Pride Month

John Nicolson Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Nicolson (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP) [V]]

Let us consider these words:

“People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

So wrote the late, great James Baldwin in his much lauded 1956 novel “Giovanni's Room”, in which the author writes profoundly of the rife gay shame of his time. I am so pleased to have secured this debate with my friend the hon. Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle). We have heard some wonderful, deeply moving contributions.

For the past month, we have been celebrating Pride. What a contrast Pride is to the shame taught to gay kids for so much of the century in which every one of us here today was born. This shame was much of the source of much of the suffering our LGBT+ communities endured. That enduring stigma forced many lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people into the closet. For many, living a lie, however painful, was safer than living openly with the truth. Decriminalisation in England and Wales in 1967, and in Scotland in 1980, laid the groundwork for change. Even after decriminalisation, many homophobic laws remained on the statute book and homophobic attitudes were commonplace in society, which entrenched the inequality faced by LGBT people.

Since the turn of the millennium, we have seen further progress towards our overall pursuit of equality. My Turing Bill—the Sexual Offences (Pardons Etc) Bill—which sought to pardon all those convicted of sexual offences no longer on the statute book was, sadly, filibustered by a Conservative Minister, despite the Government’s promise to support it. The SNP Scottish Government, however, picked up my Bill and passed it with all-party support at Holyrood. It is a source of great pride to me and, I think, to the First Minister. This year, too, we have seen a long-awaited law reform. Only two weeks ago, the blood donor ban, which prevented so many men from donating, was finally lifted.

Huge advances have been made at home, but LGBT people live in great peril abroad. Hungary’s recent introduction of its version of clause 28 drags civil rights backwards in the very heart of the European Union. Russia under Putin is a hellish place for gay people to live, and 69 countries round the world still criminalise homosexuality. Half of them are in Africa. On the roll call of shame, Iran and Saudi Arabia still have state-sanctioned murder for consensual gay love.

We must not be complacent at home, however. Older LGBT people are more likely to be socially isolated so, during the pandemic, many have felt that they have nowhere to turn and no one to turn to. We know, too, that young LGBT people bullied at home are more likely to become homeless.

Also, while our legal rights have seemed increasingly enshrined, as other speakers have noted, an onslaught against our trans siblings has been unleashed over the past year by social conservatives, importing the cultural wars from the United States, amplified by social media and whipped up by the right-wing press. The transphobic bullies in the sinister LGB Alliance and elsewhere claim that they represent ordinary voters, but, as we saw in the Scottish elections, when they emerge from behind their keyboards they get trounced at the ballot box: 0.5% percent for the Scottish Family party and, for the Alba party, 1.666%—a significant number, surely.

The future is full of promise. Young people hate intolerance and they hate bigotry. They have gay friends, gay teachers and gay role models. The TIE—or Time for Inclusive Education—campaign does wonderful work in schools. It is a world away from the society in which I grew up in the 1970s. While we on the SNP Benches find much to criticise this Parliament about, I will end on a proud note: my party has more openly elected LGBT members than any other parliamentary party in the world, and our very gayness has made Westminster the second gayest Parliament in the world.