“It’s not over until it’s over” – Waheed Alli and the fight for Equal Marriage

Waheed Alli doesn’t strike me as someone who leaves things to chance. Being successful in politics, finance and the media doesn’t come by chance. And neither does winning a vote in the Lords on Equal Marriage.

Over the past fifteen years (since he became a peer aged just 34 – making him the then youngest peer in parliament – in 1998) Alli has been closely involved with many important pieces of Equality legislation. In particular, he is credited with spearheading the campaign to repeal Section 28, and was a strong advocate of equalising the age of consent.

In recent weeks and months he’s been putting his experience to work on the campaign for Equal Marriage.

I met Baron Alli (of Norbury in the London Borough of Croydon) in his central London office last week. At the centre stands a whiteboard with the numbers 390 written on one side and 148 on the other – the margin by which Lord Dear’s recent wrecking amendment was defeated in the Lords. Underneath are the totals of votes subdivided by party – the result of a prolonged and intensive lobbying and “Get Out The Vote” campaign led by Alli in recent weeks to ensure that Equal Marriage received a strong majority in the second chamber. Binders containing spreadsheets of contact data still sit on a nearby desk. This feels less like an internal parliamentary campaign and more like a military operation (or at the very least, an election campaign).

Already the time and effort put in has reaped considerable rewards. But if you think the fight for Equal Marriage is won already, you won’t hear such sentiments from Lord Alli:

“It’s not over until it’s over. There are two more stages of this bill…The ability of those who oppose equalities legislation to disrupt and destroy are quite high.”

A particular concern is that opponents of Equal Marriage could push a “plausible” amendment around which support could gather, but of course, we have seen before how damaging such rhetoric – and such policies – can be:

“They are beginning to use the language of Section 28 – that teachers are “promoting” gay marriage – so they can bring I to the bill a clause that says that teachers are banned from promoting gay marriage. And that’s just inflammatory language – they know that, we know it.”

Alli is also clear to stress, as several people with a detailed knowledge of the Lords have echoed in recent weeks, that the recent 242 majority in the Lords isn’t as large a majority as it may appear. Some of those within the 390 are opposed to Equal Marriage but didn’t want to stand in the way of its passage, yet because they felt that throwing the it out without debate would have been unconstitutional (Alli describes the prospect as a “constitutional outrage”) they voted with Equal Marriage supporters. Similarly, he believes that there are fifty or sixty peers, predominantly Tories and crossbenchers, who are opposed to Equal Marriage so decided not to turn up and vote.

The good news is though that even taking both of these factors into account, there still seems to be a significant majority for Equal Marriage in the second chamber, a fact that Alli notes has surprised people who expect a rather more conservative outlook from our peers. But should it not have been Labour that delivered Equal Marriage when we were in government? It’s his view that Labour should take much of the credit:

“We created the environment. The changes from 1997 under Tony Blair for that decade just changed the environment for gay men and lesbians and transgender people in this country just hugely.”

And whilst he argues that “you do have to absolutely pay due credit to David Cameron for the personal courage he’s shown in putting forward gay marriage”, he’s also clear that “this bill is only delivered in both houses thanks to the Labour Party”.

And he’s fulsome in his praise for Ed Miliband – and Yvette Cooper – for their resolve and support for Equal marriage. Yet many – including me on these pages – argued that Miliband should have whipped the Equal Marriage vote in the Commons. Alli thought so too – and told Miliband as much – but has since had a change of heart:

“I was furious about it, and I went to see Ed and I said “I think you should whip this” but you also have to accept when you’re wrong. He’s the leader of the party and he was right. He was right, and I was wrong. I hate saying it, but his judgement to make it a free vote gave it a political authority when those numbers came in which was unassailable in the second chamber and unassailable throughout the country.”

But although Miliband didn’t whip the vote, Alli tells me that the Labour leader wrote to every MP and every peer – no small task – stating that Equal Marriage was not only party policy, it was also his personal conviction, and urging them to vote with him. Alli says he was taken aback by Miliband putting so much effort into securing a safe passage for the bill:

“He has been – along with Yvette – just extraordinary in seeing this through. And he’s done something which I think is really really really admirable in a politician. He has not sought to take credit for it. He has kept his mouth shut. He has done the work, but he’s not getting up there and saying “me me me me me”. And I find that fascinating. I’ve worked with lots of leaders and you know when they’re committed to stuff and this was not even – he was just so natural.”

So once Equal Marriage is achieved – and it’s surely a case of when, not if – and the first same-sex marriages begin to take place (perhaps as soon as next year), what does Alli think is the next step in the quest for equality? The answer, he says, is to look overseas – to countries where being gay is a crime punishable by violence, imprisonment and even death:

“We have to take what we have now, and in the same way that we export development, we have to export our ideology.”

Alli speaks passionately, fluently and forcefully about the fight for Equal Rights – as only someone who has driven the debate on for well over a decade can. I’m sure I could’ve have spent all day asking him about the wheres and whyfores of individual pieces of legislation and political debates that now seem arcane and outdated in the extreme – but unfortunately our time is up.

Before I go though, I’m keen to know what he thinks of Ed Miliband – outside of the Equal marriage debate. Alli was a prominent backer of David Miliband in the Labour leadership contest – donating £50,000 – but although he acknowledges that it’s hard to make your voice heard as a leader in opposition, he has high praise for Miliband’s conference conference speech last year:

“I think to have been able to have dealt with Old Labour and New Labour and build a One Nation Labour as a political concept and construct is extraordinary. I just think it was a piece of genius politics.”

The Labour leader will be pleased to have the support of an influential Labour donor – but more importantly, he should be happy to have such a tenacious campaigner in his corner. The next few years may require further concerted parliamentary campaigns, clever tactics and appeals to Labour parliamentarians – and others. If so, Ed Miliband could do much worse than having a fighter like Waheed Alli in his corner.