Alan Turing, the famous Second World War codebreaker, mathematician and computer scientist was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ under a law which criminalised homosexual acts in 1952, one of at least 50,000 men prosecuted under this law. The conviction caused him to lose security clearance for intelligence work and also forced him, after he rejected imprisonment, to undergo chemical castration. He was found dead two years later. Suicide by cyanide poisoning was judged to be the cause of death, which some dispute. Last week the government announced a royal pardon for Alan Turing, 61 years after his prosecution. Though I don’t doubt many of the petitions and individuals calling for the pardon were well-intentioned, I think this is profoundly wrong.

Legally, the pardon is not in keeping with the usual procedure, as the government’s press release acknowledges: “A pardon is only normally granted when the person is innocent of the offence and where a request has been made by someone with a vested interest such as a family member”. It goes on to say “uniquely on this occasion a pardon has been issued without either requirement being met, reflecting the exceptional nature of Alan Turing’s achievements”. It is this statement which highlights the underlying attitude of the pardon to Turing’s conviction and the history of the criminalisation of homosexuality; it is based on a justification of Turing’s exception talents and achievements, rather than on the appalling injustice of the legal system.

Indeed, the whole press release is adorned with references to Turing by Cameron and Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, as an “exceptional man”, with hardly any attempt to address the issue of the history of persecution. Thus the suffering of Turing himself, and the thousands of other victims of the oppressive law, not to mention the culture of fear and intolerance it helped create and sustain, have not been given due consideration.

Though it may seem cynical to identify the pardon with the pragmatism, self-promotion and patriotism of the government, their statements on the matter seem to be indicative of it. Cameron chose to emphasise Turing’s “key role in saving this country in World War 2” and his “remarkable national legacy through his substantial scientific achievements” rather than any moral sentiment about his prosecution. Through this rhetoric he is reclaimed as a national war hero of a nation whose representatives treated him like dirt; a figure whose achievements ensure that Britain should remember him with pride, rather than with shame at the way he was treated.

If anyone should be pardoned, then all should be pardoned. Turing’s conviction and treatment was not reprehensible because of his outstanding talents but because of its disgusting discrimination against men based simply on the gender of their sexual partners and the devastating impact it had on his life and the lives of so many others as a result. An individual pardon denies this important truth, and is empty unless it applies to everyone convicted.

Having said that, I don’t believe a royal pardon is the best way to approach the history of criminalised homosexuality. The language of ‘pardon’ still implies a need for forgiveness, and the power of the government to give it, and implies a crime on the side of the prosecuted rather than the persecutor. It offers a polite gesture in the face of a cruel injustice.  The government press release repeatedly mentioned an attempt to help ‘clear the name’ of Turing, as if it was in their power or right to do so. Surely we should recognise that in the minds of all of those of us who believe in gay equality, Turing’s name was always crystal clear, and the government that now proclaims to clear it with a noble gesture was in fact the party in need of forgiveness. The power of the government to define sexualities and discipline them was what made this law a disaster, and the pardon in some small way just reflects this tendency.

 A full and open understanding of the cruelty and persecution of the past should motivate and inform us to strive for social change, rather than be glossed over. I’m sticking a metaphorical two-fingers up to a government which seems to want a good news day so they can bask in the glory of a war hero, whom they can claim credit for ‘pardoning’, sweeping the oppression of him and many others under the rug and not doing enough to tackle LGBTQ discrimination in the present. Words and the way we view history mean so much, but for me, these are the wrong ones and they shouldn’t distract us from the fact that more of Cameron’s party voted against equal marriage than for it, or that UK government is still deporting LGBTQ asylum seekers facing similar discrimination and worse abroad back to their home countries where they are likely to face severe persecution. If we really want to do something positive for LGBTQ liberation, it should be about changing the future, not revising the past.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Here we are again. It’s New Year’s Eve; that one night in the year where boredom and sadness are magically abolished, when ‘fun’ is enforced in parties across the world with a quasi-totalitarian insistence. Anyone who doesn’t have the time of their life on New Year’s Eve – or at least does not pretend to – is a bore, a heretic, an apostate, refusing to partake in the mythology of the New Year. 

Because it is, at the end of the day, a myth. An opportunity to celebrate something abstract, ungraspable by most, while not quite knowing why; a chance to spend time with people you don’t really want to see, but act merry and drink heavily. New Year’s Eve is the ultimate saturnalia, a mindless reverie with little purpose or aim. 

Even the logistics leave much to be desired; most New Year’s Eve parties are a chance to get excessively drunk at three times the price of an average night out, filled with people claiming to be having “a fucking great time” – parties which never fail to disappoint. Unsurprisingly, given that the bar of enjoyment for New Year’s Eve is set so unrealistically high. 

As you can probably tell, I’ve never really enjoyed New Year’s Eve celebrations. All of a sudden, we are showered with end-of-year lists, vainglorious Facebook statuses which sum up people’s achievements over the last year, lists of flatulent predictions for the one to come and, worst of all, conceited New Year’s Resolutions which either won’t materialise or are of little interest to most of us. Do people really expect to change their lives and those of others through some kind of millenarian inspiration caused by the arbitrary machinations of the Gregorian calendar or the position of the earth with relation to the Sun. I personally prefer the Alexandrian calendar, which started the year on the 29^th of August. With Christmas so close, surely we could spread out our celebrations a little?

Soon, the text messages from people you have hardly ever spoken to, the Snapchats, the Facebook statuses and broadcast Whatsapps will begin to pour forth with a brimming enthusiasm which is quite frankly astounding. New Year’s Eve encourages a vain sense of hope and joy, an unrealistic expectation which can only disappoint. It’s an excuse to be happy about something which is of little more consequence than the passing of another day. What, essentially, are we really celebrating, but the passage of time? It is a fallacy based on unrealistic hopes; it doesn’t matter how shit our lives might really be, for this one day every year we can pretend otherwise.  

Don’t get me wrong – any other time of the year I am the first to enjoy a bit of fun. In fact, if people applied the same hope, enjoyment and positivity of New Year’s Eve the whole year round, the world might be a much better place. What I have issue with is the superficiality of New Year’s Eve. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re having fun or not as long as everyone knows you are. Surely it is too much to ask that everyone’s good mood should miraculously coincide on a single day every year.

In my hometown, Madrid, an increasing amount of people congregate in the traditional Puerta del Sol to welcome the New Year a day early – on the night of the 30^th rather than the 31^st. I cannot stress enough what a great idea this is; a chance to get whole palaver out of the way, becoming just as drunk as on ‘proper’ New Year’s Eve for half the price and with fewer people, and spending the whole of the day itself in bed with a hangover. 

Call me a bore, a wet blanket, a drag, a killjoy, a drip – but this year I will be trying my best to let everyone how much I’m not enjoying New Year’s Eve. In fact, I needen’t even worry about the whole thing since I got the celebrations out of the way about eight hours ago when Sydney’s fireworks started to go off, and I was just finishing my breakfast. 

Art, it seems, is becoming more and more ubiquitous in today’s world. Whether it be graffiti on a wall, music on the radio or that new movie that everyone is talking about, art surrounds and pervades the world we live in. Meanwhile, the boundaries of ‘artistic expression’ are pushed further and further every day. The advent of media means that it now exists in more forms than it ever has before, ranging from the usual suspects such as theatre and cinema to newer areas such as blogs, street art and even creative and hard hitting forms of advertising. You don’t even have to be present at an event to know what is going on; sooner or later you can just read about it on the internet. We live in an age where it is virtually impossible, a challenge even, to be completely unaware of anything that is deemed to be important enough to be broadcast around the world. In the case of any form of art, it is usually supplemented by a variety of opinions, responses and criticisms.

This expansion in the different forms of art raises questions about the need for some amount of restriction on what can and cannot be said or done in the name of art and its purposes. In the past decade, notorious incidences such as the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons and the removal of the photograph of a young and precariously clad Brook Shields from the Tate gallery spring to mind, when the phrase ‘artistic expression’ is mentioned.  Episodes such as these seem to suggest that the boundaries of what constitutes freedom within art have been tightened.  Self-imposed restrictions, when it comes to more offensive forms of art, have been advocated as being a form of good judgement rather than self-censorship, however admittedly thin the line tends to be.

The real question that still remains is to what extent should ‘artistic expression’ be allowed a free pass? We all have different ideas as to what exactly the purpose of art is; whether it serves as an expression of time, a way of making information and ideas more accessible or just to be beautiful. Regardless of what they are, how much should art be allowed to push the boundaries of what is socially acceptable? I believe that the publication of art, all art, is worth defending. Freedom of expression survives only as long as we allow it to. The second we start deciding when art is acceptable before it is actually displayed or heard is when art loses its value as a stimulus for public discussion.

Under the guise of protecting the vulnerable and defending others from what they are convinced will offend them; censorship robs people of the opportunity to form any opinion at all. Only when faced with a form of art, be it the radical art of the Australian artist Mike Brown to the controversially offensive comedy of George Carlin, can people truly make judgements for themselves and be challenged by the new and extraordinary.

More concerning is the initiation of self-censorship, whereby institutions place heavy restrictions on what they will show, reflected by the BBC’s publication strict guidelines on taste in 2009 and the Tate’s decision to remove the art piece ‘God is great’ from an exhibition of John Latham’s work over concerns that it would offend others. This further removes any hope that the public may have of ever being faced with anything that has not already been deemed ‘acceptable’ by institutions. Institutions who are too scared to cause any controversy, in an age, when the arts seem to have come under a new wave of scrutiny.

What art can offer us is a unique perspective on matters, in a way that would not normally happen in any other form. The company Lush famously had a human window display of the experiments that are conducted on animals in testing facilities. The exhibition shocked and offended many that felt assaulted by the performance art and declared that it was offensive to victims of abuse. Whatever one’s opinion on the campaign was, it undeniably created awareness of the relevant subject in a way that no amount of poster embossed with the faces of celebrities ever will.  Should art like this be censored for fear that it will offend some? Or shouldn’t it rather be embraced for the possibilities it creates and the irrefutable effect it can have on the apathetic.

One of the main purposes of art is to make a statement, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that made us reconsider the power of authoritative figures in society to the famous Pussy Riot performance that protested the leader of the Orthodox Church’s support for Putin.  By allowing the confinement of artistic expression we bring ourselves one step closer to a society in which the confinement of expression spreads itself beyond art and into the opinions and ideas that we as individuals may communicate. It is not an overstatement to say that freedom in art is a crucial part of a free society, in which we have the autonomy to think for ourselves and express our thoughts.

In the afterword to the 1971 publication of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury wrote that ‘there is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.’ We need to trust people to examine art for the sake of art, as a means of debate and a way of spreading ideas. To advocate censorship is to condemn another’s viewpoint and sentence it to a premature death without a trial. All art is ultimately simply a reflection of what some of us think, what some of us truly believe and what some of us haven’t even considered. Only by stepping outside of our comfort zones can we confront the good, the bad and the startling.