The full debate in the House of Lords is now available in Hansard (accessible via the House of Lords website). Here is what I thought was the most impressive speech.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland: My Lords, I speak without a prepared speech but with a heavy heart. As a Christian woman, I find this an extraordinarily difficult and distressing debate. It is distressing because we are not really prepared to face the fundamental issue. I have listened to speeches in which noble Lords have said, “We respect gay people, but...”. The issue is not about rights; if it were, we would not be having this debate. It is about whether noble Lords accept gay people as equal human beings.
Two hundred years ago, William Wilberforce made a speech in Parliament that freed black people to be equal human beings. I hope that this evening your Lordships will vote for these regulations. I have some quarrel with the way in which the regulations have
been brought forward, but I hope that noble Lords will vote to underline that gay people are equal human beings with others.
I say this as a Christian woman. I have listened to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, and I listened to the Catholic archbishop on the radio this morning, a very dear and wonderful man. He was struggling because he was trying hard not to appear prejudiced, but he was saying two things. Those noble Lords who are this evening saying two things are breaking their principles. If a Catholic organisation says, “Our principles do not allow us to place a child with a homosexual couple, but we are prepared to send it somewhere else for someone else to do it”, where is the underlying principle? Why will that organisation not do it but allow someone else to if it believes that that child will not have an appropriate home?
I have spent most of my life working in social care, a good deal of it worrying about the protection of children. In adoption, there is one principle and one principle only—the needs of the child are paramount. Whatever the family, whatever their colour, creed or sexual orientation, they have no right to the child. The child has the right to the home. Any good adoption agency will spend its time making that assessment. However, an adoption agency may decide that it will not place some children because it does not like the placement that it has found. For example, I know two male nurses in Scotland who are both gay. They were working with a youngster in a wheelchair who is extraordinarily disabled and extraordinarily difficult. Had they not given that child a home, he would have spent his life in an institution. That is true of many of the children to whom gay couples give homes. These are not easy children. We are not talking about handing babies to a couple of gay men—not that I think that there is anything wrong with that. I know gay male couples who have given extraordinarily good homes to children. But any adoption agency is likely to place a child with a family where there is a mother and a father. If there is not such a family and there is a good homosexual couple available who can give the child a home—the alternative being an institution—I would hope that the agency would place the child with them.
For many years, I was the chief executive of
Childline. During the time of Section 28,
not because I had any interest in it, I looked at some of the issues around bullying. We talked to teachers about homophobic bullying. Since the removal of Section 28, I have found no problems of schools being told that they have to give education about gay rights. My experience was of teachers terrified of intervening on behalf of children who were being seriously bullied for being gay, because they thought that Section 28 meant that they would be in deep trouble. The converse is true: removing these kinds of statutes helps children. I do not for a moment think that governors—never mind the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and his department—will allow the curriculum to be changed in order to accommodate issues that most are very careful about. I am talking about the whole spectrum of sexual education, which the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, knows so well.
As a Christian, I am deeply concerned. Christ told the story of the good Samaritan, who was an outcast; many gay people feel outcast. Returning to the beginning of my speech—which, I suppose, is not a speech—I say that this issue is about believing that homosexual people are equal. They are not remote sinners doing something that you may find difficult to face, but real people, who are prepared to contribute to society, to give good homes to children, to teach in our school and to live, on the whole, discreetly and kindly, and who deserve access to goods and services. Of course, children are not goods, but we are talking, in legislation, about access to services. Gay people deserve that as much as any of us, just as Wilberforce said that every black person deserved equal treatment. I commend the regulations to the House.
And here is a speech made by the Prime Minister a few nights later.
Tony Blair: It is a real honour to be here this evening at the Stonewall Equality dinner, and to say thank you to Ben for that kind introduction.
Just before I came here tonight - this is a sad reflection of type of thing you do towards the end of your time in office - I got out one of my old speeches and re-read it. It was a speech back in 1994, when, I think it was on an amendment by Edwina Currie and Neil Kinnock, interestingly enough, it wasn’t a combination that was often found. They had come together to move an amendment on equality on the age of consent. The thing that really struck me, re-reading the speech this evening, was just how a whole lot of things that nowadays we would more or less take for granted. you had to start literally with the very, very first principles. including arguments like: “how do you stop people being persuaded to be gay?”
The interesting thing is that you then fast-forward to last night in the House of Lords, and the fact is the vote was won, which is an incredible thing.
And I really just wanted to say two things about the changes that have happened over the past ten years, which you will know very well. There are a lot of important things, but I think civil partnerships is really the thing … as I was saying to people earlier, it doesn’t just give you a lot of pride, but it actually brought real joy. I don’t know whether you remember the very first day, and it was quite a bizarre circumstance that the first ceremonies were actually in Northern Ireland. I was so struck by it, it was so alive, I remember actually seeing the pictures on television. It is not often that you sort of skip around in my job, I can assure you, But it really the fact that that the people were so happy and the fact that you felt just one major, major change had happened, of which everyone can feel really proud. And now I think we were just saying, was it 16,000 civil partnerships, and what is interesting now is that other countries in Europe are looking at this legislation, and it is very divisive still in Spain and Italy at the moment. But nonetheless it is happening.
This is my second reflection about it all. There are a whole load of different pieces of legislation, which I will not rehearse here, but what has happened is that the culture of the country has changed in a definable way as a result of it. And here is what I think is really interesting. The change in the culture and the civilising effect of it has gone far greater than the gay and lesbian community. In other words, by taking a stand on these issues and by removing prejudice and discrimination, and by enabling people to stand proud as what they are, it has had an impact that I think is far more profound in the way the country thinks about itself.
And I want to say we have an immensely proud history, that is able to stand on its own merits in the 21st Century and say that we know we have a great future. One thing I think is very important for any country that is to succeed in the future you make the most of the talents and abilities of your people. If you allow discrimination to fester, that is a complete rejection of that modernising and civilising notion. That is what is really important and it is why as the day approaches that certainly I will look back on with a lot of pride.
However there is one final thing I wanted to say to you and it is this. Some people this evening have been very kind and said that it took a certain amount of political courage. Well yes it did, but you know I remember back in the early ‘80s when this type of issue was condemned as political correctness, when this was the loony-left, as it were, engaged in this. Stonewall, in my view, played a fundamental and often insufficiently recognised part in achieving this. I want to tell you why. When you are trying to do something that is difficult, divisive and when, as a politician, you do something that you know is going to be controversial … it is all very well saying well I want to do this and you can see some of you people are up for it and some of them are thinking “well, hmm”… What actually matters enormously is that the people from outside politics that you are trying to do it with have a sufficient intelligence and sensitivity, which I think has really defined the Stonewall campaign, I define it as a polite determination. In other words, a complete push and drive to get the thing done, but also a way of doing it that is always looking to bring people onside, that is always looking to understand sensitivities, that is always willing to say, "look, this is something we would like to help get done with you in a sensible and intelligent way." What Stonewall did, and Angela Mason, who I thought was absolutely fantastic when she was the Head, and now Ben what they did was remarkable and it is a real tribute.
And here we are this evening at the Stonewall Equality dinner, and a lot of the tables are from some of the best-known names in business and commerce, and this is part of the diversity agenda now of these big companies. Now everyone is entirely in favour of this. There is a greater competition for the so-called gay and lesbian vote. This is a fantastic thing that all the party leaders today, and in the future actually all of them will be, I think, in favour of equality. That is a sign of how much things have changed and actually we should not be worried about that, we should actually be proud of it. It is a great achievement for our country.
I just wanted to say this evening how deeply grateful I am for the invitation to come along and be here tonight with you at the Stonewall Equality dinner. I would like to thank each and every one of you for helping in what will be an important signal that you are part of the mainstream of our society today, and that progress does actually come about because people are determined. Thank you to you because we could not have done it without you and I do look back on it with pride and I wanted to share that with you.
