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London Pride Government reception will be Tatchell free

No Downing Street invite for Peter

Peter Tatchell

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has sent a message of support to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, ahead of this Saturday's (4th July) annual Pride London parade. His message includes the claim that: "We (the Labour government) won't ever give up on the fight for equality - we are marching with you every step of the way." He claims to support gay equality but his government actually endorses some aspects of homophobic discrimination.

It supports the ban on same-sex marriage. Civil partnerships are not equality. They are a form of sexual apartheid, with different laws for gay and straight couples. Gay and bisexual men are prohibited from donating blood, even if they always practice safe sex and have tested HIV-negative. Successive Labour Home Secretaries have given visas and work permits to reggae singers who incite the murder of gay people. Such incitement is a serious criminal offence. The government's current Equality Bill is supposed to ensure equal rights for everyone but it specifically denies lesbians and gays protection against harassment.

Labour's many commendable gay law reforms are no excuse for its stonewalling on the abolition of these remaining aspects of homophobic discrimination. Gordon Brown has declined invitations to march on Saturday's gay pride parade, citing 'security considerations.' This is just an excuse. He's not marching because he knows he would be booed and jeered, like he was at the D-Day commemorations.

Instead, the Prime Minister will host a reception at Downing Street for LGBT rights campaigners and the pink press on the morning of Pride London. Those invited are mostly - not entirely - tame apologists for New Labour. Critics of the government's record, like myself, are not invited. The same selective invitation criteria was applied when Gordon Brown hosted a Downing Street reception for LGBT campaigners in March. An insider tipped me off that my name had been removed from the invite list, at Gordon Brown's personal request. He was apparently still angry that I had heckled him over his government's erosion of civil liberties, when he opened the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library late last year.

I have been campaigning for LGBT human rights for 40 years, since shortly after the 1969 Stonewall Riots. I was one of the group of people who helped organise Britain's first gay pride parade in 1972. I don't do my human rights work to win awards, honours or invites. It doesn't matter to me that I haven't been invited. What angers me is the principle - the way the Prime Minister invites and fetes mostly tame pro-Labour loyalists in the LGBT community. It is a manipulative tactic by an insecure government that knows its record on LGBT human rights is not as glorious as it claims. Instead of remedying the remaining issues of homophobic discrimination, Gordon Brown seems more interested in isolating and excluding LGBT voices who continue to insist on full LGBT human rightsl.

The Prime Minister's full message to the LGBT community reads: "I'm very proud of all that this government has achieved on LGBT rights these last 12 years; from equalising the age of consent, lifting the ban on military service, introducing gay adoption and creating civil partnerships to scrapping section 28, introducing the Gender Recognition Act and banning discrimination at work and in the provision of goods and services,"

"We won't ever give up on the fight for equality - we are marching with you every step of the way. The Labour government has one simple guiding ideal when it comes to LGBT rights: you can't legislate love."