Public Meeting
7:30pm Wednesday 25th August
Easton Community Centre, Kilburn Street
Speaker Nick Gill
The election of a Tory government is a moment for all LGBT activists to take stock. The last 20 years have seen us arrive at something like formal legal equality – with similar advances in social attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people.
A recent poll found that 90 percent of British people were in favour of LGBT legal rights.
Yet LGBT oppression continues and abuse and assaults are commonplace. Sometimes there is worse – as we saw when bigoted teenagers beat Ian Baynham to death in Trafalgar Square last year.
Homophobic abuse is rife in many schools, and bigotry is all too common in the media, as Jan Moir’s disgusting article in the Daily Mail newspaper after the death of Stephen Gately showed.
The Tories’ track record means that nobody can be complacent about the future. David Cameron voted in 2003 to keep Section 28 – Margaret Thatcher’s law that forbade positive discussion of gay relationships in schools.
He has forged an EU alliance between the Tories and a rabidly homophobic Polish party.
Theresa May – now the minister responsible for equalities – also has a lousy track record. She voted against an equal age of consent in 1998, and in 2000 she voted against the repeal of Section 28.
In 2008 she voted against lesbian fertility rights, supporting a bill which argued that children need a male role model.
Cameron recognises that Tory bigotry is unpopular. During the election he distanced himself from shadow home secretary Chris Grayling, who said that B&B owners should be allowed to discriminate against gay couples.
The fight for liberation is far from over, come to the meeting to discuss how we win.

Organised by the socialist workers party