Diversity was something to be celebrated, not ignored, argues Dan Callaghan
To be openly gay in 21st century Britain is not always a picnic, but it is a damn sight easier now than it was in the recent past. Everyone knows about the legal changes on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights made by the Labour government after 1997: the repeal of section 28, equal adoption rights, the Gender Recognition Act and the legalisation of civil partnerships. These changes were, of course, astounding, but, for me, the greatest thing the Tony Blair government did for LGBT people was not to change laws, but to change attitudes.
One evening a few months ago, I was reading a BBC news article from 1999, which stated that a ban on sales of T-bone steak had been lifted in December of that year. Quite why I thought that it would be a sensible use of my time to peruse news stories about the finer aspects of late 1990s beef retailing is perhaps a question we can look at on another day.
‘The minister for agriculture’ the article read, ‘who came out as gay last year, announced the change in the law to the House of Commons yesterday afternoon.’
Suffice to say I was a bit taken aback by that sentence. What did the minister’s sexuality have to do with his policy announcement? Was this how gay people were discussed in the media at the time – differentiated from everyone else for no apparent reason? In short, the answer to that question was yes, especially where tabloids were concerned. In 1998, the Sun called on Blair to disclose the number of homosexuals in his government. A front page headline in November of that year asked the prime minister ‘Are we being run by a gay mafia?’ Other tabloids had ‘outed’ gay and lesbian celebrities and public figures as a matter of course.
What is interesting, however, is the way in which the government reacted to this activity. It stood up to the press, stood by any ministers affected by these intrusions of privacy, and made it clear that matters of sexuality were off limits. It has fallen into accepted parlance that New Labour did whatever Rupert Murdoch wanted, but when his red tops wanted Labour to stop the march of equality it did not just ignore him, it powered on.
Diversity was something to be celebrated, not ignored. Time and again the government affirmed the right of people to love whomever they chose and to be accepted in society as equals. Of course, they changed the laws where necessary to reflect those values – but crucially, they used the power and influence of government to change the values of others.
By the time I was at secondary school, these enlightened attitudes expressed by the Labour government had started to percolate down the bureaucracies, through the media, and into classrooms and homes up and down the land. I am lucky enough to have never felt discriminated against on the grounds of sexuality. Would I have been able to say the same thing if I had not grown up with a government that stood full square behind LGBT people as they sought the liberty that had been denied them? I very much doubt it.
Others have not been as lucky as me. There are still great injustices in our society, both within the LGBT community and in other communities too. There are still attitudes that can be changed to give voices to the voiceless. Labour made that change happen after 1997. And it can make that change happen again.
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Dan Callaghan is a member of Progress. He tweets at @DanielCallaghan