The spectre of Section 28

You may have heard today that a school has successfully destroyed plans for a new opera, Beached, written by Lee Hall of Billy Elliot fame. Their claim is that the lead character being clearly homosexual is “inappropriate” for the 300 primary-age children taking part in the performance, and organizers Opera North have supported the school in this decision. Regular readers of my blog (hello!) will probably agree with me that this is, of course, an obnoxious bigoted viewpoint that the school is perpetuating, but it got me thinking about the legality and, in particular, the ghost of Section 28. Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 was a piece of Conservative-era legislation created in response to a bit of Daily Mail hatred about a book called...

Posted by on Jul 4, 2011 in Politics | 1 comment