Love and Liberty

“Equality is not the same as sameness” was the arrogant war-cry of the Apartheid regime and, shamefully, now of Liberal Democrat Queen Mum-equivalent Baroness Shirley Williams. Reports by Pink News and Lib Dem Voice of grandstanding homophobic actions are finally bringing into the open the unpleasant side of her that many of us have had personal experience of over the years.

There are many things to admire about Shirley Williams, but her ‘commitment to equality’ isn’t one of them. It’s an extremely narrow one: proposing only her own programme of equality for women; and only the ‘right sort’ of women. It’s a great shame but perhaps unsurprising that she’s become so conservative in her years as an unelected, unaccountable peer that no-one can ever vote out. It goes back a lot further and wider than merely leading the charge in the House of Lords to put the gays in their place and propose legal special privileges for – surprise – only people like Shirley Williams.

Shirley Williams – Bully

I’ve never said this in public before. I’m writing now in part because my ever-declining health means I’m unlikely ever to seek any position again within the Lib Dems through patronage or election. I’m obviously spurred by her being not just a quiet fellow-traveller with the House of Lords bigots but appointing herself chief of the anti-equal-marriage legislators. And I regret not having thought about this over the last few months and supplied testimony to the Lib Dems’ independently-led enquiry on internal party processes. Because there is no way on Earth that I would ever trust any internal process led by Shirley Williams. She is the most arrogant and biggest bully I have ever encountered within the party, and the one who was most open about their prejudices and about acting on them.

What particularly sticks in my mind is not just her very prominent and active legal homophobia but her deplorable attitude to young people – patronising, hostile and going out of her way to block their progress within the Lib Dems. I remember particularly vividly her spiteful, patronising and ageist attacks on all the young women who disagreed with this self-satisfied grandee during the party’s debates over sexist shortlists, where any woman with the temerity to disagree with her exact decree of what should be was put down in such ageist and indeed sexist terms that any similarly haughty male Lib Dem peer would have been excoriated for.

I have direct, personal experience of Baroness Williams’ bullying ways, too. When I was young and very active in the party I encountered occasional prejudices and put-downs: certainly, when I was over a decade younger than anyone else elected to the Federal Policy Committee, I was often looked down on and had to work much harder to prove myself. Despite having been very out at all levels of the party I’ve ever been involved in, back when that was surprisingly rare, I’ve experienced very little homophobia (usually discreetly), more often having had people sneer because I had no money and, for example, had to hitch-hike to meetings (at which I didn’t wear a suit). But the overwhelming number of times I saw people try to put me back in my box was for ideological reasons – which was fair enough, as long as we both had an equal say and I could beat them, too.

The biggest exception to all this was back in 1999. Who else but Baroness Shirley Williams was in charge of making sure than all new peers would be exactly the same as the existing peers interviewing all the newly elected members of the party’s first Interim Peers’ List. This was a baby-step innovation in which, against strenuous opposition from the party’s Great and Good, the Lib Dems took a small step towards practising what we preach in electing our party nominees to the Lords rather than leaving it entirely to the Leader’s patronage that appointed the Great and the Good like Shirley Williams from on high.

Believing that the average age and background – and views – of peers should change radically, I and several other (at the time) young people (at the time) put ourselves forward and, of the original fifty, three of us were elected to the panel in our twenties. I have never, ever, been so patronised and discriminated against in the party as by Shirley Williams on that occasion: she made it very clear that she was against the plebs having a vote for Lords selection at all, and that she would do everything in her (considerable) power to prevent any young person being given a place, whatever the mere party members had voted for. It was less an interview than a lecture. She wasn’t openly homophobic to me at the time, but after the second time I’d mentioned my partner with the word “he” and she’d talked about “she” I decided not to bother correcting her again, as there was clearly no way she was ever going to get it.

Afterwards, I met up with another of the three, a young woman who also had never been so bullied and humiliated by anyone in the party as by Shirley, again primarily because of Baroness Williams’ quite open and arrogant ageism. It’s the only time I’ve seen a woman in tears at their treatment by anyone in the Lib Dems.

But she was both a young person and a woman who had the temerity to disagree with the great Shirley, so no doubt Baroness Williams would claim that she treated her ‘equally’ with her longstanding mates who were on the list… Just not the same.

So that’s Shirley Williams: a very, very narrow commitment to equality, for only ‘her’ chosen sort of women. Her latest arrogant moves for legal special treatment for her own special interests and people of her own background, her own interests and her own opinions shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen her commitment to equality for the Great and Good – but not for people who are not the same – at work over so many years.

How Do You Want To Be Remembered?

Update: Inspired by Baron Tony Greaves’ quite staggering degree of self-unawareness on the Lib Dem Voice thread – a Lord accusing a blogger of “using his privileged position… to pursue his personal hobbyhorses” and describing his fellow unelected, unaccountable, unbearable grandees as “good Liberals” for using the law and their ultra-privileged personal prejudices to grind my relationship into the dirt, as they have for many years, I ask a simple question. You might put it, politely, to any Lib Dem peers of your acquaintance.

Imagine a “good Liberal” of, say, the middle of the last century who had an impeccable record in progressive opinion and legislation save that, for reasons of moral concern, and religion, and tradition, they just weren’t comfortable with black people and white people marrying and strained every sinew in their later years to prevent the heinous sin of mixed-race marriage, because “Equality is not the same as sameness”.

Is there any way on Earth that we would remember their legacy as a “good Liberal” today?

How do Liberal Democrat Peers want their legacies to be remembered?

Former self-styled radical Tony Greaves appears to be going out of his way to prove the point that taking a place in a ‘democratic’ legislature from which no mere mortal has the power ever to remove you rots your brain into ‘going native’.

Labels: Bigotry, Gay, Liberal Democrats, Lords, Personal, Shirley Williams