Update
Greetings Iain Dale readers. And see Denis’s reply in the comments below, where he promotes Old Etonian literary prowess – and (wisely) changes the subject. I’ll respond to that later today. Now here.
* * * * *
Denis MacShane is genial and complimentary (as ever) but unrepentant in replying via a comment to my earlier posting about his unfortunate inability to distinguish Jaroslaw Kaczynski from Lech Kaczynski. Not (to be fair) that that is always straightforward.
Thus:
Where am I defending the indefensible?
Let’s look at this intelligently.
In this country homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967 by a Labour government. Three previous Labour governments stretching back over forty years had not legislated to do this. Were they homophobic?
Even the 1967 Labour government and the two administrations in the 1970s did not lift a bar on homosexuals joining the Diplomatic Service. That took a further twenty years, being accomplished when John Major became Conservative Prime Minister. Were Labour (of which Denis by then was a member) during that period champions of discrimination and homophobia?
No and no.
What we have seen over a long period – the best part of a century – is a steady changing of British attitudes in favour of a more ‘liberal’ and generous approach. Sometimes legislation has followed public opinion, sometimes it has led it.
Similar trends are happening elsewhere, sometimes far faster than we in the UK have moved. In Poland (a country with an overwhelmingly Catholic tradition) homosexuality was decriminalised far earlier than in the UK – 1932 to be precise (see this excellent Wikipedia account of the Polish approach).
So given this history, a certain humility might be appropriate for British politicians lambasting Polish politicians for their ‘anti-gay’ attitudes.
What I find indefensible in the silly noises made by Labour on the subject of the Conservative’s links to various other European centre right parties is the crude reductionist if not quasi-racist logic: Out there somewhere beyond the Swiss Alps be all sorts of ‘far right’ homophobic anti-semitic fascist lunatics, all with unpronounceable names. Eeek.
I do not "pretend" that everyone in Eastern Europe is a "paid up liberal tolerant chap" like myself. On the contrary, I have spent much of my life there and know rather too much about the region to assume that.
What I do know is that that part of the world has had a completely different historical and cultural experience from our own here in the UK, and that it is patronising on our part not to respect that.
In practice that means that we need to avoid lecturing central Europeans on liberal values, and be circumspect in assuming that they are somehow deficient if they have not ‘caught up’ with us in terms of social values.
Which, of course, has been precisely Labour’s own policy in practice.
Can anyone show me a single occasion when successive Labour Prime Ministers have made public or private words of complaint about Poland’s anti-homosexual (or anti-semitic) tendencies? Did Tony Blair or Gordon Brown ever take up personally with Lech or Jaroslaw Kaczynski the issue of their or the PiS party’s policies on gay rights, including the famous ban on the Warsaw gay parade?
No.
Why?
Because they knew perfectly well that by any normal world standards Poland is in law and substance a tolerant and open-minded country. And that if Poland needs to ‘catch up’ with our own sublime level of European social enlightenment, it will do so at its own pace and in its own way, not in response to senior finger-wagging foreign busybodies.
But what about countries where gays really are brutalised and oppressed? Such as Iran?
Here we are torn. Where on the foreign policy agenda do we put that issue? And is it best to try to achieve change through Dialogue or Pressure?
Reasonable people may and do differ on policy and tactics. As they do more widely in dealing with Islamist extremism.
The very worst FCO telegram I ever saw in my life was a report on the FCO-supported conference in Istanbul in 2006 aimed at promoting dialogue with influential Islamic thinkers. It gushed on about the wonders of dialogue and togetherness.
One of the thinkers subsidised at this event by the UK taxpayer was Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. See him here ranting on about ingenious ways to execute homosexuals:
Some say they should be punished like fornicators, and then we distinguish between married and unmarried men, and between married and unmarried women…
Some say we should throw them from a high place, like God did with the people of Sodom. Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement…The important thing is to treat this act as a crime
My point is simple.
If it is OK and indeed essential for a Labour foreign policy to reach out to brown-skinned Islamist bigots, why is it not OK and indeed essential to reach out to white-skinned Christian bigots as and where we find them?
Or do we racistly assume that brown-skinned bigots are more irrational and helpless in their bigotry than white-skinned bigots, hence we need to be kinder and more supportive to coax them along in the right direction?
A point I made in 2006 back to the FCO from my vantage-point in Warsaw, only to get no reply.
In short, I think that Denis MacShane in articles like his Guardian one today is promoting the Indefensible and (worse) the Dishonest.
It is indefensible and dishonest not to accept that it just takes time for social values to change, here and elsewhere, and that many countries in central Europe – just as we in the UK have done – are moving along their own trajectory at what is by historic standards a brisk pace.
It is indefensible and dishonest to point to this one homosexuality issue as a defining one, ignoring the broader policies of those political parties who oppose a federal Europe (although given Labour’s failure to give us the referendum as promised at the last election, it is no surprise that Labour want to talk about any European issue other than the main one).
It is indefensible and dishonest to bang on about Conservative policies, but not to explain why Labour have done nothing whatever to raise with the Kaczynski twins Labour’s pressing concerns about PiS-led homophobia in Poland.
It is indefensible and dishonest not to acknowledge the political triumph achieved in Poland by the Kaczynski party in marginalising the lumpen Red/Brown populist tendency in Polish politics (30% of the vote back in 2004), a huge gain for Europe and one reason why Poland’s economic management is in far better shape than ours.
Labour = Indefensible and Dishonest. Why I’ll be voting Conservative.
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