LOCAL HEALTH AUTHORITIES (CONTROL OF PREMISES) (Hansard, 8 June 1971)

§ Mr. T. L. Iremonger (Ilford, North)

J beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to empower local health authorities to control the establishment and conduct of premises used for advising on and dealing in goods connected with sexual intercourse. In commending the Bill to the House, I want first to dispose of two incidental points. The first is that the Bill would not in any way interfere with present commercial arrangements for dealing with birth control appliances and substances through responsible agencies or with marriage guidance counselling as at present organised. Secondly, the Bill is not connected with town and country planning legislation, which is not in my opinion the appropriate instrument of control when criteria are involved far beyond the sphere of town and country planning.

My initiative in seeking leave to bring in the Bill springs from the concern expressed to me by constituents about local developments, and my reaction as expressed in the Bill springs from three fundamental beliefs.

My first proposition is that our civilisation is based for its security on love, marriage and parenthood. My second proposition is that people must have the right, and must accept the responsibility, of choosing whether and to what extent their concepts of love, marriage and parenthood and their right to privacy in these matters are publicly to be assailed. My third proposition is that it is the duty of the legislature to be vigilant and active in protecting the most vulnerable members of society.

The provisions of the Bill would apply those beliefs to practical reality in the following way. The agency of control I propose would be, in effect, the local councillors, because in the last resort it is open to all who care to determine the nature of public policy to decide how it shall be followed through their power to elect and influence members of councils who give effect to public policy. The agency which would exercise day to day control, subject to the direction of the elected representatives, would, as I envisage it, be the local authority medical officer.

880 I think that this would be wise, because in the first place physical risks are involved in allegedly aphrodisiac substances and appliances generally and, secondly, because the most vulnerable members of society are the babies, born and unborn, and their young mothers and young women generally. Medical insight is imperative in their case both because venereal disease and the increasing evidence of resistant strains make promiscuity a hazard and because the psyche and the soma are one, if I can put it that way—the body and the soul—and medical men incline to be both more aware and more reverential about this and better able to give advice with the authority of responsibility that commands respect than mere salesmen in what might be called, perhaps, a sex shop.

Here we are touching on profound matters, and the House might think it presumptuous for me to deliver a homily. I can therefore, quote an unsolicited letter I have just received which expresses in a remarkable way the considerations that I think the House might like to have in mind. My correspondent says, with respect to these establishments, whatever they may be: The effect of such shops by their symbolism and as a manifestation in our culture is to make sex a commodity; to separate it off from the whole complex of love and personal relationship; to concentrate on sexual functions in a psychopathological way; to make the sexual life seem a thing of machinelike functioning, and thus to thingify or objectify it. This I believe is done in a sick and menacing way, and we have had rather too much of it. The air of frankness and liberation with which such interpreters conduct themselves is, of course, disguised to cloak the essential pervertedness of their business. Moreover, I believe that they are also selling their lists of addresses to firms selling pornography. I wrote for a catalogue to the one in Marble Arch, for a study of sex in our society, and since then I have had advertising material from a Danish firm of pornographers, and recently from one in Victoria Street". That is what my correspondent says, and I think that he has a message for us at that rather deeper level. For myself, I would merely add that the first of my propositions, love, marriage and parenthood as the basis for the security of our civilisation, indeed the basis of our whole civilisation, is increasingly under challenge and attack from the New Left, not least in respect of the values on which 881 love, marriage and parenthood are themselves based. Underlying the Motion for this Bill is the conflict of ideas between established society and the New Left, and the House should make it clear where it stands.