What next from our posturing leaders? Official pardons for women burnt as witches in the Middle Ages?

FINGERS on buzzers, your starter for ten. This week, the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition announced a new and pressing priority for the government he hopes to lead after the election. Was it: (a) Rebuilding the country’s defences to combat the increasing threats posed by Russia and turmoil in the Arab world?

(b) Tackling the deficit, while restructuring the tax and benefits system to ensure a fairer distribution of wealth?

(c) Strengthening border controls to ease the downward pressure of mass immigration on wages and low-skilled jobs?

(d) A measure so supremely irrelevant to the many problems facing the living that it will apply only to people in their graves?

As followers of this interminable election campaign will be aware, the answer is (d).

For in an interview with Gay Times, Ed Miliband declared he would make it a ‘matter of priority’ for a Labour government to expunge the criminal records of 49,000 dead people, convicted under gross indecency laws before homosexual acts between consenting adults became legal.

I used to flatter myself that nothing could surprise me about the vacuous posturing of modern politicians in their quest for votes from special-interest groups.

Formal

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, animals’ rights… I thought I’d heard it all. But world-weary cynic that I am, I never dreamed I would hear the leader of a mainstream party putting corpses’ rights at the top of his agenda.

Of course, there are no prizes for guessing what inspired this latest inanity. Clearly, Mr Miliband is hoping to garner pink votes from the success of The Imitation Game, in which Benedict Cumberbatch portrays Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker who contributed so immeasurably to our victory over Hitler.

As the film recounts, the war hero and pioneer of modern computing was convicted of gross indecency with his male lover in 1952. He agreed to chemical castration as an alternative to prison and died two years later of cyanide poisoning, which the coroner judged suicide (though some blame his death on accident or murder).

Fast forward to 2009, when the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology on behalf of the British people for Turing’s abominable treatment.

In doing so, he was following a trend set by Tony Blair, who was forever apologising for things that weren’t his fault (the Irish potato famine, the slave trade etc) while never saying sorry for anything that was — the Iraq War, vandalism of the Constitution, the lies, the spin, the dumbing-down of exams, the abandonment of border controls, the corruption of Westminster and Whitehall . . . don’t get me started.

Mind you, Mr Brown’s apology was fine by me, since it gave official recognition to the mathematical genius’s massive contribution to the war effort (in his lifetime, he received only a measly OBE) — and if it gave comfort to his surviving friends and relatives, so much the better.

But t o campaigners f or Turing’s reputation, sorry was not enough. So, in 2013, the Coalition bowed to their pressure and secured a full Royal Pardon.

Though I’ve hugely admired Turing since details of his work at Bletchley began to emerge, I thought his pardon absurd.

True, attitudes to homosexuality have changed enormously in my lifetime (in Britain, at least — though not, as we’ve seen so horrifyingly this week, among followers of Islamic State). Indeed, by today’s liberal standards, the old laws forbidding consensual gay sex between adults were oppressive and plain wrong.

But the undisputed fact is that Turing broke the law as it stood in 1952 — and no scrap of royal paper can change that.

It’s one thing to offer recognition of our debt to the great man by publicly expressing regret for his treatment (though he has been past caring for six decades). It’s quite another — and completely futile — to try to undo history by issuing a pardon, as if he wasn’t really guilty as charged.

Convicted

There is a respectable point to pardoning a victim of a miscarriage of justice, even posthumously. For although, strictly speaking, a pardon granted under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy doesn’t quash a conviction, in these cases it is officialdom’s way of making clear the accused wasn’t guilty after all. In other words, it’s a way to set the historical record straight.

By contrast, a pardon granted to somebody who was justly convicted and punished, under the law as it stood at the time (however unfair that law may have been), is a spurious attempt to falsify the historical record — or, at best, to impose the attitudes of the present on the past.

For this reason, I was equally uneasy about the pardons granted in 2006 to the 306 soldiers shot f or desertion and cowardice in World War I. True, it is terribly sad they were condemned to death, and we can all feel enormous sympathy for them and their relatives. But that was the law in 1914-1918, when it was thought necessary to maintain military discipline, and nothing can change the fact that they broke it.

Which brings me back to Mr Miliband. Not content with Turing’s pardon, he tells Gay Times he wants to extend the same principle to all those, living or dead who were convicted of an offence ‘simply because of the person that they loved’.

Leave aside that many of the 49,000 convicted of gross indecency were guilty of offences that some of us might find sleazy, even by today’s enlightened standards. Indeed, ‘the person that they loved’, so romantically described by the would-be Prime Minister, may often have been a stranger picked up in a public lavatory.

Does Mr Miliband plan to set up a secretariat to review every case, sorting those who would be guilty of offences under current laws from those who were prosecuted only because of their partners’ sex? Sounds like a lot of work to me.

I must say my first thought was for the poor old Queen. I imagined her being forced to spend the evening of her life writing out tens of thousands of pardons like Turing’s: ‘Now know ye that We, in consideration of circumstances humbly represented unto Us, are Graciously pleased to extend Our Grace and Mercy unto the said Alan Mathison Turing and to grant him Our Free Pardon posthumously in respect of the said convictions.’

Fatuous

As it turns out, Mr Miliband plans only to extend to the dead a right that already exists for the living, enshrined in the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. Under this law, the Home Secretary can order convictions for consensual gay offences to be treated as ‘spent’ — that is, not to be disclosed in court proceedings or in Criminal Records Bureau checks on job applicants.

I can see this is a humane and useful measure for the living. But it beats me how it will help the dead — you don’t see many corpses at court or applying for jobs.

No, this is gesture politics of a most fatuous kind. Indeed, if posthumous pardons are to become the fashion under Mr Miliband, why not extend them to everyone convicted in the past under laws that have since been repealed?

What about all those women burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages for witchcraft? Or drivers who broke the 4mph speed limit at the dawn of the automobile age? Or shopkeepers who opened on Sundays?

And if posthumous pardons, why not posthumous convictions for behaviour that wasn’t outlawed until this age of enlightenment? Why not haul dead Victorians before the courts for sending children up chimneys? How about locking up the ghost of Lewis Carroll for making indecent images of children? And how about a posthumous criminal record for everyone who married a child before 1861, when the age of consent was ten?

But I mustn’t go putting ideas into Mr Miliband’s head. Enough to say that I, like most of us, would prefer our politicians to concentrate on the problems of the living. God knows, there are enough of them.