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Vote Tory for gay sex and personal freedom
It might be a new beginning for the Conservatives to return to their tolerant, libertarian roots. Let homosexuals marry, if they want to.
The aftermath of Michael Portillo's bold confession may have turned out to be awkward for him, but it was certainly good for the Conservative Party. Not only were Conservative grandees able to bask in the reflected glory of their own tolerance, as they made friendly and encouraging noises to Mr Portillo; not only did their magnanimous line make New Labour's own pussyfooting about homosexuality in high places look priggish and calculating; not only did the Conservative Party suddenly appear, for once, somehow rather now and happening and right. Something else happened too, which I think might, and which I hope will, remind Conservatives of what really distinguishes them from New Labour; it might remind them of what they stand for.
I mean the behaviour of the gay lobby in reaction to Mr Portillo's admissions. The loathing with which gay activists went for him was quite astonishing. Portillo's crime, in their eyes, was failing to support a lower age of sexual consent for homosexuals, and to allow homosexuals openly into the Armed Services. It was inconceivable to them that Mr Portillo could without hypocrisy have thought these demands mistaken; it was inconceivable to them that he had the right to think differently; he became a hate figure. "Portillo? He disgusts me," said the pop star George Michael in screaming headlines on the front of the Sun. Coming from a man who was arrested last year for cottaging - cruising for sex with strangers in a public lavatory - that is so absurd it is almost funny. However, the deep animosity was not funny; it was a sharp reminder of how powerful special rights groups have become in the past 15 years, and of what is wrong with the lobby culture.
Most obvious is the intolerance. It's one of life's many mysteries that civil liberties activists are often not very interested in liberty, except of course their own; nor do they much value tolerance, except when they themselves expect it. More seriously, there is the self-perpetuating nature of the culture. There has been an enormous growth in the past 15 years of special rights activists - feminists, gays, farmers, ethnic minorities, eco-warriors and special pleaders of all sorts. Not all are bullies or bigots, but almost all expect new legislation and more public money; all this only seems to generate further expectations and further expense.
Last Wednesday, in a perfect example, the Law Society of England and Wales came to the conclusion that the law should be changed to give unmarried, cohabiting couples ("cohabitees") new rights similar to those of married couples, and that these rights should extend to gay couples, too. These are legal rights to do with inheritance, maintenance, pensions, citizenship, property and so on, of which married people currently have rather more. The Law Society decided on Wednesday to recommend changes along these lines to the Law Commission, so these things may well come to pass.
What better example could there be of the nonsense of giving in to special pleading? Quite apart from any other consideration, think of the complications. What is a cohabitee anyway? And who decides? Can it be anyone with whom you have lived for a couple of years, such as your flatmate, or do you have to sleep with them? Would you have to prove that you had? One can hardly imagine the mountains of paperwork and acres of office space needed to manage these minutiae, and all the disputes arising from them.
All this legislation is being proposed because all those cohabitees out there appear to want a good, binding civil contract with their partners. Hence all the fuss. But there already is one. It is called marriage. It need not involve God, if God is not wanted. I cannot understand why couples who want the protection of such a civil contract don't enter into the one that exists, and get married. What is the point of being unmarried if you want precisely what marriage offers? This squeamishness is most mysterious. Wilfully unmarried people often say that marriage is just a piece of paper. Actually, in contractual terms, it is a very important piece of paper, as it was meant to be, for mutual protection - which is what everybody seems to want, and is slowly beginning to discover. Why invent another piece of paper, at great public expense and inconvenience? Demanding the right to have all the rights of marriage, without being married, is all too typical of special pleading.
Special pleading causes more legislation, more tax, more bureaucracy, and more intrusion into our lives. It also, without fail, leads to more special pleading, as one piece of tinkering leads to another. Whether you're talking about tax or benefits or school admissions or employment or farming, when one person is "privileged" by a concession, another is "penalised". Tax breaks for working mothers "penalise" stay-at-home mothers, and vice versa. This Government lurches from protest group to protest group in a pointless series of intrusions, constantly trying to put right what it put wrong. We get adjustments here, disqualifications there and subsidies all round; we have allowances for this, deductions for that, and reimbursements for the other. It is so wearisome, so time-consuming, so needlessly wasteful, and - isn't it? - so very EU.
Surely an obvious conclusion for a Conservative must be that it is time to be brave enough to turn a deaf ear to the activists and the lobby bullies. They are the natural allies of overgovernment, of the kind we have today. Let them know all they can expect from a Conservative government is less government, lower taxes and more freedom. It might be something of a new beginning for the Conservatives to return to their tolerant, libertarian roots. Let homosexuals enter into the contract of marriage, like anyone else, if they want to; their sexual preferences are not the business of the state. Let the unmarried stay unmarried if they want to, without the rights of marriage. Let them make private contracts of any kind with anyone they fancy. But let them not expect the taxpayer to support expensive and unnecessary legal edifices of pretend marriage.
Government should not intrude into our lives any more than it absolutely must. Less government is better; it is less intrusive and less expensive and more tolerant. The last Conservative government found it impossible to live up to this principle. This Labour Government rejects it, of course. But it is a principle which might put the next Conservative government into office.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, September 24, 1999
