In a recent article for the Daily Telegraph (7th May 2013), the right-wing Catholic journalist, Cristina Odone, lamented David Cameron’s support for equal marriage, and made reference to UKIP’s “sensitive political antennae” that could tap in to the disaffection among supporters of traditional opposite-sex marriage for its own political gain. On this point, Mrs Odone is bang on the money: if there are cheap votes up for grabs from disaffected anti-gay social conservatives and outraged fundamentalist religionists, then UKIP seems more than willing to bracket its libertarianism when the only cost is equal rights for LGBT people.
If UKIP really were a consistently libertarian party, it would brook no
discrimination against LGBT couples with regard to equal marriage. Its pretence
of opposing equal marriage because of ostensible fears of European Court of
Human Rights intrusion into the religious prerogative to discriminate, is
vacuous nonsense. Not only is there the impenetrable barrier of the
Government’s “quadruple lock” to breach: there is also the fact that the ECHR
would already be intervening to force all churches to marry divorced people, or
to appoint women bishops, or to host civil partnership ceremonies, if there
were any legal prospect of their successfully imposing equal marriage on
reluctant UK religious institutions. Clearly, it has not done so, and neither
has it tried to do so in any other EU state, or to impose religious equal
marriage in those EU states where civil equal marriage has already been
legalised.
UKIP is opposing equal marriage for opportunistic reasons alone, and as
far as I am concerned, despite my sympathy as a conservative for some of UKIP’s
key positions, any party that is willing consciously, cynically and
deliberately to sacrifice the equality of LGBT people, for the sake of
opportunistically siphoning off anti-LGBT equality votes from another party, is
behaving in an institutionally homophobic and transphobic manner.
Although the UKIP vote in the recent local elections was mostly a
protest vote that will not be repeated in the 2015 general election, UKIP is
still likely to benefit from the votes of anti-equal marriage social
conservatives in two years’ time, and attacks on the Conservative leadership by
opponents of equality such as Mrs Odone and Lord Tebbit, will only encourage
this defection by social conservatives. Such people do not seem to care that splitting
the conservative vote in this way will never lead to a UKIP government, and
that it will only serve to increase the probability of a Labour victory in
2015, in the same way that the SDP kept Margaret Thatcher in power in the
1980s.
UKIP is, no doubt, enjoying an influx of support from social
conservatives who have defected from the Conservative Party. Yet, as an
occasional glance at readers’ comments beneath any Daily Telegraph online
article on LGBT issues will reveal, some of the people moving across to UKIP
are the very supporters whose toxic homophobic views and behaviour made the
unreconstructed, unmodernised Conservative Party unelectable in 2001 and 2005.
And given the widespread and ever-increasing support for LGBT equality among
the modern British electorate, anti-LGBT discrimination clearly has no
electoral future at all in our country.
In her article, Mrs Odone chooses to portray David Cameron’s and George
Osborne’s support for equal marriage as part of an opportunistic “long-term strategy”:
“One MP even assured me off the record that the
gay marriage bill was seen as "long-term" strategy: the thinking was
that young people, who overwhelmingly support gay marriage, would be converted
on the spot to Conservativism.
The strategy is clearly so long-term, the party
will have to wait until the 22nd century to reap its benefits ….”
What does not seem to have penetrated the resentful consciousness of Mr
Cameron’s anti-equality detractors is the possibility that he and his
colleagues might be sincerely committed to supporting equal marriage because it
is the right and just thing to do, despite any short-term political
disadvantages. Mr Cameron must have known how much opprobrium would be heaped
upon him from within and without his own party for championing the entitlement
of LGBT people to marry. Yet he has been absolutely determined to persevere
with this commitment, despite a vitriolic personal campaign both against him
and against the measure. Indeed, he declares he has done so because he regards
it as the realisation of Conservative values.
The Prime Minister’s concept of Conservative values is
a very different one from those who seem to identify Conservatism with
homophobia, discrimination, injustice, exclusion and religious authoritarianism.
His vision of Conservatism is one that is uncompromisingly inclusive for LGBT
people, that does not condemn people on the basis of outdated religious dogma,
and that does not deny justice and equality of opportunity, including the
opportunity to participate with full equality in society’s most important
institutions and in public life, merely because someone is LGBT.
I am confident that it is the Prime Minister’s concept
of conservatism, and not that of Cristina Odone or the sell-out UKIP opportunists,
that will find the greatest resonance with the British public.
© Gary Powell, 2013
© Gary Powell, 2013
