In the dying days of Harold Wilson’s first government, Roy Jenkins was giving a speech in Abingdon, and his focus turned to the liberalising reforms that he had initiated as home secretary. ‘The permissive society,’ he said, ‘has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilised society.’ Almost four decades on, equality before the law remains an essential prerequisite of a civilised society.
The novelist Christopher Isherwood once described the treatment of homosexuality as a metric by which every government and political party must be judged. This government still fails the Isherwood test; for them, gay marriage is just an attempt to obviate thirty years of Conservative-backed moralising, just part of the detoxification strategy, one that they aren’t even committed enough to hold as a whipped vote. That is the modern Conservative MP’s stance towards homosexuality: at best, indifference, at worst, outright bigotry.
It is a measure of the cultural revolution that Labour helped to set in motion that a government led by a man who less than a decade ago thought that schoolchildren shouldn’t be told it was okay to be gay will bring about marriage equality. But it is a measure of its limits that it will only be passed with the votes of Labour MPs. When homosexuality was decriminalized in the 1960s, it was seen as a social deviance, its decriminalization depicted as humane treatment of the perverse. Homosexuality is still given labels that bestow upon it a second class status – a different kind of love, the love that dare not speak its name – and Labour won’t have built a truly civilised society until it is recognised, simply and undeniably, as ‘love’, by everyone from your next door neighbour to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
That the Conservatives still fail the Isherwood test, however, doesn’t mean that the underlying strategy no longer has teeth. The embrace – however half-hearted and cowardly it may have proved to be – of gay marriage, the pledge to ring-fence the Department for International Development, the use of the noun ‘reform’ to obscure the reality of the verb ‘cut’, all of these are part of a concerted strategy by the Conservatives to appropriate the best of the last Labour government, to say that, actually, your equal rights and your minimum wage, your safer streets and your tax credit, all of that would have happened under a prime minister Hague. All Labour really offered was a tax hike and an expanding deficit.
The abolition of the 50p rate, the endless U-turns, and the fact that David Cameron appears to suffer from an Etonian variant of Tourette’s Syndrome all mean that this strategy isn’t, at present, working. But they have found an unexpected ally within the Labour party. There is an element of the Labour party that wants not just to defeat its opponents, but to make opposition impossible, to enforce ideological purity. They believe that, in doing so, they will shift the political paradigm drastically to the left. But in declaring the victories of the last Labour government to be somehow ‘alien’, in dismissing the achievements of the first Labour government to seriously tackle international poverty and the first Labour government to pursue true civil equality, regardless of orientation, we cede that territory to a Conservative party that will never deliver on those issues; while making it that bit harder to complete the revolution we started in 1997.
For the ideologically committed, the defeats and the compromises linger longer in the memory than the victories. But if we don’t own our victories; if we disavow those who delivered them as estranged from the Labour tent, then our achievements will be annexed by our opponents, and the only thing we’ll have left to our name will be our failures.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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Photo: Louisa Thomson