MisterTinkles Wrote:I never understood the ignorance and stupidity and blatant dumb-assed-ness of this kind of crap being done.
What the hell good does it do? NONE
Here's a bit of context.
At the end of the Second World War the UK had an election which put in a Labour government. Churchill, the war leader was kicked out; he was at that time a Tory. His achievements as war leader tend to overshadow his extremely reactionary views about the the place of the ordinary people. His aristocratic background (American mother notwithstanding) meant he saw their role as making the the lives of the upper classes comfortable with little chance of improving their own circumstances and, in the event of war, as cannon fodder.
Because there had been a war on, what many people had considered the moral fabric of society had frayed somewhat at the edges. There had been the notion that we might all be dead tomorrow (or possibly having to learn German, apologies to German speakers but it's a bloody difficult language) and so we'd best have fun while we could.
The loss of the 1945 election was a real kick in the teeth for the old order, the land-owning upper classes who were perceived as being the people who had taken us to war twice in a generation. When the Tories regained power under an ageing Churchill in 1951 they had a strong agenda to restore the old ways and undo the loss of respect for their betters that now characterised the lower orders.
Churchill's Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe (responsible for home affairs, mostly relating to law and order) was a reactionary homophobe, even by the standards of the day. When he later became Lord Chancellor he strongly opposed the findings of the Wolfenden Committee (which findings led to the limited decriminalisation of homosexual acts ten years later). He was quoted at the time as saying "I am not going down in history as the man who made sodomy legal".
There is a school of thought that holds that there was an anti-gay vendetta run by Maxwell Fyfe and certainly it was a dangerous time to be gay. There was generally an effort to put the lower orders back in their place and gay people have always been seen as transgressive, at that time as much a threat to the stability of the class system as to sexual mores (EM Forster's Maurice, written in 1913 and published in the seventies is an example).
Apart from this, the main indication of the government's callous disregard for the lives of ordinary people is epitomised by the case of Derek Bentley who was found guilty of the murder of a policeman in 1953. At the time of the murder Bentley was unarmed and in police custody at the scene of the crime. The fatal shot was fired by his accomplice (even this is in dispute) who was sixteen at the time and therefore couldn't be hanged.
All attempts to get a reprieve (which even the trial judge, himself notoriously illiberal, had expected) were rejected by the Home Secretary and Bentley was hanged. He was given a posthumous pardon in 1998.
So to answer your question, it kept the lower orders in their place. That was important sixty years ago. British society is every bit as stratified now as it was then but the dynamics that create and maintain the distinctions are different. Movement between the strata is also much easier. Gay people are among the beneficiaries of the changes that have taken place, possibly because with easier movement between social strata the greater ease of movement we have always had is less of a threat.
Turing was interesting in that he was part of the ruling class and might have been permitted to get away with what he did. His problem lay in the fact that he wasn't caught doing anything wrong, he admitted it to the police in the course of reporting a burglary. As far as he was concerned he had done nothing wrong (he was well ahead of his time).
His partner in the crime was a local working class man who engaged in a bit of petty larceny when he wasn't engaged in sexual shenanigans of one sort or another. There was no question of Turing's contribution to the war effort being taken into consideration, the work was very secret, not really coming to light until the eighties.
Such was the fear that the old order was under threat that the establishment were prepared to sacrifice one of their own to preserve it.
Alan Turing
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