Talk of pragmatic change and an end to homophobic discrimination
Lord Waheed Alli is not your average peer. He was raised as an Indo-Carribean Muslim, left school at 16, is just 45 and is the only openly gay member of the House of Lords. Despite his outsider credentials, he has been labeled a crony and was originally cited by several newspapers as a member of the undemocratic ‘Kitchen Cabinet’. But this caricature of Alli invokes the wrong connotations. He is not a manipultaive politician playing a self-interested game. His involvement in the Labour party predates the making of his media fortune and to him, the Lords is certainly not the comfortable gentlemen’s club it is to others. Rather, it is a battleground for change on which Alli has fought difficult and personal battles; helping the passage of legislation on the age of consent, civil partnerships, gay adoption and more recently, race and gender-based discrimination.
I meet him in the offices of Chorion, the media company he runs, to discuss what New Labour has done for equality in Britain today and what the future holds for those persecuted in the past. He tells me of the “extraordinary change” in levels of discrimination against different races, creeds and sexualities. “There was a real euphoria. There were eighteen years of Conservative government where there was never a chance of things changing… That changing of attitudes dates back to that election and the feeling of huge relief.”
To Alli, this change was a pro-active process. New Labour had to drag Britain forwards. “The country and the Conservatives had always been backward looking. It was warm beer and cricket. It was John Major. It was a return to the values of a different era and the country was really comfortable with that. I like warm beer and cricket, don’t get me wrong. But what Tony Blair did was say “That’s fine. I’m not taking that away from you but our future can’t be returning to the past.” You have to turn around and show them a future that’s different.”
Employing a characteristic reasonableness, Alli clarifies: “Traditional values that are a moral framework, a religious framework, I accept is the bedrock of what we believe. But that does not mean that all people are not equal, it does not mean you can discriminate against people you don’t like.”
He is keen to point out the credit Blair deserves for progress on gay rights. “Tony had the opportunity, at that age of consent debate, to walk away from the issue in the same way Bill Clinton had walked away from gays in the military. He could have said, “I’ve fulfilled my commitment. There are two houses in Parliament and the Lords have blocked it. We tried our best.” “But he didn’t… practically every year after that he did something on the issue.”
Alli approaches politics with an enchantingly principled pragmatism. Not one to dwell on the conceptual intricacies of an issue, Alli seems keener to employ the skills that no doubt helped him to succeed in business. He is a man who wants to effect change, not just talk about it. “It’s really easy, when you’re not sitting in Parliament, to take very entrenched positions and to argue because in the end its an argument between friends. When you sit in those chambers, your job is to take people with you and if you can, it sticks – it won’t go backwards. If you force people to accept it they’ll reverse it when they get into power.” The same pragmatism is evident in his dealing with the Lords as an institution. “I used to fight about all kind of things… You’re not supposed to take your jacket off. I take my jacket off. What are they going to do about it? Absolutely nothing. They leave you alone and you leave them alone.”
At the top of Alli’s current political to-do list is the safe passage of the Equality Bill through the Lords. The bill aims to ‘take all the changes we’ve made over the last decade or so [relating to equality and discrimination], look at the inconsistencies and sort them out.’ Alli tries to make it sound like a technocratic formality. In fact, the proposed changes have faced fervent criticism on a number of grounds. One provision enables positive discrimination. Employers will be empowered to choose a woman or a black man over a white man when they are equally well suited to the job in the name of increasing diversity in the workforce. “We should employ more women in the workforce because clearly half the population can’t be stupid. Most importantly, it’s about changing the way people look at someone. There are two candidates to do the job. Why are you going for one not the other?”
A second area of contention involves a section seeking to end the right of religious organizations to exclude people from employment on the grounds of sexuality. It also includes an amendment that Alli himself has successfully attached to the bill, removing the ban on religious venues and language for civil partnerships. The Pope has described these changes as an offence to natural law. “I can’t appease the Pope! He thinks what I do is evil and wrong.” But Alli, raised as a Muslim, is keen to show his deep respect for religion, without seeing it as sacrosanct. “I think it’s always important to understand that different religious communities will have different views, but there’s a huge disconnect between what the Pope says and what the mainstream Catholic community believes. Religion teaches us that we are equal, and deserve to be treated equally. I often sweep away the justification of how you’ve reached your moral code and ask what you moral code is. If you’re saying to me all people should be treated equally with love, care and respect, I’m probably with you. If your moral code is that the only people who can enter our kingdom of heaven are people that do this, this and this, I don’t agree.”
To Alli, this bill ‘completes the puzzle for gay rights.’ With the next step being “making sure the things we’ve done with legislation filter down and are deep in the way they change how society views people… If you go to small villages up and down the country I’m still pretty sure a 17-year-old girl feels particularly comfortable coming out to her family. The last 13 years have been about extending and equalizing the rights of gay men and women and we’re completing a long journey. The next decade will be defending.” In Alli’s eyes one of the threats in the future will be the Conservatives. “My worry is they say one thing and they do something else. They say they support us but every vote in the Lords is a free vote, they never whip it. They say they support us but their front bench never talks for us. On section 28, David Cameron voted against us but now says he was wrong. And so it’s always not now, not here, not this vote but I do support you. There are good people in the Conservative Party, but unless you have moral leadership from the front those people will be left out in the cold.”
The essence of Alli’s politics is clear in his disdain for fundamentalism and any influence it might have on politics. Perhaps influenced by his place as an outsider, he shows an intense skepticism when in comes to any political or social force that attempts to preach. Any institution or movement that claims a moral authority or adopts a condescending tone, Alli seems to resist almost instinctively. “I view fundamental movements as a threat to rights of all descriptions because they define themselves by saying if you’re not with us you must be wrong. They have a fight with gay people and let everyone else join in, they have a fight with the single parents and let everyone else join in, they have a fight against people who have sex before marriage and in the end you realize it’s ninety percent of the population you’re fighting against.”
For all its achievements in the area of discrimination and equality, Alli sees his party as “partly to blame for the disenfranchisement of the white working class” that has fostered racism and homophobia. “There are people who are poor and whose lives are really hard and our job is not to make them fed-up. They have a fair claim to a better life.” Solving these social problems is, to Alli, intimately related to building a Britain with less discrimination. “I can see why, if you live on an estate in Bradford, you might think your black neighbors get everything and you get nothing.”
Whether it be Bishops in the House of Lords, the Conservatives, or the man on a Bradford estate, Alli is keen to understand why they think a certain way. His complexion consists of clarity and certainty about what he thinks is right, a desire to understand and reconcile and a desire to act not just talk. Thankfully, these components have been working in tandem inside Alli’s head with extraordinary success, helping to make Britain a place free from discrimination. I hope, for all our sakes, he continues this brave crusade.
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