Equal Ever After: The Fight for Same-Sex Marriage - and How I Made It Happen

By Lynne Featherstone

"My story starts at the very end of the journey to equal marriage rights. I stand on the shoulders of giants..." In the future, people will find it difficult to believe that until 2014, somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent of Britain's population were excluded from marriage. As Equalities Minister during the coalition government, Lynne Featherstone played a fundamental role in rectifying this. From setting the wheels in motion within government, to her experiences of the abuse with which the gay community is regularly confronted, through her rebuttals against the noise and fury of her opponents, and finally to the making of history, Lynne details the surprising twists and turns of the fight. Filled with astonishing revelations about finding allies in unexpected places and encountering resistance from unforeseen foes, Equal Ever After is an honest account of one woman's pivotal efforts during the turbulent final mile. This is real, lived history - recent history. Many of us celebrated on the day the dream became reality; many of us know people whose lives were changed by the events described here. In this inside story, Lynne reveals the emotional lows and the exhilarating highs involved in turning hard-won social acceptance into tangible legal equality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Jan 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785900143

Book preview

PREFACE

My story starts at the very end of the journey to equal marriage rights. I stand on the shoulders of giants. The credit for same-sex marriage goes to them.

I want to dedicate this book to all those who have suffered the pain, insult and injury of inequality; to all those who have battled prejudice, discrimination and hatred; to all the brave heroes of the same-sex marriage journey on which I had the opportunity to go the final mile.

My thanks go to the campaigners, the LGBT community and the political parties who pooled their efforts. To Nick Clegg, who supported me all the way. To David Cameron for sticking with it. To Labour for civil partnerships. To my civil servants for their dedication. To Mark Pack for helping me to get elected in the first place. And to Iain Dale and Biteback for recognising that this story needed to be told.

This is my memory. To those who feel they should be in this book and are not I apologise. To those who are in the book but wish they weren’t – tough.

I wrote this book to get my story on the record.

Same-sex marriage is my happy place in politics and always will be.

CHAPTER 1

THE DIE IS CAST

Imade my intention to deliver same-sex marriage very clear to my officials soon after arriving in office.

Same-sex marriage wasn’t in the coalition agreement. Nor was it in any of the main manifestos, as has been pointed out countless times. It just wasn’t on the agenda but I thought it ought to have been. It was glaringly obvious to me that people of the same sex who love each other should have exactly the same right to marry as heterosexual couples. I was Equalities Minister, moreover a Liberal Democrat Equalities Minister. If I didn’t use this opportunity of a lifetime to deliver liberal policies, who would?

I received some very good advice very early from an induction session at the Institute of Government, where we new ministers had been corralled so that old hands could imbue in us some idea of what we were meant to be doing. Part of the session involved two big beasts of yesteryear: Michael Heseltine and Andrew Adonis. What on earth could I learn from a Conservative and a Labour lord? Quite a lot, as it happened. I owe both of them a big thank-you for what they told us that day.

Michael Heseltine’s advice was to the effect that we newbies had no idea of the level of work that would rain down on us as ministers. That we would shortly be overwhelmed with the relentless daily juggernaut of submissions, correspondence, miscellaneous paperwork, parliamentary debates, oral questions, Bill committees, evidence sessions with select committees, meetings, briefings, speeches, all-party parliamentary groups, events, visits, awards ceremonies and box work. Unless we decided on our own priorities and relentlessly drove them forward, we would find that we would leave office having done all our required work very nicely, but quite possibly not having done anything that we actually wanted to do.

I remember thinking as the avalanche hit that I would decide on my absolute priority issue. It would be something liberal and it would not be just part of my daily work. It would be something that no one else could or would do – well, not in this parliament. I said to my private office that I didn’t know how many times in history a Liberal Democrat would be Equalities Minister. Our disastrous result in the 2015 elections, when I lost my seat along with so many others, means it may be quite a while until the next one. I determined to make the most of the job whilst I had the opportunity. I made it crystal clear that my number one priority was to find a way to introduce same-sex marriage into the government programme and deliver it thereafter.

Private office is composed of civil servants who sit outside the minister’s office and act as the minister’s gatekeepers. They were also the minister’s link with the rest of the civil service. I had a diary secretary, a bitch of a job, taking a massive amount of patience and accuracy; a private secretary, who was my head of office; and four assistant private secretaries, each of whom was in charge of a portion of my very extensive portfolio. I mention this in particular because the other excellent piece of advice I got that day at the Institute of Government was how to get the best out of your civil servants.

The advice from Andrew Adonis was very clear. Civil servants want direction. In contrast to political life as portrayed in The Thick of It or Yes Minister – which, whilst wildly exaggerated, certainly have moments of uncomfortable accuracy – in real political life, if you tell your officials what you want to achieve they will do the very best they can to deliver for you. But if you are not careful the machine of government will roll on and over you. If you don’t make your wishes clear then your diary will fill up with duties, leaving you no time for anything proactive.

I went back to the Home Office and set out my priority to introduce same-sex marriage. It was liberal. It righted a wrong and it would mean a huge amount to those it gave the freedom to choose to marry. I believed it was possible. Thus I decided and set my course.

I have an awful lot to thank my civil servants for. I cannot name them but they know who they are and one day, when the appropriate time has elapsed, I would love to do so. It was their desire and determination to help me deliver my mission on same-sex marriage that helped break through the early barriers and blockages that could so easily have strangled the whole project at birth.

In terms of my portfolio, the title of Equalities Minister was a bit of a misnomer. Not unnaturally, people assumed that I had responsibility for women, and for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people – which I did – but also for disability, race, older people and younger people – which I did not. Disability resided at the Department for Work and Pensions, as did the responsibility for older people. Race sat in Communities and Local Government under a ‘community cohesion’ hat and I have no idea where youth was at all.

Besides LGBT and women, I was in charge of the Equality Act and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The bulk of my work, however, was not as Equalities Minister but as a Home Office minister with responsibility for a wide range of issues. Those issues ranged from violence against women, private investigators, internet child safety, criminal records, gangs and girls, prostitution, animal experiment licensing, hate crime and much, much more to wheel clamping (which I banned on private land).

Additionally, David Cameron appointed me as the ministerial champion for tackling violence against women and girls overseas. It was a role I kept for all five years of the coalition. Actually, that is not entirely accurate. Cameron had originally chosen a Conservative to carry out this important role. However, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, came into my office one day during the first few weeks of government and said she wanted to ask me a favour. Would I be willing to take on this role? She didn’t believe that the person Cameron had selected was suitable. (Yes, I do know who it was. No, I am not going to tell.) I have to say I was a bit surprised that Theresa wanted to insert a Liberal Democrat into what had clearly been a role earmarked for a Conservative. I don’t know what was found wanting with the person Cameron had originally selected but I was delighted to be offered the role and accepted immediately. This was to be the role that led to my work on ending female genital mutilation and indeed to my work in Africa both on violence against women and on gay rights.

The equality context in which I would be trying to secure what turned out to be one of the most contentious pieces of legislation of our time was not promising. My Conservative coalition partners were hardly falling over themselves to promote equality measures. They hated the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). They hated the Human Rights Act. On coming into office, they set about trying to get rid of both. We Liberal Democrats stopped them on both counts.

The Conservative track record on matters homosexual was legendary and not in a good way. The last time they were in government they introduced Section 28. Section 28 came into force on 24 May 1988. It stated that a local authority ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. Not counting abstentions, a majority of Conservatives voted in 1999 against the equal age of consent, in 2002 against gay adoption, in 2003 against the repeal of Section 28, in 2004 against gender recognition, and in 2013 against same-sex marriage. They did, however, support the Civil Partnership Bill in 2004.

Undeterred, I believed that same-sex marriage was the right thing to do, and my Conservative colleagues would have to see it my way. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

When I penned the precise words that opened the door to same-sex marriage I was sitting at the back of the canteen on the ground floor of the House of Commons. This area is reserved for members and their guests only, in a quaint form of apartheid that still pervades the House, but it is blissfully less busy than most places and quieter. One of my assistant private secretaries had come to me earlier that day and politely suggested that my first effort at writing what needed to be written to kick off my mission on same-sex marriage might not be quite strong enough to deliver what I wanted. So there I sat with my somewhat anxious civil servant hovering over me as I wrote these fateful words:

During the consultation on civil partnerships in religious premises it has become clear that there is a genuine desire on the part of some to move forward to equal civil marriage and equal civil partnerships. The government will work with those with a key interest in this to examine how we might move forward to legislation.

You can see that this original text did not include religious marriage (which did come to pass) but did include equal civil partnerships (which did not come to pass). How and why these things changed are part of the story I tell here. However, these are the original words that I wrote that set the same-sex marriage wheels in motion within government.

I had to get the wording precisely right. I had to make it strong enough to signal the coalition’s intention to proceed with same-sex marriage all the way through to legislation. However, I had to avoid making it so strong that it would frighten the horses, the horses being those for whom these words would have to pass muster. Same-sex marriage would have to jump through all manner of procedural hoops. It would also have to get past a number of key people in government, many of whom would not be in agreement with me on the matter.

I would present this wording to Theresa May for her approval. She was my first and most important hurdle. If I couldn’t get it past her it would never see the light of day. She would use it to do a ‘write-round’ to the whole Cabinet to get each Cabinet minister’s comments on our intention to proceed with this new proposal. This is normal government procedure and thus enables any new proposal to be shot down theoretically by any Cabinet minister. I sent the wording to her via her private office, and held my breath.

Whilst we are waiting for Theresa’s response, on which hangs the whole of the rest of this story, perhaps I had better begin at the beginning and explain why and how I got the idea and what made me think I could do it.

Timing is everything.

The journey towards equal rights has proceeded inch by pain-filled inch. Truly heroic and brave campaigners have had to fight every step of the way. But as we entered the twenty-first century, the pace of change on LGBT rights accelerated. Labour introduced a series of ground-breaking equality measures equally supported by the Liberal Democrats.

In 2000 the bar on homosexuals serving in the armed forces was removed. In 2001 the equal age of consent was introduced. In 2002 same-sex couples were granted equal rights to adopt. In 2003 Section 28 was repealed in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In 2004 the Civil Partnership Act passed, enabling same-sex couples to register their partnerships. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 gave transgender people the right to legal recognition in their appropriate gender. In 2006 the Equality Act passed and enabled the setting up of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Act also made it illegal to discriminate in the provision of goods and services on the basis of ‘protected characteristics’. The legally protected characteristics are: race, religion and belief, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, gender reassignment, sex, pregnancy and maternity, marriage and civil partnerships.

In 2008 the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act enabled lesbians and their partners equal access to legal presumption of parentage in cases of in vitro, self- or assisted fertilisation. In 2009 Gordon Brown made an official apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being gay. David Cameron apologised for the introduction of Section 28 during Margaret Thatcher’s government. The time was right.

But why same-sex marriage? Of all the things I could have chosen to champion as a Home Office minister and Minister for Equalities, why this? Raking through the deep recesses of my memory to my earlier life perhaps I could find some clues.

I always had an overdeveloped sense of injustice. I was endlessly trying to help people, whether they wanted help or not: visiting older citizens as a teenager to keep them company; spending a brief spell as a disc jockey at a local hospital and latterly as a volunteer in the Royal Free Hospital. I never understood that the better part of valour is discretion and if anyone told me I shouldn’t do something, I did it.

In my early days I wanted to be an actor. Well, they say politics is showbiz for ugly people. So in my teens, as well as endless school play performances, I attended many evening classes including mime, acting and tap dancing. This was during the late ’60s. Sensibly, I ditched acting. Now, my mother had always said if there was one thing worse than drama school it was art school. So I went to art school. I did a diploma course in ‘Communications & Design’ at what was then Oxford Polytechnic but is now Oxford Brookes University. I absolutely loved it. I studied graphics, design, photography, film and typography.

It was at Oxford Polytechnic, or OxPoly, that I led my first political campaign, although I didn’t know it was a political campaign until the first telegrams from student unions across the country arrived offering to come and ‘sit in’. The campaign I led at OxPoly was to save the course that I was on. The college wanted to become a university, but in order to do so it had to get rid of all its non-degree courses.

I was a rabid fan of polytechnics. Polytechnics were tertiary colleges that offered higher diplomas, undergraduate degrees and postgraduate education. To me that mix of all of us together, whether we were studying for a catering, design or building diploma, or for a Bachelor of Arts or an architectural degree, created a wonderful melting pot.

My course was one of the first to be targeted for closure. Because it was a design course and because the design staff would all lose their jobs if the course were axed, I was given a six-week sabbatical to fight the proposals. My classmates and I went to work creating posters, leaflets and fliers. We organised marches, rallies and meetings. I had my first outing in the media, an interview on Radio Oxford. I took part in my first debates and made my first public speeches.

The campaign itself was called ‘Save Art – No Time Toulouse’. It seems odd now but at the time Monty Python had a catchphrase, ‘no time to lose’, on which they punned with ‘Toulouse’. We thought we were so very clever. But we did ‘win’. The process was halted. Given it is now Oxford Brookes University, sadly it was only a temporary reprieve.

That was clearly when I got a taste for politics and campaigning. I was politicised during the campaign and realised, probably for the first time, that if you wanted to change things you had to get in there and fight.

I was very studious. Whilst my classmates would never get in to the art studio until lunchtime or later, I would be there from early every morning until late at night. One of my projects was to make a film and I had decided that I wanted to make a film about life in the gay community. Now this was back in around 1972, which is the year that Gay News, the first gay magazine in the United Kingdom, was first published. Things were changing. My sister’s best friend was gay and he had lots of other gorgeous, gay friends whom I loved to hang out with. I persuaded them to my cause and they spent much time with me recording their stories. I wish I could find the tapes! As far as I can remember from these very hilarious afternoons we spent together this was an era when much of their time was taken up with late-night strolls in small, dark lanes in Notting Hill. Sadly I never did get round to actually making the film but we had a lot of fun. I spent twenty years as a designer after leaving college, working mainly with architects, transport planners, civil engineers and transport consultants.

I joined the Liberal Democrats in November 1991. I am a natural liberal – a live-and-let-live kind of human being. In 1996 I wrote a piece for Duncan Brack, editor of the Journal of Liberal History, for a book he was editing titled Why I am a Liberal Democrat.

THE POWER OF ONE

It took me twenty years to commit to a political party. I proudly marched against Maggie Thatcher – union snatcher – in student days in the early ’70s, when to be anything other than revolutionary would have ruined one’s social life. And then realised when Labour finally did come to power the grim reality of their government. Thus believing both the Tories and Labour to be fatally flawed and regarding the Liberals, politically speaking, as non-starters, I turned my back on politics and concentrated on real life. Twenty years on as I watched society falling into the abyss, I realised that the political process is real life and if I wanted a different reality I would have to fight for it within that process.

Looking deeply into the political pot to see where my energies could best be targeted, I found that what once in its raw ‘Liberal’ form appeared to be simply a rather woolly view of individualism had now grown up and become a well-rounded political ideology. Liberal Democracy now provided the political hook on which to hang my hat. Not perfect – no system is – but in the end political expression must externalise personal core belief, and for me that is, and has always been, fairness and the power of one. The power of one is the most potent force for change which exists on this planet.

I borrowed the title of that piece from the name of a book by an Australian writer, Bryce Courtenay. I used it not because of any particular similarity in content – but I just loved that title. I so believe that each of us can be powerful. And in politics it is the power of one to bring others to a cause.

Injustice, discrimination and prejudice take many forms. In Africa, where I went many times over the two years after I left the Home Office as