Relationships Education: LGBT Content

Debate between Elliot Colburn and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Monday 18th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Elliot Colburn]

I am always happy to meet my hon. Friend. We sit on the Petitions Committee together and I am sure we can happily have that chat. To clarify, I am not saying that the material is not out there. I think I have made that clear in my speech so far, but I apologise if I have not. I want to be crystal clear that with a universal service that everybody gets, such as education or health, it is inevitable that sometimes things go wrong. What I am saying is that there is no statistical data to back up the idea that this is a widespread problem, so rather than trying to erase LGBT people from existence in schools, we need to look at why teachers do not feel confident delivering such material and why, on occasion, people sometimes invite inappropriate stuff into the classroom. I agree with my hon. Friend that if material is not age-appropriate, it should absolutely not be in our classrooms. The point I was trying to make was about ensuring that schools feel confident delivering the information and that parents feel empowered, but I am always happy to meet my hon. Friend.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is often a conflation between all the material an organisation might produce and the material that is used in schools? Disney produces adult movies as well as children’s movies; the children’s movies have children’s content and the adult movies have adult content. An organisation might produce adult materials and children’s materials. Just because an organisation produces a range of materials does not mean that is evidence they are being used in schools. The evidence is what teachers are doing and what children are reporting, which is broadly positive.

Conversion Practices (Prohibition) Bill

Debate between Elliot Colburn and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

2nd reading
Friday 1st March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The hon. Member says exactly the right word: “most”, but not all. Therapists who take a different approach will join a different organisation and get the same protection, because they will be following that organisation’s regulatory approach. In fact, the UK Council for Psychotherapy recently released a statement saying that exploratory therapy is an acceptable form of practice within the requirement of not having a “predetermined purpose”. The Bill does not support or prevent different forms of care, such as gender affirming or exploratory care. That is for the regulatory bodies to determine. What the Bill does is stop a “predetermined purpose” of offering change.

Some people have asked me to remove the “pre-determined” requirement for the health sector. They claim that it is circular and already the basis of the Bill, and that we do not need it. But without it, the chilling effect that many health practitioners feel in this area—hence they are leaving it—would continue. The Bill will allow practitioners to explore all forms of care, while having a framework to respond to someone who says, “You must say that I am this at the end of my therapy.” Practitioners can now say, “I cannot do that under law. I have to explore. I have to work with you and support you.” That is what therapists should do, that is what they want to do, but at the moment, that is what they are struggling to do.

This is a developing field and we need a framework that allows new evidence to be heard. Some have claimed that we should wait for the Cass report or that we should rule out some sorts of care. That would be dangerous. The Cass report will not be the end of the discussion of children and transgender. One sort of care might be useful for one group of people but not for another. It is up to the regulated bodies to produce guidelines. Such evidence should be treated by them, not deliberated here in the House.

[Elliot Colburn (Carshalton and Wallington) (Con)]

The hon. Member is giving a powerful speech. On the Cass review, does he want to highlight the fact that Dr Hilary Cass has said that absolutely nothing in her work should stop a conversion practices Bill going through this place?

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Exactly. I very much welcome that statement. In fact, the Bill produces a framework that Dr Cass’s review can inform as things change and move forward.

People who are not health practitioners but assist a person undergoing a regulated course of treatment, such as a receptionists or drivers, are protected under the Bill. If someone is questioning, exploring or developing coping skills—a role often taken by teachers or youth workers, which is my previous profession—they will receive clarity on the range of support they can offer.

One of the most controversial areas in the Government’s Bill was how it dealt with parents. It is my view that parents have a darn hard life already raising their children and we should not create new burdens for them. The Bill says that if someone is exercising parental responsibility and considers the welfare of their child as paramount, nothing they do will be an offence under the Bill. We refer to the Children Act 1989 and use the language in well-established bodies of law. We should not be messing with how children are treated in this way.

LGBT History Month

Debate between Elliot Colburn and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Thursday 2nd February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Elliot Colburn]

I agree entirely, and I commend my right hon. Friend for all the work he has done in paving the way for many of us in this place.

Let me now turn to some of the UK’s more recent history in this regard. As I said earlier, the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships in the UK finally occurred in 1967. By the turn of the century, LGBT people could serve in the armed forces and the age of consent had been equalised.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

We should note, however, that when same-sex relationships between men were legalised it was due not to some euphoria about gay rights, but to a conservative view held in many quarters that we should look after these sorry, poor, gay individuals who were likely to be blackmailed. While that was a step forward, the transformation in people’s minds in relation to how to consider gay people took many more years. Are there not similarities with the way in which some people talk about trans people now? Perhaps we are on that journey as well.

[Elliot Colburn]

The hon. Gentleman is right. This was not a euphoric overnight decision in 1967 after which everything was OK; things took much longer. Of course, the circumstances were very different, but the hon. Gentleman has made an important point.

I was talking about some of our more recent successes. The passage of the Equality Act 2010 protected LGBT+ people from discrimination, harassment and victimisation in many areas of public life, and the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013 and equivalent legislation across the UK—passed in 2014 in Scotland and 2019 in Northern Ireland— finally enabled LGBT+ people to marry.

We have come so far, and it is easy to reel off a long list from the history of discrimination, but it is important not to forget the implications of that history. If many of us—here in the Chamber and outside it—had been born just a few heartbeats earlier, our lives would have been completely different, and would have been hell. That was the reality for millions of LGBT+ people throughout history—our history. We must never forget the struggle that they underwent, and the sacrifices that they made, to lead to the great advances that we enjoy today, but we should also remember that for too many people around the world, that struggle is still all too real. LGBT+ people are still criminalised and persecuted because of who they are and who they love in 67 countries across the world. Half of those are Commonwealth countries, where homophobic and transphobic laws and attitudes exported and implemented by the UK have still not been repealed.

There is hope, however: I want to emphasise that. Recent years have seen an increase in the decriminalisation of LGBT+ people. Just last year, same-sex activity was decriminalised in Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Singapore and Barbados, with many more countries likely to follow. Equal marriage legislation has progressed across the world, in countries including Cuba, Slovenia and Mexico last year. I look forward to visiting the Czech Parliament later this year: it is currently considering its own equal marriage legislation. Thirty-three countries now have equal marriage laws, which means that 1.35 billion people now have access to the joy that is marriage.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again; he is being very generous to me. Does he note with disappointment Bermuda’s repealing of same-sex marriage legislation, and this Government’s failure to intervene to prevent it despite their ability to do so? They did intervene to prevent Bermuda from legalising cannabis, so they have no problem with intervening, but they did not intervene on the human rights issue of same-sex marriage, which was such a disappointment.

[Elliot Colburn]

I agree that that is a great disappointment. It also harks back to the point made by the hon. Member for Wallasey about not taking rights for granted, and the fact that the fight for LGBT+ rights does not always move in a linear, A to B direction. There is always a struggle. We have to remember that and always be conscious of it, and the hon. Gentleman has given one such example.

India and Pakistan recently passed legislation supporting the protection of trans people against discrimination in education and healthcare. Further progress can be seen, with Cyprus, India, Canada, New Zealand and indeed the United Kingdom now considering banning conversion practices, or currently legislating for them. I want to go into a bit more detail on conversion therapy, because we have been talking about it for a long time.

A ban was first announced back in 2018, as part of the LGBT action plan. I welcome the announcement by the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, at the conclusion of our proceedings on the Online Safety Bill, that the Government intend to publish the Bill for pre-legislative scrutiny in the current parliamentary session, and that it will be trans-inclusive. However, I hope that the Minister will either be able to give us a bit more of a timeline today or commit himself to sharing that information with us soon, because we have been waiting for this for a long time. Pre-legislative scrutiny is a rare tool for Parliament to use. I understand why the Government wants to ensure that legislation is done well and done right—Parliament’s job is, after all, to produce good, well-worded legislation—but I sincerely hope the Government will not allow pre-legislative scrutiny to enable a watering down of the Bill, and I hope that we can have that commitment from the Minister.

I have one final thing to touch on—I realise that I am being very selfish with my time—which is the current discussion around the trans debate, gender recognition reform, the use of section 35 in Scotland, and the potential for delisting countries for acceptance of gender recognition certificates. The hon. Member for Wallasey put it very well indeed when she said that there seems to be hysteria around trans issues at the moment. Often, discussions on those issues have become so blown out of all proportion and so lacking in any fact that we have lost sight of what people are attempting to do.

Public opinion polls have shown that, overwhelmingly, the British people come at this issue from a position of compassion. We might not necessarily understand all the issues, we might not necessarily think that everything that some people propose is correct, but the British people are overwhelmingly compassionate in this space and really want Parliament to get a grip of what has become a very toxic public debate. This is a failure of this place to get to grips with difficult issues, to calm things down and to talk about issues on the basis of fact and move the conversation on.

We will not always agree—I know that. We have seen examples of that with the passage of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in Scotland and the subsequent use of section 35. I do have concerns that there seems to have been a lack of discussion between Holyrood and Whitehall in the run-up to the passing of the Bill. I appreciate that it took a long time for all the amendments to be considered in the Scottish Parliament, but the Government have indicated that they are willing to accept a form of gender recognition reform Bill in Scotland if certain criteria are met. That is all well and good, but I do not think that it has been adequately explained exactly what that framework would look like—what the Bill would look like.

In my opinion, and in the opinion of many lawyers that we have received evidence from on the Women and Equalities Committee and beyond, the statement of reasons for the section 35 order are shaky. I worry about the Government going into legal proceedings—inevitable legal proceedings—against the Scottish Government not only because of the effect that will have on the Union and the constitution, but because it will bring trans people into a very public fight.

Again, I understand where the Government are coming from: they say that this is about procedure and not the policy itself. I hope that the Government and everybody in this House can understand the problem that many trans people have in believing that at the moment. It is because the talk about trans issues has become so toxic in Parliament, in the media and beyond. The idea that there is any sort of goodwill or benefit of the doubt that this is more to do with procedure and constitutional issues than trans people is hard to believe, whether or not it is true.

Gender Recognition Act

Debate between Elliot Colburn and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Monday 21st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Elliot Colburn]

I agree with the hon. Lady, who leads me towards points I will come on to later.

If we allow this toxicity to continue and refuse to lead from the front, we will end up in the situation we are in now, where we have ridiculous public conversations about erasing language or trying to figure out if certain words are offensive, and where we label anyone who expresses concerns about the protection of sex-based rights a TERF—trans-exclusionary radical feminist— or transphobic, rather than actually talking about the issues. If we allow that to continue, we abdicate our responsibility as a House and, most importantly, we forget the people in the middle of all of this: the hundreds of thousands of trans people living in the UK, who, like the majority of us, just want to live their lives. They do not want this massive, toxic debate about their existence going on. They just want to be able to live their lives.

I plead with colleagues to use today’s debate as an opportunity to change that narrative. Let us lead from the front, have more respectful discussions and debates with one another and explore these issues without the need to rip each other’s throats out. From looking around the room, I know that there are strongly held views on both sides of the debate. Colleagues will no doubt want to focus on appalling things that have been said and done on both sides of this debate and talk about the more nasty and absurd parts of the far ends of the debate. However, I urge colleagues to just take a moment.

People say that this House is at its best when we come together in total agreement on an issue and get things done, but I would like to go further. I genuinely believe that this House can demonstrate its strength and the strength of the democratic process by coming together on an issue where there is not agreement, creating space to talk about that respectfully and finding a way forward. That demonstrates the best of what this House can do.

I hope today will be that opportunity. We do not do ourselves any favours by taking the easy road of appealing to those who we think are shouting the loudest. Please, colleagues, join me in rejecting the Twitter-isation of this debate, where our arguments are condensed to miniature soundbites. We can find the answers and a way forward together, rather than tearing each other apart.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Member is making an important argument to frame the nature of the debate, but does he agree that it is sometimes important that we do not talk in big, grand narratives about our political beliefs one way or another? This debate is specifically about the GRA and the process of applying for a gender recognition certificate, so colleagues should not be having these big, grand debates about trans issues and feminism. Instead, we should talk about the practical things that the GRA and GRC do. It does two practical things, and nothing else. It does not give someone rights to anything other than the following two changes: a birth certificate and pension rights. We should limit the debate here to that. That will provide civility.

[Elliot Colburn]

The hon. Member has second-guessed what I am about to move on to. I truly believe that there is a way for the House to come together on this issue. As a member of the Women and Equalities Committee, which conducted a very recent inquiry into reform of the GRA, I was struck by how much agreement there was on both sides of the debate on many of the practical issues this petition is calling for. There was also repetition of what the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) said, specifically on the issue of the application process for the GRC. After all, that is what the petition is all about. Much of the discussion has centred around access to such things as single-sex spaces, but those are not catered for in the GRA or included in the scope of this petition; they are instead governed by the Equality Act 2010, which sets out provisions around single-sex spaces. It is right that we make space for that discussion to happen, because part of the reason that the debate has become so toxic is the confusion around the application of the Equality Act and its relationship with the GRA.