Author Archives: The Voice

Christine Jardine was described by Labour MP Nadia Whittome as having “long been ahead of many in this House when it comes to equalities issues, including being outspoken in support of the rights of sex workers”  a debate on LGBT History Month in Parliament on Thursday afternoon. Earlier, Christine had made a heartfelt speech which you can watch here. She looked back to the deeply homophobic and toxic atmosphere in the 1980s towards gay people and highlighted some of the injustices they had to deal with and how we are seeing the same tropes played out today.

Here is her speech in full:

It is a pleasure and an honour to follow the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen). I concur with everything she said about the work being done by the Women and Equalities Committee.

It is important to recognise where we stand in history, because when we talk about LGBTQ rights, women’s rights or racial equality in this place, we often talk about the journey that we have been on and what we have achieved. Yes, we have achieved a lot, but we face enormous challenges at this moment in our history. Our country’s LGBTQ community need to look at us today and know that we will stand up for them and that we will fight for their rights, including their right simply to be who they are.

But we have faced challenges before, and we have overcome them. I think of Scotland, particularly my home city of Glasgow, where I was brought up. In the 1970s, and when I was a student in the 1980s, it had unfortunately garnered for itself the unenviable reputation of being one of the worst places in Europe to grow up gay. Attitudes were somehow more polarised in Scotland than anywhere else in the UK. In 1957, a poll showed that more than 80% of Scots did not want homosexuality to be decriminalised; the figure was 51% in England.

In preparing for this debate, I found an article in a 1982 student newspaper from the University of Liverpool, whose student union disaffiliated with the University of Glasgow because it refused to allow a gay society to form. According to the union president, that refusal was on the ground that the age of consent for homosexual sex was 21 and, given that most students were younger than 21, the union did not want to “give the impression that the Union in some way bestows an unofficial blessing on their activities… many members of the Gay Society are not interested in a constructive approach to changing the membership’s attitude…but using this as a ploy to gain momentum to destroy the character of the Union as we know it.”

We hear an echo of that language today, but imagine how young LGBT people must have felt hearing and reading it. That was the kind of attitude they faced on a daily basis.

And imagine if we had been able to tell them that, 40 years later, Glasgow would be in the top five places in Europe for LGBT people to visit and enjoy and that, despite those attitudes, a long, rich history has developed of the community across Scotland coming together to support each other. We have improved so much, as those figures show.

Edinburgh Befrienders, later known as the Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard, opened in 1974 and was the UK’s first bespoke helpline for gay and lesbian people—beating Switchboard, which still exists, by just one day. Edinburgh was also home to Scotland’s first LGBT bookshop, Lavender Menace, and in 1995 welcomed 3,000 people to Scotland’s first Pride march. It is now huge, the event of the year, and I have been privileged to speak at it twice.

Of course, much of this change has been possible only because of public figures, including: former MPs such as Robin Cook, who equalised Scots law and English law on homosexuality; Val McDermid, whose 1987 novel “Report for Murder” featured Lindsay Gordon, Britain’s first fictional lesbian detective; and award-winning author Jackie Kay, the second woman and first lesbian to hold the post of Makar, Scotland’s national poet, and whose work has dealt with race, gender, transgender identities and her own sexuality. Thanks to such people and places, so many attitudes, laws and the understanding of LGBT+ people have changed for the better.