Oral Answers to Questions

Martin Docherty-Hughes Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lidington]

I shall ask the Health Secretary or one of his team to contact the hon. Gentleman at the earliest opportunity to try to give Oliver the news that he wishes for.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.

[Mr Speaker]

May I assume that it relates to matters that cannot wait until after the urgent questions—not because of the fullness of the hon. Gentleman’s diary but because the matter appertains to exchanges that have just taken place?

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

I would say so, Mr Speaker.

[Mr Speaker]

Oh, very good.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

Speaking on a day on which we commemorate the freedom of Europe, it came to my attention at the weekend that a fellow member of the Council of Europe—the Georgian state, and especially its Ministry of the Interior—will not provide security during Pride month to the first ever Pride march through Tbilisi. Given the history of anti-LGBT violence funded by the Russian state in previous years, I wonder, Mr Speaker, how we can convey not only to the Government of Georgia but to its ambassador in the United Kingdom that this House is not only concerned but gravely disappointed by their limitation on human dignity within the Georgian nation.

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Gentleman has partly achieved his objective by the ruse—and I will call it the ruse—of a point of order, which conceivably could have been the substitute for a question that he might have wanted to ask. If that was his objective, he has achieved it. I cannot speak for the House as a whole, but to judge from debates that have taken place in this Chamber in recent years, my strong sense is that his point will have struck a chord. The idea that such a march should not be able to take place within a safe space, with its participants’ physical security underpinned, offends very strongly against our instincts, so I hope that such measures as are necessary to be taken by Georgians will be taken.

More widely, if I heard the hon. Gentleman correctly, he made what struck me as a wholly uncontroversial observation about the record of the Russian state in human rights generally and, more particularly, the protection—or rather the non-protection—of the rights of LGBT people. That is a profoundly unsatisfactory state of affairs, and it is about time it became more civilised in these important matters. [Interruption.] It is always good to have the sedentary support of the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), and I thank him for what he has said.