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| Margaret Thatcher attempted to block an AIDS public information campaign because she feared teaching children about ‘risky sex’ would corrupt them |
Margaret Thatcher attempted to block an AIDS public information campaign because she feared teaching children about ‘risky sex’ would corrupt them, according to previously secret files.
The then Prime Minister warned that plans to educate the country to stem the spread of the syndrome could instead cause ‘immense harm’ to impressionable young minds.
It was only after her aides warned her that the country was facing an epidemic and that she did not have the support of the Cabinet that she backed down.
Horrified by then health secretary Norman Fowler’s proposal for a newspaper advertising campaign about safe sex, Mrs Thatcher scrawled on the memo: ‘Do we have to do the section on risky sex?’
‘I should have thought it could do immense harm if young teenagers were to read it.’
Her remarks were discovered in files released yesterday under the former 30-year rule by the National Archives at Kew, west London.
She suggested the advert could even breach the Obscene Publications Act and proposed a more limited campaign based on previous public information campaigns on venereal disease.
‘I think the anxiety on the part of parents and many teenagers who would never be in danger from AIDS, exceeds the good it may do,’ she wrote.
‘It would be better in my view to follow the ‘VD’ precedent of putting notices in surgeries, public lavatories etc.
‘But adverts where every young person will read and hear of practices they never knew about will do harm.’
Mr Fowler stood up to her, stating that the advert would lose ‘all its medical authority and credibility’ unless the advice was included.
‘Given that there is no vaccine and no cure, the only option open is public education,’ he stated.
‘No one is condoning these practices - quite the contrary; but they exist and are one of the ways by which AIDS spreads.’
The first case of AIDS in the UK was recorded in 1981 and by 1986 there was growing public awareness of the spread of the disease for which there was then no known treatment.
She was warned that the incurable syndrome could spread to hundreds of thousands of people unless those at risk changed their practices.
Mrs Thatcher eventually backed down when Deputy Prime Minister William Whitelaw told her there was no support for her objections among other ministers.
But she refused to sanction information leaflets being sent to every home in the country.
The cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, warned that while there had only been 512 cases so far in the UK, experts estimated that 25,000 people with the disease could be unaware.
‘If there is no change in habits and practices, particularly but not exclusively among those currently most at risk (homosexual and bisexual men and drug misusers), there could at the end of five years be half a million infected carriers of whom a substantial number would subsequently develop the disease; and that is a sober estimate,’ he wrote.
Her press secretary Bernard Ingham added: ‘There is certainly a feeling abroad that the Government is doing too little and is not treating the issue with sufficient urgency.
‘There is also a feeling that the Prime Minister is acting as a brake on educational publicity.’
Culled from DAILY MAIL
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