Global LGBT Rights

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) for securing the debate and for the leadership he gives to the all-party group. He has taken the more voluntary route of taking himself off to the Back Benches to champion these causes and we all benefit from the quality of his leadership. I took a rather more compulsory route, but that does mean that I have the freedom to engage with these incredibly important issues. I want to reflect on why they are so important. What has brought us here today are the headline issues, raised by previous speakers, relating to what is happening in Azerbaijan, Egypt and Chechnya. We only have to go online to see horrific videos of mob justice in Nigeria, where gay men are being lynched, and the administration of ISIS justice, with gay people heaved off tall buildings.

I want to reflect briefly on some of the headline issues in Chechnya, because the cases there are truly appalling. My right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs talked about Maxim Lapunov. He was lucky enough to survive. There is, however, the story of popstar Zelimkhan Bakayev, who went back to Chechnya on 8 August for his sister’s wedding. By all the accounts I was able to get hold of, he was arrested within three hours and was dead within 10. This was a man whose picture taken with Ramzan Kadyrov, when the Chechen leader wanted to ride on the back of this popstar’s popularity. If that can happen to him in Chechnya, we can draw our own conclusions about how appalling the situation is and our expectations of the Russian authorities to do anything about it.

Headline atrocities have brought us here today: the dreadful scale of arrests in Azerbaijan and Egypt, and direct state repression. The number of people affected by direct oppression runs into many hundreds of thousands. There are people who are in relationships that they do not want to be in, people who have experienced “corrective rape”, and people who are in forced marriages. There are millions of people—probably between 50 million and 100 million in India—who, because of the laws of their countries, are simply not able to be themselves.

[Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that although in various countries there is a wide range of laws to protect victims of abuse and discrimination, many are deterred from using the law to protect themselves because of, for instance, high legal costs, a heavy burden of proof or worry about the implications for their job prospects?

[Crispin Blunt]

My hon. Friend has drawn attention to all the difficulties of living a life if the society in which people live and the laws that surround them do not allow them to be themselves. The reason so many of us who are speaking in the debate are LGBT ourselves is that we know just how important this freedom is to us. I know, because I did not come out until I was 50. When I was growing up, having been born in 1960 into the United Kingdom that existed in the 1960s and 1970s, what I understood about myself was that there was something wrong with me. I wanted to be a soldier, and I wanted to be a politician, and that was wholly inconsistent with ever beginning to come to terms with myself.

An awful lot of men my age are coming out now, because they have the societal and professional freedom to do so. The British experience can provide a lesson, and the British story is one that we should be able to tell others. We should be able to tell the rest of the world how we have moved from active implementation of the criminal law in the 1950s, when more than 1,000 men were imprisoned for consensual same-sex acts, to where we are today.

When I say “we”, I am thinking of the role that we can play as parliamentarians. We should not underestimate the huge challenge that faces our parliamentary colleagues in other countries that, because of religious beliefs and the influence of religion in those societies, are in the same state as the United Kingdom in the 1950s when it comes to attitudes to LGBT people. Nor should we underestimate the effect of our own personal stories, and our own personal testimony. We should look our fellow parliamentarians in the eye when we have the opportunity to do so and get them to first base. People’s sexuality is not something that they choose.

I used those terms during a debate in the House in 1999, before I truly understood myself, and I was, quite rightly, heckled by colleagues on the other Benches. It should not be assumed that people understand. Once our fellow parliamentarians have got to first base and have accepted that sexuality is very largely innate—if not completely innate, but let us not go into that now—and not something that people choose, the public policy that ought to flow from that will flow from it.

We should say to our parliamentary colleagues in other countries, “You are representing gay people whether you like it or not. You are representing just as many gay people as I am.” There is no evidence of any difference in the proportion of sexualities between different races or parts of the world. Our parliamentary colleagues in other countries have a responsibility, and they have a lead opinion. Our responsibility is to help them to change their societies by means of the evidence that we can give them from our own experience.

--- Later in debate ---

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

It is a particular pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Gerard Killen), not least because his constituency is the part of Scotland that my family hail from. Indeed, I cut my campaigning teeth in the Rutherglen constituency but, despite its having a ward called Toryglen, I came fourth. I also commend my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) for securing this debate and for his incredibly powerful speech. He was absolutely right to say that we have a two-world situation.

We should celebrate the fact that many countries in the world are making commendable progress on LGBT+ issues. On the first day of this month, same-sex marriage became legal in Germany following a vote in its Parliament earlier this year. We have also heard about the referendum in Australia, which I hope will go the right way. I have relatives over there, and I will be doing a spot of telephone canvassing to make sure that they vote the right way. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) mentioned, Taiwan has become the first country in Asia in which the highest court recognises same-sex marriage. I hope that, despite all the other tensions in that part of the world, that country’s example will encourage others to go down the same route.

As Members on both sides of the House have detailed, however, there are also many shocking examples of countries in which incredibly regressive and retrograde developments are taking place. We have to be honest with ourselves and admit that there is not one simple, quick solution to getting those countries to move to a more enlightened place. We cannot simply legislate for change. We have to encourage and allow cultures to adapt, and prejudices to be challenged and diminished.

As other Members have said, we have to remember that this country has been on a journey as well. Yes, we probably have the most advanced equalities legislation in the world; yes, this Parliament is one of the most LGBT+-friendly Parliaments in the world; and yes, we have seen an enormous shift in British public opinion in a relatively short period of time, but it is only a couple of decades since the majority of people in this country believed that homosexual acts were sinful or wrong. That has been reversed, and rightly so, but prejudice remains.

I want to make brief reference to two events that happened to me in recent months and that confirmed to me that prejudice still exists. Back in the summer, I recorded a video for the Diana award “Back2School” anti-bullying project. As the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West said, the very fact that we have to take part in these campaigns because young people are being bullied at school shows us that prejudice remains. Secondly, in recent weeks my new partner and I were walking through the shopping centre in the middle of my constituency. We were just holding hands, as we should have the right to do, when someone who clearly knew me shouted out a comment that was both racist and homophobic. The fact that that can happen in Milton Keynes, one of the more enlightened and modern parts of our country, shows that there is still prejudice in the United Kingdom.

[Crispin Blunt]

I want to reinforce that point. While there is simple prejudice and bullying in schools, there are aspects of public policy that are still in the wrong place. I am talking about the prescription of pre-exposure prophylaxis. It has been established that the net present value advantage would be about £1 billion if gay men could be prescribed PrEP. However, we cannot have an open public policy; we have to have a large trial to get this thing delivered, all because of the attitude that would surround the challenge facing the Secretary of State for Health to do the right thing for public health.

[Iain Stewart]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. To back up what I just said, we are still on a journey in this country even though we have legislated in many areas, and we have to understand that other countries will also take a long time to get to where we want them to get—they cannot just legislate. We have to use all the tools that are at our disposal, and colleagues on both sides of the House have mentioned some of them. We have soft power that we can exert due to our historical relationships with many countries, and I hope that we put such issues on the agenda for the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. For example, the charges have now been dropped in that horrible case in the UAE where a Scottish gentleman was put on trial and, although I do not know, I hope that the exertion of diplomacy from this country helped in that situation.

We should absolutely ensure that the soft power that we can exert through our overseas aid budget is used in the right way; the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) was absolutely right about that. We need to ensure that the money is there to help groups on the ground, and I agree with him that we should not take money away from health projects just because of a country’s horrible LGBT+ policies; it should be the other way around. We should be using that soft power to encourage countries down the road.

There is also a lot that individual parliamentarians can do. My constituency has a large Nigerian population, and I do not make any secret of my homosexuality when I go to meet them. By that simple act of being open with them—they can judge me however they like—they will hopefully see that I can act as a politician who is out, and that will filter through their community. I hope that that is something that each and every one of us can do. We also need to make more use of our soft power through sporting and cultural events, such as the upcoming Olympic games in Japan in 2020. I hope that individual sportsmen and sportswomen can be out and proud. I am sure that their sexuality makes no difference to their sporting ability.

As the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) said, trade will also be an enormously important lever. I do not want to get into a Brexit discussion—that is for other debates and there will be many of them—but one consequence of our leaving the EU is that we will be able to develop new trade policies with many African countries, and I hope that that better interlinking of economies will mean that foreign companies realise that there is a huge pink pound market in the UK in which to sell their products. Countries may also realise that tourism might be inhibited by LGBT+ policies. Bit by bit and example by example, I hope that closer economic ties will help to break down some of the prejudices. We should not pretend that things will be easy or quick, but that should not dissuade us from the task of achieving a world in which people, whatever their nationality, religion or background, can love whomever they want.