AN SNP MP is trying to introduce a bill in the House of Commons that would pardon the 49,000 gay and bisexual men cautioned or convicted under historic, homophobic laws.
John Nicolson topped the ballot for private members’ bills in the Commons, which means he has a good chance of getting his proposal onto the statute books,
The East Dunbartonshire MP believes he can build cross-party support for the Bill, dubbed the Turing Law, in honour of codebreaker and pioneering British computer scientist Alan Turing, who was prosecuted and chemically castrated for having consensual sex with a man. He killed himself two years later using cyanide.
Nicolson said: “We have made huge progress towards achieving LGBTI equality in recent years, with historic changes in laws and attitudes that have seen Scotland now become the best country in Europe for LGBTI legal rights and with the rest of the UK close behind. Despite this welcome and hard-won progress we must never forget the appalling way that LGBTI people have been treated in the UK in our recent past and throughout history.
“The criminalisation of thousands of gay and bisexual men, who were cautioned, convicted, imprisoned and even castrated under homophobic laws that banned sex between consenting adult men is a blemish on our history that we must now apologise and atone for as a society.”
When Turing was pardoned in 2014, his family took to Downing Street with a petition signed by 500,000 people demanding the government offer pardons to all men persecuted for their homosexuality.
A similar bill was proposed by then-Labour leader Ed Miliband last year. At the time Turner’s great niece Rachel Barnes said: “I consider it to be fair and just that everybody who was convicted under the gross indecency law is given a pardon. It is illogical that my great uncle has been the only one to be pardoned.”
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