50 Years of Pride in the UK

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

As a queer woman and an openly proud lesbian, it is a huge privilege to speak in this debate in the House. I warmly welcome and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) on her persistence, and on being an icon in the LGBT community—I am sure many young people in our movement and across the political spectrum look up to her. We have had some brilliant contributions so far and as we mark 50 years of Pride, it is important to reflect, as many have, on how far we have come, and to look at where we are and at the challenges we face in future.

I want to acknowledge a member of my staff, Amy Cowan, who helped me to prepare for today’s debate. I also pay tribute to my dear friend Michelle Rodger, who passed away last August from triple negative breast cancer. She was the most wonderful ally, who supported me through many dark times after I came out, and helped me to write and prepare for the many LGBTQ-themed speeches and events to which I was invited after I came out. I miss her dearly: there is a gap in my life and my team that will simply never be filled.

I also want to recognise some of my dear friends—a wedge of lesbians we could call them—some of whom are here to watch today’s proceedings. They are sisters who know who they are; women who have blazed a trail in all aspects of life, and worked so hard in their many fields to further LGBTQ equality. They include our chief lesbian, Linda Riley, who has helped me personally so much since I came out, and who does incredible work through DIVA Magazine and her tireless charitable work. Many LGBTQ people have a queer family, and they are just some of mine. Among them is also Jacquie Lawrence, who this week was awarded the Iris prize fellowship for her work and contributions to the LGBTQ+ community in the media, particularly representing queer and lesbian women, who are so often under-represented.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) referred to the experience of our LGBTQ friends in the military, who have faced serious and deep discrimination. Jacquie was the commissioning editor at Channel 4 who commissioned “The Investigator”, the programme with Helen Baxendale that told the true story of some lesbians’ experience in the military. She has done pioneering work in her time, and she recently commissioned, produced and directed “Gateways Grind” with her Jackdaw Media partner Fizz Milton. Presented by Sandi Toksvig, it is a crucial, funny and brilliant piece of film making about the Gateways lesbian club in London. I implore hon. Members and those watching the debate to watch it.

I have my own family, and I am very grateful that they love and accept me. I am proud that my fiancée Emma and I are able to be open, live our lives freely and be accepted by our families. Many both home and abroad cannot do that. That is why we need Pride 50 years on, and that is why Pride continues to be a protest.

For many, Pride is personal. Local Prides have been something of a phenomenon across Scotland and the UK, and beyond. In my constituency, West Lothian Pride is a fantastic event that has brought the community together locally. We should pay tribute to those Prides and the people who run them, support them and fund them. Some will be able to choose to go out and join a march, a celebration or a parade, but some, be they here or abroad, may not be able to celebrate publicly because it is illegal in their country, because they are not quite there yet or because they cannot come out.

I have vivid memories of my first Pride march after I came out here in London: the love, the celebration and the sense of freedom. We have come a long way since the first Pride in London in 1972, when 2,000 brave activists marched. It now attracts an estimated 1.5 million people. But Pride is, and still should be, a protest. Although, as some have observed, there is a creep of commercialisation into Pride, I cannot help but feel a superficial glow when I walk down Oxford Street and see every shop window clad in rainbows during June. We see big corporate firms talking about their Pride networks and think, “How wonderful that so many corporations are embracing us, the LGBTQ+ community.”

However, when we scratch the surface and look up how many of those big companies actively support, embrace, employ and promote LGBTQ+ people, we realise that perhaps it is not such a rainbow-tinted picture after all and a fair amount of rainbow-washing is going on. Do not get me wrong: clearly many great companies are doing great things, but when we consider that there are still only eight female chief executive officers of FTSE 100 companies and zero openly LGBTQ+ ones, that does beg the question of genuine diversity and inclusion.

It is also legitimate to ask how those companies who sell rainbow tat, or indeed rainbow-branded stuff, are actually supporting Pride and LGBT people. My favourite one recently was the M&S Pride sandwich—that, Mr Deputy Speaker was lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato. To be fair, M&S was genuinely donating profits to the Terrence Higgins Trust, which is fantastic, but that does beg the question of whether some companies gloss over Pride with rainbow-themed mimics and benefit financially from our oppression while not really genuinely supporting our community. That is why, 50 years on, Pride is still a protest.

Pride is still a protest because, in 71 countries across the world, it is illegal to be LGBTQ—I am illegal in 71 countries. In 11 of those countries, the death penalty still exists for consensual same-sex activities.

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

The hon. Member is making a powerful case for the need for Pride and highlighting the extreme circumstances that people go through in other countries. One of the tests that I think we often ask ourselves is: would every gay person in this country on a late night out surrounded by drunk crowds feel confident to hold their partner’s hand? I am not sure that they would. Even in this country, there is a lot that we can still do on those issues.

[Hannah Bardell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman and absolutely agree with him. I have had experiences that I have had to report to the police, including being abused simply for holding hands with a partner, and that was in Scotland. That is a reality that many of us have faced, and we have seen in the press recently reports of members of the LGBTQ+ community being attacked and targeted simply for holding hands with their same-sex partner.

Some of those countries have been awarded international sporting awards, such as the Olympics and the World cup, and that is hugely problematic. People in those countries cannot enjoy the most basic of human rights or freedoms that many of us have. To be able to love and be loved and be yourself is truly and surely the most fundamental of human rights. It goes absolutely to the heart of who we are and how we express ourselves.

The truth is that, while in the UK we have the right to love who we want, to marry or be in a civil partnership with them and to have a family, there are still gaps in those rights and there is still huge prejudice. As we stand and sit here today, our trans and non-binary siblings are being subjected to a grotesque attack on their rights just to exist, to access healthcare, to participate in sport and wider society, and to be fairly represented in an increasingly hostile media.

I want to put it on the record here and now that I stand with my trans and non-binary siblings. I will fight for them, as they have fought for my rights against the tide of misinformation in the ’70s and ’80s —as well as before and since, against gay men and lesbians, as many Members have said—and against a hostile media and a hostile UK Government and Prime Minister, who seem intent on rolling back on promises to ban conversion practices against trans people and to reform the Gender Recognition Act 2004. I am delighted to hear Conservative Members being so genuine and speaking out and supporting trans people, but I know that they have challenges in their own party. We all have challenges. We all have members of our own party with whom we disagree, with whom we need to engage and whom we need to try to bring on board. But there is a threat to members of our community and our community in general.

I hope that in not too short a time I will be able to stand here and tell Members about the legislation that we will have passed in the Scottish Parliament to protect and promote the lives of trans and non-binary people so that they can live their lives happily, healthily and without fear of discrimination. We have made significant progress in Scotland. I am not saying that it is perfect, as I have outlined, but one of the most important things that we have done is embed LGBT inclusive education in our curriculum. Years of work and campaigning from organisations such as Stonewall and, of course, the radical work of Jordan and Liam at TIE—Time for Inclusive Education—have meant that little boys and girls, like my nieces and nephews, and like all our children, will grow up understanding that it is perfectly normal for their friends to have two daddies or two mummies, or be brought up by carers, in care, in a blended family or, like me, in a single-parent family. Inclusive education, despite the efforts of many, does not mean that we are indoctrinating or brainwashing children—quite the opposite. We are simply explaining to them that families come in all shapes and sizes, and they are all beautiful.

Let me illustrate the point. I was born the year that section 28 came into force. I also grew up in a single-mother family, at a time when Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister and was not just fond of spouting anti-LGBT rhetoric but of saying that women like my mum should be locked up in asylums. The lack of representation of LGBT people and the hyper-normalised heteronormativity pushed at us through the media and Government were enough to make me feel so much an outcast that I turned away from my own sexuality and suppressed it, until I was elected and was 32. I am willing to openly admit the profound impact that that has had on my mental health and relationships over the years. I read an article earlier in which Sir Ian McKellen talked about coming out in the ’80s and the liberation that he felt. He said:

“It changes your life utterly. I discovered myself and everything was better.”

Those words are so true. That is exactly how I felt when I first came out.

At the age of 39, as an openly queer woman, I am in a much better place, but that was not always the case. No child should grow up feeling like they do not belong. No child should grow up feeling like they are wrong or that who they love or the life that they seek is illegal. No child or young person should grow up feeling like they do not have the right to be themselves, to marry or to have children because of who they are or who they love. But that is how I felt, and it is, quite frankly, how we are making trans and non-binary people feel today. I have no doubt that we will look back on this period of political history and feel deep, deep shame—as we should—at the way we have treated and are treating trans and non-binary people, just as we look back at the appalling way that we treated lesbian, gay and bisexual people in decades gone by. Let us not repeat history.

I pay tribute to two friends of mine who are true icons, Jake and Hannah Graf, who are both trans and who recently welcomed their second child. I hope that the whole House will join me in congratulating them. I have loved watching their journey and seeing people in the media, such as the brilliant Lorraine Kelly, welcome and embrace them and their family. That will give hope to so many.

Pride is still a protest because: the 2020 LGBT health and wellbeing survey suggests that 71% of LGBT young people experience bullying in school on the grounds of being LGBT; reports of sexual orientation hate crimes recorded by UK police forces rose from an average of 1,400 a month from January to April 2021 to 2,200 on average from May to August 2021; two thirds of LGBTQ+ people have experienced violence or abuse, according to Galop; two in five trans people have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity; and LGBTQ+ people of colour or with a disability are increasingly much more likely to be discriminated against or abused. Those statistics should shame us all.

After Brexit, homophobic hate crime rose by 147%. Never let anyone tell you that Brexit brought people together. The narrow-minded bigotry that fuelled that campaign has dragged the UK down a dark ditch of homophobia, racism and bigotry. Those who have pursued that and who are implementing certain policies continue to threaten our rights, freedoms and democracy.

Pride is a protest 50 years on because we still face so many challenges, discrimination and marginalisation in the LGBTQ+ community, so let us never stop marching, never stop protesting and never stop speaking out for the rights of everyone in our community to love and live freely.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a real privilege to follow such brilliant speakers on both sides of the House. It is probably the only thing that we all share in common and agree about in this place, so it is a shame that those who disagree are not here to hear such brilliant speeches, the solidarity across the parties or the love, kindness, support, hope and optimism embodied in every single speech and intervention that I have heard so far.

Pride matters to me. My first Pride was not in Plymouth; it was Brighton Pride. I was young. I had brown hair in those days. I had an amazing time—and that is where I will put a full stop against it. It was fabulous. We all remember our first Pride: it is liberating, it is freeing and you get a real sense of knowing who you are. We need to ensure that 50 years of Pride are celebrated, we need to mark what has happened, and we need to celebrate the local Prides. Plymouth Pride on 13 and 14 August this year will be brilliant; I will be there. London Pride on Saturday will be brilliant, and I will be there as well.

Pride Month reminds us of the extraordinary progress that we have made in the past 50 years. Since the first Pride protest in 1972, we have achieved huge milestones in this country: equal marriage; gay adoption; gay and bisexual men being able to donate blood; the end of section 28; the equalisation of the age of consent; LGBT personnel serving in our armed forces, and so much more. But the LGBT community has never been a homogeneous blob of people; we have always been different, and it is that celebration of individualism, and our collective bonds, that has defined the past 50 years. To put it another way, we are all different, and we are all equal. However, the achievements of the past 50 years have created a belief among many that equality is a one-way street—that things only ever get better. There is a sense of the inevitability of progress. That is welcome—I am an optimist, and I want things to only ever get better—but we need to challenge the belief that while we must accept some bumps in the road, a challenge here or there, perhaps an obstacle to climb over, things will always get better, because it has led to a political consequence, the consequence of comfortable complacency.

I speak on the basis of my own experience as a cisgender gay man when I say that many of the members of the community with whom I associate most frequently have fallen into that trap of comfortable complacency. It is often affluent cisgender gay men who dominate the LGBT+ debates, taking the lion’s share of comment and the lion’s share of the voice. They sometimes complain about there being politics in Pride. I am sure that every Member in the House has heard this at some point: “Why is there politics in Pride? We shouldn’t have that; it is about rainbows.” We have politics in Pride because without the politics, there would be no Pride.

[Dr Mullan]

The hon. Gentleman has touched on an issue that concerns me sometimes. In the cisgender gay community, there can be what is almost a bit of distaste towards the more overt displays of sexuality and other such changes. I like to remind people that men in drag were at the forefront of the Stonewall riots, fighting for the rights from which more heteronormative-appearing gay people benefit. They should think carefully before wanting to distance themselves from people who are more overt in their displays of sexuality and orientation.

[Luke Pollard]

I have to say that I get camper by the year. I look back on my first speech in the House after my election in 2017, when I spoke about being gay, and about being Plymouth’s first ever “out” MP. I was cautious: I was careful with my words, because I was very conscious that the words I used could inspire some people but offend others. Since then, however, I have been on a diet of rainbows and glitter. It is so much better being honest about who you are, because when you are honest and authentically you, not only do you live a better life, but you allow others around you to live a better life. I think that no matter who we are, we should be encouraging everyone to be authentically themselves.

Part of that means challenging that culture of comfortable complacency and the idea that it only ever gets better. What we are seeing now, in America and, sadly, in the UK, are deliberate attempts to take us backwards—attempts to rewrite LGBT rights and to roll them back. Many of those who are comfortably complacent and are not active in this fight have not experienced that rollback, but we do not need to look far to find people who are experiencing it right now. They are members of a group within our big LGBT+ family: trans and non-binary people. The level of hate crime, the level of abuse, the marginalisation, the cutting and pasting of 1980s headlines that were applied to gay people then and are now being applied to trans and non-binary people—we can see the rollback of rights that is directly in front of us, but only if we open our eyes to it.

Our history is littered with examples of the policy that to conquer, it is necessary to divide. That is what we are seeing here, and that is why all of us, whether we are trans or not, need to stand with our trans and non-binary friends in the fight that lies ahead. This means ensuring that we have a fully trans and non-binary inclusive ban on conversion practices, and it means making a stand when attacks are made on their presence, their identity, their visibility, their legitimacy to exist. That is why we need to ensure that there is no rollback of rights, here or abroad. We need to ensure that there is no growing exceptionalism, with people saying, “LGB rights are fine, but those trans folk—well, they are different.” We have all heard that in our communities, and it is something we must challenge because being LGBTQ+ is not a single identity. It is a liberation of authenticity. It is a community where everyone is different, but it is those common bonds that make that community worth while. We must stand together, and if we do not address that comfortable complacency, hate will spread and breed more division.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate and pay tribute to the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) for opening it. I also thank every single speaker in the debate. I think I speak for everyone here when I say that we have seen one of the best examples of this Chamber in operation this afternoon: we have seen passion, commitment and the personal history that is so important for Members to bring to bear on issues such as this one.

There is so much to celebrate in the 50th year since the first Pride march took place in London on 1 July 1972. Half a century on, life has changed for the better for LGBT+ people in our country in many ways, and we should be proud of that, as hon. Members have said. We should be proud also of the contribution of so many trailblazers from this place as well: Chris Smith, Maureen Colquhoun, my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle) and so many others. This was memorably described earlier as being now the gayest of Parliaments. It has taken us far too long to get here, of course, and there will be no Parliament in the world that does not have gay people in it; it is just that those people will far too often not be able to be publicly who they genuinely are.

It can be very easy today to look back and wonder whether that progress was inevitable, but, as speaker after speaker has said, it was not inevitable. That progress was won in the face of bigotry, ridicule, hostility, violence and intimidation. In the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), it has most definitely not been a one-way street towards progress. There is politics in Pride, because these are issues about power over individuals and their right to autonomy.

When my party, Labour, voted for a resolution committing to lesbian and gay rights in 1985, it was during a period of extreme hostility towards LGBT+ people. Just two years later, of course, our opponents proactively campaigned against that position on LGBT+ rights at the general election and then, as many speakers have said, followed Margaret Thatcher’s section 28, banning councils and schools from the promotion of homosexuality as, in those bigoted words, “a pretended family relationship”. It was, of course, the last Labour Government who removed that terrible law from the statute book in 2003; who introduced the unmarried partners concession that committed the UK to ending discrimination against gay and lesbian couples for immigration purposes; who lifted the ban on lesbians, gay men and bi people serving in the armed forces; who introduced civil partnerships, in the face of strong opposition; and who introduced laws to allow unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, to apply for joint adoption, again in the face of hostility.

As so many speakers have said, today some of that hostility is less overt, but LGBT+ people are still being let down. We in this Chamber know that the Minister had ambitious plans to mark the 50 years of Pride through the flagship Safe To Be Me global equality conference, which was supposed to open this very day. Instead the Minister is here and there is not going to be that conference, for the simple reason that there would not have been anyone there for Government Ministers to confer with—not even their LGBT+ adviser, Iain Anderson. That is because his resignation and the withdrawal of over 100 LGBT+ organisations and charities from Safe To Be Me last April was a consequence of Government policy—the Government’s decision to reverse their plans to ban trans conversion therapy.

This is an international embarrassment. It shows that the Government need to rethink their approach on this issue, but so far we have not seen that. As has been mentioned, even the proposals to ban conversion therapy on the basis of sexual orientation still include the consent loophole that risks letting some of the worst practitioners off the hook.

The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn), in a very illuminating and thoughtful speech, rightly referred to the Westminster Hall debate that recently took place on the subject of conversion therapy. I do not want to repeat the arguments from that debate, but it really is extremely disappointing that instead of coming together to talk about the fact that almost a dozen countries still have the death penalty for homosexuality and that in dozens of countries it is still illegal to be who you are, we are lacking that conference.

[Dr Mullan]

The hon. Lady is talking about the global nature of these issues. Sometimes we see what is going on in other countries as being separate from us. One of the things I have noticed in the media with regard to big-budget global movies is that in the west we have now started to see more and more progress with gay characters in some of them. However, when some of the big film studios put out films in China, such as a recent “Harry Potter” film that has a really high-profile gay character, they dampen it down because they are worried about how it will be perceived there. What goes on in other countries can have an impact in this country with regard to gay representation.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am grateful for that important intervention, which links with some of the contributions from SNP speakers on the role and responsibilities of companies in this space. I pay tribute to the British Council, because the work it has done with the British Film Institute has been very important in making sure that some of the marginalised, discriminated-against voices of LGBT+ people are heard right across the world, including where they know that films they have produced have been viewed in some of the countries where homosexuality is illegal by Government fiat. That is incredibly important work.

We would argue that we really do need to see a change in approach on these issues from the current Government. We had hoped that the conference would be used to launch a new LGBT+ strategy, which it was suggested might cover, for example, IVF, trans healthcare and homelessness, but we are yet to see it. The previous strategy was abandoned but we are yet to see the new one. It does seem that there has been over-promising but under-delivery in this regard, with the LGBT+ action plan having been killed off, the LGBT+ advisory panel having been disbanded, and with promises to reform the Gender Recognition Act having been dropped.

We are also concerned about something referred to by many speakers—attempts to pit different groups of people against each other instead of standing up for LGBT+ people and bringing them together. Of course, that is taking place in a context where hate crimes against LGBT+ people in our country have doubled over the past five years. I extend my solidarity to the hon. Members for Lanark and Hamilton East and for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) and others who have been subject to homophobic and transphobic abuse—those who are in the Chamber now and those beyond it. My hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey provided some horrendous examples of the international nature of some of this hatred, especially that coming from actors from the far right and authoritarian right.

We need a different approach. The next Labour Government would not seek to divide people; instead, we would seek to bring them together. We would continue to protect and uphold the Equality Act 2010, including its protections for LGBT+ people. We would require employers to create and maintain workplaces free from LGBT+ harassment, including by third parties. As was mentioned in this debate, while some businesses are moving ahead, others are far behind in this regard; I associate myself with the remarks made about the importance of the TUC LGBT+ conference in that connection.

We will strengthen and equalise the law so that LGBT+ hate crimes attract the tougher sentences they deserve; they are not currently treated on a level playing field. We will ban all forms of conversion therapy outright, including trans conversion therapy, and we will modernise the outdated Gender Recognition Act 2004 while maintaining the Equality Act 2010 protections for single-sex spaces.

The inquiry has finally now begun on the case of LGBT veterans. We will never rest until we see that compensation, which is so needed, and things being set right for those veterans who were treated so appallingly. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) for all his work and the work of those campaigners in Fighting With Pride. I heard directly from some of them recently, and their words were incredibly powerful about the disgraceful treatment meted out to some of those who did so much defending our country, and who frankly we should be proud of indeed, despite the shameful way in which they sadly have been treated by Governments and our society.

My party, the Labour party, is and always will be the party of equality. We stand up for LGBT+ rights, not because that is always easy, but because it is always right. To conclude, this week is about far more than celebrating the wonderful diversity of this country and the achievements of the past 50 years. As important as that is, it is about recommitting to ensure genuine equality for LGBT+ people, and that is not just important for LGBT+ people—as my hon. Friend for Wallasey said, it is important for all of society. As my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) said, equality adds beauty and strength to our society. I would say that it also adds health, happiness, prosperity and decency.