Global LGBT Rights

Helen Grant 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.