Pride Month

Debate between Dawn Butler and Chris Bryant

Monday 23rd June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

And the things you do not know, Mr Deputy Speaker—anyway.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Pride Month.

I should start by declaring an interest in this Pride debate. The Daily Mail once referred to me as an “ex-gay vicar”. I am an ex-vicar, but the other stuff is coming along quite nicely. In fact, I am a practising homosexual—one day I will be quite good at it.

People ask me, “Why on earth do you need a Pride Month? Do you really need LGBT History Month? What’s the point of Pride marches and Pride flags? Hasn’t the world changed? Haven’t you already got same-sex marriage and adoption, gays in the police and the military, and laws that protect people from discrimination on the grounds of their sexual orientation or gender reassignment? What more do you want?” That is what I hear all the time, even from really well-meaning, liberal souls.

But we have always needed Pride. We needed it when people lazily assumed that a short haircut meant that you were a lesbian or a lisp meant that you were gay. We needed it when people laughed at Larry Grayson and John Inman but forced them to hide their sexuality. We needed it when people said that we should be harassed, arrested and locked up for loving who we wanted. We needed it when the police wore rubber gloves to arrest us, just in case we gave them AIDS. We needed it when we were called queer, faggot and arse bandit at school. We needed it when we were sneered at, spat at, punched, kicked and beaten up.

And we need Pride now—when kids are still bullied because they are camp or butch; when families still throw their LGBT children out of the home; when many are so worn down by abuse that they take their own lives; when so many are so terrified of coming out that they live lives of terrible, crushing loneliness; when people are abused for wanting to transition; when our cousins in Hungary are denied the right to demonstrate; when the state police in many countries deliberately entrap homosexuals; when trans people are treated as less than human; and when homosexuality is still illegal in 63 countries, including 38 that apply those rules to women, and including more than half the Commonwealth. Yes, we still need Pride.

[Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt such a magnificent speech. The first Pride march in London was in 1972, and I have met many people who were on that first Pride march who thought that they would never need to march again, but they still need to march now. Does my hon. Friend feel sorry that Pride organisations have now said that no political parties are allowed to march because of how the LGBTQI+ community has been treated? I will still be marching, because I march with other groups, but does my hon. Friend agree that this is a sad state of affairs?

[Chris Bryant]

I think we should be proud of the fact that politics has changed the law in this country, and political parties were absolutely essential to that. I pay tribute to everybody in my political party who for many generations fought for equality—but that is true for the Conservative party as well, where people in many cases had to be even braver than they did in the Labour movement, and of course in many other parties as well. I do agree with my hon. Friend; I think it is an entirely retrograde step to ban people from political parties from taking part in Pride marches.

Parliamentary Candidates: Barriers for Women

Debate between Dawn Butler and Chris Bryant

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[Dawn Butler]

The right hon. Member for Basingstoke is right. I will come to some more solutions and ways to ensure that we make this place more acceptable and accessible to women, to which I hope the Government will respond.

Sometimes, the issue is not with women standing. Women often stand for positions but find that other barriers stop them from being selected or elected. Some of that is racism, discrimination, sexism and misogyny. As uncomfortable as it is to listen to, I am afraid we have to talk about these issues, because they are barriers to women entering Parliament.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend will have noticed that one of the Select Committees just appointed has not a single woman on it. Would it not be a good change to our Standing Orders to say that no Committee of this House can be nominated if it has no woman on it?

[Dawn Butler]

That is an extremely valid point. We are a Parliament that should seek to hear the voices of all Members of this House, and that includes women. There should not be all-male Committees in this day and age.

Sport and the 2012 Olympics Legacy

Debate between Dawn Butler and Chris Bryant

Wednesday 24th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dawn Butler (Brent Central) (Lab)]

I am sure that the Mayor of London is a lover of statistics and will enjoy this one: 71.2% of adults in Brent would love to do more sporting activity, compared with 55% in the country as a whole. Unfortunately, however, the lack of access and opportunity prevents that from happening. I declare an interest in being the Member of Parliament representing Wembley stadium, where we should have seen a lasting Olympic legacy.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and it is a delight to see her back in her rightful place in this House.

There are further dangers ahead. Let us take swimming, for example. As I said, this is the one sport in which participation among girls and boys is equal. Swimming is the most popular form of activity in this country, with 2.6 million people taking part every week. There are, however, many things that put people off swimming, including communal changing rooms, lack of privacy, tired facilities, never learning to swim in the first place, particularly among poorer families, and simply the cost of using a swimming pool. Every Member will have heard of the problems faced by local authorities in maintaining leisure centres, and many of us might have had to fight for swimming pools to stay open in our own constituencies. In fact, the number of pools is pretty stable, at about 5,000 in England alone. More than half of all local authority pools, as opposed to pools in expensive private members’ clubs, were built before 1985 and require significant investment to continue to operate and be attractive to modern swimmers. There are dramatic challenges ahead in respect of just that one sport. We must ensure that more people go swimming.