The most intense cultural battle in the UK is being waged in Scotland. There, groups determined to have the nuclear or heterosexual family given statutory privilege over homosexuality in school teaching are being fiercely opposed by the Scottish government and the Scottish Parliament.
The conservative perception that liberals and leftists aim to destroy the family is an ancient grudge. But it has broken to new mutiny in the past half-year after the government’s stated intention to delete Clause 28 of the Local Government Act, which forbids the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools. This was a measure born of the struggle between high-Thatcherism and ultra-leftism – pushed through to guard schoolchildren against what was widely perceived as a radical cultural agenda, endorsed by some teachers.
The conservative perception was correct – and in its moderate form, this agenda is now part of the beliefs of most liberals and centre-leftists. It allows for formulae that concede that the heterosexual family is the commonly accepted way in which to bring up children; but it refuses to countenance any stigma attaching to children born to, or brought up by, an unmarried couple.
In England and Wales, the government seems to have placated those who wanted the family honoured, by a formula that replaces the deleted Clause 28 and enjoins teachers to stress the “value of family life . . . the significance of marriage and stable relationships”. But Scotland, with a separate educational system, has given a much weaker undertaking.
In its pursuit of sexual equality, Scottish Labour, usually thought of as “old”, is actually “newer” than English new Labour. New Labour has equality at its core, but it is also willing to “include” as many who disagree with its principles as possible, by finding a consensus. The English formula for family, set out by David Blunkett, the Education Secretary, seems to have succeeded in doing that (though there are some critics from the liberal left who think this is actually worse than Clause 28 itself).
Scotland is, as it likes to stress, different. Its version of inclusion is much more exclusive; its new parliament unskilled, or uninterested, in finding consensus. Besides, those who have opposed the scrapping of Clause 28 are much more determined than their English and Welsh counterparts. They have the backing of Brian Souter, the founder and chairman of the successful bus company Stagecoach, who has pledged his very large private fortune to fight for the family; and earlier this week, they had the backing of almost all the faiths in Scotland for a letter which pleaded with Donald Dewar, the First Minister, for a written commitment to family-centred teaching.
On 20 March, the Scottish Parliament’s Equal Opportunities Committee met in the main debating chamber of the parliament. It was composed wholly of Labour and Liberal MSPs (who form the ruling coalition) with some opposition Scottish Nationalists. The only Tory on the committee was absent. All the MSPs were for scrapping Clause 28.
They were examining two sets of witnesses; one from the “Keep the Clause” group, the other from various gay and lesbian groups. “Keep the Clause” has as its most powerful advocates Brian Souter and Cardinal Thomas Winning, the head of the Scottish Roman Catholic Church; but, as Tom Cassidy of the PR company Media House, which organises the “Keep the Clause” movement for Souter, told me, they chose to put “ordinary people” before the committee in order to make a more powerful impact.
It was quite powerful, but perhaps for the wrong reason. The two “witnesses” – a roly-poly man called Patrick Rowling from Airdrie, and Anne Stewart, a minister’s wife from Perth – faced unremitting hostility. The committee had slightly more women on it than men and was under the chairmanship of Kate MacLean, a Labour MSP from Dundee; they saw it as their job not so much to examine Rowling and Stewart, but to make it clear they hated what they stood for.
The most adept at this was Tommy Sheridan, who is the only representative of a socialist party (the Scottish Socialist Party) in a British legislature. Handsome and dapper in black, Sheridan exuded an air of amiability as he lay into his opponents. He accused them of being “set up” by Media House; of being misleading in their claims on majority support; and of upholding”the antithesis of democracy”.
Labour’s Johann Lamont subjected Rowling (who did most of the talking) to a close and unforgiving interrogation on the effects of the campaign. The best question came from MacLean, who listed possible “families” – married couple, foster parents, gay couples, grandparents, lone parents – and asked Rowling: are these equal or unequal? Rowling, who had stood up well to the hostility, conceded that this was a “very clever question” and had to fall back on a meaningless formula about nothing being more equal than anything else, but marriage being better. When Anne Stewart talked about children finding “a Mr Right or a Ms Right to marry”, it clanged down on the floor awkwardly, as if from another age.
By contrast, the representatives of the gay and lesbian groups were treated with friendliness. They were also let off lightly by the inquisitors. So lightly, indeed, that two of their most questionable statements – that “homosexuality cannot be promoted” and that suicides among homosexuals had gone up since the campaign started – were not questioned at all. It was not put to them, as it had been unremittingly to the Keep the Clause representatives, that their point of view might cause distress to those who were antithetical to it; and several of the MSPs said that they were moved by the evidence given.
Some of it was, in fact, moving. Judith Mackinlay was that bogey of anti-political correctness conservatives, a lesbian single parent. She was also a primary-school teacher. She was a little overemotional (though that went over well), but what she said resonated with some truth. She said that children in schools frequently met with homophobia, and that there was, in the playground, little defence against it. She described her five-year-old daughter as already spinning fantasies of marrying and having a family; she said she neither discouraged nor encouraged her to “be” heterosexual or homosexual, and would not.
Sitting beside her was a white-bearded man in his sixties; Joe Patrizio and his wife (who was not present) have run a helpline called Scottish Parents’ Enquiry for the past eight years – putting their own experience of a son “coming out” as gay to use for others. Patrizio said the best thing of the afternoon. “People think there are bogeymen out there,” he said, “But when you explain things, the bogeymen disappear.”
It was a dispiriting session. The “Keep the Clause-ers” were patently decent enough people: the MSPs simply saw them as representatives of dark forces. Or at least elusive ones – Brian Souter, whom I asked to interview, would not do it either in person or on phone. Nor would Cardinal Winning.
One can talk to their spokesmen; and there, in the case of Souter, you strike a controversial area. Media House, which is hired by Souter to co-ordinate the campaign, is run by Jack Irvine, who, when he edited the Scottish edition of the Sun, swung it behind the Scottish Nationalists. He is very much disliked by the Labour Party: one senior representative of it told me that he was dangerous and sinister.
Media House seemed to louse up in the early part of the campaign, by claiming that a number of celebrities were supporting “Keep the Clause” who later denied they had committed themselves to it. But it has recovered: Irvine claims that, in the recent Ayr by-election for a Scottish Parliamentary seat, which saw the Tories beat Labour into third place behind the Nationalists, 15 per cent said that they had voted Tory because of Keep the Clause.
Also veined into the debate are rival conceptions of Scotland. Rowling told the committee that he had hoped that devolution would mean a very “inclusive” Scotland – one which respected the will of the majority. (The “Keep the Clause” groups have numbers on their sides: the opinion polls, most recently by ICM, show their position attracting up to 70 per cent support.) Both Rowling and Stewart several times referred to the better position enjoyed by parents in England who have more of a say in their schools (Scotland has no parent governors) and, as the Souter camps sees it, a better replacement clause.
That this issue should have become so inflamed in Scotland, while only ever being of mild interest in England, is perhaps a sign of a raw political class believing its own propaganda – that it now rules, that it can decisively change the country and that it has a mandate. But it is also something to do with Scots extremism; even when the political class is determined to be liberal, its very determination to be so betrays it into illiberalism; meanwhile its opponents, vowing fidelity to decent hearthside principles, spin and trick their way through the media with the reckless use of slogans that unleash hostility and prejudice.
It is not over yet. Either the Scottish Executive gives a form of words that the campaigners and the faiths can live with, or it becomes a deeper grudge. It is a bad issue with which to enter the new millennium, but a very Scottish one.
Content from our partners
Related
