In-depth: Are LGBT people safe with the Tories?
Five years ago David Cameron gave his first gay press interview to Attitude, in which he said the Conservative party was no longer the party of extreme homophobia, something that defined them for the 25 years previous in which they opposed all efforts to bring about LGBT equality. Prime Minister David Cameron pushed through equal marriage, but what’s the real story about the rest of the party he leads? Are we now safe with the Conservatives? Writer Simon Edge takes a hard look at the numbers for Attitude.
On May 7th Britain goes to the polls in a general election different from any in living memory. Five years ago we saw the death of two-party politics when the Lib Dems performed well enough to wield the balance of power between Labour and the Conservatives. This time we are witnessing the death of three-party politics, as the Greens and UKIP stir things up on the left and right while the Scottish National Party seems poised to make massive gains at the expense of Labour north of the border and Plaid Cymru are giving them a run for their money in Wales.
If you support the smaller parties, this makes everything more exciting than usual. If any pundit claims to know the result, they’re probably not much of a pundit.
It’s also the first general election for at least 25 years where there isn’t a major equality issue at stake. Stonewall has been doing its best to lay out a stall, calling for LGBT-friendly sex education at primary and secondary level, a new hate crime banning homophobic bullying, the inclusion of LGBT equality as a criterion for international aid and a review on laws affecting trans people. But none of these make for a key battleground splitting the various parties, as happened with rows over the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in the 80s, the repeal of homophobic laws in the 90s and early Noughties, and same-sex marriage in 2013.
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So if you’re energised by this election, that may be because you have strong views about the cuts or the deficit; you may be horrified by Nigel Farage or excited by the Green surge; or you may have a lifelong affiliation to one or other of the main two parties. But it seems that many people are less likely than they were at previous elections to be strongly driven by gay issues. With the exception of UKIP, all the national parties are officially pro-equality these days and in any case, there are no legislative battles brewing where it’s likely to matter. When Attitude interviewed the leader of the Conservatives in 2010, David Cameron told us that within the Tory party there was now “a shared consensus bedrock view that this is a party for equal rights whether you are male, female, black, white, urban rural, straight or gay.” But is that true? Cameron stuck to his word with equal marriage, pushing through the new law despite there being a huge amount of opposition – from within his own party.
One yardstick of how much less divisive sexuality is nowadays is the number of out MPs. Twenty years ago it was easy to know who all the gay MPs were because there were so few. Each of them represented a new milestone: first to come out; first Tory to come out after being outed; first Tory to come out with no threat of outing; first to be elected after standing as an out candidate. (Chris Smith, Michael Brown, Alan Duncan and Stephen Twigg/Ben Bradshaw, since you ask.) Today at my count there are 25 out LGBT MPs, some of them familiar, some so obscure half their constituents wouldn’t be able to name them. (There are even more LGBT people standing as prospective MPs at this election.) Surprisingly by far the largest number are Tories. There are 13 out gay, bisexual or lesbian Conservative MPs, compared with nine for Labour and three for the Lib Dems. That roughly matches the size of the parties, but it’s still a remarkable progression from the era when deeply closeted Tory MPs had ‘lavender marriages’ of convenience and lived in dread of their blue-rinsed party faithful finding them out.
Nevertheless, differences endure between the parties, revealed not so much in the attitudes of their leaders but by those of their backbenchers and party members. Pockets of diehard homophobia remain, offering a glimpse of the bigoted traditions they come from and showing that reform still has some way to go. Despite the fact that David Cameron pushed through equal marriage, fewer than half of Tory MPs supported it. This is in direct contrast to both Labour and the Lib Dems whose MPs supported it overwhelmingly. There were three different votes in the House of Commons. A total of 148 Conservative MPs voted in favour on at least one occasion, while 141 voted against – including the future Equalities Secretary Nicky Morgan – and 14 abstained. That means just 49 percent backed gay marriage. So much for detoxifying the Nasty Party.
The opponents this time round were reasonably polite in their rhetoric, with most of the stupidest quotes about the end of marriage/the family/civilisation-as-we-know-it coming from church groups and leaders rather than MPs. But it wasn’t always so good-mannered. It’s only 30 years since the horrific homophobia that the Tory party and the right wing press fanned as a way of turning people away from the Labour party. In 1987 Leader of the Tory group on South Staffordshire District Council called for 90 percent of gay men to be sent to the gas chamber to curb the AIDS epidemic. Councillor Bill Brownhill said, “I should shoot them all… We must find a way of stopping these gays going round yet we are making heroes of some of these people and some of them are even being knighted.” And in December 1987, when Labour’s Chris Smith mentioned in Parliament that the offices of the London paper Capital Gay had been firebombed, the Tory backbencher MP Elaine Kellett-Bowman called out, “Quite right too.” She later defended her remark, saying she was “quite prepared to affirm that there should be an intolerance of evil.” She wasn’t speaking against the firebombing but in support of it. Significantly, nobody in Tory high command sought to rein her in. Quite the opposite: less than a month later, she was made a dame.
By that stage, Margaret Thatcher had already played the gay card to win a third term. Her party issued crudely homophobic ads during the 1987 election campaign taunting the ‘Labour Camp’ over their supposed support for gay rights, and in a party conference speech a few months after victory she complained: “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay… These children are being cheated of a sound start in life.” That heralded the most vicious legislative attack on gay people since the Labouchère Amendment of 1885, which had criminalised homosexuality in the first place. Responding to reports in the Tory-supporting Sun about a harmless book about gay parenting called Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin, David Wilshire, the Tory MP who introduced the notorious Section 28 of the Local Government Act, complained that “homosexuality is being promoted at the ratepayers’ [local taxpayers’] expense, and the traditional family as we know it is under attack.” His new law – passed with government-backing – banned local councils from ‘promoting’ homosexuality. Even though no prosecution was ever brought under this measure, its effects included convincing some teachers that they were breaking the law if they stepped in to prevent homophobic bullying. That’s one of the reasons why teachers have not felt able to stamp out the use of the word ‘gay’ as a playground synonym for ‘rubbish’.
After Thatcher left there were five more years of Conservativism under John Major, during which time the gay community waged a massive campaign to equalise the age of consent, winning only a partial victory with a reduction from 21 to 18 due to opposition from Tory MPs. The election of New Labour in 1997 at last enabled the gradual dismantling of Britain’s anti-gay laws. In each case these reforms passed smoothly through the House of Commons, where Labour overhwhelmingly supported gay equality, but faced opposition from Conservatives especially in the House of Lords, where the Tories still outnumbered everyone else. Baroness Thatcher herself returned in her dotage to vote against LGBT equality in votes in November 2000, October 2002, July 2003, November 2004 and January 2008. Markedly, when it came to Labour’s vote to attempt to repeal Section 28 in 2000 Baroness Thatcher sat next to the woman leading the Conservatives successful effort to stop it.
The Labour leadership put its weight behind gay equality and the vast majority of its MPs did too, though not unanimously. In 1994, 39 Labour MPs voted against an equal age of consent, including leading frontbenchers David Blunkett and Ann Taylor, while a handful voted against any reduction at all, including future speaker Michael Martin. A larger number sat the whole vote out, not actually voting against equality but refusing to vote for any reform of the cruel law. This homophobic rump on the Labour benches continued to oppose equality throughout the Blair and Brown years and plenty of them are still there. While 229 Labour MPs voted in favour of equal marriage on at least one occasion, 24 voted against and five didn’t vote. Senior opponents included former Cabinet ministers Paul Murphy and Stephen Timms, an East London MP who enjoys Labour’s biggest majority. (If you live in his constituency, you may like to know that he is being challenged by an out lesbian Green candidate at this election, Tamsin Omond.) Despite this group it means that 89 percent of the Labour party’s MPs supported the measure as opposed to just 49% of Tory MPs. For the Lib Dems, 52 MPs voted in favour on at least one occasion while four voted against and two didn’t vote at all (although one of these, Jenny Willott, was on maternity leave and is otherwise a strong supporter.) That means 91 percent of the available MPs were in favour. It is consistent with the party’s past record, tending to vote more solidly in favour of gay rights measures than Labour. For example no Lib Dem MP voted against repealing Section 28 in 2003, and every Lib Dem MP who voted was in favour of civil partnerships in 2004 – neither of which you can say for the Labour Party.
But to get back to where we started, this year we have far more than three parties to choose from and it’s revealing to look at the smaller outfits’ voting record on gay marriage. Plaid Cymru, the Greens, Respect and Northern Ireland’s Alliance and SDLP all had a 100 percent record albeit with a much smaller number of MPs: all three Plaid MPs voting in favour, while the other four parties each have one MP.
The outsiders are Sinn Fein, who don’t attend the House of Commons on principle and therefore never vote – although they led the attempts to legalise gay marriage in the Northern Ireland assembly – and the Scottish National Party, whose six Westminster MPs didn’t vote because the measure only affected England and Wales. But they too are strongly pro-equality. When the Scottish Assembly legalised same-sex marriage a year later, the measure was backed by 88 percent of SNP members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), compared with 87 percent Labour, 100 percent Lib Dem and Green, and again, just 47 percent of the Tories (including their lesbian leader Ruth Davidson) supporting gay marriage.
And what of the antis? If you want to make sure you’re not voting for an explicitly homophobic party, your main danger of doing so is in Northern Ireland, where the ruling Democratic Unionist Party voted unanimously against marriage, as did the Independent unionist Sylvia Hermon. And finally of course there’s UKIP, whose leader disgusted half the nation by playing politics with the lives of some of the most vulnerable immigrants to this country, those infected with HIV, at the leaders’ debates.
Given that UKIP campaigned explicitly against gay marriage while the measure was going through Parliament, taunting the Conservatives for losing touch with the traditional views of their grass-roots supporters and offering a refuge for outspoken homophobes, it’s quite a surprise to look at the voting record of the party’s only two MPs. UKIP by-election winners Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless didn’t sit for Farage’s party when equal marriage was going through the Commons, but they did take part in the vote in their previous capacity as Conservative backbenchers. While Carswell opposed it, Reckless voted in favour. This is, of course because there is only two of them, but statistically, at 50%, it means they are one point ahead of the Tories.
But that’s a rogue result, based on the fact that the sample – two MPs – is tiny. If you polled UKIP’s parliamentary candidates in the 624 (out of 650) seats in which they’re standing, it’s a fair bet that well over 90 percent of them would have opposed gay marriage while it was going through Parliament and a large number would want the measure repealed. The party’s only openly gay MEP, David Coburn, says same-sex marriage is “false bollocks” supported only by “equality Nazis” which “makes a mockery of the holy sacrament of marriage… and is just for some queen who wants to dress up in a bridal frock and in a big moustache and dance up the aisle to the Village People.” Small wonder that Tom Booker, chair of the UKIP LGBT group, resigned from the party in February saying he couldn’t defend it any more.
It’s important to be vigilant against this lot. If any party yearns to turn back the clock and undo all the advances we have made in securing equality, it’s UKIP. But the good news is that they have virtually no chance of doing it. Their homophobic pronouncements don’t just disgust gay people: for most heterosexuals too, their bigoted anti-gay utterances are one of the main reasons they are so widely reviled. And that’s really worth celebrating: whereas once homophobia was a vote-winner, now it’s an out-and-out vote-loser.
As a final thought, we should remember how that came about. Those of us who have lived through these battles know that politicians didn’t become enlightened of their own accord. Gay rights became a mainstream political concern thanks to the unflinching pressure of LGBT people: a handful of activists at first, building pressure groups on shoestring budgets, gradually maturing into fully fledged lobby groups which employed the smartest people to take their arguments into the corridors of power. Those lobbyists were sustained by donations from ordinary LGBT people, whose own day-to-day openness – coming out at work, to families, to neighbours, and winning respect and acceptance for doing so – was what really changed the world.
So that’s an uplifting message as you head for the ballot box. Politicians may aspire to change the world, but when something really needs changing, it’s people power that actually makes them do it.
WORDS BY SIMON EDGE