LGBT History Month

Debate between Angela Eagle and Graham Stringer

Thursday 7th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I certainly agree.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind hon. Members that we are not pushed for time this afternoon. Interventions should be short and to the point.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

It is a great luxury not to be pushed for time these days in the House and, Mr Stringer, you tempt me; but let us see how we get on.

I particularly welcomed the Mayor of London’s announcement about the renaming of the overland train lines after what I think are progressive causes, one of which my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) just mentioned, and a pretty fantastic football team—even if they have to keep proving themselves over and over again.

As I was saying, this is a time to remember the past but also to be clear-eyed about some of the potential problems that face us, as a global LGBT community as well as a community in this country. This debate gives us a chance to do that. LGBT+ History Month 2024 celebrated the community contributions to medicine and healthcare, as my hon. Friend said in her intervention. It also highlighted the community’s blighted history in getting access to healthcare, as well as the ignorance, prejudice and inequality that came about as the AIDS pandemic—which is a pandemic and has killed millions of people—raged around the world. All that we got was prejudice and ignorance, and the only thing that helped to make any progress in those grim times was the self- help that the community came together to provide in very many inspirational ways.

Hopefully, we are in more enlightened times now, although I have to say that I have heard similar arguments about the threat that LGBT people present resurfacing again in political discourse. It happens more abroad than here, but it rears its ugly head on occasion here, too. That is an alarm bell that we should all be listening to. We should all be ready to fight because, as my hon. Friend said, a battle for equal rights and equality in the law or for equal access to goods and services, and being able to live a life that is not blighted by prejudice, ignorance or the fact that one is a particular thing—be it black, Asian and minority ethnic, be it a member of a particular faith, or be it LGBT—is all really important. When we fight together to improve the prospects of everyone who might be subjected to discrimination, we create a better, fairer and more equal society in which people’s human rights are properly recognised and prejudice is pushed to the sides.

LGBT History Month is really all about remembering. It is also, I think, about teaching some of the younger members of our community, who breeze through life, never had to be in the closet and have never been subjected to the quite extraordinary vitriol that used to be a regular feature of the media in the 1980s. They do not really understand how far we have come and what gains had to be fought for and made. They take it all for granted, which is fantastic—I hope that they can continue to take it for granted—but I always think that if we do not know our history, there is an increased chance that we will have to repeat it.

It is, then, an important time to reflect on the huge legislative progress that we have made in campaigning for our rights and against prejudice—the kind of progress that I thought was probably unimaginable when I was marching against section 28 in the 1980s. Some of us are old enough to remember Margaret Thatcher’s conference speech in 1987. I used to watch all the conferences, including the TUC’s—they were all televised, constantly, at the time. I was a bit of a junkie when it came to seeing what was happening, and I remember watching the speech in which she declaimed that children were being

“cheated of a sound start in life”

due to the fact that they were

“taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.”

It is not about a right to be gay; it is about being what you are and being able to live a life that is authentic to what you are, not having to hide away or be berated for who you are, and not being frightened to walk the streets.

Some of us who are old enough do remember the prejudice-laden tabloid coverage and the bullying that that involved, as well as the weaponisation of prejudice for electoral purposes that led to the enactment of section 28, which made the lives of LGBT+ pupils and teachers in schools a misery for generations. Gradually, though, in the face of often open media hostility, the last Labour Government changed all that in a series of landmark changes to the legal statutes that created circumstances in which, largely, LGBT+ people got their equal rights in law.

Many of those changes were hard fought for, including the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000, which reduced the age of consent for gay and bisexual men to 16. We had to put that legislation through Parliament three times and use the Parliament Act to get it on to the statute book, because the Lords simply would not pass it. Because we persisted with it, we were then accused on the front pages of the tabloids of being obsessed with buggery. Everything is created to make it look like you are the obsessive—the one who is trying always to go on about these things. There is no understanding that, actually, this is just a basic equality requirement that has to be there in law, otherwise that person will be discriminated against, regarded differently and treated differently. The world has not come to an end since we equalised the age of consent, despite some of the warnings, but it really had to be pushed.

Similarly, many here will remember the 2003 repeal of section 28, which talked about “pretended” family relationships and ridiculed LGBT people and their relationships and commitments to each other at a time when people could not get married or do any of the legal things that are available now. That legislation took us three years of persistence to finally repeal because the Lords would not pass it. Every time we were nearly losing our local government Bills, which had increasingly important things in them, we had to keep leaving the change out and putting it in again. It took three years to get that sorted out.

The landmark Gender Recognition Act 2004 enabled transgender adults to achieve legal recognition in their acquired gender. That was because of important international court judgments that basically said they had a right to that. I suspect that the fact that the Gender Recognition Act has been on the statute book for 20 years has passed by quite a lot of people who have suddenly discovered that they are worried by transgender people. The fact is that transgender people were not really visible at all until after the Act was passed. It is an example of how our society gets kinder and more equal if people feel that they can present as they really are. That is what transgender people have been doing since then, until, for various reasons, that has become problematised in the last few years.

As well as that Act being put on the statute book, we had the Civil Partnership Act 2004, which established a new legal relationship for same-sex couples. Some people say that that was then upgraded, but I do not because I still have a civil partnership. I have not got married yet, partially because the Catholic Church does not recognise same-sex marriages and my partner will not do it anywhere else. It is important that we have recognised that civil partnerships can also apply to heterosexual people, because many worry about the baggage that comes with the chattelisation of women in a marriage. I know many feminists who felt that way, and are more than happy to have a civil partnership rather than a marriage in that sense. We are creating circumstances in society in which people’s loving relationships can be recognised, validated and made sound in law so that there is not a problem if somebody dies, is ill or needs to have an official connection as next of kin. That is really important.

The Equality Act 2010 included sexual orientation and gender reassignment as two of the nine protected characteristics. I think it is a pretty good Act. I know that various people have problems with it at the moment, but I think it is a well-balanced piece of legislation that does not need change. The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 legalised same-sex marriages at a time when the party of the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington realised that it had got a bit left behind and that it ought to come into the modern world. The vast majority of them are still there, but not all of them, it seems, as we saw last Friday.

All that change was thanks to having a progressive majority Labour Government in the 1997 to 2010 period. We passed progressive legislation that made people’s lives easier and demonstrated that their relationships, their loves and what they did in their lives was properly respected. However, the progress has not been linear—progress very rarely is—and the community faces threats now that are reminiscent of what I hoped we had left behind in the 1980s. For four consecutive years, between 2015 and 2019, Britain was ranked the best place to be LGBTQ+ in Europe, in the Rainbow Europe index, but we are now 17th. There has been a cocktail of anti-LGBT hate crime on the streets, and anti-LGBT diatribes have featured increasingly in the media and some political discourse. Some members of the Government are trying to use that for their own purposes, when it comes to modernising and reform. I am not pointing the finger at anyone in this Chamber, because I know we are among friends, but there are some issues.

Police-recorded hate crime on the basis of sexual orientation is up 112% in the past five years, and against trans people it is up 186%. In Merseyside, where my constituency of Wallasey is, reported hate crime based on sexual orientation is up 162%, and against trans people it is up 1,033%. So let nobody say that the problematising of LGBT people, particularly trans people, does not have consequences on the street, because it does and they are often very brutal.

We need to try to marginalise the people who think that a divisive war on woke is the way they can win the next election, shore up the blue wall or do any of the things they think they are doing by problematising trans people in particular and painting them as a threat. They think what happens on social media is real, and that those provocations are anything other than that—they are often generated by bots and agents provocateurs outside our country in order to divide us. It is called hybrid war, and it is not something we should indulge in.

I am disappointed—I hope the Minister might be able to cheer me up—that the Conservative Government dropped their LGBT+ action plan and dismissed their LGBT+ advisory board. Having such voices at the centre of where policy is made is always very important. The Minister for Women and Equalities, the right hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Kemi Badenoch), has not seen any LGBT+ organisations except those that are gender critical in any of the meetings she has had when she has been formulating Government policy. That is, to say the least, regrettable.

The problems around modernising the Gender Recognition Act and the manifesto promise to ban the abusive practices of conversion therapy need not have happened, but we are where we are and we have to find a way through. There has been an authoritarian far-right backlash evident across the world, encompassing President Putin all the way to Steve Bannon, Trump’s guru, and a lot in between. We need to see what is going on globally and connect it to how the trans issue has been used as a wedge issue in order to take the “T” out of LGBT and destroy progress in this area.

Just last week hon. Members were lining up to stop a very mild private Member’s Bill. It was so mild that I wanted it to be toughened up considerably, were it ever to reach Committee stage. But we could not even get it there, nor would the Government even allow opinions on it, despite the sponsor bending over backwards to try to create a situation where the Bill could get to Committee. We have had Members of Parliament talk about LGB people, erasing the “T”, and equating conversion practices with families having a normal conversation about their children growing up and exploring ideas about themselves and their identity. That is not what conversion practice is. It is easy to recognise torture and abuse when we see it. Torture and abuse is definitely not a conversation.

This year, whether the Prime Minister likes it or not, there will be a general election. Labour will offer the country the chance to pick up on legislating to protect the LBGT community with a comprehensive, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy. I would have liked to get it done sooner, but it will happen. We just have to make progress. It is very sad that, as the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington said, it has taken longer than the Brexit negotiations. That should make us stop and think about what has been going on. We will also strengthen the law so that anti-LGBT+ hate crimes are treated as aggravated offences, and there will be a much-needed modernisation of gender recognition processes, which are humiliating and overlong.

Progress on LGBT rights around the world was summed up very well by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington. There are still 67 countries that criminalise homosexuality, 51 that restrict freedom of sexual and gender expression and 11 that apply the death penalty for same-sex offences. Uganda and Ghana have passed the two most recent pieces of anti-LGBT legislation that feature capital punishment. Just last week, Ghana passed its Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill unanimously. Even thinking about the title, there are a whole load of assumptions in there that are interesting to say the least.

That Bill criminalises being gay, prohibits adoption for gay people and forcibly disbands all LGBT associations. For same-sex intercourse, one is likely to be jailed for up to three years. For producing, procuring or distributing material deemed to be promoting LBGT activities, it is six to 10 years. For teaching children about LGBT activities, it is also six to 10 years. Just yesterday, on Ghana’s independence day, LGBT+ protestors demonstrated in solidarity outside Ghana’s high commission against this appalling Bill.

Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act passed last year. It includes the death penalty for the offence of “aggravated homosexuality”—whatever that is—life imprisonment for the offence of homosexuality and up to 20 years in jail for promoting homosexuality. A report was compiled late last year by the Strategic Response Team, which is a coalition of Ugandan LGBT+ rights organisations, which have been criminalised for even existing in their own country and have to operate in very difficult circumstances. They found that between May, when the Act became law, and September there had been 180 cases of evictions, 176 cases of torture, abuse and degrading treatment, and 159 incidents of discrimination.

All of those were against both real and perceived LGBT+ people. We have to remember that just because something is anti-LGBT+ legislation, it does not mean the people caught by it are necessarily LGBT+. They are marginalised or focused on for whatever reason the authorities feel that they wish to focus on them. We have heard that the first person arrested who faces capital punishment under the law was not even gay. They were homeless, and they were arrested for being shirtless, which was because they were poor, and they were charged under the legislation. The Ugandan authorities are using the law to brutally criminalise the LGBT+ community, but also to go for any marginalised groups they want to attack. It is one of those catch-all things that they can put people in jail for. As is often the case, an attack on one minority is only ever the beginning of attacks on many others.

On our own European shores, over a fifth of countries lack broad protections for LGBT+ people—again, mentioned by my friend the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington. Discussions in schools on LGBT+ issues are outlawed in Russia, as is being LGBT+, and in Hungary, Lithuania and Latvia. In Poland, nearly 100 municipalities have self-declared as LGBT-free zones. I hope that President Tusk, who—thank goodness—has just been elected in Poland, can start to undo some of the damage done in this area by the previous long-standing regime.

Across the Atlantic, the American Civil Liberties Union is tracking 474 anti-LGBTQ Bills in state legislatures across the country. That was the number as of yesterday, but it is probably out of date already because several get promulgated every day. Florida’s so-called “Don’t say gay” law bans discussion on sexual orientation or gender identity in schools for children under 10—that is their very own section 28. That is being exported by American Christian groups, which ploughed more than $280 million into campaigning against LGBT+ rights and abortion rights worldwide between 2007 and 2020, targeting communities and Parliaments around the world with their well-funded and co-ordinated doctrine of hate.

The legislation in Uganda and Ghana is peculiarly similar because it was drafted in that context. That does not arise spontaneously; it is well organised, and it has to be fought. Britain, as a country that respects international human rights and has better standards on that, ought to be financing some of the battles to prevent the spread of that pernicious and damaging ideology.

Britain has to get back on the international stage to advance LGBT rights across the globe and has to support those campaigning to change those unacceptable laws at home. I know that the international development Minister, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), is very aware of that, and we as an APPG have been to see him about it. It would be interesting if the Minister said a bit about whether there is funding to help to support a battle against those worrying developments on the African continent.

We have made progress, stalled and progressed again, and are going forwards and backwards in a non-linear way. There are challenges ahead, but we have to redouble our efforts not only to be proud of who we are and proud of our communities, but to try to create a circumstance where once more Britain leads the world in LGBT+ rights.