Apology isn't enough for wronged service personnel

Led away in full view of his colleagues and the watching public, he was held in the castle prison, where he underwent intensive interrogation until he “cracked” and was summarily dismissed from the Army.

Paul’s “crime” was to be gay at a time when it was illegal to be homosexual and a member of the armed forces. The rule was stringently enforced, with undercover military police officers cruising bars, propositioning servicemen and women they suspected of being gay in order to “out” them.

This was not back in the dark, unenlightened days of the 1950s when Alan Turing, the British codebreaking war hero and father of modern computing was chemically castrated after being convicted of gross indecency for homosexual acts.

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Paul’s five-year Army career ended in disgrace in 1998. It wasn’t until two years later that the law was finally changed and the punitive and anachronistic ban on LGTB people serving in the military ended.

Last year Rishi Sunak stood up in the House of Commons and issued a public apology to all those who had been affected, describing the ban as an “appalling failure of the British state”.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister said that the Government "deeply regretted" the treatment of LGBT service personnel, and that it was working to implement a number of reparations, including paying compensation. A year later, they are still waiting.

That Mr Sunak was happy to condemn the benighted failings of his predecessors, while leaving it to his successors to foot the bill, is emblematic of the hypocrisy surrounding such public apologies.

In the absence of meaningful reparations, what is their purpose other than to allow the issuer to bask in the virtue of being seen to respond to a fashionable public clamour, whatever that may be?

In 2016 it was announced that thousands of gay and bisexual men - convicted prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, and the reduction of the age of consent to 16, in 2001 - were to receive official pardons.

The action, which followed the 2013 exoneration of Mr Turing, applied to anyone who had been found guilty of consensual homosexual sex, who would have their names cleared and the offences removed from any criminal record checks.

"It is hugely important that we pardon people convicted of historical sexual offences who would be innocent of any crime today," said the then Justice Minister Sam Gyimah.

Of the 65,000 men convicted under then-repealed laws, 50,000 were dead and among some of those still alive, it was a pious, empty gesture.

One man convicted of gross indecency in 1974, said he would refuse to accept a pardon which, he said, still implied that he was guilty.

“I was not guilty of anything. I was only guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

Rishi Sunak last year issued an apology for the historic ban on LBGT service personnel (Image: PA)

Nor could the Government make up its mind about what the statute of limitation was for culpability.

While Mr Turing, convicted of gross indecency in 1952, was included, the scope of the general pardon did not extend to the playwright Oscar Wilde, who served two years' hard labour in Reading Jail from 1895 during a Victorian clampdown of homosexuality.

There is no doubt that Mr Turing’s treatment, viewed through modern sensibilities, was hateful and primitive. But it took more than 50 years, the declassification of secret documents detailing the work of codebreakers at Bletchley Park, a mountain of books and newspaper articles and a Hollywood film for him to become a cause celebre.

The notion that public apologies and criminal exonerations appear to be restricted to cases that garner enough media attention, or which present easy wins for politicians to ingratiate themselves with persecuted communities, should sit uneasily with anyone concerned with the multitude of other historical injustices that go unaddressed.

Many of the same politicians who supported Mr Sunak’s welcome apology for the historic ban on LGBT service personnel, are among the loudest voices opposing the removal of public statues and endowments of figures associated with the slave trade.

We are either a society that recognises and disowns the crimes and misdemeanours of our predecessors or we don’t, and it shouldn’t matter that their victims are alive or dead for us to do so.

Those who argue that we can’t - and shouldn’t try - to rewrite history, and that the actions of past generations must be viewed in the context of the attitudes and mores of their time, might have a point. But if we apply those principles to one generation, surely we must apply them to all.

If we decree that the state failed one group of people 50 years ago, then we must also give equal consideration to whether another group of people was failed 200 years ago.

Slave owners were, in large part, the embodiment of the state in the 18th century, and to continue to honour them is as wrong as it would be to build and retain statues of the politicians responsible for drafting the legislation used to convict Mr Turing and others.

Meanwhile, Paul Wilson continues to wait to be compensated for a life ruined by an unjust and vindictive law.

“It's an experience I would like other people to know about, but there's so many people out there don't know this went on. It's something that was us. To think that my career was over in minutes. Taken away. Wrecked. It was my life. After five years, cut short.”