but that does not mean he would approve of them influencing young children’.46 Straw's reaction was in contrast to the 1970s episode when he chaired the Further and Higher Education Committee of the GLC and had stopped the funding of a training course for social workers on issues faced by gay people, a training course condemned by Conservative members as ‘homosexuality on the rates’.47
In its 1987 election manifesto Labour again offered a commitment to improving gay rights, albeit in somewhat diffident terms. It simply stated that it would ‘take steps to ensure that homosexuals are not discriminated against’.48 In some ways, this was still a bold move and, as Purton noted, was a consequence of the 1985 and 1986 conferences, which had supported the commitment to equality in the manifesto. This was in no small part due to the support given to Chris Smith, the first openly gay MP, who had been elected in 1983 for the seat of Islington South and Finsbury and had come out in 1984. For Smith, gay and lesbian rights were a natural cause for Labour: ‘some people might regard it as marginal to our concerns as a movement. It is not. It is central to our socialism. It is central because we believe in equality – the equal right of everyone to live their life.’49 Smith's re-election in 1987 may have been a sign of a more tolerant approach of electors towards homosexuality, but such sentiments were not necessarily held by the wider electorate and, as Gay Times noted twenty years later, ‘it would be another 13 years and three general elections before another openly gay person was elected’.50
The decision to fight for gay rights may have been a factor contributing to Labour's losing votes. Where the British Social Attitudes Survey in 1983 showed that 62 per cent of respondents who identified as Labour voters viewed homosexuality as ‘always or mostly wrong’, by 1987 this figure had risen to 74 per cent. To put the matter in a coldly political perspective, it was risky to continue supporting gay equality in a decade that was marked by anxiety about sexual difference.51 This was also a time when fear surrounding the AIDS/HIV epidemic was reaching a crescendo, and the association of the disease with the gay community served only to highlight the heightened suspicion with which it was viewed.52 However, as Arthur Marwick noted, there was ‘no real evidence of a return to pre-sixties morality’ during this period and, for all the prudery of the Thatcher Government, its advertising campaigns ‘brought an anatomical explicitness, and an open acceptance of the sexual urges of young females as well as males, that would not have been contemplated in the sixties’.53
There was, however, a perception that gay men were receiving preferential treatment from local councils. The tabloid press reacted furiously to the decision of Lambeth Council to designate homeless people with AIDS as a priority for housing.54 Labour's core constituency – white, working-class, socially conservative voters – had been attracted to the Tory message in the late 1970s, particularly in Essex and the South East; voters were turned off by talk of yet more nationalisation, while policies such as the Right to Buy found favour with them. The Conservatives and their allies in Fleet Street had been successful in smearing Labour as the ‘loony left’. According to Eric Shaw, this provided an ‘invitation to voters to define themselves as white and respectable rather than as working class, to identify with the Conservatives as the Party of whites and the upwardly mobile – and to reject Labour as the Party of minorities and the failures’.55
The particular bête noir for both the Conservatives and their supporters in Fleet Street was Ken Livingstone and the GLC. Livingstone had pushed successfully since the mid-1970s for financial support for gay pressure groups, sometimes in the face of the objections of fellow Labour councillors.56 In particular, Livingstone's support for the Gay Teenage Group highlighted the difficulties faced by gay people under the age of twenty-one (at that time still the legal age of male gay consent). Livingstone noted that this particular policy created ‘hysteria’ and led to furious denunciation by Conservative MPs and an attempted investigation into his private life by newspapers such as the Sun.57 Critics of such policies viewed them as, at best, misguided and, at worst, simply cynical politics, money being spent on such causes in order to recruit ‘a sizeable army of politically and racially motivated mercenaries, hostile to the State that supports them’.58 According to The Times, Livingstone had only himself to blame, having spent £5 million on causes such as the Gay Arts Sub Group Festival Babies against the Bomb, Lesbian Line Campaign against Racist Laws and the Gay London Police Monitoring Group.59 Such support may have been noble in intent but it added to the perception that Labour councils were determined to spend local taxation on what were deemed niche subjects. Polly Toynbee contended that the cause of gay and lesbian equality, as put forward by Livingstone, was actually counter-productive and provided ‘the hounds of the moral right all the meat they needed for a successful red-blooded backlash’.60
This strong criticism, while publicly rejected, came to be reflected in Labour Party circles. Following the Greenwich by-election of 26 February 1987 (which Labour lost to the SDP), Patricia Hewitt commented in a memo to Kinnock that the ‘gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear’.61 Conversely, Linda Bellos, leader of Lambeth Council, refused to apologise for policies such as assisting homeless young gay men. She accused the tabloid media of wilful misinterpretation, and a similar accusation was made by the leader of Islington Council, Margaret Hodge, who said that, despite the expenditure on the gay and lesbian community of a mere £1,500 out of a budget of £300 million, ‘vindictive newspaper campaigns’ had distorted the picture.62 The chair of the London Labour Party, Glenys Thornton, agreed with Hewitt, saying that while Labour councils should not change their policies, they should be better aware of the adverse or, in some cases, misleading publicity created by the tabloid newspapers.63 Hewitt's thinking was perhaps borne out by voters such as Mrs Gwendoline Naden, who remarked that she had always voted Labour but was likely not to vote at all: ‘all these lesbians, gays, if that's the way then fair enough but we shouldn't have to pay for it’.64 It was perhaps with these sentiments in mind that even Frances Morrell, a noted Benn supporter and the leader of the Labour-led Inner London Education Authority, called for a scaling-back of the presentation of the gay and lesbian issue because ‘it makes Labour unpopular, and it causes us to lose elections’, consequently ‘damaging the interests of interest groups’.65
What became Labour's more avowed commitment to gay rights was exemplified by the party's reaction to the introduction of a piece of legislation which became synonymous with the battles faced by gay rights movements in the 1980s. In her speech to the Conservative Party conference on 9 October 1987, Margaret Thatcher took aim at Labour and, in particular, the councils which until a year previously had been part of the GLC, saying: ‘Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.’66
Here was the throwing down of a moral gauntlet: traditional values as proffered by Thatcher did not permit non-heterosexual forms of identity to be discussed in Britain's schools. From having been a supporter of the Abse Bill in the 1960s, Thatcher was now about to implement the most retrograde legislation in relation to gay rights in twenty years.
The Section 28 amendment to the Local Government Act 1988 stipulated that local authorities could not ‘intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ nor ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.67 While historian Richard Vinen later noted that the measure was vague, this did not detract from the intent of the legislation, which was to specifically discriminate against gay people. If it was an obscure codicil to a wider piece of legislation, why did it provoke the backlash which it did? While the measure could be seen as part of the ‘loony left’ council issue, the reaction to it transcended the actions of certain Labour-controlled councils.68 The discriminatory basis of the measure was seen as ‘a symbol of the prejudice of the present parliament’ and, while it was, according to Spare Rib, ‘legal gobblygook’, the intent was ‘intimidatory’.69 It did not matter that the great irony was that it did not prevent teachers from promoting positive images of gay and lesbian identity in the classroom (as sought by figures like the Conservative MP Jill Knight), but applied only to local authorities. It was designed to marginalise.
Labour's initial reaction to the legislation was to support it, despite the avowed declarations made in the manifesto of both the previous year and 1983 and the opposition of the MP for Tottenham, Bernie Grant.70 In due course, Labour was to strongly oppose it, with the shadow secretary of state for the environment, Jack Cunningham, declaring that it raised ‘fundamental issues of personal liberty and civil rights’ and comparing it to the discrimination faced by Jews and immigrants.71 Labour's stumbling into opposition to the measure did not to endear it to those who were being affected by it.
Labour was therefore not a confident liberal party in the 1980s. It was in a difficult position electorally. While figures like Cunningham criticised the introduction of Section 28, the party was aware that to take too strong a stand was to potentially alienate an electorate that at the last general election had once again rejected it comprehensively. Polling on the issue explains the balancing act that the Labour leadership was trying to achieve. As Brooke noted, it was ‘hard to see any other space for the espousal of gay rights at this time, particularly given the Kinnock leadership's desire to move Labour to the centre’.72 Nevertheless, Kinnock referred to the new legislation as a ‘vicious … pink star clause,’73 and at the party conference in 1988, backed by the leaders of the Transport and General Workers Union and the General, Municipal and Boilermakers Union, voted for the eventual repeal of Section 28.74 Reckless as it may have seemed from a purely political perspective, Labour under Kinnock included the commitment to repealing Section 28 in its 1992 manifesto. The party was also committed to a free vote on the issue of the equalisation of the age of consent. It was not as strong a statement as that which appeared in the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto with its commitment to the equalisation of the age of consent as well as the repeal of Section 28, but it did continue the thread of Labour's commitment to equal rights – something that had been absent from the agendas of other parties in the previous two elections.75 The social conservatism of the 1980s on the matter of gay rights made Labour's position all the more remarkable. As Stephen Brooke observed, ‘it was not simply that the Labour Party took up gay and lesbian rights, it was that the Conservatives politicized the issue’.76 Despite popular opposition, the party found itself compelled to take a stand.
In the early 1960s the president of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) was the former Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, who was keen to promote both his working-class origins and his disapproval, according to the critic Alexander Walker, of ‘homosexuality, of loose living among teenage youth, and of whores and tarts, and his disapproval vented on films which featured these things’.77 Morrison's opinions would have found support from many on the Conservative benches who were now pressing their government for action on what people were able to watch in their homes. Some Conservative backbenchers sought to reassert what they saw as traditional morality in the heart of society, which had been undermined as a consequence of the 1960s ‘permissive society’.78 They wished to regulate what was available for people to watch on their television screens, particularly with regard to the rapidly developing home video market that was emerging in the 1980s.
The unalloyed zeal of the more censorious Conservative MPs was often given tacit approval, and this was particularly underscored by the Video Recordings Act of 1984. Introduced by the Conservative MP Graham Bright as a means of regulating the home video market (ironically, in view of the rapid deregulation that was taking place elsewhere), the Act emerged from a campaign strongly supported by the Daily Mail and by Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVLA). The primary purpose of the Act was to ban or censor films with offensive, violent or obscene content: the so-called ‘video nasties’, films such as Driller Killer, Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit On Your Grave, the majority of them produced by the low-budget exploitation market in the United States and continental Europe.
The sense of outrage demonstrated by the tabloid media made this a cause célèbre. It was intensely felt by MPs, who were directly lobbied to support the legislation by constituents, the NVLA, the tabloid press and even television (the BBC's Newsnight and Nationwide programmes were less than impartial in the way the issue was reported).79 The Daily Express viewed it clearly as society walking ‘the tightrope between good and evil’, arguing that the country should ‘shake ourselves free of the cretinous “progressive” dogma that if we burn video nasties today we shall be burning books tomorrow’.80 As far as certain tabloid newspapers were concerned, it was very much a moral crusade. However, there were also objections to such films from progressive voices, on the grounds of the depiction of violence against women; for example, feminists picketed the film I Spit On Your Grave.81
In the face of legislation which decided what people should be able to watch in the privacy of their own homes, there was a need for a response. The resistance to government intervention in entertainment was taken up by pressure groups outside of Parliament, such as the National Council for Civil Liberties, in a rare attempt to counter-balance censorship. This was the period when Polly Toynbee wrote, ‘Common sense and the national opinion polls tell us that most people believe that repeated exposure to violence on television and in films is a bad thing. A generation brought up on a diet of violence is likely to produce more violent people.’82 Her article was symbolic of much of the discourse which was taking place and which had been adopted by those who saw themselves as social democrats, just as it had been by those who identified as traditionalist Conservatives. While the thrust of Toynbee's argument was against the objectification and the depiction of violence against women, it also justified wider censorship, something which film critic Alexander Walker pointed out already existed within the Obscene Publications Act.83 Even the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's Dr Alan Gilmour, while decrying the access children were able to have to such films, said that ‘if an adult wishes to watch it that is presumably their right in a free society’.84
Would the Labour Party of the 1960s and 1970s have approved of such legislation? In the 1970s, Labour figures featured strongly in cases where censorship was being pushed for by conservative groups. Ken Livingstone, for instance, was vice-chair of the Film Viewing Board of the GLC, which acted as a body to hear appeals by the makers of films banned by the BBFC. Livingstone said that both he and the chair, Enid Wistrich, ‘opposed censorship on principle’, and set about trying to ‘justify ending film censorship for adults’.85 Yet by the time Livingstone had become leader of the GLC in 1981 his views on censorship were to be ‘changed by feminism and by some disturbing films that celebrated sexual violence against women’.86 As a result, his attitude hardened and became accepting of censorship in films which featured such content. The feminist criticism of degrading images of women became more vocal in the 1980s. Labour MP Clare Short's attempt to ban the pictures of topless women on page 3 of the Sun newspaper is an example. This created, in the words of Clarissa Smith, an ‘uneasy alliance … between the forces of the Right and feminist groups’, both keen to distance their association with each other, yet overlapping ‘in their assertions of pornography's degradation and harm to women and children’.87
The video nasties episode showed that there were limits to Labour's liberalism. Opposition to the Video Recordings Act came from civil liberties groups, but in Parliament no such opposition existed, or at least very few felt compelled to comment. Few MPs directly opposed the introduction of tighter home video regulation and censorship and it was left to a Conservative MP, Matthew Parris, to suggest that the Act was at best misplaced.88 Alwyn Turner notes that ‘there had been a time when left-wing intellectuals would have opposed such moves, at least on the grounds that “censorship of art by the state is always to be regretted”, yet by the mid-1980s such figures were thin on the ground’.89 There were no challenges to some of the patronising statements made by supporters of the Bill about working-class viewers. Conservative MP Harry Greenaway claimed that videos ‘are often a higher priority in the homes of people who are not particularly articulate, and who do not read books or listen to music very much’.90 The argument was both anti-intellectual and snobbish. Moreover, while the 1984 legislation was sponsored by a Conservative MP, a previous attempt on 15 December 1982 to bring in a similar Bill had come via the urging of a Labour MP, Gareth Wardell, who went on to castigate the Thatcher Government for inaction and support the Bright legislation in Parliament.91 Indeed, as Julian Petley notes, it was this first attempt to bring in legislation which had prompted the subsequent Daily Mail campaign against the video nasties.92 It was believed then, as indeed it still is, that what was seen on screen would be replicated by some viewers. Denis Howell, former Labour sports minister, said in the House of Commons that ‘when instances of it are shown on television there is an immediate increase in the amount of football hooliganism. Obviously, there is a direct relationship between the showing of such news items and the incidence of football hooliganism.’93 These certainties were never challenged; the assumptions (made on the basis of questionable research) were not scrutinised by any member of the Labour benches, nor was there any highlighting of how censorship could potentially impact on those whom the Labour movement was meant to help. This latter point was made by the human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC, who asked:
But (to take an entirely hypothetical example) will they be happy to open their Guardians in a year or so to read an angry article by Polly Toynbee about the collapse of a GLC-funded feminist video-collective, whose award-winning educational films about rape (‘human sexual activity’), wife battering (‘acts of gross violence’), and child birth (‘depiction of human genital organs’) have been declared ‘unsuitable for showing in the home by the BBFC’.94
Robertson's analysis may have been somewhat hard hitting, yet the wider point about the potentially invasive nature of cultural censorship was not highlighted by anyone on the Labour benches. This was a long way from the reforming movements of the 1960s, the pushing of envelopes and the broadening of minds, which, for better or worse, had been facilitated by a Labour government. What is particularly ironic is that the man who in 1955 had objected to the banning of ‘horror comics’ as ‘a thoroughly bad Bill’95 remained silent throughout the passage of Bright's Bill almost thirty years later. Roy Jenkins, as many others in Parliament, did not vote against the measure. Many supported it, including Neil Kinnock. The tabloid press scolded any MPs who harboured doubts, saying that they would ‘be a very unpopular minority’.96
Bright's attempt to encourage similar legislation in the European Parliament in November 1983 was not successful, despite his efforts to show edited highlights of certain horror films to MPs and MEPs.97 Similarly, attempts to include sexually explicit films at the committee stage of the Bill were defeated when Labour, the SDP and six Conservative MPs voted against it by 11 votes to 6.98 Nevertheless, the Bill was passed unopposed in Parliament and became law in 1984. This was not the end of the matter. On 5 December 1985 the backbencher Ivor Stanbrook asked Thatcher to agree with Norman Tebbit ‘that many social evils of our time derive from the permissive society promoted by liberal politicians in the 1960s and 1970s’. He called on the government to ‘abandon their posture of neutrality on some issues’, which was endangering the ‘Christian way of life’. In reply, Thatcher remarked that ‘the Government have supported private Members’ Bills on issues such as controlling video nasties and indecent displays. I hope that we shall continue to take that attitude.’ The ‘video nasties’ furore continued to be a useful prop for the Conservative Government and they were presented in the media as the cause of various societal ills.99 The Conservative Government was able to do this with the assistance of the opposition benches. In this instance, Labour was a willing participant in abandoning the liberal notion of questioning censorship. Its reasons for doing so were based on the well-intentioned restriction of what could be viewed in the home by children or of the depiction of violence against women. Thirty years earlier, Anthony Crosland had written that the then-current laws on censorship in the arts were ‘intolerable, and should be highly offensive to socialists, in whose blood there should always run a trace of the anarchist and the libertarian’.100 On this occasion, the Crosland legacy was abandoned.
Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that ‘the art of progress is to preserve order amid change and preserve change amid order’.101 In the 1960s it was good fortune that there was a Labour government in power during a period of considerable social transformation. In the 1980s the Thatcher Government not only put a brake on progress but set about reversing it. During that decade Labour (for the most part) maintained a commitment to social liberalism when it would have been so easy to abandon it. It should be said that the issues of gay rights and video nasties were not high on the list of electors’ priorities. Further, the manner in which Labour reached its eventual position on gay equality caused despair among those who wanted a more decisive and principled approach. One could argue that Labour's halting progress in a country as socially conservative as Britain was perhaps the correct strategy to adopt.
When one considers the programme implemented by Tony Blair's New Labour governments, which included the eventual repeal of Section 28, it was in no small part due to the party's continuing the progressive social liberalism that had survived the tumultuous 1980s. Policies which had been derided by a hostile tabloid media as the crackpot ideas of a few London councils were, in due course, to become the accepted norm and provided a link from the Foot era to the Blair years. (Indeed, so accepted were the notions of gay equality that it was a Conservative-led government that introduced same-sex marriage onto the statute book in 2013.) Yet, unlike in 1992, when Labour clearly stated its intention to repeal Section 28, there was to be no mention of this in the 1997 manifesto. In 1994 acrimony was directed toward some Labour MPs who had abstained or voted against a Bill proposed by Conservative MP Edwina Currie to equalise the age of consent, a measure which was supported by Neil Kinnock (now no longer party leader).102 Indeed, it was 2003 before the legislation was finally repealed, and then by the mechanism of a free vote. As Simon Mackley observed, this prompted the Labour MP David Cairns to ruefully note that they ‘would not dream of allowing a free vote on issues of race discrimination or gender discrimination’.103 So, while in theory Labour was an agent of social liberalism, the move to repeal Section 28 was tentative: perhaps this was due in part to the need to maintain adherence to ‘big tent’ politics and thus not wishing to push too fast too soon.104 Labour wanted to appeal to Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters, but also to its own working-class supporters who were less socially liberal. This linked Blair's leadership in some respect to Callaghan's, in that it showed adherence to a more gradualist approach to achieving stated aims, in the belief that this would ensure longer-term acceptance. Ironically, New Labour's record was that of a government that came to power with socially liberal aims which it promptly met, yet it became identified with the illiberal – damaged by the association with the Iraq War, the pursuit of ninety days’ detention of suspects without charge and the attempted introduction of identity cards.
Did social liberalism ultimately come at the cost of alienating the working classes who for so long had supported the Labour Party? At the time of writing (2017) the party's association with liberalism has been one of the drivers of the turn towards UKIP in traditionally strong Labour areas, a turn which reflects the natural social conservatism of the working classes and a rejection of metropolitan thinking. The philosophy of Blue Labour, which combines an emphasis on localism, what is seen as a less wedded approach to the top-down aspects of the welfare state and a more socially conservative approach to issues such as immigration, has been proffered as a means of combating the populist right. But should the party abandon a commitment to equality in order to counter the accusations that it is too bound to ‘political correctness’? As Patrick Diamond and Michael Kenny wrote, ‘while its diagnosis of Labour's ills was powerful, Blue Labour's remedy may have offered the wrong kind of medicine. Many question the implications of romanticising the social relations of the past, against which women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians have rightly rebelled.’105 Moreover, the suggestion that Labour support remains wedded en masse to the ideals of social conservatism was not borne out by polling for the British Social Attitudes Survey in 2012, which found that only 29 per cent of respondents viewed same-sex relationships as always or mostly wrong, reflecting a rapid decline in opposition to the LGBT community from the mid-1990s onwards.106
Labour should certainly not take its core white working-class support for granted, for, as John Clarke noted, ‘Labour without its traditional voters is the SDP – and look what happened to them. As a rootless elitist Party they evaporated like a thimbleful of sherry in the hard Tuscany sun.’107 Yet Labour has always been at its most effective when it has challenged the accepted norms even when it seemed politically dangerous to do so. Indeed, it would be more severely damaging to the party were it to water down such commitments in order to accommodate those who might never vote for it. It would lose new converts and long-standing supporters in the process. Frank Dobson argues that voter mistrust is a direct result of parties saying one thing and then implementing another, that you may not win the vote but you may, oddly, win the voters’ trust. He adds that ‘Consensus is something that is pushed through by people with a real commitment to something and it is gradually accepted.’108
In the face of crushing defeat and existential crisis, Labour's social liberalism survived the many problems that the party faced throughout the 1980s. The defection of the liberal-minded Social Democrats in 1981 did not diminish the social-liberal instinct within Labour, and indeed the party continued to fight for equality with an ever louder voice when it would have been easier to downplay it. During the 1980s Labour's socially liberal commitment was maintained; after 1997 its liberalism was implemented. Labour lived up to the declaration made in Harold Wilson's famous call to arms: ‘The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.’109
1 Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1989), p. 273.
2 David Marquand, ‘The Paradoxes of Thatcherism’, in Robert Skidelsky (ed.) Thatcherism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), p. 165.
3 Christopher Bray, 1965: The Year Modern Britain was Born (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), p. 277.
4 John Campbell, Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014), pp. 182–3; Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: Constable, 2006 [1956]), p. 403.
5 Andy Beckett, Promised You A Miracle (London: Penguin, 2016), p. 136.
6 Frank Dobson, interview with author, 4 November 2014.
7 Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the 1960s (London: Abacus, 2010), p. 338; Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain: A New History of the Labour Party (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 337; Ken Livingstone, You Can't Say That: Memoirs (London: Faber &Faber, 2011), p. 119; Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 209; Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, p. 267; Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning, and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011), pp. 180–1.
8 Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 180.
9 Brian McConell, ‘A Charter for the Outsiders’, Daily Mirror, 5 July 1967, p. 7.
10 Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 183.
11 See Sandbrook, White Heat, p. 341; ‘57 Votes Carry the Sex Bill’, Daily Express, 12 February 1966, p. 5; Pugh, Speak for Britain, p. 336 and Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 181.
12 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 13; Sandbrook, White Heat, p. 341.
13 Brooke, Sexual Politics, pp. 4 and 15–23.
14 ‘Gay Libs Seek Law Reform’, Guardian, 3 July 1975, p. 6.
15 www.lgbtlabour.org.uk/history (accessed 3 October 2016).
16 Roy Hattersley, Fifty Years On (London: Brown & Company, 1997), p. 177.
17 Austin Mitchell, interview with author, 4 November 2014.
18 Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 296.
19 Kenneth O. Morgan, Michael Foot: A Life (London: Harper Perennial, 2007), pp. 245–6.
20 Morgan, Michael Foot, p. 494; Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 403.
21 Peter Purton, Sodom, Gomorrah and the New Jerusalem (London: Labour Campaign for Gay Rights, 2006), pp. 42, 46.
22 Gerald Kaufman (ed.), Renewal: Labour's Britain in the 1980s (London: Penguin, 1983); Peter Archer, Socialism, Freedom and the Law (London: Penguin 1983), p. 167.
23 Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-War Britain: How the Personal Got Political (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 157.
24 Eliot Henderson, ‘Was the “Loony Left” Right?’, Labour Uncut, http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2014/02/20/was-the-loony-left-right/ (accessed 26 October 2014).
25 Laurie Taylor, ‘Tatchell Man's First Test’, The Times, 22 February 1983, p. 8.
26 ‘What Tatchell Wrote about Extra-parliamentary Protest’, Guardian, 8 December 1981, p. 4.
27 Roy Hattersley, ‘Outraged of Lambeth’, Guardian, 2 February 2000, p. 7.
28 Taylor, ‘Tatchell Man's First Test’.
29 Alwyn W. Turner, Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s (London: Aurum Press, 2013), p. 48.
30 Hattersley, ‘Outraged of Lambeth’.
31 James Curran, ‘Hounds Off Peter Tatchell’, The Times, 20 October 1982, p. 14.
32 Turner, Rejoice! Rejoice!, p. 48.
33 Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 242; ‘Tatchell Plea for Respite from Press’, The Times, 15 January 1983, p. 2; Philip Webster, ‘Tatchell Hits at “Smears” ’, The Times, 1 February 1983, p. 2.
34 Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 244.
35 www.bsa-30.natcen.ac.uk/read-the-report/personal-relationships/homosexuality.aspx (accessed 26 October 2014).
36 Leo Abse, ‘The Law that Failed to Liberate the Gays’, The Times, 28 July 1982, p. 8.
37 Abse, ‘The Law that Failed to Liberate the Gays’.
38 Labour Party Manifesto, 1983, www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab83.htm (accessed 7 November 2014).
39 ‘Manchester Spends a Lot on Rubbish’, The Times, 24 February 1983, p. 4.
40 Colin Clews, 1981. Politics: The Rights of Gay Men and Women, www.gayinthe80s.com/2014/03/1981-politics-the-rights-of-gay-men-and-women/ (accessed 17 November 2016); Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 244.
41 Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-War Britain, p. 173.
42 Purton, Sodom, Gomorrah and the New Jerusalem, p. 44.
43 Sex Equality Bill, House of Commons Debates, 9 December 1983, 50, cols 607–44, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1983/dec/09/sex-equality-bill 1#S6CV0050P0_19831209_HOC_149 (accessed 17 November 2016).
44 Sex Equality Bill, House of Commons Debate, 9 December 1983, 50, cols 607–44, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1983/dec/09/sex-equality-bill 1#S6CV0050P0_19831209_HOC_149 (accessed 17 November 2016).
45 ‘MPs Trade Accusations over Councils’, The Times, 6 December 1986, p. 4.
46 ‘Commons Row over Gay Slur’, The Times, 6 December 1986, p. 1.
47 Livingstone, You Can't Say That, p. 121.
48 Labour Party Manifesto, Enhancing Rights, Increasing Freedom, 1987, p. 1, www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab87.htm (accessed 7 November 2014).
49 Quoted in Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 246.
50 Benjamin Butterworth ‘GT Heroes – Chris Smith’, Gay Times, 30 December 2015, p. 1, www.gaytimes.co.uk/life/19687/gt-heroes-chris-smith/ (accessed 18 November 2016).
51 www.bsa-30.natcen.ac.uk/read-the-report/personal-relationships/homosexuality.aspx (accessed 26 October 2014).
52 Purton, Sodom, Gomorrah and the New Jerusalem, p. 45.
53 Arthur Marwick, British Society since 1945 (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 363–4.
54 Matt Cook, ‘London, AIDS and the 1980s’, in Simon Avery and Katherine M. Graham (eds), Sex Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 52.
55 Eric Shaw, The Labour Party Since 1979: Crisis and Transformation (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 195.
56 Livingstone, You Can't Say That, p. 121.
57 Livingstone, You Can't Say That, p. 182.
58 George Gale, ‘Whites Have Rights, Too’, Daily Express, 25 April 1985, p. 8.
59 Ronald Butt, ‘After the GLC, a Greek Lesson’, The Times, 21 July 1983, p. 10.
60 Polly Toynbee, ‘Freedom's Roadblock’, Guardian, 14 January 1988, p. 13 and Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 247.
61 Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 247.
62 Geoff Andrews, ‘Activists Deny their Loony Left Label’, Guardian, 7 March 1987, p. 2.
63 John Carvel, ‘London Labour Chief Rejects Policy U-turns’, Guardian, 13 March 1987, p. 4.
64 Andrew Rawnsley, ‘SDP raises Ghost of Traditional Labour Voter’, Guardian, 6 February 1987, p. 3.
65 Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 249.
66 Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Party Conference, 9 October 1987, www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106941 (accessed 21 September 2016) and Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 247.
67 www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/9/section/28 (accessed 21 September 2016).
68 David Willets, ‘The Family’, in Denis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon (eds) The Thatcher Effect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 267.
69 Geoffrey Robertson, ‘Fear not Clause 28, Only the Prejudice Behind It’, Guardian, 1 June 1988, p. 19; Sarah Roelofs, ‘Section 28 – What's in a Law’, Spare Rib, No. 192 (1988), p. 42, https://journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk/britishlibrary/sparerib (accessed 18 August 2016).
70 Martin Fletcher, ‘Homosexual Bill Wins Labour Vote’, The Times, 9 December 1987, p. 3.
71 Simon Mackley, ‘The Long Road to Repeal: The Labour Party and Section 28’, New Histories, 5 July 2012, http://newhistories.group.shef.ac.uk/wordpress/wordpress/the-long-road-to-repeal-the-labour-Party-and-section-28/ (accessed 26 October 2014).
72 Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 251.
73 Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 251.
74 Purton, Sodom, Gomorrah and the New Jerusalem, p. 51.
75 www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab92.htm (accessed 13 October 2016); www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/libdem92.htm (accessed 13 October 2016).
76 Brooke, Sexual Politics, p. 227.
77 Alexander Walker, quoted in Tom Dewe Mathews, Censored (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 159.
78 Marcus Collins, The Permissive Society and its Enemies (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2007), p. 29.
79 See also the documentary, ‘Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape’, by Jake West in the collection, ‘Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide’, Nucleus Films, 2010.
80 ‘Express Opinion’, Daily Express, 10 November 1983, p. 8.
81 Julie Bindel, ‘I was Wrong about I Spit On Your Grave’, Guardian, 19 January 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jan/19/wrong-about-spit-on-your-grave (accessed 21 December 2016).
82 Polly Toynbee, ‘Why Nasty Is as Nasty Does’, Guardian, 13 March 1984, p. 11.
83 ‘It's Hard to Find a Video Nasty’, Letters, Observer, 18 December 1983, p. 24.
84 Shyama Perera, ‘NSPCC Seeks Curb on Video “Nasties” ’, Guardian, 12 October 1982, p. 6.
85 Livingstone, You Can't Say That, p. 105.
86 Livingstone, You Can't Say That, p. 107.
87 Clarissa Smith, ‘A Perfectly British Business: Stagnation, Continuities and Change on the Top Shelf’, in Lisa Z. Sigel, John Phillips and Maryna Romanet (eds), International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 154–5.
88 Turner, Rejoice! Rejoice!, p. 209, and Martin Barker, ‘Nasty Politics or Video Nasties?’, in Martin Barker (ed.), The Video Nasties – Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. 7–38, p. 37.
89 Turner, Rejoice! Rejoice!, p. 210.
90 Julian Petley, ‘Us and Them’, in Martin Barker and Julian Petley (eds), Ill Effects – the Media/Violence Debate (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 179.
91 https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?d=1982-12-15 (accessed 27 November 2016); House of Commons Debates, 11 November 1983, 48, cols 521–80.
92 Julian Petley, ‘Are We Insane? The “Video Nasty” Moral Panic’, Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques 43 (2012), 35–57.
93 House of Commons Debates, 16 March 1984, 56, cols 629–48.
94 Geoffrey Robertson, ‘Chain-saw Censor’, Guardian, 14 March 1984, p. 23.
95 Campbell, Roy Jenkins, p. 183.
96 Norman Luck, ‘Maggie Pledges War on Nasties’, Daily Express, 11 November 1983, p. 2.
97 John Burns, ‘Video Horror Show Shocks Europe’, Daily Express, 17 November 1983, p. 3.
98 ‘Maggie Loses Porn Curb Bid’, Daily Express, 2 February 1984, p. 7.
99 www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106191 (accessed 4 November 2014); Barker, ‘Nasty Politics or Video Nasties?’, p. 29; Staff Reporter, ‘No Video Nasties – We're British’, Observer, 14 October 1984, p. 5.
100 Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 403.
101 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1985 [1929]), p. 339.
102 Patricia Wynn Davies, Colin Brown and Marianne Macdonald, ‘Sexual Equality for Gays Rejected: Angry Protests Greet MP's Backing for Consent at 18’, Independent, 22 February 1994, www.independent.co.uk/news/sexual-equality-for-gays-rejected-angry-protests-greet-mps-backing-for-consent-at-18–1395642.html (accessed 18 November 2016).
103 Mackley, ‘The Long Road to Repeal’.
104 Collins, The Permissive Society and its Enemies, p. 27.
105 Patrick Diamond and Michael Kenny, ‘Comment: Liberalism for the Left’, Guardian, 13 March 2012, p. 28, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/12/labour-lost-liberal-streak (accessed 10 September 2014).
106 www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-30/personal-relationships/homosexuality.aspx (accessed 26 October 2014).
107 John Clarke, ‘The Choice – Support or Dump Labour's Traditional Voters’, Labour List, 9 August 2014, http://labourlist.org/2014/08/the-choice-support-or-dump-labours-traditional-voters/ (accessed 10 September 2014).
108 Frank Dobson, interview with author, 4 November 2014.
109 Stuart Thornton, Dictionary of Labour Quotations (London: Biteback Publishing, 2013), p. 375.