E-Democracy Win: Britain Apologizes to Alan Turing

This morning, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official statement of apology to Alan Turing, a mathematician who led the WWII code-breaking effort that broke Germany's Enigma codes and did pioneering work in the development of computers. Turing, who was gay, was convicted of "gross indecency" in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration. He committed suicide two years later.

Notably, Brown's statement came in response to a petition posted on the Prime Minister's 10 Downing Street website, which had received thousands of signatures in recent months, as a number of prominent scientists led by computer scientist John Graham-Cumming and public figures like writer Ian McEwan stepped up to ask for the action. Thus, Brown's Turing statement should be seen as a small but significant win for e-democracy.

Almost three years ago, the PM's office contracted with mySociety.org, the scrappy and brilliant democracy hackers, to build an online platform that allows any British citizen to submit a petition or sign existing ones. The government filters submissions before posting them to weed out the inappropriate ones and duplicates, and since then about 25,000 have been published and signed by about 8 million people, roughly 10% of the country's population. But while the government has sent replies to about 2,800 petitions out of that group, and taken some actions in response, this is the most visible step it has ever taken due to public demand aggregated by the e-petition platform.

Tom Steinberg, mySociety's director, told me this morning, "It is good to see the Prime Minister's Office starting to realise that the nearly 25,000 petitions submitted do sometimes contain things that can be acted on straight away, for the benefit of the people who signed them, and for the good of the country more generally. I'd like to see them dedicated more resource to pursuing the good, sensible ideas that unsurprisingly crop up quite often in a site of this size."

Here's Brown's full statement on Turing:

2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate - by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices - that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown