Apology Of The Week: Norman Fowler

Margaret Thatcher's health minister today apologised for the controversial Section 28 of the Local Government Act as he backed a campaign to make sex education — including lessons on gay relationships — compulsory in schools.

Lord Fowler told the Evening Standard: “We have come a long way. It [Section 28] was a great mistake and I think it’s now recognised as a great mistake and I would apologise for it. It was totally misjudged.”

Lord Fowler was part of the Eighties Government that brought in the ban on schools from promoting homosexuality as a “normal family relationship”. The law was repealed in 2003.

He has signed a letter calling for sex education to be made statutory and suitable for both heterosexual and homosexual students.

The letter, written by gay rights campaigners, warned that children will get their sex education from internet pornography unless they are taught it by qualified teachers.

Lord Fowler, who was behind the Don’t Die Of Ignorance Aids information campaign in the Eighties, said properly taught school lessons could “torpedo inaccurate and sensationalised information” children come across online...Evening Standard.

And it only took a quarter of a century to realise this...

That same-sex SRE open letter in full.

And finally... Norman Fowler's recent book, Aids: Don't Die Of Prejudice.

Norman Fowler: Gay Icon?

'There are heroes in politics whose virtue goes almost unremarked. In the Lords this week Norman Fowler (as Baron Fowler of Sutton Coldfield) has been quietly pushing through a measure to allow migrants to Britain, including those not lawfully here, to be treated for HIV/Aids.
'It was he who, as Health Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s Government in 1986, took this country down the track of an energetic, expensive, positive, honest, generous response to the Aids crisis, launching a massive advertising campaign and helping us to lead Europe in grappling openly with the threat. And he’s still here, still “boring”, still the last man on Earth to want to be a gay icon, or any kind of icon, still patiently engaging with the machinery of public administration, still showing how government can matter and how politics can be worthwhile.'

Matthew Parris pays tribute to his former parliamentary colleague, Norman Fowler, in The Times.
Parris neglects to mention that Fowler's Aids awareness campaigns in the 80s were done despite the indifference of Margaret Thatcher to the Aids crisis, and the hostility of several cabinet members.* 
It's worth noting how there was no tabloid hysteria over the new measure, despite its conflation of three red buttons; "migrants", the NHS and HIV.

* See The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of Aids - Simon Garfield, page 107.