Keep the Clause: the legacy

FIVE years ago, Scotland was convulsed by a ‘moral values’ row which scarred the new Executive and soured the early days of devolution. Billboards showed Donald Dewar and Wendy Alexander with their fingers in their ears. The press was consumed by the controversy. Even Labour’s by-election loss of Ayr to the Tories was put down to the Keep the Clause campaign.

Looking back, the storm around the repeal of Section 28 may seem no more than a passing squall. The law - which banned councils from ‘promoting’ homosexuality - is off the statute book north and south of the Border. No parent has brought a legal challenge under the sex education guidelines that were designed to reassure opponents of repeal.

The protagonists are either dead, as in the case of Donald Dewar and Cardinal Winning, or out of the spotlight. Wendy Alexander is no longer a minister. Brian Souter is in the news for pursuing rail franchises, not for funding private referendums. Martin Clarke, then editor of the Daily Record, is in London editing a freesheet version of the Evening Standard.

Perhaps as a result, the Section 28 furore is easily forgotten or dismissed as a media frenzy. But the episode deserves another look.

First, it posed a direct challenge to the legitimacy of elected politicians - and had a major impact on the way in which MSPs have acted since.

Second, it saw the emergence of a potent axis between protest and the press.

Third, it sent a message about the importance of what might be called identity politics or the politics of behaviour.

Section 28 took all the political parties by surprise. New MSPs were expecting rows over tuition fees and land reform, not uproar about a Thatcherite law that had never been invoked. Wendy Alexander was blamed for failing to foresee that what was meant as a commitment to civil equality might be interpreted as a bid to indoctrinate children.

Yet she was not alone. The repeal of Section 28 was a manifesto commitment for UK Labour in 1997, albeit not for Scottish Labour in 1999. Johann Lamont spoke for many of Alexander’s colleagues in predicting it would be "widely welcomed in Scotland".

Far from acting as the fulcrum of national debate, the parliament was sidelined by the Section 28 saga, which was fought almost entirely through the press. Just as the alliance between Winning, a Catholic archbishop, and Souter, an evangelical Protestant, bridged a religious divide, the campaign against repeal confounded political categories.

This could have been a Tory issue, yet prominent Conservatives such as Annabel Goldie clearly found the row distasteful. The Daily Record, a Labour paper, led the charge against the Executive, and Dewar’s ministers were themselves at odds. Souter had been an SNP donor, yet the Nationalists backed Labour and the Lib Dems in supporting repeal.

The challenge to representative democracy has been underestimated. In a country of five million people, 1.2 million voted in the referendum funded by Souter and publicised by the Daily Record, with 87% opting to keep the clause. Even allowing for irregularities and multiple voting it is an impressive number, which confirmed the Record’s insistence that people wanted a say.

The referendum was Souter’s masterstroke, transforming him from a rich man crying in the wilderness to a protagonist of DIY democracy. Until then, it was possible to dismiss Keep the Clause as a hoo-ha got up by a few homophobes and an editor in search of circulation. Thereafter, even though Section 28 was repealed a few weeks after the result, the parliament’s claim to represent public opinion had been damaged.

Yet this was not a protest expressed through demonstrations, lobbies or pickets. Keep the Clause was a near virtual campaign. There were no grassroots members, no activists’ meetings: just Souter’s PR consultant, Jack Irvine, and a couple of friendly newspapers. Cardinal Winning was regularly quoted, as were one or two dissenters from the Scottish School Boards Association and a couple of prominent Muslims. But Keep the Clause was more an idea than a pressure group, born in the space between Irvine’s PR firm and the newsrooms of the Record and the Daily Mail.

The campaign was sometimes slapdash - celebrity endorsements backfired when Nick Nairn and others declared they were backing repeal - and highly personal in its attacks on Wendy Alexander. Its achievement was to wrest control of the debate and link Section 28 with the protection of children instead of discrimination against homosexuals. While Souter, Winning and the Record failed to prevent repeal, they ensured ministers would move cautiously on issues of morality and family values. It is no coincidence that legislation covering civil partnerships was sent to Westminster.

There was a dispute at the time over who was responsible: the Record, for whipping up a storm, or the Executive, for choosing to poke at a wasps’ nest? While the press undoubtedly kept the row boiling, Keep the Clause would have bombed had it not struck a chord with public opinion. The most interesting question is why devolution’s first major controversy focused on lifestyle and morality.

A Nationalist might see this as a consequence of the parliament’s limited powers. Without control of defence, tax, welfare or immigration, most big issues are out of its range. A Unionist might view it as poetic justice for Home Rulers who dreamed of enlightened collectivism then found themselves in a Scotland where prejudice was no longer diluted by membership of the UK.

The error on both sides is to see Section 28 as a peculiarly Scottish affair. It fits a trend across western democracies which sees voters focusing not just on their standard of living, but on lifestyle and behaviour. The most obvious example is gay marriage in the US presidential election, a row which, while partly manufactured, took light across the country. In Britain, the battle over hunting acquired significance far beyond the feelings of foxes.

This could be because people feel powerless in a globalised world and seek to displace their frustration; because they resent state intrusion in their personal lives, or because they are prosperous and secure enough to attend to the icing on the cake.

Whatever the reason, issues like hunting and Section 28 take on a symbolic value, representing a range of anxieties about the loss of a way of life and the speed of social change. These surges of protest, often with media support, could prefigure the future for 21st century politics.

Kirsty Milne’s ‘Manufacturing Dissent: single-issue protest and the power of the press’ will be published by Demos on March 17