Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I have listened with great care to many very fine and thoughtful speeches today. I support the intentions of the noble Baroness, Lady Burt. I think some kind of intervention in this area is long overdue. We have heard from the speeches of Theresa May when she was Prime Minister, and Boris Johnson, when he was Prime Minister, made similar remarks.

It is always dangerous to attempt to gauge the consensus of your Lordships’ House, but, like many noble Lords, I do not think that Clause 1(2) works, as it is cast too wide. However, like the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and as with the outstanding interventions of the noble Baroness, Lady Hunt of Bethnal Green, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol, I believe that it is within the capabilities of people of good will, wit and wisdom to tighten the net and attack the real harm that is being caused to people, as we know that it is.

Words have been used by noble Lords such as “coercion”, “manipulation”, “degradation” and “abuse of power”. I add that, notwithstanding the very thoughtful remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, there are people putting themselves out there, in a desert of mental health services, who should not be. These talking therapies can be very powerful for good, but can also be very dangerous when they are manipulative.

On 31 January, in her article in the Times, to which the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, referred earlier, Emily Sargent described what is, frankly, this quackery. It is an article that I recommend noble Lords read. The noble Lord and I read the article very differently, and so I urge noble Lords to read it for themselves. What I read was the testimony of a very brave undercover journalist, who put herself in harm’s way to expose quite dangerous quackery that left her feeling very vulnerable.

The noble Lord, Lord Robathan, joked about how he nearly joined the SAS but some psychologist did not let him. I am saying nothing about that—I am not qualified to comment on entry requirements to the SAS—but, from his nature and his strength of character, I suspect that he feels very robust in his mental health, which is wonderful. But that is not true of everyone, particularly the many young people whom he referred to just now. So, in the particular area exposed by Emily Sargent in her piece, we see that there are conversion therapies that are not currently banned by the extant criminal law because, for example, they are not sexual or violent offences. It is the abuse of power when somebody effectively gets into your head and makes you feel worse about yourself. In some of the examples given by Emily Sargent, people were turned against their own parents. There are all sorts of problems there that we have to attack.

I do not want to be discourteous by taking too much time, but I will say that the tone of your Lordships’ debate has been a lot better than what happened at the other end of the building on Wednesday. I sincerely wish that the Prime Minister would apologise to Brianna Ghey’s grieving family for his error. There would be no harm or dishonour in apologising for that kind of error when it has caused such dismay not just to that family but to so many other trans people and their families in this country.

To end more positively, I will briefly quote the wonderful young writer Shon Faye, who wrote:

“Hope is part of the human condition and trans people’s hope is our proof that we are fully human. We are not an ‘issue’ to be debated and derided … Our existence enriches this world”.