The Spectator

Victims of hysteria

Many innocent people have had their reputations besmirched in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal

This week, 49,000 gay men were granted posthumous pardons. Had Harold Macmillan’s government taken notice of this magazine in 1957 that number would have been far smaller. After the Wolfenden Report, we called for decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults and at the time we stood out among Fleet Street publications in taking this view, earning us the appellation ‘The Bugger’s Bugle’.

It would be tempting to think that the pardons, which form part of the Policing and Crime Bill, mark the end of a dark chapter. No longer, we are invited to believe, could good people like Alan Turing — himself pardoned in 2013 — be hounded to their deaths by misplaced and misapplied hysteria.

Yet our legal system still struggles to cope with sex offences. Issuing posthumous pardons for gay men is the easy bit for ministers — it costs them nothing to apologise for the actions of distant predecessors. What is far harder, but more urgent, is to apologise to the innocent people who have been hounded after being falsely accused of various sex offences in the febrile atmosphere since Jimmy Savile’s crimes were posthumously exposed in 2012.

Sixty years ago, the (many) critics of The Spectator’s stance argued that the law should reflect public opinion, rather than seek to steer it. If the consensus was that homosexuality should be punishable in the courts, that’s where the matter should end. In a front-page article, we argued differently: no national mood or newspaper moralist can justify keeping an ‘irrational and illogical’ law which was passed late one night in 1885 without discussion and possibly by mistake. Furthermore, when judges and policemen are expected to relax or intensify their efforts based on public opinion, the conditions are set for a witch hunt.

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