Someone's just gone and written "I'm sorry" there.

[venta]

Well, well, well. Mr Brown (Gordon, in this case) has issued the apology we were talking about the other day. According to the BBC, he agrees that the treatment meted out to Turing as a result of his homosexuality was - though legal - "utterly unfair

Comments

[lathany]

Yes, I like what he's written too. Despite feeling that the apology wasn't really something to demand (as I said in the earlier post).

[undyingking]

This is what frustrates me about Brown (Gordon) -- unlike many senior politicians, he does seem to possess a genuine moral conscience and instinct for what is right. (It's difficult to imagine that Blair or Cameron, for example, could care less about the Turing issue; they would have issued an apology only if advised it was politically profitable to do so, and it would probably be packed with weasel words.) But he acts on it so dispiritingly rarely.

[emarkienna]

On the subject of whether people should apologise for things they didn't do, I note he says sorry in the sense of sympathy - "sorry ... for what happened to him". Which kind of makes sense - when people say "I'm sorry to hear this" to some bad news, that clearly doesn't mean they're responsible for it.

[onebyone]

Saying "I'm sorry for what happened" and acknowledging that it was wrong, is an apology precisely to the extent that you're responsible for it. It was clearly the British state of the time that did it, So I think Brown's statement pretty much leaves it open to people to decide for themselves to what extent nations and governments have an enduring responsibility for their past actions. If you think they do they they (we) have apologised. If you think they don't, then they have made suitable noises of disapproval.

[thefon]

I think it helps. Certainly doesn't do any harm.
I'm happy I signed the petition.

[condign]

In any moral, ethical, or rational sense, the apology is a bit strange, as it can no longer assist Turing, nor is it being given by anyone responsible for actually enforcing the policy. But so long as it sounds nice and it does no harm, there's little reason not to issue it.

That said, I wonder at the "utterly unfair." It may be wrong (in the sense that the law was substantively one that Brown disagrees with), but I haven't seen anything suggesting that it was "unfair" (in the sense that Turing was dealt with in a manner that was procedurally unjust).

[onebyone]

I assumed he meant "unfair" in the sense of, "It was unfair that Turing picking up blokes constituted criminal gross negligence, where a woman picking up blokes would not have done". Rather than "unfair" in the sense of "contrary to some rule written down at the time defining what they considered fair".

Or if not that precisely, I certainly think Brown considers "fairness" to be something of a value judgement, rather than an objective statement of whether the law is followed (which in Turing's case it presumably was).