Colin Clews’ wonderful website Gay in the 80s provides encyclopaedic detail about gay life, culture and politics in that decade, but has one curious omission.
There is no mention of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. This is strange, because PACE, as it was known in short, was seen at the time as the most serious attack on civil liberties in the modern peacetime era.
All gay campaigning organisations were against it. The National Council for Civil Liberties passed a motion condemning it, and legal advice services warned it would create a wave of clients beating a path to their doors. Despite all this, both main political parties were in favour of it, with the honourable exception of the left wing of the Labour Party under Tony Benn.
The intention of the Bill was in the first instance benign. It had come about in the wake of the 1981 Chapeltown, Toxteth and above all Brixton riots. Confrontations which had been waiting to happen for several years. The Scarman Report which followed concluded that ‘racial disadvantage was in danger of becoming an endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society’.
In particular, Scarman highlighted the arbitrary power of the police to stop and search, which were haphazardly applied mainly in black communities, under Vagrancy Acts going back to the 1830s.
Nowhere were those powers, and checks on those powers, systematised in law. PACE was intended to address this by defining and checking police powers, introducing among other things an independent Police Complaints Authority in an attempt to shore up public confidence in the police.
However, when the bill was published, it was clear that the wording left large loopholes for police harassment and defiance of natural justice while remaining within the letter of the law.
For lesbians and gay men, who had been victims of police brutality, which was well documented, both as individuals and in raids on bars and clubs, alarm bells sounded immediately. In terms of press coverage, protest marches and systematic campaigning against the bill, this was seen as the biggest threat to the community until Section 28.
Consenting Adults had always seen itself as embedded in the queer community and reflecting community concerns. Many members of the company had direct experience of police aggression, or of police indifference in the fact of queer bashing. So for the first time the company decided to devise a show collectively which would highlight the pervasive dangers of the would-be law.
It was first presented under the title of It’s an Unfair Cop, a succinct bit of agit-prop which served as half of a double bill with Genet’s Deathwatch. That was in April 1984. The Parliamentary process ground on throughout the year, (the Bill got royal assent in November) and we continued to perform it into 1985.
In May 1984 we had a rethink. It was the only play we had which could serve as a Heath Play that year, but as it stood it was far too po-faced, as agit-prop tends to be, to appeal to the cruisers and pub-goers who by now made up our Hampstead Heath audience.
I had taken a back seat so far, but I was asked to lighten the play; the company understood my essentially trivial mind. So I added a few panto-like gags, the cod advertisements and the songs. In the process I made the show too long for the Heath. We never got that balance right, I fear.
The cast changed between the two shows as well, and we never had a proper programme or photos for either; if I’ve left anyone out, I apologise.
In the event, for all its curtailment of civil liberties, it was merely a foretaste of much more drastic assaults on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly which occurred over the next forty years under governments of both parties. The concepts of ‘antisocial behaviour’ and ‘hate speech’ as separate offences have created a whole new order of social control.
The play is peppered with references to queer culture of the time, and to other political movements. For this reason it has a lot more footnotes than the other plays.
Peter Scott-Presland
April 2025
Read the Script
"I remember that we decided to write the script together Everyone was enthusiastic but as I had never written much more than a shopping list, I lagged behind. There were regular meetings at John Anstiss's place. I doubt that I contributed much apart from the odd "that's great".
I was impressed at the contributions made and the complete absence of egoism. It really was a collective experience. We took it to Bristol University, if I remember correctly. I don't remember where else we presented it.
I think we can be proud, very proud of that. We responded to a threat in a collective way. Egos were left at the door. Sadly, things haven't exactly improved, have they?"
Barry Scanes (The original Host)
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