Tory MP Keith Hampson did us all a favour by getting arrested for policeman in a gay bar in Soho. Although presumably it was a coincidence that news should break at the same time that the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill was having its Third Reading in the House of Commons, it nonetheless provided a perfect demonstration of the hypocrisy of the British state in all its tawdriness.
Peter Purton Alliance MPs rapidly cobbled together an amendment to the Police Bill to reduce the powers of arrest that the police have under the 1956 Sexual Offences Act. They proposed that in future only police in uniform could make arrests for 'importuning' or 'gross indecency', evidence would not be admissable unless a third person would testify to having been offended.
Needless to say, the government defeated it. But the debate publicised the widespread and fierce persecution of lesbians and gay men by the police, and the connivance of most MPs of every party in this, until one of their own number fell foul of this repressive and discriminatory law.
Mr Eldon police had any conscious policy of harassing gays. Events in recent months suggest otherwise. Following on from the spate of cases involving the entrapment of gay men by 'pretty police' in Earls Court last summer (most of them subsequently acquitted) there have been numerous other cases of clearly organised harassment, the most significant being the raid by Customs and Excise officers on the London lesbian bookshop, Gays the Word on 10 April and the descent of 60 police on the gay disco at 'The Bell' in Kings Cross, plain-clothes operations against 'male opportuning' have to be authorised at a very high level, we can conclude only that either the police on the ground are out of control - or that there is a high-level police conspiracy to crack down on lesbians and gay men.
Indeed, the debate that the police will re-affirm their rules against acting as agents provocateurs can only be interpreted as an official admission that such behaviour takes place.
Lesbians and gey men have been prominent in the opposition to the massive consolidation and extension of police powers represented by the Police Bill. If the sudden display of concern in the House of Commons wakes up the Labour threat, made his best contribution defence of democratic rights.
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