May 29, 2010
David Laws and Gay Equality
Upon the recommendation of Sunder Katwala, I’m blogging this small observation about the resignation of David Laws.
Sunder has a good analysis up here (and longer version here). He covers a lot of important points about the way we now view homosexuality in politics. But I feel he has missed the most striking – and significant – aspect of this entire debacle.
When it first emerged that David Laws was at the centre of a financial scandal, his response – apparently backed by both his party and their Conservative coalition partners – was to claim that he’d used £40,000 of taxpayer money to rent a room from his partner with the aim of hiding the fact that his partner was his partner. In other words, Laws appealed to his own desire for privacy – not wanting to be a publicly known gay figure – as a mitigating factor for his financial impropriety.
What’s striking – and pleasing – is the fundamental acceptance of this line of reasoning. Even though it wasn’t considered enough, and Laws has consequently had to resign, the point is that Laws’ hiding his homosexuality was indeed accepted as a mitigating factor and not a further revelation doubling the scandal.
It’s hard to imagine that this would have been the case even 15-20 years ago. The first openly gay MP – Labour’s Chris Smith – only came out in 1984, and Laws would have been the first openly gay Lib Dem if he’d come out before being elected in 2001. As Sunder notes, newspapers like The Sun until relatively recently ran stories about Britain being run by a “gay mafia”. Not so long ago national newspapers – and indeed, Governing parties – frequently implied that homosexuality equaled pedophilia.
Although this is a disaster for Laws’ personal career, and many gay rights advocates might feel dejected that in 2010 a top politician still feels the need to hide his sexuality, the big-picture story here is a positive one. As I noted when David Cameron stumbled through his Gay Times interview, these are in fact signs of progress.
Of course we’re not yet at the level of full gay equality. That would be a world in which sexuality is as irrelevant as having brown eyes. But when a national politician can plausibly claim that he committed financial impropriety to hide his sexuality, and this is viewed with a degree of sympathy rather than further disapprobation, things are getting better.
Having said that, you can’t be helping Boy George wield the axe and slashing public services after you’ve claimed £40,000 of taxpayer money against the rules.* On balance, Laws had to go. The interesting question now is what Cameron’s right-wing backbench loons make of all this – and whether they use it as a stick to beat the Coalition leaders and undermine this centerist LibCon arrangement.
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* Although the irony here is that Laws would have personally profitted if he had stuck to the rules.
senusert said,
May 30, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Or, you just might, as a Gay Man, be entirely disgusted by his conduct. You may also feel that being judged double standard incredibly hypocritical, and intesely degrading; that in fact, all that matters is whether your conduct is honorable and conscientious.
There is a difference between something being explicable and being defensible. Being gay, and wishing for privacy, is no excuse for fraud, in fact it’s a rather poor excuse.
Paul Sagar said,
May 30, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Well I think so too.
But what I’m interested in is the way it was used as an excuse and not seen as a scandal in itself.
Hengist said,
June 11, 2010 at 3:46 pm
ODE TO A LAND WITHOUT LAWS
Of Laws what is writ?
The hubris of a banker
preaching public thrift?
What of the watchman
o’er the nation’s treasure
who took from the hoard
to steal private pleasure?
Fools may proclaim
a Kingdom ingrate
to waste the wits
of this Man of State.
Yet far better gone is he
who took his duties light
to fritter our wealth
on another sodomite.