LGBT History Month

Debate between Stewart Malcolm McDonald and Peter Kyle

Tuesday 28th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

It is always a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Dorries. An honour it is to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Richard Arkless). I am not sure that his constituency has a gay bar as such, as the city of Glasgow does, but it does have the fantastic Beltie Books bookshop in Wigtown, run by a fantastic gay couple, Andrew and Nick. On my first visit there, when they were not entirely sure if my partner and I were a couple, they told me that the place was very much for the “friends of Dorothy”. That was my first ever hearing of that phrase as a way to know that it was a welcoming place in that part of the world for folk like us.

It is slightly depressing to pick up on what my hon. Friend said about the low interest that there seems to be in this debate when we look around the Chamber right now. This is the last day of LGBT History Month 2017. There is a lot to consider and to reflect on, in terms of both the history and what we collectively, as a Parliament and as a country, wish to achieve, not just on these islands but around the world for which this Parliament bears some responsibility.

Before the debate began, I mentioned to the Minister that I had taken some time, if not a lot of time, to look through the Hansard for the 1966 debate on the Sexual Offences Bill. If you have a spare 20 or 30 minutes, Ms Dorries, and you fancy a laugh at the past, go through that Hansard. It will make you laugh, but it will also make you slightly depressed. I would not wish to quote all of the comments that caused me to wince, but I will pick up one or two particular howlers.

Mr Humphrey Berkeley, at the time the Member for Lancaster, said that it was

“clear that homosexuals have a choice.”—[Official Report, 11 February 1966; Vol. 724, c. 785.]

Sir Cyril Black made, from what I read, some of the most astonishing contributions. He said:

“We also, if we pass the Bill, give a new view of this form of sin”—

that being homosexuality—

“to the great mass of the nation. This fine argument of the difference between sin and crime is not an argument that is understood by the great mass of the people.”—[Official Report, 11 February 1966; Vol. 724, c. 800.]

Mr William Shepherd, the Member for Cheadle at the time, is one of the few Members who made any reference to the “L” in LGBT. He said that lesbians were different, because they

“do no physical damage by their acts. They are not proselytisers as homosexuals are and, on the whole, they find it agreeable and acceptable”.—[Official Report, 11 February 1966; Vol. 724, c. 816.]

[Peter Kyle]

The hon. Gentleman refers to 1966, but many of us can remember similar comments made very recently. In all of the debates in this place about legalisation on the age of consent, gays being able to serve in the military and the abolition of section 28, similar and worse comments have been made. Rather than dismiss them as part of a bygone era, it is important that we recognise that they are still representative of people’s views in wider society. That is why events such as today, marking LGBT History Month, and challenging and engaging with such views in order to shape them is incredibly important, as well as reflecting on the historical aspect.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We can laugh at some of this stuff, but in reality I did not have to go back to 1966 to find such views—we could probably take a walk around some of our constituencies and find some of these views.

[Peter Kyle]

Not in Hove.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

Perhaps not in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency—I accept that! Let us not pretend that the progress that we celebrate is universally celebrated across the country.

I will perhaps touch on that later on, but I want to reflect on some of the history and the landmarks that have gone by. There is a lot more to it than what was achieved in this or that year. Last week, I took part in Queer Question Time in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, which is I think the oldest gay bar anywhere in Britain. I was on a panel with two guys in their seventies and two others. The two guys in their seventies had helped set up the Gay Liberation Front. One is now chair of the Sexual Avengers; the other is involved in the International Radical Pink Fairies. They had done loads so that I could campaign as an openly gay man in my election campaign, and I have never felt so unqualified to talk about gay history in my entire life as I felt on that night. [Interruption.] I hear my hon. Friend the Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Stuart Blair Donaldson) saying from a sedentary position that I am not!

I want to mention a few of the key elements in UK history. In the 1950s, the Wolfenden committee was formed after a succession of well-known men were convicted of indecency, which called into question the legitimacy of the law. Its report recommended that homosexual behaviour be legalised, which was rejected at the time by the Government.

In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalised sex between two men over 21 and in private, but that did not extend to the merchant navy, the armed forces, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man. It has to be said that Scotland was, to an extent, dragged kicking and screaming to catch up with our counterparts south of the border in this regard. It was in 1980 that sex between two men over the age of 21 and in private was decriminalised in Scotland.

In 1992, the World Health Organisation declassified same-sex attraction as a mental illness. In 1999, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found that the investigation into and subsequent discharge of two personnel from the Royal Navy on the basis of their sexual orientation was a breach of their right to a private life under article 8 of the European convention on human rights. That historic ruling is what causes so many LGBT people across this country great concern about the Government’s plans on European human rights as we move forward next year—there is a lot floating around about how the Prime Minister wishes to see that legislation go. It would be most welcome if the Minister could shed some light on that.

In 2000, the ban on lesbians, gay men and bisexual people serving in the armed forces was lifted, under a Labour Government—that was a great achievement of the Labour Government. I do not want to be partisan, but let us not forget that they went to court to try to prevent that from happening.

In 2003, section 28 was repealed in England. We had a brutal and horrifying debate on that issue up in Scotland. One of my earliest memories is going to school and seeing the big “Keep the clause” posters and the campaign trucks that were being driven around towns and cities across Scotland. From 2004 onwards, we started to move into an era when civil partnerships became legalised. We now have full equality of marriage under the law in Scotland, England and Wales. Northern Ireland always feels a wee bit left out. It is the last place on these islands that still does not have same-sex marriage. It falls on all of us who believe in progress to stand in solidarity with those in Northern Ireland campaigning for reform and to offer practical support so that they can have equal marriage. I am proud to say—I am not sure whether this is still the case—that when the Scottish Parliament passed the same-sex marriage legislation in 2014 it did so with the largest majority of any legislature in the world.

There are a couple of things that we need to consider as we move forward. My hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway rightly mentioned the recent case of the Afghan asylum seeker, but there is a wider issue about how LGBT people’s asylum claims are handled. I shall be interested to know what reforms the Minister intends to put forward to improve the way we handle the cases of people who identify as LGBT and could be sent back to countries where that is a crime.

My hon. Friend also rightly mentioned transgender rights, which, as I said last week at the panel event I mentioned earlier, are hugely important. Too often, gay and bisexual men seem to think that the fight is done. When we talk about transgender rights, people say, “Yeah, yeah, of course I am in favour of that,” but they will not be caught on a march or joining a campaign to lobby Parliament. We gay men can be a bit self-centred at times, so we need to get out of that box and join with transgender people in campaigning for the changes they wish to see.

My hon. Friend rightly mentioned education, which is a devolved matter. England is the largest constituent nation on these islands, and I want us all to marry up our education systems so that, when someone goes to school and receives personal and sexual education, it reflects the person they are. The only thing I can remember from the sexual education I got at school is that it is not sex unless you are lying down. In many ways, it has not moved on. How on earth is a young transgender, bisexual, lesbian or gay person sitting in school listening to that kind of stuff supposed to learn anything about what a healthy sexual relationship looks like, about issues of consent, and about how to build emotional relationships with other people?

An issue I am campaigning on along with the excellent organisation Freedom To Donate and the all-party parliamentary group on blood donation is that of gay men giving blood. At the moment, I do not believe that our policy reflects modern science. I welcome the Government review that is taking place at the moment, and I hope that the report that we aim to produce by the middle of this year goes some way to informing its conclusions. I would like to see a system in which we say to people, “If you can safely give blood”—there are millions of men who have had sex with men across this country who can—“you should be able to do so.” That is something I would like to see progress on.

The final thing I want to mention—to my shame, I had no idea that this was the case until I met my two friends from the International Radical Pink Fairies and the Sexual Avengers last week—is that there is no AIDS memorial anywhere in the UK. I was in Berlin at new year, and it has one. There are AIDS memorials in Washington DC, New York, San Francisco—all over north America and in different parts of Europe.

[Peter Kyle]

rose—

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

The hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) is now going to tell me that there is one in Brighton.

[Peter Kyle]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again; it is very generous of him. I invite him to come and visit Brighton, where in New Steine there is a very beautiful memorial designed by an architect called Romany Bruce. It is one of the most beautiful testimonies to love and to the legacy caused by the AIDS/HIV epidemic. We meet at it regularly to hold vigils and to celebrate the life of the gay community in Brighton and Hove. I invite the hon. Gentleman to come down at his earliest opportunity to see it for himself.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

The hon. Gentleman has bagged himself a Scotsman for the weekend. I cannot wait to come and see it. Having spent some time in his constituency two years ago—I hate to say that it was washed out by rain the entire time in the middle of August—I know it is indeed an excellent place for LGBT people.

We need a national memorial. The London Assembly has recently had a debate on that issue and has agreed to establish one, and I hope that Sadiq Khan will take that forward. Not to be political, I have a different view of what the nation is, so I would like to see one in Scotland, and I do not see why there cannot be memorials in Cardiff and Belfast, too. It strikes me as slightly odd that none of our major cities have one. I do not want to cause any offence—I have perhaps just lost my invitation to the constituency of the hon. Member for Hove. It is bizarre that in London, Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff there is no acknowledgment of the AIDS crisis and what it means to the LGBT community. Although it does not affect only our community, it is undeniable that it had a massive impact.

LGBT History Month is hugely important, but we have to reflect on how we move forward. I have covered a lot of issues, but there are a lot that I have not covered, including the need to seek decriminalisation in other parts of the world, where we have enforced the laws that people now have to live under. I would be interested to hear anything on that issue from the Minister. Let us ensure that, when we come back here to debate LGBT History Month in 2018, I can tick something off my list of what I would like to see achieved.