The Times- Westminster used to agree on LGBT+ rights. What happened?
Westminster used to agree on LGBT+ rights. What happened?
There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children. I cannot think of anything more sickening than a child being abused. It is comparable to the act of homosexuality. I think they are all comparable. I feel totally repulsed by both.”
Imagine comparing a loving gay relationship, like my marriage, to the abuse of children. Who would say such a thing? Well, it was the DUP’s Iris Robinson, a former MP and wife of the former first minister Peter Robinson, back in 2008. You’d think that a political party would want to apologise for this, particularly in our age of identity politics.
Last week at PinkNews’s remote Stormont Pride event, Paula Bradley, the new deputy leader of the DUP, joined leaders or deputies of the main Northern Irish parties to discuss the future of LGBT+ rights. She surprised many on the panel and in the audience by apologising for comments by her party colleagues that she described as “absolutely atrocious”. Her words were a far cry from Ian Paisley’s “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign in the 1970s.
Bradley’s words are part of a journey for the DUP. As leader in 2018, Arlene Foster surprised me by accepting the invitation to attend our event in Stormont with the other party leaders. I was expecting to be ignored, or perhaps for her to politely decline. Instead Foster agreed to speak and invited me to meet her beforehand.
In her office, she respectfully allowed me to explain my view on her party’s position on same-sex marriage while looking through snaps from my wedding a few weeks earlier. Foster’s speech certainly didn’t go as far as many would have hoped but it was the first step, not the last.
At the PinkNews event last week there was consensus on a number of LGBT+ issues, from banning conversion therapy to improving services for trans people. At events like this there is a degree of competition for attention and visible support; if the SDLP leader backs something, so too must the Sinn Fein leader and so on.
As I remarked in my speech at the event, I don’t believe that PinkNews (or indeed anyone) could have staged a similar cross-party LGBT+ event in Westminster today. How times have changed.
It feels a long time since 2017, when Theresa May joined the other main Westminster leaders and the mayor of London at the PinkNews awards. Each, in their ways, shared the same message: that they supported the march of progress on LGBT+ rights and were particularly focused on improving trans rights. It was at these awards that Theresa May made her groundbreaking pledges for trans people, before the culture wars began to dominate discussion of these issues.
Westminister is a strange place to be in 2021 if you are interested in the politics of LGBT+ rights. We have a prime minister whose position seems to contradict itself daily. One day his women and equalities minister is calling for government departments to stop working with Stonewall, the next the charity’s leader is on the guestlist for his lacklustre Pride event. He has his Government Equalities Office go out of its way to break down years of relationship building with the LGBT+ community, while simultaneously appointing the well-regarded Nick Herbert as the UK’s first envoy on LGBT+ rights.
Johnson seems to want to build on his positive reputation on this topic from his time as mayor — he was the first senior Tory to back same-sex marriage — while allowing his ministers to trash the hard work done by Theresa May. Her LGBT action plan, for example, is now disregarded by the same office that published it. This contradictory position is enough to cause a culture war by itself, straight from the heart of No 10.
Keir Starmer, meanwhile, upset many LGBT+ members by not providing a robust position on trans rights in the first year of his leadership. When he did start advocating strongly, at the PinkNews Pride for All event, his words, as is typical for him, barely cut through and elicited no response from Johnson.
While there is still a long way to go in Northern Ireland, it says something when the DUP and Sinn Fein leadership can share a platform and agree on so many LGBT+ issues in a way that the leaders of the Conservatives and Labour just can’t anymore.
Benjamin Cohen is the chief executive of PinkNews
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