Reducing the number of MPs is bad for our democracy

The ability of our MPs to keep an eye on the actions of government has been dealt a major blow. The reports of the parliamentary boundary commissioners were published this week.  These periodic reviews rearrange the constituency jig saw, altering the size and shape of the pieces that make up our electoral map. All previous reviews were an attempt to alter the map to reflect shifts in population.  This review is different.  It’s the first since the departure of the Irish Free State in 1922 to set out deliberately to reduce the size of the House of Commons by a significant amount. The size of the government will not be changing.  But there will be fifty fewer backbenchers to hold them to account as the Commons shrinks from 650 to 600 MPs.

The origins of this strange “reform” go back to before the 2010 general election.  All three party leaders at the time were falling over themselves with eagerness to give MPs a kicking in response to the abuse of the expenses system by some of their colleagues.  Nick Clegg talked about “reducing the cost of politics” and one of his suggestions was to reduce the House of Commons by an arbitrary number of 50.  It wasn’t clear to his bemused colleagues which of us he expected to volunteer for self-immolation but it’s safe to assume he didn’t have the member for Sheffield Hallam in mind. David Cameron came up with an identical proposal.

When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition was formed in 2010 the reduction made its way into the Coalition Agreement. This time it was dressed up as part of the package of constitutional reforms that included a referendum on the voting system and an elected second chamber.  The PM and DPM trotted out the line that reducing the Commons to 650 MPs was hardly a calamity, after all the US got by with just 535 members of the House of Representatives.  I could not vote against the 2011 Bill that provided for the reduction as it was intertwined with the legislation paving the way for the AV referendum.  But I spoke against the seats reduction during the committee stage.

I pointed out that the charge that Britain was over-endowed with politicians was spurious.  I had recently been on a cross party delegation of the Britain-America Committee designed to increase understanding of US government.  We had spent time in Washington DC, a weekend with a Congressman (in my case a curious match with Republican Robert Aderholt of Alabama, we got on fine) and then a few days in Lansing, the state capital of Michigan.  In my speech I pointed out that a citizen in Michigan would be able to vote for the President and Vice President, two federal Senators, a federal Congressman, the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Michigan, the state Attorney General and Secretary of State, a state Senator and a state member of the House of Representatives.  There was also the statewide Board of Education and a plethora of local council members and officials.  The citizen had plenty of choice of who to contact about a personal problem or who to lobby about a political issue.

In contrast, Britain’s political system is remarkably thin and flat.  In England people would have an MEP (now with a 6 months sell by date…) and an MP and that was it for national or regional issues.  There would be a local councillor or two and since 2011 there are now some city Mayors and Regional Mayors plus a Police and Crime Commissioner.  Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have national Parliament members.  But Britain is very lightly governed compared not just to the US but also all our fellow European neighbours.

Power in Britain is still concentrated in Westminster.  An over-mighty government is drawn from the ranks of Parliamentarians, another key difference with the US conveniently glossed over by Messrs Cameron and Clegg. There is no separation of power between the executive and legislature. Scrutiny of the executive is done by MPs (and unelected Peers), many of whom are wannabe or ex Ministers. This is an imperfect system but the changes proposed now will make it worse.  There will be a reduced pool of MPs able to question ministers and scrutinise legislation and policy implementation. Theresa May’s government in 2018 has 25 MPs in the cabinet, 58 MP ministers outside the cabinet plus 17 whips – a round total of 100 MPs in the executive.  In a House of Commons of 600 members, a government needs only about 295 MPs to command a majority, once the Speaker and Sinn Fein MPs are taken out of the equation.  A government should be able to operate with fewer whips, their flock of sheep having been reduced.  But the government will be a bigger beast, with a reduced number of challengers both on the government and opposition benches.  There will be fewer MPs for the vital work of legislation Bill Committees and departmental Select Committees.  Causes that are promoted by cross party APPGs will have fewer parliamentary champions.  The House of Commons will be impoverished and the imbalance of numbers with the unelected Lords will be even starker.

In 2011, as in 2018, most of the attention has been focussed on the changes to boundaries, rather than the diminished scrutiny of the government.  The boundaries are being altered for more reasons than usual.  The Coalition enshrined in law a requirement that constituencies should be of equal size, with only a 5% tolerance away from the norm.  Using the electorate at December 2015 this means a target electorate of 74,769 with a minimum size of 71,031 and maximum of 78,507.

I supported this change back in 2011.  First Past the Post is a terrible system to use in a multi-party democracy.  But its distortions are made more extreme if constituencies vary too much in size. This proposed change triggered howls of protest, mainly from Labour MPs representing small constituencies. For instance Tristram Hunt, my fellow member of the Constitutional Reform Select Committee, was a vocal critic of the reform.  His Stoke on Trent Central electorate in the 2010 general election was just 61,003 compared to my Bristol West electorate of 82,728. Even within the same city there were major distortions – my Labour neighbour in Bristol East had 69,448 electors.

Equal sized constituencies means that five of the six demands of the Chartists in the 1840s are now in place.  British democratic reform moves at a glacial pace.  But the constituency map will now change massively.  The Press Association calculates that 272 current constituencies will be either completely abolished or changed radically. Half of Labour’s current seats fall into this category as do just over a third of Conservative seats.  The elections centre at Plymouth University (essentially Professors Thrasher and Rallings, psephologists extraordinaire) have re-run the 2017 general election, with estimates for the new boundaries and a 600 seat House of Commons.  The Conservatives would have won 308 seats. Theresa May would be free of the bowler hatted men of the DUP, if not her own troublesome backbenchers.  Labour would be 76 seats behind and my own party would be on just 7 seats.  Of course people will often vote differently if local circumstances change so the position could be rosier for Labour and the Lib Dems.  But it is clear that it will be harder for Labour to over-haul the Tories at the next election now that they have lost the cushion of small safe seats.

These changes, if approved by MPs, will go ahead in the absence of compensating constitutional reform. Westminster will remain far too powerful, particularly in England where devolution is at very early stages.  English MPs will completely dominate the House of Commons.  There will 501 MPs representing English constituencies compared with just 29 for Wales, the lowest number since before the 1832 Reform Act.  This is particularly hard on Wales, while the National Assembly remains under-powered with just 60 members. Brexit is consuming all the political energy of the government and the Labour “opposition” have shown no interest in meaningful reform either.

In the absence of a fairer voting system, an elected Senate and real devolution within England, I believe these changes worsen our democracy. In 2013, after being stabbed in the back by Ed Miliband over AV and the collapse of House of Lords reform, Liberal Democrat MPs broke ranks with our Tory coalition partners and voted down the boundary changes.  (I wish we’d done this a little more often, most obviously on tuition fees.)  In 2018 it is likely that the DUP will stick with Mrs May and support the changes, which are expected to leave DUP representation unchanged at ten MPs. If Mrs May’s Brexit critics eventually force her out of Number Ten, her successor will have very incentive to call another early election on the more advantageous boundaries.

British politics has had four shocks to its system in the last few years.  The full effect of Brexit on domestic politics is as yet unknown. Corbyn has transformed Labour, probably for the worst.  Labour’s hegemony in Scotland has been shattered by the SNP.  The Coalition broke the Liberal Democrats.  All of these are changes that could be reversed or take a new direction. But the reduction of the House of Commons will impair the effectiveness of our Parliament for years to come.

 

Notes

My blog on a model constitution for Britain and Northern Ireland can be read here – https://stephenwilliamsmp.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/how-a-federal-republic-could-keep-britain-united/

The boundary reviews for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland can be read here –

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-boundary-commissions-boundary-review-2018

No Bristol Arena, so what now for our city centre?

Bristol’s elected Mayor has scrapped plans for an entertainment Arena near the city’s Temple Meads mainline station. In making this decision Mayor Marvin Rees has binned plans going back over a decade that have been promoted by previous city leaders and several government ministers and agencies. He’s discarded a fully worked up design for a building that received planning permission in 2016 and was assumed to be a done deal by most Bristolians. The future of one of the last large city centre development sites has been thrown into confusion. Bristol, once again, looks like a city that struggles to deliver big projects and is led currently by a politician without a vision.

Bristol should have a large capacity arena, capable of staging some of the world’s biggest acts in music and entertainment. I’ve long believed that the largest city in the south west of England and the country’s most economically successful city region should have the very best cultural, entertainment and sporting facilities. We lag behind on most fronts, apart from theatre and art house cinema and in recent times our sporting facilities have improved. Our concert hall, currently bearing the name Colston, is closed for a revamp that should put it into the premier league for orchestral music and venues hosting other events for a crowd of up to two thousand.  The O2 Academy also sits about 2,000 but Bristol can’t stage anything indoors on a scale beyond that number. An Arena, with a capacity exceeding five thousand, would mean Bristol attracting the acts that currently by-pass us for Cardiff, Birmingham and Bournemouth.

But while I’ve consistently supported Bristol having a new arena, I’ve also always thought that it should be in the city centre. An arena in the centre would complement Bristol’s existing cultural facilities and provide a boost to hotels and the hospitality industry. Its location would be sustainable, located right next the region’s busiest main line rail station, itself due for a revamp. The signalling and line improvements currently being made will increase its capacity. Many major bus routes pass the station. The city centre is the core of radial road routes and there are plenty of car parks nearby that are under used (or closed at the moment) in the evenings.  I don’t agree that a city centre arena would cause unbearable gridlock.  The city centre of Cardiff has the 74,000 capacity Principality Stadium, the 7,000 capacity Motorpoint Arena and the 2,000 capacity St David’s Hall.  I am not aware of any calls for these facilities to be relocated to the northern outskirts of the city. People enjoy congregating in city centres.

If Bristol isn’t to have a large arena in its centre, then I would rather it didn’t have one at all.  An arena at Filton, which appears to be the Mayor’s preference, would definitely cause traffic congestion on a smaller road network, with far fewer public transport options. Like Cribbs Causeway is to Broadmead, an arena at Filton would be a rival for city centre attractions and businesses. Competition is fine if it leads to overall growth in the combined economy.  But I think a damaged city centre is the more likely outcome.

This leaves two questions and problems to solve – what to do with the abandoned Temple Island site and what to do with the Brabazon hangars at Filton?

Let’s take Temple Island first.  Bristol is a city without an obvious centre.  When I came to Bristol as a student I was puzzled by people referring to “The Centre”, which at the time was strip of greenery resembling a sea front garden.  The only major attraction there (and now) was the Hippodrome. The name derives from “Tramways Centre”, which has been irrelevant for about 80 years!  The truth is that Bristol’s shopping, commercial, cultural, political and transport hubs are strung out in a lineal pattern from the Victoria Rooms on the edge of Clifton, down Park Street to College Green, through the “Centre” to Broadmead with a gap before reaching Temple Meads station.

The area around Temple Meads station was derelict for a long time but in recent years a transformation has got underway. New commercial office buildings and blocks of flats have sprung up.  The Coalition Government made the Temple Meads area into the Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone, with favoured business rates retention for the council as an incentive to encourage development. The zone was billed as a hub for Bristol’s creative industries.  The government provided £12million for a new bridge over the Avon to improve connectivity with the “island” earmarked for an arena. While cutting the sod for the bridge in May 2014 I announced another grant, £6million which was to be spent (though for commercial reasons I couldn’t say so) on the acquisition of the derelict former Royal Mail sorting office (which ironically closed in favour of a facility at Filton), an unsightly blot on the landscape greeting all train arrivals from London.  I was hopeful that the BBC would relocate from Whiteladies Road to the sorting office site, freeing up their old home for expansion of the Bristol University precinct.  Instead we’ve got a new university campus at Temple Meads.  This in itself may be a good thing, if the research activities complement the city’s digital and creative sector. But it also means lots of precious land given over to student flats.

The Temple Island site itself needs a new use.  Mayor Rees favours a “medium sized” conference centre.  This could be a good solution, if the surrounding uses are got right. A medium sized conference venue could be on a similar scale to the centres familiar to most politicians at Bournemouth and Brighton, hosting conferences and music and entertainment acts for about 5,000 people.  For this to work, there will need to be an adjoining hotel plus plenty of smaller halls and break out rooms for fringe events.  A convention centre that is used during the day as well as evenings will provide a stimulus for more cafes and bars nearby so mixed use developments should be stipulated in a masterplan.  Ideally, the council should draw up a masterplan for outline planning approval and invite applicants to come forward with designs that can deliver the vision for the site.

Temple Quarter should become a new thriving East End of the city centre.  What is needed is a plan to deliver an arc of prosperity and sustainable living through to the West End and Clifton.  Temple Meads needs to be better integrated to the city.  This means improvements to both Victoria Street and Redcliffe Way. It’s time to dust down plans for Redcliffe Way that I first saw as councillor for the city centre back in the 1990s.  Redcliffe Way should be traffic calmed and turned into an attractive boulevard linking Temple Meads to Queen Square.  The road should be moved towards the Portwall, enabling the creation of a new square in front of St Mary Redcliffe church.

At the end of Victoria Street and over Bristol Bridge we have the total mess at the corner of Castle Park that was the heart of the medieval city. The junction of High Street and Wine Street badly needs new development.  The unsightly disused bank buildings should be demolished.  New buildings will recreate the historic heart of the city and should enable a new public space around the hidden ruins of St Mary le Port church.  This will provide a boost to the struggling west side of Broadmead, a counterpoise to Cabot Circus.

Our linear city centre needs to be joined up and made accessible in a sustainable way. I would like to see a city centre circle line, with trams joining Temple Meads to College Green via Victoria Street, Baldwin Street and back through the Centre and Broadmead.  As an interim measure this is the perfect short haul route for clean electric buses.  Something for our Regional Mayor Tim Bowles to take up…

What about Filton?  The huge Brabazon hangars need a new purpose.  Siting an arena there would be a huge mistake, for the reasons already given.  Maybe the spaces lend themselves to sporting use, for indoor hockey, basketball and 5-a-side football.  I think the site owners YTL should set aside their private chats with the Bristol Mayor and open up a conversation with the people of Bristol and South Gloucestershire, asking them for what they would like to see there.  The Regional Mayor should lobby Network Rail and the government for swift reopening of the nearby Henbury rail link.

Finally, a comment about the state of our local government.  Bristol now has experience of two very different directly-elected Mayors.  I’m fonder of George Ferguson than most of my fellow local Liberal Democrat politicians.  But his flinty temperament meant he lacked the diplomacy to persuade councillors to buy into his plans. But nobody could credibly accuse him of lack of vision for Bristol. His successor Marvin Rees doesn’t seem to have much of a vision about the sort of Bristol he wants to build.  His lack of any political experience prior to being elected Mayor (never once standing for election as a ward councillor for instance) means that there is no platform of experience to carry his ego. Politicians need self-belief but they need to be grounded as well.  Mayor Rees has set aside the clear desire of most councillors (and the tens of thousands of people that they represent) for a city centre sited arena. The opaque way he has arrived at this point and the somewhat lofty manner he has dealt with questions and challenge has undermined his office. An air of suspicion hangs over his dealings with Malaysian property developer YTL, the owners of the former Filton Airfield, and his apparent failure to give serious consideration to an offer from Bristolian property magnate Stephen Fear and impresario Harvey Goldsmith to develop the Temple Island Arena.

I favoured the move to the Mayoral model of governance both for the city and the wider sub-region. But the lack of vision by Mayor Rees and Mayor Bowles coupled with the inadequate means of holding them to account does throw the model into doubt.  Mayors are the norm in every other country and should work in England too.  Let’s not forget the truly awful Labour Leaders of Council that were a disaster for Bristol for many years.  But just maybe what our region needs is a return to the more collegiate model of Leader and cabinet, accountable to councillors, for the city council.  A strong executive Mayor is still needed for the West of England region, with the powers and budget to deliver a vision but with robust scrutiny in place.  Whatever the model, in the end what matters is the quality of candidates and their willingness to work together for the good of our city and region.

 

 

Notes and updates

More information on the government funding for the Arena Island Bridge and Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone can be found in my blog from May 2014 here – https://stephenwilliamsmp.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/big-boost-for-bristol-arena-and-enterprise-zone/

After the special council meeting Liberal Democrat and Conservative councillors used their power of “call in” to re-examine the Mayor’s decision.  A scrutiny committee was held on Thursday 20^th September 2018. The Labour and Green Party councillors voted to uphold the Mayor’s decision so there can be no reference back to the full city councillor and the Mayor can now go ahead with whatever plans he makes for Temple Island.

Stephen Fear and a group of American investors have met with council officers (but not the Mayor) and have stated that they think Filton is a non-runner and that the Arena will work only if it is on a city centre site,  either Temple Island or elsewhere.

Meanwhile Stephen Lansdown’s company Bristol Sport announced that they would be building a new sports arena, hotel and flats next to Ashton Gate stadium.  https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/plans-unveiled-new-south-bristol-2015609 The arena will be home to the Bristol Flyers, the basketball team owned by Lansdown, who also owns Bristol City FC and Bristol RFC, both of which play at Ashton Gate.  The new basketball arena will also be able to host conferences and music events.  Is the market big enough to support a similar facility at Temple Island?

The trouble with Boris

Is the joke at last on Boris Johnson?  His multiple gaffes, political mistruths and misjudgements would have sunk most other politicians years ago.  Johnson’s career as a serious front line politician has been living on borrowed time. Now, maybe, surely, his time is up.

Johnson has survived as long as he has as a politician and columnist partly due to his self-deprecating charm and humorous lines. Anyone who’s had any dealings with him will know that the self- deprecation is skin deep and internally he has the bags of self-confidence possessed by most Old Etonians. Since 2016 he has been one of the heroes of Brexiters.  His late decision to back Vote Leave was in itself an act of self-promotion and belief, knowing he would be one of the few well known faces of the Brexit campaign.  As a Remainer, he would have been overshadowed by that other possessor of Etonian swagger, David Cameron.

Theresa May gave him the chance to deliver the Brexiters’ vision of global Britain.  He turned out to be the worst Foreign Secretary since 1945. His eventual resignation was another act in the Johnson playbook, escaping responsibility for the government’s Brexit failures and positioning himself at the head of hard Brexit malcontents and then for a challenge to Theresa May.

His Telegraph column on the clothing choices of Muslim women was no doubt meant to be the start of the next stage of achieving his destiny in Downing Street.  The column was the usual Johnson blend of comedy and politics.  But it’s blown up in his face.  It was a little too obvious to everyone that the mocking of face-veiled Muslim women as “letter boxes” or “bank robbers” was really a shrill and nasty dog whistle on immigration, masquerading as comedy.  He probably gave more thought to those words than the rest of the article, seeking lines that would be noticed, rather than penning a serious column on culture clashes in a liberal society.

Brexit has obvious economic consequences.  But the 2016 referendum also exposed deep seated social divisions, which were exploited to the full by the Leave campaign. The success of Trump across the Atlantic later that year showed that exploiting social fears, spreading “fake news” and deploying other underhand campaign techniques could work to devastating effect.  We know now that there was a huge amount of cross over between the Leave and Trump campaign techniques.  Trump’s associates, such as Steve Bannon, are keen to make Britain the next front in their culture wars.  Johnson, Gove, Fox and Farage see themselves as his British generals. Britain’s first past the post electoral system (for Westminster) lends itself perfectly to a polarisation of society, with a right wing party stoking up fears about immigrants and championing economic nationalism.  I’m surprised they’ve not already borrowed Trump’s slogan and called their movement ‘Britain First.’

Liberals, social democrats and others who believe in an open and diverse Britain must be careful how they respond to the rise of identity and culture based politics. I’ve written other articles on this blog site about how we should respond on policy issues.  But one thing that should definitely be avoided is an over-reaction to every provocation. There’s a tendency among far too many liberals to express their hurt and to show in public how they feel offended at the slightest barbed comment.  There’s often a rush to label someone a racist, homophobe or transphobe just for expressing an opinion or making a poorly worded joke.  If the words are uttered by a political rival then there’s palpable glee in the trashing of their reputation via social media.  I’ve been called homophobic and racist on several occasions by rivals on the political left.  The over censoring of political speech ends in the stifling of legitimate debate, most obviously on immigration. Over sensitive criticism of genuine extremist politicians plays into their hands, giving them more publicity and strengthening their appeal among the disaffected voters whom they are targeting.

Some of the criticism heaped on Johnson has been over the top.  I guess many of us feel he’s got away with so much for so long that a heavy pummelling is justified.  But in my opinion his comments aren’t racist and aren’t a hate crime. They are culturally insensitive, rude and calculated to appeal with those who do have a problem with Muslim immigrants, which is bad enough. The criticism isn’t just from liberals and the left. Moderate Conservatives are desperate to block his path to the top.

Johnson’s reputation may well have sunk among his political and commentariat peers. But polls show that millions of voters have misgivings about Muslim women covering their faces, even if they confuse a niqab from a burka. They may tell reporters that Johnson shouldn’t use insulting language but privately they fee such issues need an airing. At this moment in time Johnson may calculate that he’s advanced his standing with the section of the public that might vote for his brand of politics.  But if the Conservative Party finds that he’s breached their code of conduct then his words will have backfired spectacularly.

Finally, one of the problems with Boris Johnson is the over familiar use of his first name. It gives him the air of a jovial fellow who we can laugh along with. News presenters have said “Boris will be Boris” thereby excusing behaviour that would be frowned upon or just considered weird if it came from any other public figure. So let us all resolve to refer to him in the same way as we would any other politician.  It’s the first and easiest step in the battle to stop his attempt to inject American culture wars into our political debate.

 

Note

I wrote a blog  the day after Trump was elected, reflecting on some of the lessons that should be learned by liberals from his success and the Leave result in our referendum –

https://stephenwilliamsmp.wordpress.com/2016/11/09/president-trump-and-brexit-some-lessons-for-the-liberal-left/

Brexit – is the tide turning against Leave?

A month is a very long time in Brexit politics.  At the start of July Theresa May had stayed at the helm and held together her minority government for a year longer than many thought likely.  She was edging towards getting her fractious party and cabinet to accepting a carefully crafted Brexit plan that delivered an exit from EU institutions while seeking to minimise the damage to trade. A cabinet away day at Chequers endorsed the plan. Two years after the referendum and a year after losing her majority in a general election, the Prime Minister at last had a deal that could be presented to Monsieur Barnier as the definitive British objective in their negotiations.

Within 48 hours harmony had turned to discord and rupture.  Her Brexit Secretary resigned, followed by the Foreign Secretary and a clutch of minor members of the government. By the end of the month the Chequers Agreement was in tatters, amended in the Commons as May caved in to the Rees Mogg led Brextremist faction in her party.  In trying to hold together her party it seems May had pleased nobody.  The Brextremist faction (numbering perhaps 50 MPs) pulled one way and the Tory hard core Remainers (now as low as about 15 MPs) tugged another way but the party and government has now moved onto true hard Brexit territory.

This raises the prospect of Britain leaving the EU in March next year without agreeing exit terms or a trade deal.  Theresa May’s second most (in)famous Brexit related phrase is that “a no deal is better than a bad deal” but she must now realise that this is as fatuous as “Brexit means Brexit.”  Representatives of British industry have become louder in their warnings about the chaos that will ensue if there is no deal. As her new Brexit Secretary was appearing before a Commons committee, Downing Street announced that the Prime Minister was taking the lead in the remaining stages of negotiations with Brussels. Dominic Raab’s rather unhelpful metaphor for describing his demotion was that it was a “rearrangement of the deck chairs” of government. Let’s hope there are enough lifeboats.

If the government has abandoned “cakeism” and accepts that the EU will agree a Canada style trade deal but not cherry picking current arrangements, then Mrs May’s problem is that her Brexit ultras now appear to prefer a no deal outcome.  Liam Fox has indicated his preference for such a “clean Brexit” and the government has prepared a series of 70 ‘technical notices’ for what we should expect in a no deal scenario.  This has led to speculation that the supply of certain foods and medicines that are sourced from the EU will quickly dry up, the approach roads to ports will be jammed with lorries and the army will be deployed to get essential supplies to hospitals and vulnerable people.

Such talk has previously been dismissed by the Brexit brigade as “Project Fear” and scaremongering. But more of the public, including many Leave voters, are now appreciating that exiting the European Union comes at an enormous cost. They also believe that the government has failed so far and is unlikely in the future to agree a beneficial deal with the EU.  Support is growing rapidly for a referendum on the terms of the exit deal, with an option for abandoning Brexit altogether and staying in the EU. Several polls now show strong support for a “Peoples Vote” on Brexit, rather leaving it up to a dysfunctional Parliament.

A Sky News poll today shows that a slight majority of people now believe that Brexit will be bad both for themselves and the country. A huge majority of 78% believe that the government has done a poor job of negotiating with the EU.  The poll also shows that if there were to be another referendum, the Remain option would be the clear winner. If people are presented with the three options of Remain, the government’s Chequers Agreement or No Deal then Remain comes out ahead with 48% support with No Deal on 27% and the government deal with just 13% support and 3% don’t know.  When asked about second preferences Remain wins with 59% support.  What stood out the most for me was that my home country of Wales, which voted narrowly for Leave in 2016, now becomes the leader of the pack in EU support with 73% backing Remain, a truly remarkable turnaround.  The Sky poll was limited to Great Britain.  Several separate polls have shown a solidifying of Remain support in Northern Ireland. The Brexiters will no doubt now start to panic that the “dream of Brexit”, to quote Boris Johnson’s self-serving resignation letter, is slipping away from them. Expect to see more comments about a “great betrayal” and a “stab in the back” as the Brexcrement hits the fan.

Delivering Brexit was never going to be the walk in the park predicted by the Brexiters.  They said negotiating a trade deal with the EU would be easy, as they needed us more than we needed them. Davis and Johnson have fled the field.  Fox and Gove remain in post, believing in a Britain free from the EU but closer to the US. They now have to work with May to salvage Brexit, while reality dawns on more people inside government that the project may be undeliverable.

The Brexiters’ chickens have now come home to roost.  With Trump in the White House, demanding “America First” trade deals, those chickens will be chlorine washed.  I’ve thought since 2016 (perhaps with a dose of wishful thinking) that Brexit would eventually collapse, pulled apart by its internal contradictions. With eight months to go I am now more hopeful than ever that this national act of self-mutilation will be averted.  The public have got wise to the snake oil salesmen of Brexit. The tide is turning but eight months is a very long time and who knows what twists and turns lie in the road ahead.

 

The full data set of the Sky News poll can be read at https://interactive.news.sky.com/brexitshifttabs.pdf

 

Time for full equality in our marriage and partnership laws

The Supreme Court ruling that civil partnerships should be open to opposite sex couples is a welcome instruction to the government to update our personal relationship laws.  Marriage law has long been an interest of mine, both as a politician and due to one of my major hobbies outside politics, as a genealogist.  It’s time that marriage moved from its legal origins of advancing the property rights of men and safeguarding the male lineage to a fully equal institution recognising loving and committed sexual relationships and celebrating them in an inclusive way.

The case decided unanimously by the Supreme Court judges today is an important victory for the plaintiffs Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan, who want a civil partnership rather than a civil or religious marriage. The anomaly in the law was created by the Civil Partnership Act 2004 and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013. The former gave legal recognition for the first time to same sex relationships. The latter extended the rights of marriage to same sex couples.  In a radical change from the usual state of our laws this meant that gay and lesbian couples had more legal rights and options than heterosexual couples. This anomaly was never likely to last long and should have been prevented when the gay marriage Bill was progressing.

Gay marriage is one of the landmark reforms of our century and will be seen as an enduring achievement of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government.  On a personal level, it was something I was proud to play a role in achieving. The reform started in the Home Office, initiated by my Lib Dem colleague Lynne Featherstone and supported by Theresa May.  It was given enthusiastic support at the top of government by both David Cameron and Nick Clegg.  By the time the legislation was ready for its Parliamentary stages Lynne had moved to the International Development Department.  The Bill was to be led for the government by a Tory minister from DCMS, Hugh Robertson. As the Liberal Democrats’ first openly gay MP I asked if I could lead for the party during its Commons stages.  I thought it was important that the Bill was not seen as a Tory achievement and that gay MPs should be involved in its passage.  I was joined on the Bill committee by my Lib Dem colleague Stephen Gilbert, our second openly gay MP.

During the evidence sessions in advance of the formal committee stage (where most of the time was spent dealing with the agonies of the Church of England and other denominations) it became obvious that at the end of the process gay couples would actually have two relationship recognition options open to them, while straight couples could only marry, though their religious options were wider. So I tabled an amendment, opening up civil partnerships to opposite sex couples.  You can read about that amendment in my blog written at the time – https://stephenwilliamsmp.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/extending-civil-partnerships-to-opposite-sex-couples/

I assumed, perhaps naively, that the government would accept the amendment.  But it was made clear to me by Nick Clegg’s office that Cameron wanted the smoothest possible passage of the Bill.  This meant no amendments, no matter how worthy.  The Bill was unpopular with many Tory MPs and Cameron did not want any opportunity for it to be derailed.  There was an implied threat that the Bill would be withdrawn if it ran into difficulties and delays. So I withdrew the clause.  Later on, during the Report Stage, Tim Loughton, a Tory MP who had not been very supportive of equal marriage at the committee stage, tabled his own amendment for opposite sex couple civil partnerships.  He had recently been fired from the government by Cameron and many people saw his amendment as more to do with causing difficulty for Number Ten than with a genuine interest in relationships equality.  So I voted against his cynical manoeuvre.  Loughton has taken up the issue again in 2018, perhaps this time with genuine commitment.

I hope that the government will now act swiftly and amend the Civil Partnership Act in the way that I intended five years ago.  I hope that they will also take the opportunity to amend several other aspects of relationships law that were also discussed in 2013.  Humanist marriages should be recognised in England and Wales in the same way as they are in Scotland.  I proposed such an amendment in 2013 and (being made angry by the dismissive response of Tory minister Helen Grant) pushed it to a vote.  The result was a tie, which meant that the Bill was left unamended! Reform is also needed in the law governing married couples where one of the spouses transitions gender.  Again, Edinburgh is more advanced than Westminster on this issue, avoiding a spousal veto.  While on the subject of devolution, as the Northern Ireland has been suspended for some time, I hope Westminster will legislate for same sex marriage and other reforms in Northern Ireland.  Given Theresa May’s dependence on the extremist DUP, this may be a forlorn hope.

It’s time that our relationship laws reflected society in the 21^st century.  Marriage is available to straight couples but it is estimated that there are over 3 million “cohabiting” couples who do not want to join the institution.  Many of them want to enter a civil partnership.  Enabling them to do so would be a reform that enhances the rights of one group of people without diminishing those of anyone else.  It’s a liberal reform that would bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people.  The Supreme Court has spoken, Parliament must act.

Addendum

This was my speech in February 2013, at the start of the Same Sex Marriage Bill – https://stephenwilliamsmp.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/marriage-same-sex-couples-bill-commons-debate/

 

 

 

How long will British politics float in suspended animation?

A year ago during general election campaign hustings and interviews in Bristol West I predicted with confidence that the shock of Brexit was about to shake up British politics.  One of my frequently deployed phrases was that Brexit was “a meteorite striking the surface of our politics.”  I thought that the almost 50:50 split of the country into two camps would break the mould of politics in the way that many had predicted in 1981.  The fact that the Labour Party really had been captured by the hard left between 2015 and 2017 meant that the conditions were surely right for a major realignment.  I was wrong. But then so were most other predicted outcomes of the 2017 election.

The result left May weakened, Corbyn strengthened, the Liberal Democrats stabilised, the Greens deflated and UKIP almost extinguished. The Tories and Labour had a combined vote of over 80% for the first time since 1979.  The Ugly Sisters had shared the Brexit spoils between them.  The Remain vote had given Labour the benefit of the doubt, with the party clocking up 65% vote shares in most urban intelligensia seats, including the one formerly represented by me. The Tories added lots of votes to Cameron’s 2015 tally but lost seats.  Ironically, May’s Premiership was saved by Unionism, in Scotland where they did manage gains from the SNP and by the Northern Ireland DUP, one of the most right wing parties in western Europe. The Liberal Democrats bet everything on a trenchant pro EU stance.  It worked in south west London, Bath and Oxford but fell flat elsewhere.

In the last year nothing much has changed.   The Brexit negotiations grind on.  The difficulties of achieving a deal that satisfies all sections of the Tory party become ever more apparent.  Yet polling shows very little slippage in support for Leave.  While I don’t set much store in individual opinion polls of party voting intentions, the overall trend is clear.  British politics has settled into support ranges of just over 40% for the Conservatives, just under 40% for Labour, a static 8% for the Lib Dems, with UKIP and the Green Party in the margin of error of negligible support below 3%.  We are now in a holding pattern, the question is – how long will it last?

There is one factor that mystifies me more than any other.  It infuriates me as much as it puzzles me. How does Corbyn still manage to delude millions of progressive voters that he is on their side? How has he remained the utopian Pied Piper at the head of a column of millions of young people?  Corbyn has convinced them that he is the new Red Messiah.  But Brexit is the biggest blow to progressive politics in the post Second World War era. It will reduce work and study opportunities for everyone.  It will hobble economic growth.  A weakened economy means lower tax revenues, starving the NHS and other public services of the extra resources needed for a growing and aging population. There is nothing socialist about Brexit. The only red thing about it is the carpet Corbyn has rolled out for Theresa May’s plans.

Corbyn is May’s brother in arms in Brexit. He is her collaborator, a harsh political word.  It was one that was spat at me with some venom by numerous Labour voters in 2015. The Liberal Democrats have been given a punishment beating and shoved out of the electoral sight of millions of progressive voters for the crime of acquiescing in the increase of tuition fees while in coalition.  Brexit will have a far more adverse and long lasting effect on the future prospects of all young people. But in the weighing scales of progressive opinion Brexit is not yet tipping the balance.

It seems that Corbyn can do no wrong. Neither his long term Eurosceptism, nor his opposition to any war unless it is against the interests of the west, nor his insouciance in the face of evidence of ant-Semitism in his party nor the vile behaviour of many of his acolytes towards their rivals – none of it takes the glow off his halo.  Peak Corbyn, like peak oil, seems to always be further away than predicted.

The Brexit clock is ticking.  In less than ten months time we will have left the political structure of the European Union. Depending on the terms of the eventual deal Mrs May negotiates we may have left the Single Market and the Customs Union too. If Mrs May lands a deal that satisfies most of her MPs then her party will continue to enjoy the support of over 40% of the public and UKIP can be given a local authority funeral.

Maybe it will take until the day after 29^th March 2019 for 16 million plus voters to realise that Brexit has actually happened and Labour waved it through. The betrayal of political adultery will finally be revealed as people cease looking the other way, no longer hoping it would just stop. Will they then turn on Corbyn and Labour?  Logically, yes.  But I can’t be sure.  The last couple of years have been one long psephological headache.  I used to pride myself on the ability to read the minds of voters and predict electoral outcomes.  Thousands of hours of canvassing, public meetings, surgeries, letters and emails gave a smell to the wind of public opinion. I now have a blocked nose and just don’t know.  Neither do all the well paid pundits in the media and academia.

One thing is certain – that the Brexit meteorite will strike on 29^th March 2019.  When the dust settles we could be looking at a new political landscape.  It’s also possible that the dust will take a long time to clear! Corbyn could still be marching at the head of his true believers and liberalism might still be in the doldrums. Or he could have been rumbled and liberalism will be bouncing back.  I may have lost my political nose but I cling still to my liberal optimism.

The Severn Bridge doesn’t need a new name

Naming places and objects can be a political minefield.  Whether it’s a polar exploration ship or a Bristol shopping centre, letting the public suggest a name risks frivolous recommendations while an elite committee might choose a name that causes offence.  Now the Secretary of State for Wales has caused an upset by announcing that the Severn Bridge, or at least the newer Second Severn Crossing is to be renamed the Prince of Wales Bridge when the tolls are abolished later this year. He’s turned a good news story on the tolls into a public relations disaster worthy of the ‘Thick of It’. What on earth was Alun Cairns thinking? You can imagine the scenes in Gwydir House on Whitehall, where Wales Office officials, press officers and the hapless minister himself are all blaming someone else for the mess.

The original suspension bridge was opened in 1966 and has been known as the Severn Bridge for over fifty years. A graceful piece of engineering, it must be the most visually arresting link between two countries in the world. Strictly speaking though, the Severn Bridge is entirely within England, linking the two Gloucestershire banks of the river Severn.  The rather more utilitarian bridge over the Wye has to be crossed in order to arrive in Wales. The bridges over the Severn and the Wye need no name other than the rivers that the cross, just like the Humber and Forth bridges.

A case could be made for a different name for the newer bridge, opened thirty years after the original.  But that case should have been made in 1996.  It wasn’t, so for the last 22 years it has had the rather ungainly name of Second Severn Crossing.  It’s more of a causeway than a bridge with four fifths of it a concrete viaduct, with the bridge as the central span. Maybe it should have been called the Severn Causeway in 1996.  Renaming it the Prince of Wales Bridge now seems a bit late.

Perhaps Mr Cairns was trying to make his mark in his inconsequential role.  Devolution has been in place for Wales and Scotland since 1999.  The Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament have legislative competence over a wide range of areas.  Yet there are still UK cabinet positions for a Secretary of State for Wales and Scotland. There can’t be much for the Wales Secretary to do. Ironically, even the bridge tolls decision was out of his hands as the bridges are managed by the England Department of Transport, headed by his awful colleague Chris Grayling.  If Cairns had wanted to both show his relevance and make a popular intervention he should have got Grayling to scrap the tolls before the Easter holiday, rather than on some indeterminate date later this year. I’m glad the tolls are going, I launched a campaign for their abolition four years ago, with my Welsh Liberal Democrat colleagues.

Cairns’s bridge naming intervention shows that Westminster still doesn’t respect devolution.  The Second Severn Crossing has one leg in devolved Wales and another in the West of England, which elected its first Regional Mayor (regrettably not me…) last year. Neither the First Minister of Wales nor the Mayor appear to have been involved in the decision. If they had been I would assume that they would have suggested at least some form of public engagement, rather than a fait accompli.

Personally, I think the first bridge should remain as the Severn Bridge, Pont Hafren in Welsh. The 1996 bridge should be called the Severn Causeway, or Sarn Hafren in Welsh.  But there are alternatives:-

Prince of Wales Bridge – I gather Cairns means this name to be a 70^th birthday present for Prince Charles.  On balance, I admire Charles and think he’s made a positive contribution in his difficult role of understudy to his mother. The Prince’s Trust does excellent work with young people.  But the bridge name is non-specific, rather like a lot of pubs with the same name.  The name will upset republicans on either side of the border and will upset nationalists in Wales as it refers clearly to the prince of the English crown, rather than a native Llywelyn or Owain.

St David’s Bridge – after the patron saint of Wales.  Maybe the 1966 bridge could be the St George’s Bridge (as it’s all in England) and the two could be known as David and George. This might upset secularists as well as multi-culturalists.

The Red Dragon Bridge – after the national flag of Wales.  Even if this name isn’t adopted, I think more Welsh flags should be flown on the Welsh side, maybe where we now have the clutter of the toll booths.

Other national symbols such as the daffodil or leek don’t sound right for a solid structure like a bridge.

Famous Welsh people – with priority for South Walians such as Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Dylan Thomas or Ivor Novello. If we widen the net to all of Wales then it should be the Lloyd George Bridge, after my political hero.

I think what this proves is that bridges are best named after the river that they cross, or after the town or village in which they lie.  Naming a bridge after a person, especially a living one, is asking for trouble. And there must be better birthday presents to give to Charles.

 

Petition

A petition has been launched, against the renaming of the bridge.  At the time of writing 35,000 have signed it. https://www.change.org/p/alun-cairns-mp-stop-the-renaming-of-the-severn-bridge-to-the-prince-of-wales-bridge

 

 

 

The legacy of the SDP

Today is the anniversary of the launch of the Social Democratic Party in 1981.  I was too young to join at the time but I was interested in politics and joined just after the 1983 general election, when I was 16. The following year I helped in what would turn out to be the first of many Parliamentary by election campaigns, in my home constituency of Cynon Valley. I stood as the SDP candidate in my school’s mock election and won. The SDP had started me off on a political journey that has had its ups and downs and may or may not be completed.

The SDP had a short life of just 7 years before it merged with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats.  Historians and commentators have generally described its brief existence as a failure.  It did not “break the mould of British politics”, the task set by one of its founders, Roy Jenkins. There were some spectacular by election results, stellar heights in opinion polls but the 1983 and 1987 general elections were both crushing disappointments.

Political parties are more than brands. They are a collection of like-minded people. The SDP as an institution ceased to exist in 1988 but lives on through the former members who are still active in politics.  They are mainly in the Liberal Democrats but there are others in the Labour Party (attracted by Blair) and even a few in the ranks of Conservative MPs.  The SDP’s core policies of a mixed economy, constitutional reform and above all keen support of Britain’s place in the European Union, are still the key messages of the Liberal Democrats. The SDP brought tens of thousands of people into political activism.  Rather than a failure, I believe it was an understated success.

In March 2011 I planned to write a blog to mark the 30^th anniversary of the SDP’s foundation.  My intention was to show the strength of the contribution of former SDP members to the Liberal Democrats in Parliament.  I set out to speak to all of my then 57 Commons colleagues, plus many Peers and former MPs, to gauge how many of them came into politics via the SDP.  The list took so long to compile that I sailed past the anniversary and never wrote it up.  So today I’ve dug it out of my files.

SDP members in the House of Commons

The original SDP parliamentary party was made up of 28 defectors from Labour and one from the Conservatives. Between 1981 and 1987 there were 4 MPs elected at by elections and there was just one gain in the 1983 general election, though it turned out to be a very significant one. The SDP MPs who went on to serve as Liberal Democrat MPs are Robert MacLennan (the last Leader of the SDP and the first joint Leader with David Steel of the Liberal Democrats), Charles Kennedy (the sole gain in 1983) and Mike Hancock.

The MPs elected as Liberal Democrats who had come into politics as SDP activists are, in chronological order – Matthew Taylor (originally SDP but elected as a Liberal in Truro in March 1987), Mike Carr, Mark Oaten, Vince Cable, Paul Burstow, Bob Russell, Evan Harris, Sir Robert Smith, Michael Moore, Annette Brooke, Norman Lamb, Paul Holmes, David Laws, Roger Williams, Alan Reid, Chris Huhne, me, Stephen Lloyd, Gordon Birtwhistle, Ian Swales and Mike Crockart.

What was interesting from my conversations was the number of my colleagues who had never been a member of either the Liberal Party or the SDP, in many cases because they were too young!  The post 1988 political joiners of the Lib Dems who became MPs were – Andrew George (who had been in Mebyon Kernow), Steve Webb, Edward Davey, Richard Allen, Lembit Opik, Sandra Gidley, Matthew Green, Sarah Teather, Parmjit Singh Gill, Lorely Burt, Julia Goldsworthy, Jeremy Browne,  Lynne Featherstone, Greg Mulholland, John Leech, Jenny Willott, Jo Swinson, Danny Alexander, Dan Rogerson, Susan Kramer, Nick Clegg, Stephen Gilbert, Duncan Hames, Tessa Munt (who left Labour in 1997!), Julian Huppert and Simon Wright.   I don’t know the origins of the new MPs from the 2017 general election, so would be interested to find out about Layla Moran, Jamie Stone and Christine Jardine.

Many former SDP MPs and activists have entered the House of Lords. All bar one of the Leaders of the Liberal Democrat parliamentary party in the Lords have come from the SDP – Roy Jenkins, Bill Rogers, Shirley Williams, Tom McNally and the current leader, Dick Newby.

Outside Parliament the SDP will have contributed tens of thousands of party activists, many of whom will have served as local councillors. Several professional staff went on to work for the Lib Dems or elsewhere in public life.

Thoughts in 2018

It’s my belief that the short life of the SDP has had an enduring and positive impact on British politics.  Its founders left Labour as it had lurched to the left and advocated Britain’s withdrawal from the European Economic Community.  Sounds familiar? The Labour Party of 2018 is under a more left wing (and much less intelligent) leader than Michael Foot. The party leadership has embraced Brexit.  The party machinery has been captured by the hard left, to a much greater extent than 1981.  Yet moderate, pro EU Labour MPs are sitting tight. Maybe they hope Corbynism is a temporary aberration.  But I suspect in many cases they will have looked at the fate of the 28 defectors in 1981 and don’t fancy their prospects outside Labour.  I think they are mistaken.  An understanding of history shouldn’t lead to fear that it might repeat itself.  The circumstances of 1981 and 2018 are quite different.  Brexit is a meteorite about to strike our political order.  A breakaway of pro EU MPs from Labour could easily become a success and this time there might be more than one defector from the Conservatives. So much has happened in recent years that was not predicted, so who knows what lies around the corner.  I hear all the time that people are fed up with the current political offer.  It’s time to try breaking the mould again.

How we can build the new homes that are needed

The fact that Theresa May is taking a direct interest in building new homes is a welcome step. Government departments and their ministers will often roll their eyes at yet another initiative from Downing Street, catching the daily headlines but without the follow through that makes any real impact.  But they also know that if the full weight of Number Ten is behind an agreed policy then it stands a good chance of success among competing demands for parliamentary time for legislation and also Treasury money.  Over the next year (as over the last one) Brexit preparations will crowd out most of the routine business of government.  If a drive to build houses is going to gain any traction then the active support of the Prime Minister is essential.

There is a big hill to climb if the country is going to build enough homes to meet the increasing demand of a growing population. Even without population growth (and it’s possible that new household formation will dip post Brexit if immigration falls) we need new homes to match the pent up demand already in the system.  In property hot spots, with high private sector rents and large deposits needed to buy your first home, it is now common to find “young” people in their late twenties or early thirties still living with their parents, while they save up the money needed for independent living.

Estimates have been bandied about but it is fair to say that we need to build at least an extra quarter of a million homes every year.  The Liberal Democrats went into the 2015 and 2017 elections saying that we needed to reach 300,000 pa over a ten year period.  Both of these figures are a huge leap from our current position.  The latest housing completion figures for 2016/17 show that there were 217,350 net additions to the housing stock in England.  Only 183,570 of these were completely new builds. Much of the balance was from various other initiatives, including office to residential conversions and the sub division of houses into flats. Some empty homes would have been brought back into use as well.

The country has only just got back to the level of house building prior to the crash in 2009. The last time the nation built at the levels needed now was in the 1950s. But the extraordinary levels of house and flat building under Harold MacMillan was largely to make up for war damage and there was also a huge programme of slum clearance.  So much of the building programme was replacing existing housing stock.  It is also true to say that much of the building, particularly council tower blocks, was well below the standard that would be acceptable and legal now.

So how do we increase the rate of new home building by say 100,000 every year? It won’t be easy. The Prime Minister resorted to attacking the private sector volume builders, an odd position for a Conservative politician. It’s true that companies could build out their sites at a faster rate. But that’s not always going to be the most profitable option and like it or not, companies are not social enterprises so their shareholder interests are paramount. The bonuses paid to their directors, obscene as they might appear, are a consequence of this economic reality.

Theresa May also announced yet another review of the local authority planning system.  I was a minister at the Department of Communities and Local Government from 2013-15.  I believe that the Coalition Government wrung the most that was possible (or desirable) from reforms of the planning system.  There will be much diminished returns from further reforms, though some could work.  I also think that the Treasury led initiatives to help people onto the housing ladder have little scope for expanding the rate of house building. “Help to Buy” and its various funding cousins have certainly helped individuals finance their first house purchase and when the housing market was flat it would have stimulated new build. But now that house building has picked up there is a danger that the major result of finance schemes is to blow price inflation into the market.

So here are some reforms and initiatives that I believe will drive up the rate of housebuilding:

1              Planning reforms – I would tighten up two existing rules.  Housebuilder companies have been much criticised for “land banking” whereby they sit on sites without building homes once planning permission is obtained.  This stops anyone else taking on the permission in place for the site for three years. It should be straightforward to reduce the maximum time allowed between permission being granted and work starting on site.  There should also be tougher anti-avoidance rules to make sure that the clock isn’t stopped by minor works that are not a serious intention to build out the site. If the limit was reduced to two years then further pressure could also be applied after 18 months, opening up bids for someone else to acquire the site.

The second planning reform I would advocate is a tightening up of site viability assessments. Local councils enter into negotiations with developers for local improvements (highways works, etc.) and also for a proportion of the development to be affordable housing. Developers will, naturally, try to get away with as little as possible.  They will claim that the development is economically unviable if councils demand too much.  During the recession developers often wriggled out of prior commitments.  This may have been a pragmatic approach by councils at the time, some new homes (plus construction jobs) being better than no activity at all. There is no excuse for it now.  It would be better for all if the process was more transparent and assessed by an independent examiner. If a developer wishes to revise an agreement then they would have to pay for a report, with the consultants appointed by the council.

2              Restructuring local government – successive Conservative ministers have criticised local councils for their tardiness in driving extra house building.  Yet they’ve shied away from any meaningful structural reform. Local government in England is a mess, with some areas little changed from the last nationwide reforms in 1888 (county councils) and 1894 when district councils were created. Edward Heath’s government started to put in a more rational structure in the early 1970s. Then Margaret Thatcher and John Major scrapped the strategic authorities created by their Tory predecessor.  New Labour carved lots of city and large towns out of their historic counties, creating all-purpose unitary councils on tight boundaries. These are usually surrounded by small district councils, which hold the planning powers that are key to increasing the number of new homes.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government made a start on re-ordering the map by creating a network of Local Enterprise Partnerships and providing finance to competitive local growth deals.  I appraised many of these and it was often clear that the lack of affordable housing was a drag on economic growth.  This was particularly true around Oxford, Bristol, Cambridge and other centres of the high-tech knowledge economy.

All too often the economic needs of a city are not the direct concern of the surrounding authorities, where protecting the character of small towns and villages will be seen as more important. There was little incentive for districts to expedite planning consents for new housing.  My Conservative coalition colleagues came up with the New Homes Bonus, a central government grant for each extra unit in the council tax base. This sounds fine at first but I found it objectionable as the extra money was funded from top-slicing the whole local government budget. Once data became available for a couple of years it was clear that much of the “bonus” was going to prosperous districts that had plenty of scope for expansion, at the expense of depressed areas that had little need for new housing.  At a time of a huge squeeze on council budgets this policy has become socially unjust and should be phased out.

The creation in May 2017 of new Regional Mayors and Combined Authorities in several conurbations (West of England, West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Teesside and Cambridgeshire) may bring people together for a more holistic approach to planning.  But the underlying structure of local government remains and it is unlikely that the May government will go for a big bang reform. During the coalition Eric Pickles told me that he kept a pearl handled revolver ready to shoot any (Tory) minister who talked about reorganisation.  The preponderance of Tory councillors in the shire districts makes Tory MPs nervous about upsetting their activist base.

But Dorset is about to restructure, abolishing all its districts, merging Bournemouth and Poole into a single unitary with the rest of the county’s towns and villages coming under a Dorset county authority.  The two new councils will undoubtedly save money and will hopefully also be a model for strategic planning in the rest of England.

I have long favoured a Dorset model for the rest of the country.  England should be divided between city region and county authorities.  The new structure would be more efficient, would have the potential to rejuvenate local council chambers and crucially, would be able to plan in a strategic way to meet local needs, including new housing. A duty to cooperate would ensure that structure plans were coherent across a county or sub-region.

3              State intervention in house building.  Even with a fit for purpose planning system it is inconceivable that we would get anywhere close to 300,000 units a year by relying on the private sector. The huge volumes reached over 50 years ago were achieved only with a large amount of state investment, with much of the delivery by local government. The state needs to get back into the business of building homes. That means enabling local authorities to build but also making sure that housing associations have the resources to expand their portfolios.

There should not be a return to the state building monolithic estates of council houses and flats. The state should finance the building of balanced communities of homes of different sizes for rent and sale. The Treasury should relax local authority housing borrowing constraints, making permanent an initiative I helped launch in 2014.  Local authorities, housing associations and other state bodies (the NHS and MoD own lots of land) could pool resources into a social enterprise to build homes for sale and social rent.  All profits would be reinvested in social homes.  To safeguard the asset base and to maintain social balance the ‘right to buy’ should not apply to new homes.

4              Diversify the housing mix.  While our housing stock has not grown to accommodate a larger population it has also not changed to reflect the changing demographic mix. There are more single households and people are living at home well into their eighties and nineties. More smaller units of accommodation are needed in the social sector, to free up houses for families.  The same principle applies in the private sector.  Many elderly people are living in houses that are larger than they need and are also expensive to adapt for reduced mobility.  People are reluctant to give up the autonomy they enjoy in their own home if the alternative is council sheltered accommodation often presided over by a jobs-worth warden telling them they can’t have flower pots outside their front door. We build far fewer units of high quality owner occupied flats and bungalows than other countries. Perhaps a tax incentive would get pension funds and other institutional investors more interested in this sort of long term investment.  At the other end of the age spectrum students occupy large swathes of neighbourhoods near to their university.  The huge expansion in student numbers in the last two decades has not been matched by new halls of residence or purpose built student flats. Local families have been crowded out of many streets by buy to let landlords. Universities or private investors should be incentivised to provide student rooms and flats and local authority plans should identify suitable sites.

5              Learn from others. My comments so far have referred to England, where I have been a politician as a councillor, MP and minister.  Local government and housing policy are devolved to Wales and Scotland. It’s possible that their governments have had more success in raising the levels of housebuilding and have invested more in social housing, though I’ve not seen any evidence that this is so.  Housing pressures are concentrated mainly around Cardiff and Edinburgh so it’s possible that the national need is not as urgent as it is in large areas of England. But there are undoubtedly lessons to be learned from many of our European neighbours.  There is a much larger private rental sector in prosperous countries such as Germany and Switzerland.  But the flats and houses are purpose built, owned and managed by institutional investors rather than the small private landlord model we have in Britain.  Modular build is also more common, enabling sites to be built out much faster than our traditional bricks and mortar method.

6              Address the skills gap.  Building more homes will require more resources other than land and money.  A big expansion cannot happen without the skilled workforce needed to bring sites to completion.  It is likely that Brexit will make this much harder, as freedom of movement ends and the pool of labour from Eastern Europe diminishes. A concerted drive is needed to attract more young people into the construction industry, with particular focus on the gender gap.

7              Quality and sustainability.  Finally, this is not just a matter of numbers of units. The mass building of the 1950s to the 1970s was often of very poor quality, especially in flats.  Today’s building regulations are much tighter. All homes, whether private or social sector, need to be built to high standards of sustainability and with generous dimensions.  As a minister I put in place a national standard for room space and also the legislation for “zero carbon homes.” The Conservatives governing on their own have scrapped the higher sustainable standards and the ‘allowable solutions’ that would have compelled housebuilders to invest in other environmental schemes such as retrofitting older homes.  This policy should be reinstated so that new homes are built to last and older homes (the vast majority of our stock is a century old) refurbished for more sustainable and affordable living.

 

 

Further information

DCLG latest housing statistics for 2016/17 – https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/659529/Housing_Supply_England_2016-17.pdf

My best LGBT+ heritage sites

This article was edited and added to during LGBT History Months and other occasions in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023

British heritage sites are at last beginning to acknowledge aspects of their queer past that have long been swept under the carpet. Many of the country houses and castles that I’ve visited in the last 40 years have been owned at some point by families with gay and lesbian characteristics. But guide books, exhibitions and human room guides have usually been silent about the sexual identity of former lords and ladies.  Often at best there were hints, nods and winks about a king’s “favourite” courtier, or a lord’s “eccentric” behaviour or a lady’s “close companion.”

This is now beginning to change.  Marking the 50^th anniversary of the 1967 partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality, the National Trust announced its “Pride of Place” initiative to highlight the queer personal histories of many of the former owners of its properties.  Historic England, the government body with responsibility for listing buildings of historic or architectural interest, is now adding LGBTQ characteristics to its listing particulars, accompanied by a mapping project. English Heritage, the charity that manages state owned sites, is also now promoting the gay lives of people associated with their castles and houses.  I hope that Cadw, the Welsh equivalent to which I belong, will follow suit but a Google search brought up a list of Cadw camp sites, which wasn’t quite what I wanted!

There is an inherent problem in identifying historic sites that are of interest to modern queer or transgendered people, or to anyone interested in all aspects of a building’s past. For most of the history of a site the sexuality of its owners, people who worked there or were associated with it would have remained secret, were denied or played down.  Homosexual men were until 1861 in danger of losing their lives as anal sex was a capital offence.  It wasn’t until our current century that holding hands or kissing in public became activities that would no longer land men in a police cell. This means that very few male historical figures were open and unambiguous about their sexuality.

Men who today would be free to express themselves would have then lived a double life, with a wife and children but also a male “favourite” in their entourage.  It is assumed that men from Edward II to John Maynard Keynes had male lovers but to many of their contemporaries they lived conventional family lives.  There are very few Oscar Wilde exposés and convictions and even he artfully denied the charges. Some men achieved notoriety for exuberant and flamboyant lifestyles, what today we would call high camp, but they avoided being labelled homosexual men.

So in many of the grand houses of Britain, visited by millions of people today, we have some stories about the owners who lived complicated lives, possibly genuinely bisexual, more likely living a lie.  While there is little firm evidence about queer lives upstairs, next to nothing is known about life downstairs or about what went on in those strictly gender segregated attic bedrooms.  What little is known is mainly about men, though quite often the facts are thin. Even less is known about lesbian relationships, although these were never outside the law and “Sapphic” love was not persecuted. See below for the remarkable contrast between the attitudes to the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, who received celebrity visits in an age when gay men were being executed.

When I was an elected politician I made many speeches on gay rights.  I often asserted that one day the law would be broadly fair, treating us all as equals.  For lesbians and gay men we are now at that point, though there is still some way to go for transsexuals and people born inter-sex. I used to add that even when the law was fair, society would not be equal until gay men and women were portrayed alongside our straight fellow citizens as full participants in all aspects of our popular culture.  This includes how we tell the story of our past and who we celebrate and recognise in our national history. There are now many more openly gay MPs than when I was elected in 2005.  Sport, especially football, in on a journey but has a long way to go.  Gay characters do now feature in many of the TV dramas that I have time to watch these days but some of them don’t seem to last long. It’s time that all of our castles, houses, museums and galleries told the full and inclusively queer story of all the people who have lived and shaped their buildings and collections.

One of my interests outside politics is visiting historic places.  I’ve been writing about my favourite castles, abbeys, cathedrals and sites associated with Prime Ministers.  So for LGBT History Month, what follows is my first attempt at a guide to the best places to visit that are associated with people who used to be forgotten because of their sexuality or remembered in all aspects except for their sexuality.  It’s time to celebrate Britain’s queer past.

Hadrian’s Wall – named after the Emperor who ordered its construction, marking the north-western boundary of his empire.  There are more surviving statues of Hadrian than any other Roman emperor, apart from Augustus.  The third most commemorated man is Antinous, or Antinoo.  Who was he? When he drowned in the Nile a grief stricken Hadrian ordered many statues to be carved in memory of the young man who was probably his lover.  They show Antinous as an exquisitely beautiful man, of the sort you might expect to grace the cover of Gay Times or Attitude.  Some show him in Egyptian garb, as the god Osiris.  Others show him as a classical Roman, like the much later statue of David by Michelangelo.

Most of the world’s great museums will have a statue or bust of Antinous.  The best one that I’ve seen is in The Prado in Madrid and I have a poster of it on my bedroom wall, so I see Antinous every day!  In Bristol I can also see a fine plaster cast of a bust of Antinous staring down from the staairwell of Blaise Castle House. The British Museum has a fine version.  The museum is also the place to see the remarkable Warren Cup.  It’s a small silver vessel with an image of two men having anal sex. There are numerous images on Greek and Roman pottery and metalwork showing same sex scenes.  Given that what we see now in museums is just a tiny fraction of what Mediterranean culture has left us, there must have been thousands of them.  Back to the Wall – you won’t find any busts of Antinous or sexually explicit vessels in the otherwise excellent museums.  You’ll just have to imagine what those soldiers got up to on cold nights at the end of the Roman world.

Archaeology informs our imagination and a report on a dig in 2002 enhanced our understanding of Roman culture and what we would now call a transsexual sub-culture.  Catterick (Roman Cataractonium) lies half way between Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman city of Eboracum, now York. During the excavation of the scant remains of the small Roman town a remarkable grave was discovered.  The skeleton of a young man was buried with what appeared to be female funeral goods, bracelets, necklaces and an anklet fashioned with jet. Archaeologists have concluded that this was probably the grave of a galli, one of the eunuch priests of the cult of the maternal goddess Cybele.  The cult of Cybele reached Rome from Asia Minor in about 200BC.  Cybele’s lover Attis castrated himself as punishment for his infidelity. The practise was carried on by devotees of Cybele as the cult spread throughout the Roman world.  We know that the cult reached the northern limits of Britannia as there was an altar to Cybele at the fort of Cortbridge, on the Wall. Finds from the Catterick dig are held at the Yorkshire Museum, in York.

Kings and “queens” – several kings of England and Scotland are believed to have had same sex experiences.  The evidence is a bit flimsy with William II (1087-1100) and Richard I (1189-99) but firmer with Edward II (1307-27) and James VI and I (1567 and 1603 – 1625) who lavished attention on male favourites.

Edward was the son of Edward I, the conqueror of Wales.  He was born at Caernarfon castle in 1284 and his father proclaimed him the first English Prince of Wales in 1301. About this time the young prince’s household was joined by Piers Gaveston, a native of Gascony. The two formed a close bond, which came to be resented deeply by England’s nobles.  Gaveston was the first of Edward’s male favourites. Gaveston was exiled by Edward’s father (a character loosely based on him was instead thrown out of a castle window by the king in the film ‘Braveheart’) but returned to England when Edward became king in 1307.

By 1311 Edward’s closeness to Gaveston had estranged him from his barons. After a period holed up in Scarborough castle, Gaveston was taken prisoner, taken to Warwick castle and in early 1312 was condemned to die.  He was killed on the road between Warwick and Kenilworth.  Medieval chroniclers claimed that Edward and Piers had been in a homosexual relationship.  Whether or not this was true, the story was perpetuated by Christopher Marlow in his play Edward II, written in 1592. In our own times the story has been repeated in Derek Jarman’s 1991 film and in the 1997 ballet Edward II, a dance by the Stuttgart Ballet that I saw at the Bristol Hippodrome.

Back to history, Edward soon took another male favourite, the much wealthier Hugh Despenser (the younger) who was Lord of Glamorgan. He held Caerphilly castle, the largest castle in the kingdom after Windsor. Edward was unlucky in his favourites, as the Despenser family also made enemies of the great families of the kingdom and furthermore caused a rift with Edward’s queen, Isabella, sister of the king of France.  By 1326 Edward had lost the support of the nobility and facing an army of invading French mercenaries led by his wife, fled to Despenser’s castle at Caerphilly with much of the royal treasure.

Instead of facing a siege, Edward escaped to Neath Abbey, where the monks were reluctant to grant him sanctuary.  He was captured by Isabella’s forces just north of Llantrisant. Despenser met a grisly end, being hung, drawn and quartered at Hereford.  Edward was imprisoned at Berkeley castle.  You can see the pit where he was held and where it is assumed he was murdered in 1327.  There is no evidence to support the story that the method of murder was via a red hot metal rod inserted into Edward’s rectum but the story persists.  Whether or not it happened that way, the story is clearly meant as a reference to Edward’s behaviour with his two favourites, Gaveston and Despenser.  Edward’s body was taken to St Peter’s Abbey, now Gloucester cathedral, where you can see his fine tomb.

When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603 she was succeeded as monarch of England and Wales by the 37 year old King James VI of Scotland. Known to most people for avoiding the Gunpowder Plot, for commissioning his eponymous Bible and for founding lasting colonies in North America, James also had an eye for attractive young men.  James had what we would call now a troubled childhood. He was brought up without his parents (his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, had been exiled when he was one and was later executed in England) or grandparents. He was also an only child.  Raised by scheming Scottish nobles, it is hardly surprising that he craved male attention.  His first recorded favourite during his early teens was the much older Esme Stuart, who James later raised to the title Duke of Lennox. Lennox, a Franco-Scottish catholic, was eventually exiled by James’s Presbyterian nobles and died in Paris in 1583.  James wrote a poem in his memory, the Ane Tragedie of the Phoenix, describing Lennox as a bird of fancy killed because of envy.

James’s first recorded favourite as king of England was Robert Carr, who the king first encountered in 1607 after a fall from his horse during a joust watched by James. Carr was 17 and the king was 41. The handsome Carr was made a member of the king’s private staff and rose quickly up the ranks at court. By 1615 Carr was married and had been created Earl of Somerset.  The jealous James complained that Robert had been “withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber…” Carr’s wife Frances was implicated in the poisoning of one of Carr’s friends and the two were put on trial.  It is alleged that Carr threatened to reveal that he had slept with the king.  But he stayed silent and the king commuted the death sentence.

By this time James had already moved on to a new favourite, the best known in history, George Villiers.  James first met the handsome and intelligent 21 year old George at a Northamptonshire hunt at Apethorpe hall in 1614. James’s infatuation suited his nobles, keen to be rid of the Earl of Somerset. George became the royal cup-bearer.  His rise was meteoric, within four years he moved several steps up the peerage to become Marquess of Buckingham and James’s most trusted adviser and companion.  James told his privy counsellors that “Christ had John, and I have George.” The correspondence between the two men is extraordinary, even allowing for differences of expression over four centuries.  James called George, “Steenie”, after the angelic faced Saint Stephen. (I’ll try this next time someone calls me Steve…) He wrote to George as his “sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear father and husband.”

Historians agree that George was James’s most significant favourite and that he had a powerful hold over the king. Some have cast doubt on the sexual side of the relationship as James had defended Henry VIII’s laws against buggery (see below), I would suggest that this shows the limit of straight male historian imaginations, not being able to contemplate love without penetration.  James certainly had an active sex life with his queen, Ann of Denmark.  She became pregnant eight times, with two surviving sons.  James (like Edward II) had done his regal duty and produced an heir and a spare.  Unfortunately, it was the spare, Prince Charles, who succeeded his father in 1625.  George retained his position at court, having been raised to duke in 1623. But he became unpopular with Parliament and the nobles and in August 1628 was stabbed to death at the Greyhound pub in Portsmouth, now called the Buckingham house hotel. Charles gave him a tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Numerous portraits of James can be seen in London, Edinburgh and several country houses.  The reign of James is depicted in the magnificent ceiling paintings by Rubens at The Banqueting House, in Whitehall. They would be the last grand images seen by Charles I as he was led to his execution from this room in 1649.  Apethorpe has been restored in the last decade by English Heritage as one of the best Jacobean interiors in the country.  During the restoration a secret passage was rediscovered, linking the king’s bedroom to another.  As the house was used regularly by the king, EH have now renamed it Apethorpe Palace and it is open for a limited period in the summer. James’s tomb is in Westminster Abbey.

James VI and I was not the first king of the House of Stewart to exhibit same sex attraction.  His ancestor James III (r 1460-88) was despised by Scottish nobles, suspicious of his interest in the arts and music and resentful of his young and low born male favourites. James’s enoblement of the young John Ramsay (as Lord Rothwell) in 1484 set him on a collision course with his nobles culminating in his death at or immediately after the battle of Sauchieburn in 1488.  His restored tomb can be seen at the ruined Cambuskenneth Abbey, Stirling.

Farleigh Hungerford Castle – just outside Bath, now largely ruined but once the home of the Hungerford family.  Walter Hungerford (c1503-40) was an associate of Henry VIII’s second chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who arranged for Walter to be made a peer in 1536. Lord Hungerford was known to be a cruel husband, locking up his third wife Elizabeth in a tower at Farleigh Hungerford.  She wrote to Cromwell that she had resorted to drinking her own urine to survive. The Privy Council was investigating a charge of cruelty against his wife when in 1540 both Hungerford and his patron fell from favour and were accused of treason. Hungerford was accused of harbouring a priest who had predicted the death of Henry. But an additional charge was added against him. In 1533 Parliament had passed an “Act for the punishment of the vice of buggerie”, taken through the Commons by Cromwell, a useful tool in his work to discredit monks in the run up to the dissolution of the monasteries.  Walter Hungerford was the first man to be accused and convicted of this offence. The Act provided for the death penalty and Walter was beheaded at Tower Hill on 28^th July 1540, at the same time as Cromwell himself. Executions for buggery, sodomy or “unnatural acts” were common in the 18^th century. The penalty for anal intercourse remained death until 1861, when it was reduced to life imprisonment. It remained an offence until 1967 when anal sex in private between men aged 21 was decriminalised. The offence was not removed completely until 2003.

Ickworth, Suffolk – Ickworth house, near Bury St Edmunds, is a peculiar piece of architecture.  It resembles a stone drum, with a domed roof.  Its unconventional style is appropriate for the most unconventional family that occupied it until recently. The Hervey family, Marquesses of Bristol (with no connection to my home city!) have long been the source of controversy. The seventh marquess died young in 1999, his drug habit bankrupting the family.  His relative, John, Lord Hervey (1696-1743) was one of the most notorious aristocrats of the 18^th century.  A phrase from the time went, “When God created the human race, he made men, women and Herveys.” John Hervey was what we would now call camp, an effeminate man, fond of wearing white make up.  Although he was married and fathered eight children, he was assumed (though not charged under the law) to be in a relationship with Stephen Fox-Strangways, the first Earl of Ilchester. Ickworth displays a portrait of the two of them.  Hervey served under Prime Minister Walpole and was a witty pamphleteer. He thus had enemies, who would use his effeminacy against him.  The poet and satirist Alexander Pope was his most vociferous enemy in print, dubbing Hervey as Lady Fanny. In his poem Epistle to Arbuthnot, Pope depicted a character based on Hervey as “fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board, now trips a lady, and now struts a lord”…”a bug with gilded wings.”

 Strawberry Hill, Twickenham – a walk through the unprepossessing streets of Twickenham leads to a most unexpected architectural gem, a building looking as quite out of place as the Brighton Pavilion.  The creation of Horace Walpole (1717 – 1797), Strawberry Hill house long predates the London suburbia that now surrounds it, when remodelled from 1749 onwards it was neighboured along the Thames by other out of town villas and mansions for the capital’s wealthy. Walpole had plenty of money to lavish on his country villa, being well set up in life by his father, Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister. Horace spent his early life at Houghon Hall, the Walpole mansion in Norfolk, where his father had built up the country’s most fabulous art collection. Horace sat as an MP for sixteen years from 1741 (for the Cornish rotten borough of Callington and then for his father’s former seat of Castle Rising in Norfolk) but his political career was more to do with lucrative positions than high offices of state.  His income facilitated a life spent writing, travelling and collecting.  His letters are an important insight into 18th century high society.  In 1764 he wrote ‘Castle of Otranto’, the first ‘gothic novel’. He is credited with initiating the revival of gothic architecture.  His remodelling of the house at Strawberry Hill transformed the exterior with battlements and turrets, with the walls painted in ‘wedding cake’ white. The interior contains fireplaces modeled on medieval tombs.  Horace filled the rooms with the books, paintings and objects he collected throughout life and visitors were entertained lavishly.  While Sir Robert was a great hulk of a man, his youngest son had a slender and delicate frame. One of the loves of his life was a soldier cousin, Henry Seymour Conway.  Horace showered Henry with attention and money but got little in return, unrequited love – the curse of gay men down the ages.  Another close friend was John Chaloner Chute, of The Vyne in Hampshire. Chute was also unlucky in his affections for young men. He shared Horace’s interest in art and was one of the ‘Committee of Taste’ that advised on the furnishing of objects at Strawberry Hill.  Biographers differ on Horace’s personal life, some saying he was homosexual, others that he was asexual, which of course could be true as repressed desire.  Horace Walpole died in 1797 and his tomb is at the family church in Houghton. Strawberry Hill was restored in 2011 after a long period of institutional use.  Walpole’s collection was auctioned off in 1842.  When I visited in 2012 the rooms were splendid with much colour and gold leaf but the library bookshelves were empty, there were no pictures and the rooms echoed without furniture. In the intervening decade I see some furnishings have appeared and from this year (2023) there will be pictures on the walls, on long term loan from Dulwich Picture Gallery.  So definitely worth a visit.

Beckford’s Tower, Bath – at the age of ten William Beckford (1760-1844) became one of the most fabulously wealthy men in the country.  He inherited from his father the rough equivalent today of £125,000,000.  The fortune was from sugar plantations in Jamaica.  There is an interesting parallel historical awakening in many country houses, an acknowledgment that the buildings and their art collections were funded on the backs of slaves. Beckford’s fortune enabled him to indulge a life-long passion for books, pictures and architecture. On his travels he received music lessons from Mozart.  In the early 1780s he had a homosexual relationship with William “Kitty” Courtenay (1768-1835), heir to the Earldom of Devon, reputed to be the most beautiful young man in the country.   Unfortunately, letters between the two were intercepted by Courtenay’s uncle, who used the evidence to shame but not prosecute Beckford.  The two men lived secluded lives thereafter, with periods abroad.  Beckford’s extravagant tastes sapped his fortune.  He built Fonthill Abbey, an enormous gothic mansion in Wiltshire.  It collapsed and little now remains. He lived instead at Lansdown Crescent in the north of Bath.  He built the Lansdown Tower behind his house, which is now named after him.  There are superb views from the top and Beckford’s grave can be seen in the cemetery in the grounds of the tower.  Beckford’s art collection is now dispersed, with many of the world’s great galleries owning a picture that once hanged at Fonthill or at the tower. Beckford’s own portrait can be seen amongst the fabulous art at the National Trust’s Upton House, near Banbury.  Courtenay’s portrait can be seen at his family home, Powderham Castle, Devon.

Plas Newydd, Llangollen – A traditionally styled black and white half-timbered house in the Vale of Llangollen was once the home of Regency Wales’s equivalent of a celebrity couple, Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby. “The Ladies of Llangollen” lived together at the house for 50 years from 1780.  Lady Eleanor was born in 1739, daughter of the Earl of Ormonde. The Butlers were one of the grand families of Ireland and she was brought up at Kilkenny castle. Sarah was born nearby in 1755, her family were less grand but still in the higher echelons of Anglo-Irish society. Sarah met the much older Eleanor while at school in Kilknenny.  The two became firm friends and in 1778 decided to elope together.  To escape the clutches of their disapproving families they sailed from Waterford to Milford Haven.  They travelled around Wales in search of an ideal home and eventually settled on Plas Newydd. Dressed in a male like appearance, with dark clothes and black stove pipe hats, they soon became local eccentrics.  They also attracted attention from travellers on their way to explore the scenery of north Wales or travelling to Dublin and struck up a correspondence with many of the era’s most famous figures.  Among their early visitors was Arthur Wellesley, from another Anglo-Irish family, who remained a friend when he was more famous as Duke of Wellington.  Another Irish luminary (and former Bristol MP) who visited was Edmund Burke.  Wordsworth and Southey visited and wrote poems for the ladies.  Many of the most famous names of Regency Britain called on the ladies for lunch, tea or dinner.  The royal family took an interest and George III awarded them a pension.  There is little doubt that the ladies were in a lesbian relationship.  It is a remarkable contrast in society’s attitude to gay men, who were still being executed at the time.  The ladies are buried together at Llangollen churchyard.

Kingston Lacey, Dorset – The Bankes family were forced to abandon their ancestral home of Corfe Castle after one of the most famous sieges of the civil war. They built a new home at Kingston Lacey, in mid Dorset.  The house was remodelled in the style of an Italian palazzo by the architect Charles Barry (of Palace of Westminster fame) for his friend William John Bankes (1786-1855) and is one of my favourite country houses. Bankes used his wealth to travel widely and acquire great works of art.  He bought many pictures in Spain and Portugal during the Peninsular War. One of the stereotypical homosexual dalliances of the upper classes is to be caught with a London guardsman.  Bankes was twice caught in the act.  In 1833 he was caught with a soldier in the urinal outside Parliament. He was acquitted (only buggery was an offence at the time) with the help of the Duke of Wellington, who he would have met during the Peninsular War. But the accusation ruined his Parliamentary career as the MP for the Dorset county seat. In 1841 he was arrested for “indecently exposing himself with a solider of the foot guards in Green Park.” He avoided trial by fleeing the country and lived the rest of his life in exile in Venice.  He died there in 1855 and his body was brought back for burial in Wimbourne Minster.

Shibden Hall, near Halifax in West Yorkshire was the home of the Lister family for over 300 years until 1933.  It’s most famous owners were Anne Lister (1791-1840) and her partner Ann Walker (d 1854), a wealthy heiress in her own right. On Easter Sunday 1834 at Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, York, Lister and Walker took holy communion together and regarded it as a marriage.  In 1836 Lister inherited Shibden and the couple lived there for the rest of their lives, though they were often away travelling Europe. The couple were local notables, with Anne nicknamed Gentleman Jack by some of the people of Halifax. In July 1822 Anne Lister visited the more famous Ladies of Llangollen while staying in Chester. Lister died in Georgia while on a long trip around eastern Europe with Walker.  Her body was brought back for burial in Halifax parish church, known since 2009 as Halifax Minster.  Anne Lister’s diaries have been transcribed and interpreted (much was written in code) and form the basis of several books and dramas, including the 2019 BBC/HBO drama Gentleman Jack. As of 2021 a second series is in production.  In 2019 a rainbow plaque commemorated Lister and Walker’s private marriage at Goodramgate church.  Shibden Hall and gardens are open to the public.

Clifton Hill House, Bristol – Once the home of John Addington Symonds (1840-93), who was one of the first writers to use the word ‘homosexual’, in his ground breaking writings on male same sex love.  He was himself attracted to men, a fact that he volunteered to his wife and close friends.  At a time when the law became even more oppressive to gay men, Symonds was taking quite a risk in his writings and activities.  The risk was mitigated by spending much of his later life in Switzerland. Symonds was born in Bristol in 1840, the son of a wealthy doctor, one of the founders of the Bristol General Hospital. In 1851 the family moved into Clifton Hill House, Bristol’s grandest Palladian villa. As a boy in fashionable Clifton and throughout his life he met many of the literary leaders of his times. From his time as an Oxford student he soon acquired a reputation as a writer in his own right.  He wrote mainly about classical poets and also figures from the Renaissance. In 1868 he set up his own family home with his wife Catherine at 7 Victoria Square in Clifton, now marked by a plaque. The couple had four daughters.  Their friend Edward Lear wrote ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ for their eldest daughter Janet.  Catherine resigned herself to tolerating her husband’s sexual appetite for men. He wrote to her, “The anomaly of my positon is that admire the physical beauty of men more than women, derive more pleasure from their contact and society, and am stirred to sexual sensations exclusively by persons of the male sex.”

While at Victoria Square in 1873 Symonds wrote ‘Male Love, A Problem in Greek Ethics’ and it was in this work that he was among the first to use the new word ‘homosexual’, with homo drawn from the Greek “same” rather than the Latin for “man”. The book was not published for a decade, just before the law on homosexuality became even tighter.

In August 1885 Lord Salisbury’s government introduced a brief Bill to amend the criminal law by raising the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16, in order to outlaw child prostitution. As the Bill reached its final stages in the Commons in the early hours of 7^th August 1885 the Liberal MP for Northampton, the writer Henry Labouchere, proposed an amendment which said, “Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour…” the sentence for which would be up to 2 years in prison, with or without hard labour. The amendment was passed with very few MPs present.  At a stroke the law against gay men was widened well beyond the prohibition of buggery that had been law since 1533.

Symonds was one of those who spoke out against the new law, though now from the safe haven of Davos in Switzerland, where the family lived from 1877 owing to Symonds’s poor lung health. While in Switzerland Symonds enjoyed mixing with male farm workers and had a lasting relationship with Christian Buol, a sledge driver. Symonds wrote that homosexuality should be studied as a medical issue, not something for criminal prohibition.  He wrote jointly with the physician Henry Havelock Ellis ‘The Sexual Inversion’, a scientific work but also partly autobiographical.  It was published in German in 1897, four years after Symonds’s death. Many of Symonds’s writings on homosexuality could not be published in Britain during his lifetime.  His family destroyed many of his manuscripts but surviving drafts and others published in German have been published in the last few decades. Symonds died in Rome in 1893 and is buried in the city. Clifton Hill House was sold to the University of Bristol in 1909 and the house and grounds were used as a hall of residence for women students.  This is doubly appropriate as Symonds was an advocate of women entering university and he was one of the founders of Bristol University College in 1876.  The college was the first university to admit women on the same basis as men from the date of its foundation.

Henbury churchyard, Bristol – An obelisk next to the wall of the church marks the grave of one of Victorian Britain’s most remarkable women, Amelia Edwards.  Born in London in 1831, Edwards achieved fame as a novelist and a writer about her archaeological travels, most notably in Egypt. In 1877 she published ‘A Thousand Miles up the Nile’, illustrated with her own drawings of Egyptian artefacts.  It was a best seller. From 1864 to 1892 Edwards lived at The Larches, Eastfield, Westbury on Trym in Bristol, with Ellen Braysler who was to be her companion for 30 years. The house was destroyed in the Blitz and a modern house is now on the site, but there is a commemorative plaque on the garden wall, recording her role as an Egyptologist and novelist. Edwards used her fame as a writer to promote votes for women and she was Vice President of the Society for the Promotion of Women’s Suffrage.  Amelia was a close friend of fellow writer and Bristol resident John Addington-Symonds. Ellen and Amelia died within a few months of each other in 1892 and were buried in the same grave. An ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life, lies on the grave. In September 2016 Historic England gave the grave a grade II listing, for its architectural, historic and social interest. Amelia’s name lives on locally as Amelia Court, a new complex of flats for elderly people.  A charming statuette of Amelia, atop 4 of her books, has been set into the wall of the flats, on the corner of Henleaze Road and Eastfield Road.

Reading Gaol – The most famous victim of the Labouchere Amendment, section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, is of course Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Like many gay men at his time and since, Wilde was married with children. But his marital life and his fame as an author did not stand in the way of him indulging his sexual desire for younger men. In 1888 he began a sexual relationship with the 17 year old Robbie Ross, a youth half his age.  Ross was an acquaintance of Lord Alfred Douglas and by 1891 Wilde had also embarked on a relationship with the 20 year old, known as “Bosie.”

Lawyers had predicted that the Labouchere Amendment would be a “blackmailers’ charter.” Wilde was playing with fire once Bosie had introduced him to a succession of rough trade rent boys. Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury (a man with two failed marriages who enjoyed watching men hit each other in the sport whose rules bear his name) had a tempestuous relationship with his son. His efforts to draw Lord Alfred away from Wilde failed.  In early 1895 he attempted to confront Wilde at his club but instead had to leave his calling card, addressed to Wilde, “posing as a sondomite” (sic).

Despite being advised of the risks, Wilde initiated a libel suit against Queensbury. The case collapsed in court when it was clear Queensbury had several witness statements of Wilde’s meetings with rent boys. The tables were turned on Wilde, arrested and charged with gross indecency under the 1885 Act but fortunately for him, not for the more serious 1533 Buggery Act. Wilde was convicted and given the maximum possible sentence of two years in prison, with hard labour.

Wilde’s prison sentence began in London on 25^th May 1895 and the hard labour regime soon took its toll.  Wilde was saved by the intervention of Richard Haldane, a Liberal MP. Haldane was unmarried, effeminate and nicknamed ‘Pricilla‘ by fellow MPs. He was also an admirer of Wilde’s works and had been serving on Herbert Gladstone’s commission looking at penal reform. He was able to use this position to visit any prisoner and called at Wandsworth Prison, where Wilde had been admitted to the infirmary.  He arranged for Wilde to be transferred to Reading gaol on 23^rd November 1895. There was to be no more hard labour and Haldane took Wilde paper and pens. He also supplied him with a selection of books to read, beyond the permissible Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Wilde then wrote a 50,000 word letter to Lord Alfred. The letter was not sent but Wilde took it with him on his release in May 1897.  Wilde left immediately for France, never to return to these islands.  Robert Ross joined him in France and became his literary agent.  Wilde wrote ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and it was published under the pseudonym C.3.3 – Wilde’s cell number at Reading. The poem runs through a description of the horrors of hard labour, ‘we tore the tarry rope to shreds with blunt and bleeding nails…’ and also recounts an execution by hanging.

Wilde died of meningitis in Paris on 30^th November 1900, with Ross by his side.  He is buried there and in 1909 Ross commissioned a memorial from Jacob Epstein.  It is a modernist depiction of an angel, complete with a penis.  Ross published a version of Wilde’s letter to Bosie, as De Profundis. In 1950 his ashes were buried with Oscar.

HMP Reading closed in 2013 and awaits redevelopment.  The building is listed so I hope a way can be found to preserve the cell of its most famous prisoner.  There is a superb statue of Wilde in Merrion Square in Dublin, the city of his birth.  His clothing is picked out in different colours of marble. There are two adjacent statues, a nude woman representing Constance Lloyd, Wilde’s wife and a male torso, representing the Greek god Dionysus.  Wilde’s direction of gaze is towards Dionysus.  There is a less satisfactory of Wilde in London by Maggie Hambling, called a conversation with Oscar Wilde.  Located in Adelaide Street at the rear of St Martin in the Fields, a green granite sarcophagus acts as a bench, with a bronze sculpture vaguely resembling Wilde’s head at one end.  The best bit about it is the quote carved below, “we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars”, from Lady Windermere’s Fan.

The Ivor Novello Awards have since 1955 been among the most coveted and prestigious awards to British songwriters and composers.  David Ivor Davies was born in Canton, Cardiff in 1893.  He later took his mother’s middle name and became known on the stage and screen as Ivor Novello. He composed his breakthrough popular song in 1914.  ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ gave him fame and fortune.  There followed a phenomenally successful career composing songs, singing and acting.  It was through acting that in 1917 he met actor Bobbie Andrews, who became his lifelong partner. Novello died suddenly in 1951 and his ashes are buried in Golders Green. In 1952 a bust of him was unveiled at Drury Lane and in 1995 the Strand Theatre was renamed the Novello Theatre.  In 2009 a statue of a seated Ivor Novello was erected in Cardiff Bay, between the Pierhead Building of the Senedd and the Wales Millennium Centre, the national home for Wales’s orchestra and opera in the city of Ivor’s birth.

Knole, Kent – one of the great houses of Tudor England, built on a grand scale rather like Hampton Court. It was commissioned by Thomas Sackville, one of Elizabeth I and James I’s ministers. The Sackvilles live in part of the house to this day, though the state rooms are opened to the public by the National Trust.  When I visited last summer they had just opened a set of rooms in the gatehouse to mark the 50 years of the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales. They were furnished in the style of the 1920s, when they were first occupied by Eddy Sackville-West (1901-65), the heir to Knole. Eddy was a writer and music critic.  He promoted the works of gay composers Benjamin Britten (see below) and Michael Tippett. He had a succession of male lovers at Knole and at his house in Dorset.  One was Paul Latham of Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, who used Eddie over a decade for BDSM, causing Eddy to have a breakdown in 1937. Latham was a Tory MP (Scarborough & Whitby 1931-41) and holds the dubious distinction of being the only example in the last century of an MP who had to resign and also be court martialled. Latham was exposed in 1941 for having sex with men under his command in the Royal Artillery. He was sentenced to two years, without the hard labour.

Eddy’s cousin Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) was also brought up at Knole but as Eddy was the male heir to the title she made her home at nearby Sissinghurst Castle.  There she and her husband and fellow prolific writer Harold Nicholson (1886-1968) created what has become a famous garden. Vita and Harold had many friends in the Bloomsbury Group of artists and intellectuals.  Most of them were married but had lived unconventional lives with many same sex relationships.  The group included John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell.  Woolf had a lesbian relationship with Vita, one of many same sex relationships throughout Vita’s life. Harold also had same sex relationships and close male liaisons from literary and political circles.  He was the National Labour MP for Leicester West from 1935 to 1945 and his diary is an important insight into the lives of many of the leading figures of the time. Among his supposed liaisons were Liberal politicians Lord Beauchamp (see below) and Robert Bernays (1902-45), the MP for Bristol North 1931-45 and the last Liberal MP in the city before my election in 2005.

Aldeborough, Suffolk – a village in Suffolk made famous by Benjamin Britten (1913-76) and Peter Pears (1910-86) who established an annual music festival there in 1948. Britten composed a variety of works, both for orchestra and for performance by a specific individual.  He met the tenor Peter Pears in 1937 and the two then became lifelong musical, emotional and physical partners. Though their relationship would have been known to many people, they escaped prosecution. Britten became Britain’s most celebrated and honoured 20^th century composer.  He wrote ‘War Requiem’ for the 1962 rededication of the new Coventry Cathedral. A clear sign of the acceptance at the highest levels of society of Britten’s position came in 1964 when the Queen made him a member of the Order of Merit, three years before decriminalisation. The Queen opened The Maltings, the concert hall developed by Britten at Snape, Aldeburgh in 1967.  In 1976, just before his death he was made a peer.  Britten and Pears are buried in adjacent graves at Aldeburgh and Britten has a memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey. Their home at Aldeburgh, the Red House, is the base of the Britten-Pears Foundation.  A scallop sculpture on the beach at Aldeburgh is also a memorial to Britten. The relationship of Britten and Pears was long, happy and successful and a rare example of a known same sex relationship that was not subjected to adverse comment or the harsh intervention of the law.

Plas Newydd, Anglesey – overlooking the Menai Straits, the house has been home to generations of the Paget family. Most famous was Henry, 1^st Marquess of Anglesey, awarded the title for his service in the Napoleonic Wars.  Second in command to the Duke of Wellington, he lost his right leg at the Battle of Waterloo. You can see his wooden false leg at Plas Newydd.  Most infamous was the 5^th marquess, Henry Cyril Paget (1875-1905), known as the Dancing Marquess. He was fascinated by all things theatrical and when he inherited the title and estates in 1898 he had the means to indulge his wildest fantasies. He had a particular passion for jewellery and established a Polish jeweller in Llandudno to supply his pieces. Henry converted the chapel at Plas Newydd into a theatre. He staged plays by Oscar Wilde, despite his recent disgrace and imprisonment. Henry also staged his own special productions, appearing as the glittering star on the stage in front of bemused guests, to whom the Marquess gave souvenir photographs of himself in his bejewelled costume. The architect of Port Meirion, Clough Williams Ellis, described the marquess as “a sort of apparition, he was quite unforgettable – a tall, elegant and bejewelled creature, with wavering elegant gestures…”

By 1904 Henry had racked up jewellery purchase debts of over half a million pounds, leading to a forced sale of possessions. He died the following year in Monte Carlo, aged only 29. His cousin was left the job of rescuing the house and estate.  The 6^th Marquess commissioned the bisexual artist Rex Whistler (1905-44) to decorate his new dining room. Whistler, one of the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the age, painted a 17 metre long mural of Italian sea port and North Wales mountain scenes, now the most famous feature at Plas Newydd.

Tredegar House, Newport – South Wales’s next generation answer to Henry Paget was Evan Morgan (1893-1949), who succeeded his spendthrift father Courtenay Morgan as Viscount Tredegar in 1934.  While his father was a womaniser, Evan was known to be homosexual, though he married twice to keep up a respectable façade. He continued his father’s practice of spending on a vast scale, during the last of the glory days of wealth from the Monmouthshire and Glamorgan coalfields. Tredegar House had been the home of the Morgans since medieval times but its current red brick main block dates from the 1670s.  It is one of the few grand houses of Wales.  The house and grounds became famous in Evan’s time for his grand parties.  His guest list drew from many other members of the Bright Young Things, including Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Aldous Huxley, H G Wells and Charlie Chaplin. Apart from the food and alcohol guests were able to bathe naked in the lake or watch performances by Evan’s menagerie that included a boxing kangaroo.

Walmer Castle, Kent – one of the coastal forts commissioned by Henry VIII, it has long since been the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.  After it ceased to have any real commercial or naval marine meaning, the post has been held mainly by leading politicians or royals, including Wellington, Asquith and the Queen Mother.  Walmer Castle was a handy place to hold weekend parties away from London.

The Lord Warden from 1913-34 was the Liberal politician William Lygon (1872-1938), the 7^thEarl Beauchamp.  His parties at Walmer were all male affairs, with other high society homosexuals mixing with local fishermen and youths. Beauchamp was married to Lady Lettice Grosvenor, sister of the Tory Duke of Westminster, who was eventually to bring down Beauchamp.  Lygon had succeeded to the title at the age of 18 and his wealth and peerage opened the way to several political appointments.  He spent two years as a very young Governor of New South Wales from 1899-1901.  The new Liberal Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, made him government Chief Whip in the House of Lords in 1905.  He held a series of other appointments, the final of which was Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords from 1924-31.  It was during this time that he and his Tory brother in law became bitter enemies, both political and social.  The Duke later referred to his sister’s husband as his “bugger in law.”

Beauchamp had a string of male sexual encounters, both at Walmer and at the family’s own home, Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, where he had sex with his valet and handsome footmen.  He is also thought to have had sexual encounters on his political travels with Harold Nicolson and Robert Bernays (see above). In 1931 the Duke of Westminster brought matters to a head by informing the king and persuading his sister to file for divorce.  George V is supposed to have told the Duke, “I thought men like that shot themselves.” He was also concerned about his fourth son, Prince George (1902-42, later Duke of Kent) who had spent time with Beauchamp at Madresfield and was reputed to have had several same sex experiences.

The divorce petition stated that Beauchamp was “A man of perverted sexual practices, [who] has committed acts of gross indecency with male servants and other male persons and has been guilty of sodomy … throughout the married life … the Respondent habitually committed acts of gross indecency with certain of his male servants.” Such a charge would have led to arrest, so Beauchamp fled abroad to Paris. He was able to return from exile in 1937 but died within a year.  His children had stayed loyal and had disowned their mother, throwing her bust into the moat at Madresfield.  One of Beauchamp’s sons was Hugh Lygo, who predeceased him in a 1936 road accident.  He was a friend of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who in 1945 published Brideshead Revisited, with characters based loosely on the Beauchamp family.

My guidebook to Madresfield is silent on the sexual activities of its most famous owner or his fall from grace. The only hint is the reference to one of the objects in the house, a statuette of a naked golfer, sculpted by Lord Beauchamp from a young Australian model while he was Governor of New South Wales.

Buscot Park, Oxfordshire – home to an eclectic art collection, assembled mainly by Gavin Henderson (1902-77), the 2^ndLord Farringdon.  His father amassed a fortune from railway finance, enabling Gavin to live a carefree hedonistic lifestyle.  He threw wild parties at Buscot and had a particular taste for working class youths. Earlier in life, in 1926, his family attempted to marry him to a respectable bride, Honor Phillips.  Gavin fled to Australia for 4 months but was persuaded to return home for the marriage.  But on his wedding night he abandoned his new wife and spent the night with a sailor. His marriage was annulled in 1931. On inheriting his title in 1934 Gavin became a Labour member of the House of Lords.  His sexual preferences were well known inside Labour circles so he never held ministerial office.  However, he did become chairman of the Fabian Society and hosted many parties for Labour luminaries at Buscot.  I visited the house just after the 2015 general election.  It’s well worth a visit, for the gardens as well as the art.  But, as with Madresfield and Lord Beauchamp (see above), the guidebook says much about Lord Farringdon’s politics but nothing about his sexual personality. Again, as with the Beauchamp family, Evelyn Waugh knew the Farringdon family and in his novel Vile Bodies based his character Lord Parakeet on Gavin.

Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire – the location of the government’s secret code breaking base during the Second World War. When I visited the site on a Parliamentary delegation a decade ago it was still in the early stages of its development as a museum of cryptology and computing.  But I was delighted to see a statue of its most famous war time worker, Alan Turing (1912-54), a pioneer in his fields of maths and computing. The statue is a remarkable piece of art, made up of thousands of slices of Welsh slate. Turing is shown holding an Enigma machine, the German code settings for which he had helped to break. The work of Turing and other cryptographers and engineers at Bletchley Park saved thousands of lives, in particular those sailing the Atlantic convoys that kept Britain supplied with food and armaments. Historians agree that his work also shortened the war in Europe, by at least a year.  The details of the work at Bletchley remained a secret for many years and Turing’s own papers have been declassified only recently. That is one reason why Turing’s name was absent for decades from the legions of history books, films and TV programmes about the war. The other reason was his subsequent disgrace in 1952 and the circumstances of his death in 1954.

Turing was homosexual. There is no evidence of any war time relationships. Maybe there wasn’t the time, maybe he didn’t want to jeopardise his war work. After the war Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington.  I’ve visited the NPL (learning a lot about SI measurements) but they didn’t make anything of their links to Turing.  There is however a plaque on his house at nearby Hampton High Street. In 1947 he moved to Wilmslow (there’s a plaque on his house) to take up a position at Manchester University. In early 1952, aged 39, he began a relationship with Arnold Murray, a workman 20 years his junior. Events quickly turned for the worst, when Turing’s house was burgled by someone known to Murray. During the police investigation it became clear to them that Turing and Murray were in a relationship. The victim of a burglary became the one accused of a crime and Turing was charged with gross indecency under the 1885 law.  The police at the time were under instructions from the Home Secretary to ramp up the arrests of homosexuals. David Maxwell Fyffe had served as the main British prosecutor of the Nazis at Nuremburg but at home he was a thoroughly illiberal hardline opponent of rights for homosexual men. In his first year as Home Secretary (1951) the arrest rate more than quadrupled to over 5,000. Turing and Murray were two of those swept up and Turing’s record of service was not going to save him.  He actually pleaded guilty at his trial on 31^st March 1952, escaping prison but instead sentenced to a parole period of a year of chemical castration treatment. Murray received a conditional discharge.

Turing was stripped of his security clearance and could no longer act as a consultant to GCHQ. On 7^th June 1954 his housekeeper found him dead in bed, with a half-eaten apple. The inquest recorded a verdict of death by cyanide poisoning.  The ghost of Labouchere had deprived the world of one of its most brilliant scientists, half a century after the death of Wilde.  How many other positive contributions to humanity have been cut short by prejudice?

The law under which Alan Turing and tens of thousands of other gay men were convicted was not repealed in full until 2003. Since then there have been many calls for convictions prior to that date to be quashed and the accused to be pardoned.  The case of Alan Turing has been at the head of several petitions and parliamentary procedures. In 2009 Gordon Brown issued a statement of regret about the treatment of Turing but his government did not offer any legal redress for him or anyone else.  In 2012 the Coalition Government passed the Protection of Freedoms Act, which enabled victims of the 1885 and 1967 laws to have the convictions disregarded in any criminal record check.

Campaigners urged the government to go further and to issue pardons.  My Liberal Democrat colleague John Leech (MP Manchester Withington 2005-15) tabled a motion in January 2012 (EDM 2660) that called for a full pardon for Turing. I was one of his 27 co-signatories. The campaign widened and became known as a call for an Alan Turing Law, for the pardon of all victims of the persecutory laws.  On Christmas Eve 2013 a rare Royal Pardon was issued for Alan Turing.  Leech and Lord John Sharkey (a Liberal Democrat Peer) had introduced Bills in both Houses to amend the law. Eventually the Police and Crime Act 2017 introduced a retro-active pardon for all deceased victims and a procedure for people still alive to apply for a pardon from “crimes” that are no longer on the statute book.

Universities and scientific institutions all over the world have buildings named after Turing.  I have seen the statue of him at the University of Surrey in Guildford. There is also a statue of him at Manchester, showing him seated on a bench, apple in hand. It is appropriately sited between the university and Canal Street, Manchester’s world famous gay friendly district. Turing now has the positive place in history that he deserves.  I was delighted that the Bank of England decided that Turing’s face will appear on the new £50 bank note, launched in June 2021.  Further recognition came in May 2022 when Great Western Railway named one of its inter-city express trains Alan Turing.  The engine has rainbow colouring and is nicknamed the trainbow.  Now everyone travelling between London Paddington and South Wales or the West of England can be reminded of Turing’s contribution to our freedom.

Beaulieu, Hampshire – most people visit Beaulieu for the National Motor Museum. The vintage and classic car collection were assembled in the grounds of the Palace House in 1952 by its owner Edward Douglas Scott-Montagu (1926-2015), Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. Few visitors in the last few decades would know much about Lord Montagu, apart from his passion for cars and promoting British tourist attractions. But in the 1950s he was famous for a court case and prison sentence that could have ruined him but instead gave impetus to a relaxation in the law against homosexuality.

Montagu inherited his peerage at age 2 and became an attender of the House of Lords as soon as he reached adulthood.  He was one of the 92 hereditary peers to retain a seat in the upper chamber when Tony Bair compromised with the Conservatives over Lords reform. He became one of the longest serving peers and I saw him many times in his wheelchair, particularly at the arts and heritage events that I attended as often as I could.  He is one of several figures who I now wish I’d had a longer conversation with, while I had the chance.

Montagu has stated that he has been comfortable with his bisexuality since his days at Oxford. He went on to host beach parties at his hut on the Solent, on the edge of his Hampshire estate. In 1953 he was accused of having sex with a 14 year old boy scout but he was not convicted. The following year he invited his cousin, Dorset and Wiltshire landowner Michael Pitt Rivers (1917-99) and his friend the Daily Mail journalist Peter Wildeblood (1923-99) to a beach party. Wildeblood brought with him an RAF corporal with whom he was having a relationship, Edward McNally along with McNally’s friend John Reynolds. All five were arrested and charged under the 1885 Act.  McNally and Reynolds turned Queen’s Evidence, so leaving Montagu, Pitt Rivers and Wildeblood to face the music. Montagu and Pitt Rivers denied the charges.  Wildeblood took the brave and principled stance of stating to the court in Winchester that he was indeed a homosexual. His letters to McNally were also cited in court.  On 24^th March 1954 Wildeblood and Pitt Rivers were sentenced to 18 months and Montagu to 12 months.

The case attracted huge attention (unlike Turing’s, two years earlier) due to the high profile of the defendants. It helped to raise fresh debate about the suitability of the law, in the face of its hardline enforcement by Maxwell Fyffe. Wildeblood contributed to the debate with a book published after his release. “Against the Law” set out a case for homosexual law reform and also told a grim story of prison conditions. It was the Home Secretary himself who in the autumn of 1954 set up a committee to look at both the law on homosexuality and prostitution.  It was chaired by the Vice Chancellor of Reading University, Sir John Wolfenden.  The committee deliberated for two years, with Wildeblood among those giving evidence. The Wolfenden Report was published on 4^th September 1957 and recommended the decriminalisation of private homosexual acts.  The government declined to implement the report and Fyffe, now as Viscount Kilmuir the Lord Chancellor, was one of its chief opponents.

It was not until 1967 that the 1885 law was amended, to exempt from prosecution same sex activity in private by men aged 21 and over.  The law was changed via a Private Member’s Bill, introduced in the House of Lords in 1965 by the Conservative Lord Arran, then in the Commons by Labour MP for Pontypool Leo Abse.  The Bill was supported from the government front bench by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins and was applicable to only England and Wales.  Scotland and Northern Ireland had to wait until the early 1980s for similar legislation by the Thatcher government.

In 2017 the BBC commissioned a superb selection of dramas and documentaries marking the 50^th anniversary of the 1967 Act.  Among the dramas was the story of Wildeblood, Pitt Rivers and Montagu, named after Wildeblood’s book, ‘Against the Law.’

Carrow Road football ground, Norwich – Among my responsibilities as Communities Minister in the Coalition Government was combatting hate crime.  Most of my time was spent on racism, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.  But I also persuaded officials that we should spend time on other identity related prejudice, including violence against people because of their appearance or lifestyle (a concern from the Sophie Lancaster murder) and of course homophobia.  I decided that football would be the area where I would direct my efforts on homophobia. The FA and all league clubs were contacted and I visited several of them. I do not know whether my Conservative successors have continued dialogue with the football authorities but it is certainly clear that football still has a massive problem. There are no openly gay male players in the four top leagues. With over 1500 players between them, this is clearly an implausible scenario.

There will be several factors to explain the reluctance of any player or group of players to be the first to come out, while still playing the professional game. Maybe the sad story of Justin Fashanu (1961-98) haunts the game.  Fashanu played for Norwich City from apprentice to full team professional by 1978.  His fame should derive from the £1million transfer fee to Nottingham Forest in 1981. But his period at Forest was a miserable experience, being bullied verbally by the manager Brian Clough, one of the most famous people in the game at the time (even I knew who he was…) Clough knew that Fashanu visited gay bars. He left Forest after a year and played for short periods with a succession of clubs, never settling in. Then in October 1990 in an interview with The Sun (a paper that had a strong homophobic reputation at the time) he came out as gay.

Fashanu continued to traipse from club to club, in England, Canada, Scotland and eventually the USA. In March 1998 he was accused of sexually assaulting a 17 year old male in Maryland. He flew back to England to escape arrest. On 3^rd May he was found hanged in a garage in Shoreditch. In his suicide note he claimed the sex was consensual.

Justin Fashanu was the first and 28 years later is still the only football player to come out, while still playing. So I’m including his first football ground as a reminder that football, compared to most other sports, still exists in a state of denial about the contribution that gay players and officials make to the phenomenal success of the game. The worlds of the arts, politics and most other walks of life, including sports such as rugby (league and union) have embraced both their queer past and current prominent LGBT faces. Hopefully our most popular sport will join them soon.

Useful links and further reading

The National Trust list of LGBTQ property associations – https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/exploring-lgbtq-history-at-national-trust-places

Historic England – https://www.historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/

English Heritage – http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/lgbtq-history/

Bristol Outstories – http://outstoriesbristol.org.uk/welcome/

Prejudice and Pride by Alison Oram and Matt Cook, NT Enterprises 2017

Closet Queens by Michael Bloch, Abacus books 2015

A Palladian Villa in Clifton by Annie Burnside, Redcliffe Press 2009

Guidebooks to all the above mentioned sites.

See my other heritage site blogs on castles, abbeys and cathedrals

History of Parliament Trust on James I and Villiers –   https://thehistoryofparliament.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/james-i-and-his-favourites-sex-and-power-at-the-jacobean-court/

BBC report on the Catterick Roman grave of a galli – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1999734.stm