ABORTION. DRUGS. GAYS. TRANSSEXUALS. WE'RE NOT A PROGRESSIVE NATION, ARE WE?

The Bishop of Barking argued that it would lead to impressionable young men
getting carried away and becoming women

Here's one that David Blunkett does not need to agonise over. Yesterday the
European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, upheld Christine Goodwin's
right to be a woman. The judges unanimously ruled that her country -
Britain - had breached her right to privacy and her right to marry by
refusing to accept that, though born a man, she was now a woman.
Incidentally, the other three countries who are in the same boat as us are
Ireland, Andorra and Albania.

You can just imagine, however, what would have happened had there been no
Strasbourg court and had the Home Secretary proposed action himself.
Various newspapers would have declared that this was "political correctness
gone mad", phone-ins would have asked how such legislation could be a
priority at a time when policemen are crumbling and there aren't enough
hospitals on the street. Then the legislation would have been held up for a
thousand years in the Lords while Baroness Young and the Bishop of Barking
argued that it was bound to lead to thousands of impressionable young men
getting carried away and becoming young women.

This is not a country to be bold in, as evidenced by the reaction to David
Blunkett's decision, announced on Wednesday, to reclassify cannabis from a
Class B (Bad) drug to a Class C (be Careful) one. Immediately Brixton was
scoured for bobbies who thought it was a disaster, newspapers that - six
months ago - thought reclassification was a neat idea suddenly got a fit of
the vapours when confronted with real action, and the drugs tsar upped and
resigned.

Changing the drugs laws is complex enough. Changing them in Britain is a
labour of Hercules. Look at what Mr Blunkett feels forced to say. The
journalists ask him, of cannabis: "Is it bad for you, and is it wrong?" To
which Labour's own Hercules answers: "Yes and yes." But what he really
means is: "A little bit and no, it isn't." How can it be "wrong" per se to
smoke or eat cannabis? The missing question, though, was: "Is it pleasant?"

In the House, the admirable Conservative home affairs spokesman Oliver
Letwin understands the logical flaw in Blunkett's public reasoning. Well,
who doesn't? If you let people consume a product, but make the selling of
the product illegal, you hand supply over to criminals. QED. Letwin's
answer to this conundrum, however, is obscure. Does he choose vigorously to
prosecute cannabis consumers, or does he take the opposite logical course
and legalise the sale of spliffs? Um, no.

We have only got to this point because: (a) the police have, effectively,
demanded it; and (b) cannabis-taking is pretty universal among the young in
this country. It is, partly, the change in public opinion that emboldens a
Home Secretary who is more than usually sensitive to shifts in the popular
mood.

His incremental pace, however, is dictated by a determination not to do the
right thing before enough people realise that it is the right thing.

Look back at the history of social reform in this country, and you can see
that Blunkett's carefulness is typical. In 1861 the Offences Against the
Person Act made it illegal "to procure a miscarriage" (ie carry out an
abortion). The penalty was life imprisonment. It took another 75 years
before the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) was formed. In 1938, Dr
Aleck Bourne, a gynaecologist, invited the police to prosecute him for
performing an abortion on a 14-year-old rape victim. Bourne was acquitted
on the grounds that he had acted to prevent the girl from becoming a
"physical and mental wreck".

A year later, a government committee recommended changes to the abortion
laws, but nothing was done. It wasn't until the thalidomide tragedy in the
early 1960s that abortion became a matter of wide public controversy. When
- - at last - in 1967 a Bill liberalising the law passed though the Commons,
it was a young Liberal MP who sponsored it - not the Health Secretary. It
was a rough ride. And even then the new law did not apply to parts of the UK.

Gay law reform has taken even longer. After a series of scandals, largely
caused by police overzealousness, the Wolfenden Committee was set up in
1954 to consider the laws on homosexuality. In 1957 the committee
recommended liberalisation, and the first parliamentary debate on the
subject was held in December that year. The then Home Secretary parked the
Wolfenden recommendations, arguing that they wouldn't enjoy the support of
the general public. More research, he said, was needed. That's the way it
stayed for another 10 years, until the Sexual Offences Act was passed. Even
this put the age of gay consent at 21 and made homosexuality a criminal
offence if more than two people were present.

Some Labour ministers feared the public reaction. Richard Crossman, in his
diary for 3 July 1967, wrote of the Bill: "It may well be 20 years ahead of
public opinion; certainly working-class people in the north jeer at their
Members at the weekend and ask them why they're looking after the buggers
at Westminster instead of the unemployed at home."

Just last year, the Lords were refusing to accept an equalisation of the
gay age of consent, and the right of gays to serve in the armed forces was
only upheld by a judgment from the European Court of Human Rights. In all
cases it was argued that liberalisation of the law was running ahead of
public opinion.

The abolition of capital punishment was even more tortuous. In 1908 it was
abolished for people under 16; in 1922 for maternal infanticide; in 1931
for pregnant women; in 1933 for the under-18s. In 1957, following the
wrongful hanging of Timothy Evans, the ultimate penalty was restricted to
murder in the course or furtherance of theft, murder by shooting or causing
an explosion, murder while resisting arrest or during an escape, murder of
a police officer or prison officer and for two murders committed on
different occasions. So if you strangled two people at the same time, you
were OK, as long as you weren't robbing them and they weren't police
officers. Not until 1969 was the death penalty abolished for murder altogether.

In each case, necessary action awaited the creation not of a majority for
change, but of a critical mass of law-makers, enforcers, professionals and
a progressive section of society. And in each case the progression was
uneven and met by hostility.

So, one day (round about the same time as Andorra) we will legalise
marijuana and drugs such as ecstasy, regulate their quality by law and then
launch education campaigns to persuade youngsters not to use them in school
hours, drivers not to take them, and spliff-smokers to find a less harmful
way of ingesting their jollies. Gradually, over time, we will cease the
demonisation of pushers - not because they are a fine upstanding group of
men and women, but because drugs are about demand pull not supply push. The
problem with drugs is pullers, not pushers, and they need education, not
punishment.