Westminster Commentary
'THE vice Anglais,' said Mr. Leslie Hale, 'is not buggery but hum- buggery.' It was the perfect epi- graph for the House of Commons debate on the report of the Wolfenden Committee.
But what would. you? The Committee reported nearly fifteen months ago. The stock excuse advanced by the Government for its delay in providing time for the House to debate it (Mr. Butler repeated it in a speech which I was tempted to wrap in newspaper for the same reason that Mr. Polly's uncle wrapped in newspaper an eel he was using as a weapon—that it was too slippery to hold otherwise) is that the lapse of time was necessary to allow 'public opinion' to manifest itself. This, if I may say so, is a proper hum- bugger's argument. The very fact that the Com- mittee was ever set up at all was one of the greatest manifestations of public opinion possible, for on matters of this kind the Government is invariably, and as a matter of policy, at least twenty years behind the least informed member of the public. In the notorious case which, as much as anything, gave rise to the Wolfenden Committee, it was not the defendants who were the objects of a hostile demonstration by the waiting crowd outside, but the police witnesses. And what better cross-section of informed public opinion could you hope to have than the members of the Committee itself? Or is it the Government's contention that their own mental metabolism is rigidly adjusted to that of the average village idiot? As a matter of fact, of course, it is; but it is rare for even Mr. Butler to go so far towards admitting it in public.
Anyway, as it fell out, the debate took place in a grim shadow, and almost every Member who spoke was clearly conscious of it. And, just as the death of the suffragette who died when she threw herself under the hooves of a horse in the Derby silenced, at any rate temporarily, the more hysteri- cal and brutish part of the anti-suffragette cam- paign, so—though with one or two exceptions—this debate was conducted in consequence with a good deal of calmness and restraint. The upshot was that a practically empty House did indeed 'take note' of the Committee's Report, and the Govern- ment (not to mention the Opposition) for this relief gave thanks. And of course nobody mentioned that the only reason either side was not officially in favour of implementing the Committee's recom- mendations on homosexual practices was that both feared the electoral complications which might ensue.
So, as I say, they had this debate. Sir John Wolfenden, thinking his thoughts (and looking as if the bench was growing very hard indeed), sat alone in the Distinguished Strangers' Gallery; how he refrained from interrupting on several occasions I really do not understand. At the other side of the House Mr. Peter Wildeblood looked down more in sorrow than in anger. Both of as it turned out, figured largely in the debate, and the latter's book was almost as much in evidence as the former's. For the Government, Mr. Butler soft-shoe-shuffled his way in and out of his own inconsistencies. Speakers more naive than Mr. Butler sometimes tend to demolish their own arguments with a few indiscreet facts added afterwards. Not Mr. B., a boy so wide that I sometimes wonder how he gets through the door. His technique is to demolish his arguments before he presents them, in the hope that everybody will have forgotten the demolition when he finally gets around to what he has to say. But you really cannot, even if you are Mr. Butler, declare your conviction that men sent to prison for offences which harm nobody else come out of prison worse than they went in, and then go blandly on to insist that the men in question must still be sent to prison. (On second thoughts, you can; you must be able to, because Mr. Butler did.) Speaking for the Opposition, Mr. Greenwood declared that he spoke for himself, and followed this unpromising start by adding an assurance that he would be guided by the sense of the House. Considering the amount of nonsense that was subsequently talked, this—if it was seriously meant—could have been a rash thing to promise, but I have too much regard for Mr. Greenwood to imagine that he would change his opinions merely because they were not shared by, say, Alderman Black and Mrs. Jean Mann. But for whomever Mr. Greenwood spoke, he did at least say that he believed the Wolfenden Committee's recommendations on homosexuality should be implemented (Mr. Younger said it a good deal more forcefully when he came to wind up), and from a front-bencher that was, I suppose, food for gratitude, at any rate after Mr. Butler.
After Mr. Greenwood's sleek head had bobbed down, however, the gates were thrown wide. And a pretty odd lot of creatures swarmed through them from time to time. To begin with, a couple of psychiatrists came trotting up the gangplank, two by two, which made Mr. Bellenger's squeal 'We're not a collection of lawyers and psychi- atrists' even more ridiculous than, in the light of the number of lawyers in the House, it was already. As it happened, both the psychiatrists, Dr. Broughton and Dr. Bennett, came down against the Committee's main proposals on the homosexuality issue, and I thought in each case after making an unanswerable case in their favour. But both of them spoke with a quietness and a humility, a calmness and lucidity, that put to shame even before it was uttered some of the rubbish spoken later about psychiatrists. Dr. Broughton in particular (why do I not hear this admirable speaker more often?) gave a demon- stration that can only be described as noble of his belief that reason is a better—and a safer— guide than emotion. What on earth is a man who believes in reason doing in party politics? No matter; there he is, and we must cherish him.
For if we do not, we shall find ourselves left with only the Bellengers, the Blacks and the Dances, not to mention the Mrs. Manns, and fat lot of chance reason will have then. It will a long time before I hear a speech as rastY, hysterical, and incoherent as that of Mr. Bel' lenger; at least I hope it will. He doesn't hold, he told us, with all this 'fancy talk' about love and affection between homosexuals, but there was no evidence that he understood or had studied ant thing of the subject other than what can be picker up on top of a bus. Even the poor Lord Chamber' lain, that blue-nosed laughing-stock, was too lax fa Mr. Bellenger in his approach to this subject, and as for television—why, homosexual influence on it did as much harm as subliminal advertising. 'We are representatives,' he yelled (which way 4diti this walking vox populi vote in the privilege debate last session, I wonder—or rather do not wonder it appears that a representative cannot agree to s proposal that might bring an end to the agony' misery, degradation, cgrruption and suffering tnal many of his fellow-beings suffer as a result of $ law which does no corresponding good.
Mr. Bellenger yapped on, declaring on the ject of prostitutes that we must not only 'cl down the full harshness of the law' on t women, but also do something for their generation; he apparently saw no inconsistent the proposals. And his attack on Mr. Wildebl was as brutal as it was unforgivable: it wa the middle of it that I realised of whom Bellenger reminded me. If Mr. John Got could speak, he would speak like this. Still, it was not all like this, though a 80°4 deal of it was. Why are people like Mr. Dance permitted to contribute to a debate on a subject of this kind? They add nothing to it, and, indeed, subtract a good deal. A tall, gangling friend of mine insisted that people like Mr. Dance rant be let loose so that the public can see their own fallacies mirrored in their representative and eventually learn better. I remain uncoil- vinced that sense is not better for the public than Dance, who trotted out yet again the stuff about psychiatry paying too much attention to the n ind of the murderer and too little to that of his victim. Now, in words of one syllable for Mr' Dance : if you ex-am-ine the mind of a,crim-it you may find out why he commits crimes, and thus stop o-ther crim-in-als in time, but you will not find this out by ex-am-in-ing the mind of his vic-tim. Nor, I imagine, by examining the mind of Mr. Dance, who believes that hoi sexuality was the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire and Nazi Germany.
I comfort myself with the two psychiatrists, with Mr. Jay—almost unprecedentedly brief and quite unprecedentedly sensible—who spoke with quiet courage of his support for the Wolfenden Committee's recommendation on homosexualitY, with Mr. Hale and Mr. Rawlinson, with Mr. Silver' man, whose interruptions were often the only sensible things, in his opponents' speeches, and above all with the thought that history cares nothing for the cowardice of politicians and Will eventually take care even of this problem. SO' the debate was on the whole a depressing experience. Somebody wrote to the Spectator Doi long ago to say, among other things, that '0 chief function of the man of letters is to deliver his fellows from barbarism.' And what, praY the chief function of our legislature? To deliver them back again? Low
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