politicsjunkie

A momentary glimpse of how government should be

2008-07-10T00:36:00.003+01:00

Harriet Harman filled in for Gordon Brown at Prime Minister's Questions today, and in my view she played a blinder.

Although there was a touch of the Prescotts about some of her responses, one thing that struck me was the way in which she dealt with some of the questions put to her.

Although the banter with William Hague was funny, she commenting that the government would take no advice about food wastage from a man who thinks 18 pints of beer is a good diet, and Hague responding that none of his youthful beer consumption was wasted, one thing stood out.

And it was not Hague's slick line, standing in for Cameron, that the PM is past his sell-by date.

It was the way that Harriet spoke to and listened to the Cabinet sitting around her.

On the economy, she was prompted by the Chancellor, and her answer was stronger for it.

On Heathrow expansion, she got advice from Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly and then answered.

On the emotive issue of Zimbabwean refugees, she was on the front bench talking to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to formulate her response.

Although there is no chance of Harriet becoming the next PM, I was impressed with her approach.

Government is collective, and should be co-operative.

It was a stark contrast with the macho posturing of Gordon Brown, and most other government ministers.

It was a small thing, but it made me want to back her more when, instead of pretending she was master of all trades, she turned to the people around her who knew more about each issue for help with her answers to MPs.

It felt more real, and for a small moment I was impressed by Harriet Harman.

Will Glasgow East be the end for Gordon?

2008-07-08T21:14:00.004+01:00

Yea, yea, I don't have time to blog - so here is another entry - it's only been three weeks.

Fun things have been happening - I met that David Cameron for the first time - he is bulkier in real life - not fat or anything - just meatier. I had a lovely birthday picnic, went to Pride London and have interviewed Boris twice in a week - but not about his troubles unfortunately but about gay related things.

Interesting guy that David Cameron. I was slightly impressed that he rocked up to Glasgow yesterday to do a launch in a by-election he has no chance of winning.

Of course, things are looking very bad for the PM.

House prices are falling, the market for new home buyers has all but disappeared, the people are angry about fuel and rising bills and rising prices.

Even my mum said she would vote him out, if only she could (she lives in Northern Ireland).

That whole mollycoddled generation of English people who think it is normal to buy eight year old children hundreds of pounds worth of gifts twice a year are suddenly feeling the pinch, and Labour MPs in seats that are starting to look to the Tories are more nervous than Adam Rickitt at a selection meeting.

Big name pundits are saying that if Gordon loses the Glasgow East by-election, he is toast. Three disasters in a row - the party as you know lost Crewe and Nantwich, a supposedly safe seat.

They came fifth in the by-election to replace Boris (who the Speaker thinks is the Lord Mayor of London), beaten by them Greens and the lovely BNP.

So the smart talk is all about Labour losing in Glasgow East, and that the PM cannot even attract support in Scotland, and that he will have to go.

I do not buy it. A string of by-election defeats is damaging, but I do not think it is fatal. Perhaps I am naive to make comparisons with John Major, but he lost a string of by-elections during his time as PM and the public hated him too.

Then again, he did not get us involved in any wars and his whole party knew they were going to lose the 1997 election, and indeed Major won in 1992.

And perhaps the public's disaffection with Gordon is of a different order. More visceral.

But the idea that the Labour movement will remove the PM in mid parliament is madness as far as I can see.

It is not just MPs and the Westminster crowd who pick and choose leaders but the affiliated societies, MEPs, the unions and party members.

Are they all baying for his blood?

Also, its bloody difficult to remove a sitting Labour Prime Minister. You need a lot of those MPs to put their head above the parapet and it will cause infighting that the party can ill afford.

It seems to me that no matter how bad things get, Gordon is staying in Number 10 until the bitter end.

THT on why they support a ban on gay blood

2008-07-08T21:12:00.003+01:00

Sexual health charities are one of the most complained about groups working within the gay community.

While they broadly command the support of the pink press, there is consistent criticism of their ad campaigns, priorities and stance on issues such as the ban on gay men donating blood.

Terrence Higgins Trust is the biggest fish in the HIV/AIDS pond, and consequently comes in for the most criticism.

Recent campaigns such as Drugfucked and PlayZone are accused of glamourising drug use and underground sex clubs.

THT command considerable amounts from the NHS and other statutory bodies.

Their most recent report states:

"In 2006-07, we received income from 108 statutory bodies, funding both regional and national work. Of our total statutory income for the year of £8,031,000, £568,000 (7%) came from new contracts.

"Voluntary income rose in 2006-07 by £433,000 (12%) to £4,155,000, with a key increase of £139,000 (8%) coming from individual givers, through regular and one off gifts. Additional funding of £330,000 was also received from the Department of Health."

So THT has the support of government and donors, even if there is disquiet about their strategies to reduce HIV infections in the UK.

The charity works with all people, not just gay men.

Approximately 2,700 men who have sex with men were diagnosed in 2006, the highest number since the epidemic began. 82% of these men probably acquired HIV in the UK.

PinkNews.co.uk sat down with Lisa Power, head of policy at THT.

A gay activist since the 1970s, she has been with the charity for more than a decade.

In a frank interview, she revealed that THT is committed to becoming a mass membership organisation, defended their controversial campaigns and explained why she does not think the gay blood ban is discrimination.

PinkNews.co.uk: The first thing that we need to clear up is that a lot of our readers are under the impression that THT just deals with gay men.

Lisa Power: It would be reassuring to know in a way, since we seem to get a lot of complaints from gay men that we don't deal with them enough, that we are giving too much time to somebody else.

We deal with HIV and sexual health, and HIV will always be central to our work, so a lot of our work is with gay men and a lot our work will remain with gay men.

But we also work, in terms of HIV, we have three target groups.

One is gay men, one is African migrants and the other is people with HIV, anybody who has got HIV.

In terms of sexual health it's again gay men, because gay men have particular issues around sexual health, ethnic minorities, because there are a number of black men who have raised levels of problems with sexual health, and it's young people.

We have incredible rates of things like chlamydia in this country and in fact we have the worst sexual health in western Europe, which is a bit of a disgrace really, and a bit turn up from the 80s when we had some of the best.

PinkNews.co.uk received a lot of emails about a new website for gay men about sex and drugs, it talks about the effects of recreational drugs. How do you counter the argument that you are encouraging drug use.

We have been told that we had been encouraging all sorts of things right from the beginning, we started out with people like Mary Whitehouse saying we were encouraging sex.

The point is that you have to start of from where people are, and not from where you want them to be, and the fact is that a lot of gay men are using recreational drugs.

We'd rather they took them safely, and if they must take them we'd also rather that they thought about the kind of sex they want to have and to try and make that as safe as possible.

Our main aim is to reduce the transmission of HIV and poor sexual health, and gay men as a group have particularity bad sexual health.

We know that is linked with large amounts of recreational drugs taken and if we don't do something about it we are seriously not doing out duty.

We know that it doesn't work to tell people not to do it, we aren't Nancy Reagan we are not going to go 'just say no,' we have to talk to people in the language that they use and in the manner they will be most willing to hear what we have to say.

If that means T-shirts that say drugfucked and special materials for that group and using the language that people who use recreation drugs use, then that's what we will do.

Large amounts of immigrants, people who don't speak English very well, are not getting, served the way English speakers are.

We would agree with that, and it's one of the things that we have really started to highlight, we have just done the annual gay men's sex survey again with Sigma and through the CHAPS programme.

There is some really clear evidence this year that we need to do more targeting of certain groups of gay men.

A key group of gay men who are themselves migrants, it's not just African migrants, it's also gay men who have come here from Latin America, from Eastern Europe and a whole range of other places.

They are not as clued up around sexual health as people who have been subjected to all the materials for the last few years, sometimes it's a language issue, sometimes it's cultural issues, sometimes it's about getting to people in the right place, and we are very well aware of that and it's some of our key aims for future work.

We always work on the evidence base, and the evidence is clearly there, and we would agree that people have been saying that do you that we need to do more work.

An argument often put forward is that the approach that you are taking in your campaigns isn't working you need to start scaring people.

Read the rest of this interview here.

Interview: Richard Barnes, Deputy Mayor of London

2008-07-08T21:05:00.002+01:00

Deputy mayors have been in the news a lot recently.

On Friday Ray Lewis resigned as Deputy Mayor of London amid a welter of allegations about his previous incarnation as a Church of England priest.

While his departure was a blow to Boris Johnson, he has quite a few other deputies.

However, only one of them is the statutory Deputy Mayor, the one mentioned in the legislation that created the post of Mayor of London.

That man is Richard Barnes, who has been out and proud, and fighting, for so long that sometimes it seems he was the original gay Tory.

A Hillingdon borough councillor since 1982 and former council leader, he has served on the London Assembly since its creation in 2000.

After eight years of Ken, he is finally in power and, before last week's Pride parade, he sat down with PinkNews.co.uk to talk about Boris, HIV prevention, and why the terrorist attacks exactly three years ago today showed our city at its most resilient.

PinkNews.co.uk: Congratulations on your appointment. I understand that you are the statutory Mayor, can you explain what that entails?

A statutory Mayor is a legal requirement and should be there if anything untoward happened to the Mayor.

Does that mean you are a heart beat away from being Mayor?

I'm just a little bit further but yeah.

How does that work in terms of influencing the Mayor, do you meet regularly, do you have conversations?

We will meet regularly but obviously during the course of the campaign Boris and I did establish a close rapport and we worked very closely together.

When we were talking about Boris Johnson in November and even in January and February there was this idea that his candidacy was a Tory bit of fun …

I don't believe that.

Well what I was going to say is his majority is sizeable, a considerable vote, did that surprise you having been on the campaign trail with him, or were you expecting it on election night?

Before he was selected I just had that gut feeling that he was that symbol of change that everybody in London wanted and given the way his magnetic celebrity status on the campaign trail people just flocked to him.

I've been out with (former Mayor) Ken and you see people on opposite sides of the street say "oh there's Ken Livingstone."

With Boris they had to get near him, they had to get their photograph taken with him.

They want to be close to him which is that difference between premier division and a full star if you like.

You have been and assembly member since the beginning. What sort of changes did you want to see over those eight years, what changes do you want to see now and what do you think Boris will bring forward?

I would rather look forward than look backward.

But you must have seen an organisation that you thought could be better run?

I thought the organisation has improved since we came into office, that it was dysfunctional, the decision making was channelled through a very small coterie of people.

The professional offices were not allowed to make decisions of their own, they were all referred upwards.

What I believe is that you should trust the offices and professionals that you've put there, that you should allow them to get on and make decisions, clearly ask for checks and balances.

They just got a budget which has been examined and approved. I don't expect them to come back on a monthly basis and say "can I spend part of my budget?"

Boris had a bit of a rough ride from the gay community….

Read the rest of this interview.

The Democratic race explained in under nine minutes

2008-06-14T16:14:00.003+01:00

This video is awesome!

David Davis - what the hell is he up to?

2008-06-12T22:59:00.002+01:00

The DUP are the undertakers of governments, as Shirley Williams said on Question Time. Very true, a typical blast of common sense from the tenacious peer.

However, yesterday's vote on 42 and the shenanigans around how Gordon won the vote seems like months ago after today's bombshell.

David Davis insists he is resigning from the Shadow Cabinet on a matter of principle. I don't buy it.

Why resign and fight a lone battle against a piece of legislation? Why piss off the leader and abandon the party, steal headlines from them and make the fight against 42 when the Lords are more than likely to kick it out, plus the government bill is unworkable?

And why now? I think this has got a lot more to do with the leadership of the party and not any issues of liberty.

Fighting his case in his own constituency - it is barmy.

And where will the Tories come into all this? Is he official candidate?

Cameron said he was going to campaign for Davis? How will that work?

Its all very confusing, but I think at the end of the day the loser will be Davis. He is out of the Shadow Cabinet - will he ever get back in?

Nice to see one of the Robinsons has some sense

2008-06-09T20:25:00.003+01:00

The Iris issue rumbles on - she was on the radio this morning claiming that she only said that gay people could be cured, not they should be.

Her hubby, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, today assured the Assembly that not only does he take his responsibilites seriously with regard to discrimination but he and the missus are fighters against it.

Anyway there are still issues, not least round this idea that people can be "converted" by nutty psychiarists.

It hurts gay people. It gives the impression that they are somehow mentally ill, that they need help.

We don't. Leave us alone.

Iris through the looking glass

2008-06-06T19:34:00.002+01:00

Iris Robinson's outburst about how gays just need therapy is interesting - on her first day as the effective First Lady of Northern Ireland, the rib enthusiast (see quote) just popped on Radio Ulster to remake herself as helpful kind of Oprah figure - offering to put gays in touch with a nice doctor who can make them all better.

Here she is on lesbians being allowed near baby making facilities without even having the deceny to bring a gay along so they can pose as a couple for the nice doctor.

"I speak tonight saddened by the approach taken by right hon. and hon. Members who wish to airbrush out the role of fatherhood. I notice that there are many grins on faces, but I stand by my faith and the word of God that man was created in the image of God and that woman was created from the rib of Adam to be his helpmeet and companion. That is the natural progression of procreation."

Well exactly.

Since you've been gone

2008-06-06T19:22:00.005+01:00

SO here it is my first blog entry since 19th April.

In that time I have been to Miami, spent the day with schoolkids at Auschwitz, been on BBC Radio Ulster (personal goal ticked off the list - shame my mum wasn't listening!) reported on the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, been to my first PMQ and got to sit in the Press Gallery which was just SO cool (thanks Kevin), talked St Paul's epistles with the only gay bishop in the Anglican communion (only out one obviously. Its faggot central as everyone knows) discussed the psychology of Ann Widdecombe with drunken Labour researchers, listened to London's first gay deputy Mayor relive the experience of his partner dying in his arms, and then be told he was not a 'fit person' to register his death - he went all the way to the Registrar General to have that obscene insult abolished.

I have brooded over getting an interview with David Cameron, then brooded over getting one with Gordon Brown, planned by birthday picnic on Primrose Hill, thought about growing my hair long, had a beautiful dinner with my friend Michael in his new flat, received news that my brother Dominic is a father for a third time, a girl called Megan, found myself agreeing with everything my mother was saying about Tibet, fought a losing battle with Snickers addiction, argued about the ban on gay blood donations with two people who knew a lot more about it than me, had dinner with someone I fully expect to be in the Cabinet in ten years, realised what an brilliant film Minority Report is, interviewed about a million interns and not slept enough.

Clearly no time for blogging - its SO 2007. But we shall keep at it when we find a moment.

Dunwoody's death is a blow for the Commons

2008-04-19T17:11:00.005+01:00

I was genuinely upset to hear of the death of Labour MP Gywneth Dunwoody.

Ms Dunwoody, who had been the MP for Crewe and Nantwich since 1974, was chair of the transport select committee and a highly-respected parliamentarian.

She was 77.

The longest serving female MP ever, she first entered Parliament in 1966, representing Exeter. From 1966 to 1970 she sat alongside her then-husband, John Dunwoody, MP for Falmouth. In 1983 she ran for Labour deputy leader on a Euro-sceptic platform, but only attracted 1.3% support.

Ms Dunwoody was one of life's awkward squad, speaking out when she thought her own party was wrong, and her fellow MPs clearly had a lot of time for her.

An attempt in 2001 to remove her from the chair of the transport committee led to an effective rebellion by her colleagues, and the government had to let her take her rightful place.

In committee she was a wonder to behold, making ministers, civil servants and senior transport executives look like ill-prepared chancers.

In the chamber she was an exceptionally effective speaker, but more than that she carried before her respect, from MPs on all sides of the House. They listened to her. They liked her, and she was always good value for money.

The Times summed it up best: "a battleaxe in the best tradition."

I saw her in Parliament just a few weeks ago. She was examining trinkets for sale just outside Central Lobby, and I wanted to go over and speak to her, to say hello, so I could say that I had met her, someone I admire so much.

But I was late for my appointment, and I figured I would get many more chances to meet this formidable woman.

She was one of the only MPs I ever saw who managed to pin down the elusive Tony Blair, forcing him to admit that he had, in effect, no policy on immigration.

While some may breathe a sigh of relief that they will never be on the receiving end of her fearsome questioning, most people who knew her will say that the Commons lost one of its most important MPs this week.

Among the tributes from party leaders and political grandees, the words of her son David were the most touching:

"She was a woman who stood up and said what she believed was true and defended those who did not have many people to defend them. And she stood up for her principles, she was a wonderful woman."

Andrew Pierce's piece about her is outstanding - read it here.

Hustings was a huge success

2008-04-19T16:54:00.004+01:00

This morning's Mayor of London hustings, organised by Stonewall, was packed - nearly 400 people were there to hear Ken, Boris, Brian speak alongside Sian Berry from the Greens and Lindsey German from Respect - The Left List.

Both the female candidates impressed the audience with their common sense answers and general demeanour. Sian, only 33, is particularly highly thought of not just in the Green party but among political watchers of all shades. I do hope she wins a seat on the London Assembly.

I was chairing the event, which was daunting, but I think it turned out OK in the end. At least the crowd was mostly well-behaved, with just a handful of people shouting out from the crowd. What is it with these people? How is shouting at people acceptable? It is just rudeness in my opinion.

Anyway, there was very little of that, though one person did shout at me at one point, accusing me (at the end) of not picking any black people. She didn't even mention Asians or other minorities. Racist.

Boris had an interesting time - both charming the audience and failing to convince them that he never really supported Section 28. I tackled him about his infamous comment piece where he compared civil partnerships to "three men and a dog" getting married, but he would not apologise.

Ken was in his comfort zone. I thought he dealt well with accusations about corruption - there are seven police investigations ongoing, apparently.

Anyway, I have chaired my first hustings, and I liked it. I guess I will only have to wait until 2012 for the next one!

Ken tours Soho in search of pink votes

2008-04-18T16:47:00.000+01:00

It was a surreal moment in an already bizarre election; Ken Livingstone standing at the bar in Comptons, chatting happily to bears about his plans for London if elected for a third time as the city's Mayor.

Ken's whole Soho walkabout was part farce, part hard-nosed politics.

With Brian Paddick, the only openly gay candidate, attracting a respectable number of LGBT voters, Ken was out to remind people he was fighting for gay rights when his opponent wasn't even out.

Of course, he got stuck into Boris at every opportunity.

Ken, a man with acute political antennae, knew better than to attack Mr Paddick. He brushed away questions from PinkNews.co.uk about whether the 49-year-old Lib Dem was challenging for the pink vote.

Gay MP Chris Bryant was Mr Livingstone's guide round the area. He confided that he has a flat "near here" but added he doesn't spend much time in the gay ghetto. He certainly seemed to know where he was going.

Ken's cavalcade of press photographers, journalists, members of LGBT Labour and other supporters began at Comptons in Old Compton St and finished up at Heaven.

The nightclub's VIP room was bedecked with some very fetching images of Red Ken from the days when he sported a neat moustache, several drag queens and some of the prettier Labour supporters.

But back to the walkabout. Scrums of photographers followed the Mayor from the Admiral Duncan, up Dean St and across Soho Square.

In that time about two voters spoke to Mr Livingstone, a gang of camp, annoying teenagers joined the throng and several people shouted obscenities at the candidate.

The press were relieved to reach Profile, where canapes, cocktails and champagne were laid on.

Topless waiters presented Mr Livingstone with a thick, sludgy beverage which I was informed contained brandy and cream, and possibly champagne. I spilt a cocktail on my notes so I can't be sure.

I asked one of the waiters if they are normally topless, or if it had been laid on for Ken.

In a delightfully impregnable Brazilian accent he informed me they do "no top" on Fridays and Saturdays. And sometimes Mondays.

Famed journalist A.A. Gill was there to observe the scene - he is to write a piece on Mr Livingstone for The Sunday Times. He seemed amused by the whole experience.

After this short respite Ken was back on manoeuvres.

"Oh, this is fun!" he exclaimed as he and his posse of press and leaflet-wielding supporters made their way into The Yard, where he was warmly received by patrons.

As he trolled past Comptons for the third time, he popped in for a drink, and was greeted with cheers. They like the older gentlemen at Comptons.

Moving finally towards the river, there was a touching moment when a young, frail homeless girl, who looked about 17, a dirty blanket wrapped round her shoulders, pushed herself forward.

As Ken leaned in to listen, so did the press. I was too far out to hear what she said, but I noticed that Ken was holding her hand, looking into her eyes, and I heard him promise that someone would "come back for her and find her."

Among the jollity, the camp boys at G-A-Y and the drunken secretaries shouting “KEN!” as if they were at a hen night and he was the stripper, it was a sobering reminder that the gay village is also filled with the desperate and despondent, the ones London fails.

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE HERE.

MP calls for Speaker to go

2008-04-14T20:10:00.003+01:00

It wasn't a vicious attack by any means. Rogue Tory Douglas Carswell has said what many of his colleagues think: the House of Commons needs serious reform and that cannot begin until the Speaker stands down.

He has broken a strong convention of the House, namely that the Speaker is above both party politics and public reproach, and by attacking him Carswell is attacking the Commons itselt.

Not quite. While he can expect a chat with the Whips, it would be stupid and petty of the Speaker not to call him in debates.

And his point is valid, and it could be argued he is acting in defence of the best traditions of the House.

The Speaker's own expenses are the subject of investigation and tabloid fodder adding to the gaiety of the nation on a weekly basis. Perhaps it is he who should consider if that damages the Speakership?

Carswell, the MP for Harwich, is an ardent campaigner for a range of parliamentary reforms.

"We need to clean up Westminster politics and take action to restore faith in our political system," he told the Mail on Sunday.

"Speaker Martin must step down. Perhaps not immediately, but he needs to set a date for his departure now.

"Until Speaker Martin goes, we will make little progress with anything else."

The photo is from Douglas Carswell's website.

"Douglas in Afghanistan
08 March 2007
Watch on ClactonTV.com"

Stonewall hustings event names chair

2008-04-14T20:06:00.004+01:00

And it's me!

Yes, yours truly will be on stage at BFI Southbank (formerly the National Film Theatre) on FRIDAY 19th APRIL from 11am.

The whole thing is booked up, which is a bit scary, as is the prospect of trying to keep the peace between Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone, Brian Paddick and Lindsey German, the Respect - The Left List candidate.

It will be the last hustings before voters go to the polls on May 1st, so the candidates will either be particularly combative or dog tired, we will just have to see.

Bad press day for the Prime Minister

2008-04-14T19:51:00.003+01:00

Bad news for Gordon Brown - the papers today are a chorus of disapproval - Matthew Parris in The Times complaining that he is a naked, clueless vacuum.

Crikey. The Sun reports that he could face a challenge to his leadership if Labour do badly in the local elections next month, and The Guardian has published a series of comments from un-named government MPs bemoaning his election unopposed as leader last year.

All are agreed that the boy Miliband will not be challenging, and that the most likely contenders are Blairites Alan Milburn or Charles Clarke.

This talk of a leadership challenge is bollocks, though the underlying message that support for the government has all but evaporated is true.

The collapse in Gordon Brown's poll numbers is stunning, and it looks unlikely he will substantially raise it in the coming months.

Tessa Jowell, that harbinger of doom, has been raising hackles about the abolition of the 10p tax.

It looks likely that the PM is entering his John Major phase much earlier than predicted; we will see him defeated by his own party on key legislation, his younger Cabinet colleagues jockeying for position, safe in the knowledge they can hold their fire until after he loses the next election.

It is fast becoming a cliche, but it is all so terribly Shakespearean. It is as if he is under a curse, to always half-succeed but always look as if he failed completely.

Everything from the signing of the Lisbon treaty to getting lost in Windsor Castle, to not going to the opening of the Olympics, but happy to be there for the closing, he and his team seem unable to get anything right.

Kebab-eating Home Secretaries, the one-woman wrecking machine that is Harriet Harman and the sight of Tessa Jowell and the Olympics budget roadshow, all adds to the tragedy.

The idea that Brown promised only to serve one term, in favour of Ed Balls, is pure fantasy. There are few Cabinet ministers with as little support on the backbenches as Balls. He is entirely a creation of the Prime Minister, not the party.

And while the Tories may be jubilant at their poll lead, they are still only getting 40% of the vote - hardly enough to propel them into government.

They have yet to make a serious impact in cities like London, Manchester and Sheffield. The local elections on May 1st is their best chance to achieve those symbolic gains.

Even if they do, David Cameron has yet to convince voters that he is the man to lead Britain in a new direction.

boris blears and the BNP

2008-04-13T13:58:00.004+01:00

The Secretary of State for Communities has said that the Tory candidate for Mayor of London will "depend on attracting support in second preferences from BNP and UKIP supporters" to win the May 1st election.

Hazel Blears, who is in charge of the Labour party's local election campaign, made her assertion in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph in which she characterised the council elections as vital for David Cameron.

Labour is braced for considerable losses in the 4,500 seats up for election across England and Wales, with party insiders predicting as many as 250.

The party could lose control of Sheffield to the Liberal Democrats. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is an MP for the city.

It is Gordon Brown's first major electoral test since becoming Prime Minister last year. In cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Sunderland, and 73 English district authorities, one third of the council seats are up for election.

Seven English district authorities will elect half of the council while in Wales all councillors in all 22 councils will be elected.

The Prime Minister already faces unrest among his own MPs about plans to extend detention without trial for terrorist suspects and the abolition of the 10p tax band, which took effect last week.

Meanwhile Tory leader David Cameron will be hoping to pick up support in northern England, particularly cities, where his party is currently absent.

"Cameron needs to show he can get real support in the North of England and Wales, beyond his political comfort zone in the shires. Not just a few gains here or there," said Ms Blears.

Her comments about Conservative candidate for Mayor of London Boris Johnson indicates that the battle for City Hall is set to remain ill-tempered right up until polling day.

"The London Mayoral will be very close, given the resources the Tories are ploughing into the capital," she told The Sunday Telegraph."

Success for Boris Johnson will depend on attracting support in second preferences from BNP and UKIP supporters, I am afraid."

Labour candidate Ken Livingstone, seeking a third term in office, has used the threat of a BNP candidate winning a seat on the 25-member London Assembly as a late theme in his campaign.

"Like all fascist parties the BNP seek power with populist policies but their aim is to divide communities and foster hatred and violence," he said last week.

"We have to get across one simple fact: there's only one way to stop the BNP, which is by actually going out to vote against them. A low voter turnout will help the BNP get elected."

He was speaking after the fascist party had called on its supporters to cast their second preference vote for Mr Johnson – an endorsement he utterly rejected.

"In this race, the Tory clown Johnson is a lesser evil than the Marxist crank Livingstone, so replacing the latter with the former would, on balance, be an improvement for the majority of Londoners," the party said in a statement on their website.

"Even if Johnson condemns the BNP a second choice vote for him gives you the chance to vote BNP as your first preference and still vote to get Livingstone out of office."

Ms Blear's advisers later said she had not mean that Mr Johnson was seeking the votes of BNP members, but he rejected that position.

"Regardless of whether or not she meant to suggest I was deliberately courting BNP votes, this is yet another cynical attempt by Labour to play politics with an issue on which all the mayoral candidates are united," he said.

"I have said before that I don't want the second preference vote of any BNP supporter.

"I believe my message of a fresh approach and new ideas for London will resonate with all voters."

For more click here.

Harriet and William banter over the despatch box

2008-04-12T18:04:00.005+01:00

Secretary of State for Equality Harriet Harman made history yesterday when she became the first woman from the Labour party to answer Prime Minister's Questions.

Ms Harman is also Leader of the House of Commons and Deputy Leader of the Labour party.

Yesterday she was faced with former Tory leader William Hague, filling in for David Cameron.

The Prime Minister was at a NATO summit in Bucharest, and by tradition the other party leaders stay away from PMQs as well.

Mr Hague's performance at the dispatch box confirmed his reputation as possibly the funniest Commons performer of his generation.

Earlier this week Ms Harman caused outrage in her own constituency after she was filmed on a walkabout with local police wearing a stab-proof vest.

She later insisted she was only wearing it as part of the 'kit,' in the same way a politician visiting a factory may wear a hard hat or a hair net.

"Before turning to domestic issues, I was going to be nice to the right honourable and learned Lady," said Mr Hague.

"She has had a difficult week.

"She had to explain yesterday that she dresses in accordance with wherever she is going: she wears a helmet on a building site, she wears Indian clothes in the parts of her constituency with a large representation of Indian people, so when she goes to a Cabinet meeting, she presumably dresses as a clown."

Ms Harman kept her composure, though many on her own benches were visibly amused by the barb, and responded in kind:

"I would just start by saying that if I were looking for advice on what to wear or what not to wear, the very last person I would look to is the man in the baseball cap."

Read the rest of this story here.

Gay terrorist shocker

2008-03-31T23:01:00.001+01:00

Is someone out to get the Speaker?

2008-03-31T22:02:00.006+01:00

Revelations over the weekend that the Speaker has spent £148,900 on furniture, £191,000 on an air conditioning system and £13,000 on art for his official apartment in the Palace of Westminster make for grim reading.

Particularly for Labour MPs who have been defending Michael Martin as a working-class hero and the victim of a Daily Mail-led campaign of snobbery against the former sheet metal worker.

OK so I get that the Speaker's apartment is used for official business and you can't really pop down to IKEA when you live in a Grade I listed property.

But the sums involved here do seem profligate. However, these stories are not about art or air-conditioning. Like the furore surrounding Lord Irvine's wallpaper, these attacks are about the man.

I think the Speaker is below-average and I sympathise with the many MPs on all sides who want him to retire.

The Tories are right not only to still be sore that Labour broke the convention of alternating Speakers from the main parties in 2000, when Martin succeeded Betty Boothroyd.

He has appeared at turns nakedly partisan and close to incompetence. But the point about the Speaker is that no MP can speak out against him. It has been left to former independent MP Martin Bell to say what needs to be said: it is time he stood down.

Because the Speaker in many ways IS the House of Commons, MPs are in a difficult position. They cannot openly express their displeasure at his performance and the ida of removing him is unthinkable.

There have been problematic Speakers before, many of them Labour. George Thomas was a drinker, for example, but the "usual channels" prevailed on him to stand aside for the legendary Bernard Weatherill.

The problem with Michael Martin is that, because the attacks on him appear class-based, they raise the hackles of many of his former Labour colleagues.

But the bottom line is that a Speaker on the front pages of the papers cannot, by defenition, continue in his job as an impartial chairman and figure of respect in the House.

We can expect Michael Martin to stand down at the next election. My money is on Ming Campbell to succeed him, and if he does not want it, there is talk of John Bercow.

After the shambles of the 2000 election, we can also expect his successor to have been decided behind the scenes.

From Wikipedia!

Betty Boothroyd announced her retirement shortly before the summer recess in 2000, which left a long time for would-be Speakers to declare their candidature but little opportunity for Members of Parliament to negotiate and decide on who should be chosen. Many backbench Labour MPs, especially from Scotland, advanced the claims of Michael Martin as a long-serving Deputy Speaker. Most Conservatives felt strongly that the recent alternation between the main parties ought to be maintained and a Conservative Speaker chosen. The most prominent Conservative choices were Sir George Young and Deputy Speaker Sir Alan Haselhurst. With several maverick candidates announcing themselves, the total number of Members seeking the Speakership was 14, none of whom would withdraw. A lengthy sitting of the House saw Michael Martin first proposed, then each of the candidates proposed as an amendment which was voted down. In points of order before the debate, many members demanded a secret ballot.

Is our politics genetic?

2008-03-29T00:32:00.001Z

very interesting article on the bbc website which poses the question, are our political views genetic?

Why we love the Sarkozys

2008-03-28T00:07:00.010Z

The next time the President of France comes to London, can he bring his son Jean? We want to ask him about the small animal he appears to be hiding in his trousers.

Though there might be some quarantine issues ...

Catholics victorious over embryology bill

2008-03-25T21:42:00.004Z

It may have saved Gordon Brown the crisis of three members of the Cabinet resigning over a point of religious principle, but I for one would question whether people who cannot reconcile party and government policy with their faith should be in the Cabinet at all.

After days of hysterical and mostly totally inaccurate attacks from leading Roman Catholic church leaders, the PM has caved and announced that three parts of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill currently before Parliament will be a free vote for Labour MPs.

While this may spare Ruth Kelly, Des Browne and Paul Murphy from resigning from the government, it raises the role of the Roman Catholic church in British society.

If, like me, you grew up in Ireland in the 1980s and 90s, the sight of the government caving into the brute force of the Roman church demanding that MPs put faith above their role as elected representatives is worrying.

Ireland did not have divorce or abortion because priests stood up in their pulpits and instructed their parishoners how to vote in referendums. The church effectively decided social policy.

Now they have won a significant victory in the UK, and they are unlikely to rest there.

The PM should have stood firm, as Tony Blair did over gay adoption. The church on that occasion threatened to close its adoption agencies rather than consider gay couples. After much internal wrangling Blair, ironically a convert to Catholicism, called their bluff.

What is most troubling about this recent church spat is that they have told blatant lies about the scope and the impact of the bill. There will be no Frankenstein monsters, half-human half-beast creations.

More than 200 charities have spoken up for research. Yet the PM, somehow fearful of the small minority of his own MPs and Cabinet colleagues who feel they must side with their church, has allowed the bill to be challenged by Catholic politicians.

The Roman church has been trying this tactic in every country where they have influence. Gay rights in Italy are frustrated by their malign influence. They blatantly tried to stop the re-election of the Spanish government earlier this month, preaching that people who had allowed gay marriage were "anti-family."

Now they have managed to get their way in the UK. Fortunately, the bill will still pass and those Catholic MPs will have to explain to their constituents why they did not keep their best interests at heart over this matter.

Oh, and yes David Cameron and Nick Clegg have given their MPs a free vote, but then this is not their bill is it!

Read this excellent article on the topic of church vs constituents!

Mirror skewers bicycling Dave

2008-03-21T12:37:00.002Z

You have to smile at the good old-fashioned journalism on show in today's Daily Mirror.

Journalists, determined to find something about David Cameron's cycling to the Commons stunt to take the sheen off it.

They followed him on three Wednesday's as he cycled from his Notting Hill home to Parliament.

The Tory boss was spotted flouting the law by cycling the wrong way in a one-way street, through red lights and the wrong side of a bollard on his 30-minute trip to work.
Hapless Cameron was breaking the rules within minutes of leaving his Notting Hill home in West London for Westminster.
He sailed past a large red no entry sign even Mr Magoo would have noticed. Another clue was the huge arrows on the road pointing which way traffic should go.

Next to be ignored was a keep left beacon in the Mall. He veered off to the right...no change there then. Cam also hurtled over a toucan crossing, for cyclists and pedestrians, while the signal was red.

Dave, to his credit, immediately apologised and said he would not do it again. But still, its made it onto the One O'Clock News, which is not good at all.

Obama, race and gay business

2008-03-19T22:18:00.004Z

Hey

it has been a while - work it mad ATM.

Anyway my friend asked me what I thought about diversity strategies encouraging companies to purchase services from businesses just because they are gay owned, and why I published this article on the website I edit.

Here is what I said - probably the most logical thing I am going to write tonight, so enjoy!

gay businesses: interestingly Stonewall ask that their workplace diversity champions ensure their suppliers have gay-friendly hiring policies, which I agree with

But just going to a business because its owner is gay is madness, and only in America would I back going to a business because its owner is from an ethnic minority

Most of the UK minorities seem to be doing quite well enough in business without our help.

This sort of action entrenches the ghettoisation of the gay community.

It always strikes me that people are shocked to find out that most of the people who write for PinkNews.co.uk are straight

Like a straight person could not get their head round the issues, like I would not, as a journalist, be able to go to write for the Jewish Chronicle and easily pick up what their issues where and become attuned to it.

I think businesses should be encouraged to be gay-friendly, but ownership is a ridiculous model on which to judge whether or not a company will be the best to fulfil a contract.

"For me that speech yesterday showed more than ever that this man can be a great president," you said in your email.

I agree 100% and you know I do - that is why I published it in full, at one in the morning, having just read it.

But a news organisation exists to challenge the accepted wisdom and to stimulate debate.

Duane, who wrote the obama piece, is a black gay American - I felt his points were valid, if only because everyone deserves a say, if only for their view to be shot down, as is already happening on our comment pages.

The race speech is, in my opinion, one of the defining speeches we have seen this century, and is already being talked about in those terms on the BBC, who do not throw around accolades like that very often.

I agree with your comments about leadership and "qualifications"

Those that think leadership is about being experienced, go to Iraq and tell that to the 20 year old officers who lead our troops into danger every day.

Unfortunately, the sense I get is that the Hillary lady is going to work her black magic and snatch the nomination, back room style, before the convention - and then attempt to make obama take the VP slot.

But, in the unlikely story that is America, there is nothing false about hope! After all, JFK and Teddy Roosevelt made it to the White House by appealing to exactly the same values as Obama.

So there.

The expert speaks ... again

2008-03-11T20:08:00.002Z

Me in The Scotsman:

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Catholic-couple-win-first-round.3862907.jp

Barack and the Vice Presidency?

2008-03-10T20:11:00.000Z

Barack Obama's campaign to win the Democratic nomination for President of the United States was given another boost when he won another state over the weekend.

Admittedly Wyoming is the least populous state in the union, but his comfortable margin of victory, 61% to 38%, has heartened his supporters after his rival Senator Hillary Clinton won three key states last week.

Senator Obama took seven of the twelve delegates Wyoming sends to the Democratic party nominating convention in August.

Both campaigns are looking to the remaining contests.

Mississippi Democrats will choose a candidate tomorrow, with Senator Obama expected to win comfortably.

The next major state to decide will then be Pennsylvania on April 22nd.

Many party activists, alarmed at the prospect of a bitter and acrimonious fight all the way to the convention, are pushing the candidates to compromise and come together on a President/Vice President ticket.

A Newsweek poll found 69% of Democrats are now in favour of a combined "Dream Team" ticket, though the poll did not specify which candidate would run as President.

The Republican party nomination has already been won by Senator John McCain.

Senator Obama has a lead over his rival in pledged delegates but neither candidate can now win outright without the support of the super-delegates.

The 795 super-delegates can vote for whoever they want.

All Democratic Congressmen, state Governors and former and current office holders, along with members of the Democratic National Committee, are super-delegates.

Yesterday former President Bill Clinton talked up the prospect of a Clinton/Obama ticket.

"He would win the urban areas and the upscale voters, and she wins the traditional rural areas that we lost when President Reagan was President," he said while campaigning in Mississippi yesterday.

"If you put those two things together, you'd have an almost unstoppable force."

Three times in the past week the Clinton camp has made it clear it would be willing to accept Senator Obama as a Vice Presidential candidate.

"You won't see me as a Vice Presidential candidate," was his response.

"I'm running for President. We have won twice as many states as Senator Clinton, and have a higher popular vote, and I think we can maintain our delegate count."

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-7083.html

Stupid photo

2008-02-28T19:58:00.000Z

As you can see, this is from Northampton:

Obama accuser fails polygraph

2008-02-27T19:35:00.000Z

Remember Larry Sinclair, who claimed that in 1999 in the back of a limo he took coke while Barack Obama smoked some crack?

He then gave Obama a blow job in a Chicago hotel room and performed a similar sex act at another location.

Or actually he didn't.

Whitehouse.com, had offered Sinclair the sum of $10,000 to take a polygraph plus another if $100,000 he passed.

He failed.

"On the first test, questions were administered about Sinclair’s claims that he and Obama had sex.

"The second test focused on Sinclair’s claims that he and Obama did drugs. Dr.Gelb found “deception was indicated” in both tests."

Shame - though that scandal is so last week - now it is all about Barack Hussein Omaba, the Muslim.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-6964.html

When visiting his father's homeland of Kenya two years ago, Presidential candidate Barack Obama wore a traditional white turban and a wraparound white robe presented to him by elders.

In the febrile atmosphere of the 2008 primaries, that picture has been released, allegedly by staffers for his rival for the Democratic nomination for President, Senator Hillary Clinton.

Senator Obama's campaign manager was furious, and the claim and counter-claim over the issue brings the public scrapping between the only female and the only black candidate in the race for the White House to a new low.

Just days ago Senator Clinton was saying her opponent ought to be ashamed of himself over campaign leaflets about her plans for health care. Over the weekend she bitterly mocked his message of hope and change.

"I could just stand up here and say 'Let's just get everybody together, let's get unified,'" she told a rally in Rhode Island.

"The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.

"Maybe I've just lived a little long, but I have no illusions at how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.

"Yesterday the team around her was accused of "the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party in this election" by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe over the photo incident.

Senator Clinton's team tried to spin the story to their advantage, but their protestations of innocence were not helped by the fact that two staffers had to resign in December after sending out emails claiming her 46-year-old opponent is a secret Muslim.

"If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed," Senator Clinton's campaign manager Maggie Williams said.

She did not comment on how the photo came to be distributed.

"Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.

"This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry."

The two contenders for the Democratic party nomination will debate tonight for probably the last time in this campaign.

The increasingly strident attacks by Senator Clinton are a symptom of her steady loss of support among her core support groups.

Meanwhile Senator Obama continues to gain ground in the key primaries of Ohio and Texas, which will be held on March 4th.Senator Obama has won the last eleven contests in a row and now has more pledged delegates at the nominating convention than his opponent.

In Ohio Senator Clinton, 60, has seen her lead reduced from 21% to 11%. The national polls are even worse for her campaign.

A New York Times/CBS News Poll published today also found that Senator Obama's appeal is broadening. Nationally, 54% of Democratic primary voters saying they wanted to see him nominated, while 38% want Senator Clinton.

See full results of the NYT/CBS poll here.

"I think if we lose in Texas and Ohio, Mrs. Clinton will have to make her decision as to whether she moves forward or not," senior Clinton aide Harold Ickes told the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

Resignation of Speaker's aide spells more trouble for Martin

2008-02-23T17:58:00.005Z

A spokesman for the Speaker of the House of Commons resigned today after misleading a journalist.

Mike Granatt has done the honourable thing, but the circumstances of his departure raise more questions about Michael Martin.

It is an open secret that many MPs are very unhappy with his performance as Speaker, and they have good reason to be.

Granatt resigned after denying that the Speaker's wife had run up a £4,000 taxi bill on shopping trips. He had claimed she was accompanied by an official at all times and was buying food for official occasions.

It has now emerged Mrs Martin was in fact with her housekeeper and was off buying herself new hats and the like.

This latest example of improper use of funds comes hot on the heels of a complaint that the Speaker flew his family down from Glasgow using air miles that had been accumulated on official business.

There have been persistent rumblings about his high-handed attitude to many of the servants of the House, and ugly stories about his wife complaining about having to go through the same security procedures as everyone else.

All of this makes his position untenable. The office of Speaker is one of the few in politics that is by and large untainted by any sleaze or partisanship, or was before Gorbals Mick took the chair.

For a start, his election broke the convention that the Speakership should rotate between Labour and Tory MPs. He succeeded Betty Boothroyd, a former Labour MP, over the heads of much better qualified candidates from the Conservative benches.

Ming Campbell would have been a much better choice back in 2000.

But the present Speaker has been contentious from day one, with many MPs privately questioning many of his rulings from the chair.

At Prime Minister's Questions last year he caused outrage by trying to block David Cameron from asking about the Labour leadership.

Many of his judgements appear partisan, he seems to have little understanding of the House.

That he is overseeing a parliamentary inquiry into MPs' expenses seems laughable. When compared to his two immediate predecessors, he is an embarassment to the House.

Can anyone seriously imagine the late, much missed Bernard Wetherall or the great Betty allowing themselves to be exposed as misusing public funds?

The Speaker should be above all of that.

It is time for him to retire. The question is, who will replace him? It seems certain that the next Speaker will be chosen from the opposition benches.

Ming is certainly a candidate that would be popular with MPs on all sides, and the small but perfectly-formed Tory John Bercow is known to want the job.

However, they will need to get rid of Mr Martin first.

Interview with UKIP's candidate for Mayor of London

2008-02-21T21:23:00.003Z

The UK Independence Party is misunderstood and misrepresented, their candidate for Mayor of London tells me when we meet.

Gerard Batten is a somewhat unusual politician, in that he is a member of a parliament that he desires to have no power over the lives of his constituents.

As an MEP for London since 2004, he spends his days in Brussels trying to think up new ways to discredit and dismantle the European Union (or "ferment rebellion" as he describes it).

For a long time UKIP was seen as something of a joke by the political establishment, flirting with Robert Kilroy-Silk and appealing to the sort of voter who thinks the Tory party is full of bleeding-heart liberals.

They weren't laughing so hard in 2004, when the party took more than 16% of the vote in the elections for the European Parliament.

The party now has 10 MEPs, 30 local councillors and two members of the House of Lords who defected from the Conservatives.

Perhaps that is why David Cameron felt moved to refer to them as "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists."

UKIP was founded in 1993, a year after Tory Prime Minister John Major signed the UK up to the Maastricht treaty.

Its aims and beliefs are simple: full withdrawl from the EU and the return of sovereignty to Westminster, the maintenance of the union between Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland and an end to the present immigration arrangements.

Batten descibes the party as "libertarian" and denies they are racists. No one can deny that their message resonated with some Londoners – in the 2004 Mayoral elections UKIP candidate Frank Maloney came fourth, winning 6% (115,665) of first preference votes and 10% (193,157) of second preference votes.

Batten, a founder member of the party, is their candidate for Mayor of London in the May 1st election.

While unlikely to either unseat Labour's Ken Livingstone or defeat Tory candidate Boris Johnson or the Lib Dem's Brian Paddick, the party could win a seat or two on the London Assembly.

Though it should be noted that UKIP, who have nearly 17,000 members, advocate abolishing the Assembly.

Batten, who will be 54 next month, worked as a salesman for BT for 28 years before being elected as an MEP.

In person, he is fluid and likable, if somewhat exercised about the direction of the UK, and at times is reminiscent of Ricky Gervais in his tone and delivery.

His references to the views of cab drivers can seem more like Jim Davidson, but there is no doubting he is sincere in his beliefs.

A report in the Evening Standard last month claimed that Batten would end funding for Pride London and his comment that incumbent Mayor Ken Livingstone's distribution of funds to gay and ethnic minority events is "cultural Marxism" piqued my interest.

Batten contacted us to say he had been misrepresented, and we decided to speak to him about his policies on immigration, race and the politics of Europe.

PinkNews.co.uk: Let's start with the charges that UKIP is racist and has an agenda similar to that of the BNP.

Gerard Batten: We have people from different races and nationalities running for UKIP and among my friends who advise me on the Islamic issue, one of them is actually an ex-Sharia lawyer who converted to Christianity.

We don't have a problem with foreigners or people of other races. You can have a multi-ethnic society and it can work so long as people feel like they belong to the same society. What doesn't work is multiculturalism.

It creates division and especially when you've got now the idea of introducing Sharia law to the country. The whole thing is crazy. You can have a country where people have their own culture and their own customs but they've got to sign up to one legal system, one political system.

We want controlled immigration. The BNP have another agenda, which is ethnic cleansing, and if you talk to any of their activists that's what they want. I know that because that's what they've told me.

They were regretful about it but they had to explain to me that my wife and family would have to be deported at some point in the future if they ever came to power. My wife comes from the Philippines.

I don't understand their obsession with us, because they do seem to be totally obsessed with us. The kind of people that join UKIP wouldn't join the BNP. We get the occasional person who would go off and defect but they are possibly in the wrong Party to start with.

Read the rest of the interview here.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/opinion/2005-6891.html

Nutter claims he had gay sex with Obama

2008-02-20T20:15:00.011Z

And they took class A drugs together too!

So says one Larry Sinclair, an ugly, overweight, middle-aged, sartorially challenged drug abuser, whose wild and probably delusional claims have been given some worrying coverage in America.

To summarise Sinclair told equally deranged far right "news" service WorldNetDaily (A Free Press For A Free People) that in 1999 in the back of a limo he took coke while the then Illinois state Senator smoked some crack.

He then gave Obama a blow job in a Chicago hotel room and performed a similar sex act at another location.

"My motivation for making this public is my desire for a presidential candidate to be honest," he told WorldNetDaily.

"I didn't want the sex thing to come out. But I think it is important for the candidate to be honest about his drug use as late as 1999."

Sinclair has of course aired his "revelations" on that home of nutters, YouTube, see video at the bottom of this entry, and has got close to 400,000 hits.

Sinclair has filed a federal lawsuit against Obama in Minnesota district court. He is also suing campaign consultant David Axelrod and the Democratic National Committee, claiming slander, internet harassment, physical threats, and attempts to suppress his speech in violation of his First Amendment rights.

Respected politics website whitehouse.com, (which helpfully informs visitors that it is "not affiliated (with) or endorsed by the US government) has offered Sinclair $10,000 to take a lie detector test.

And do you know, he has accepted.

whitehouse.com must be pretty confident that he isn't the full shilling - they are offering him $100,000 if he passes the polygraph.

"We're going to meet him on Tuesday, February 26th at an undisclosed location in New York City," they said in a story posted on Monday.

"We've picked a polygraph expert, too: a renowned expert who has been involved in quite a few high-profile cases who we're not going to name until the results are not only in, but have been verified by a second renowned expert.

"Then, we'll post the results, the names of both polygraph experts, and other relevant information, along with video and pictures, here on whitehouse.com.

"Since the outcome of the test will be vital interest to the voting public, our findings will be made available before the presidential primaries in Texas and Ohio slated for March 4. That's all for now, but check back for updates. "

Obama has been candid about the fact that as a much younger man he dabbled in drugs. Who hasn't? Well two of the UK party leaders clearly have.

What should be worrying the good people at whitehouse.com is that a) delusional people often pass lie detector tests because they do actually believe what they are saying and b) cocaine addicts are about the most delusional people around, they lie even more than alcoholics and the coke makes them super-confident!

Meanwhile Obama beat the Hillary lady in the Wisconsin primary and the Hawaii caucus, giving him ten wins in a row.

Let's hope he can keep it up. As it were.

Texas is make or break for the Dems

2008-02-16T12:31:00.005Z

As Hillary Clinton concentrates her campaign for the White House on the key Texas primary on March 4th, there is more evidence that the Democratic nomination may be slipping out of her grasp.

Polling data from the American Research Group will make for grim reading chez Clinton.

While the former First Lady leads Barack Obama among self-described Democrats in Texas 47% to 42%, Obama leads Clinton among self-described independents and Republicans 71% to 24%.

So the voters that the Democratic candidate will need to win in November vastly favour the 46-year-old Senator from Illinois.

A couple of factors in the laughably convoluted primary rules could also favour Obama - delegates in African-American districts will be over-represented among the 126 delegates Texas sends to the convention. Obama leads Clinton among African American voters in the state 76% to 17%.

While Hillary has been counting on pulling in the significant number of Hispanic voters, she only has a slight lead there, and it is the same story among white male voters and women.

My interview with Brian Paddick, Mayor of London candidate

2008-02-13T20:24:00.005Z

Pubished on Monday on PinkNews.co.uk

Brian Paddick is enjoying running for Mayor of London.

The Liberal Democrat candidate may be a distant third in opinion polls, but he has one distinct advantage in this race – lots of people know who he is.

The 2008 Mayoral election is already the most exciting contest since the post was established at the turn of the century.

Incumbent Ken Livingstone is facing a concerted (some would say co-ordinated) barrage of negative press on everything from cronyism to his alcohol intake.

After eight years of his rule London's main newspaper, the Evening Standard, has gone into anti-Ken overdrive.

The election is further enlivened by the presence of one Boris Johnson, the Tory candidate. He is no stranger to the press or the voters.

A journalist, broadcaster, columnist, scallywag and sometime Member of Parliament, he has been happily knocking lumps out of the Mayor and banking on his unique personality appealing to London's voters.

Faced with those rivals, even the most exceptional third party candidate would struggle to make his voice heard.

Paddick, who is 50 in April, does not have a track record as an elected representative, only rejoined the party he now represents two years ago, and he talked to the Tories about the possibility of representing them.

So why would not one party but two want him to run for Mayor? As a career Metropolitan police officer, he first came to the attention of the press over cannabis policy in the London borough of Lambeth.

For operational reasons, he took the decision as borough commander to concentrate resources on hard drugs. That meant cautioning instead of arresting people caught with amounts of cannabis small enough to be considered for personal use.

The fact that he was openly gay only gave the right-wing press more to be unhappy about. His career at Scotland Yard proved even more controversial, and he earned a reputation for honestly over the Jean Charles DeMenezes affair.

His account of when senior police officers knew that the man they had shot at Stockwell tube station in July 2005 was not a terrorist but an innocent electrician was at odds with that of the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair.

It is no secret that Paddick had professional ambitions beyond the role of Deputy Assistant Commissioner, but he left the force at that rank in 2006, after 30 years service in the Met.

When asked about his lack of experience as an elected official, he claims:

"In terms of politics, there is nothing more political than the eighth floor of Scotland Yard."

He says that running for Mayor has allowed him to speak more freely than he ever could in uniform.

"It is a bit like being a senior officer again," he says of the campaign.

"Morning, noon and night it is TV and radio and newspaper interviews, so I am very comfortable with it. But it has the bonus that I can say what I want.

"It took a while for me to convince myself that I wasn't going to get hauled in front of the Commissioner every time I gave an interview, which was the situation it had got to in the police.

"So it's quite liberating. I am in my comfort zone.

"If Ken and Boris keep taking lumps out of eachother like they are now then I might be the last man standing."

To read the rest of the interview click here.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/politics/2005-6813.html

O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!

2008-02-13T19:59:00.002Z

Three for three for Barack Obama in the Patomac primaries. He took DC, Maryland and Virginia last night, and not by a small margin.

Meanwhile the Hillary lady flew off to Texas, the last really, really big state in the race, and talked up her campaign. She didn't mention that she has lost the last eight to Obama and his momentum.

"We're going to sweep across Texas in the next three weeks,” the former First Lady said.

"I'm tested, I'm ready, let's make it happen."

Yes, let's hope. Oh, sorry, hope is his thing.

Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina are also have significant amounts of delegates. Then there is the super-delegates. There are 796 of them, about 20% of the overall total.

They are Democrat Senators, Congressmen, members of the Democratic National Committee (397 of them - big committee) and 23 distinguished party leaders, and 76 others.

The way this race is going, it could be up to them who gets the party nomination.

At present she is estimated to have 62% of these superdelegates on her side.

In any case, the Clinton campaign are fighting every inch of the way, and cannot be helped by the fact that her deputy campaign manager is reported to have resigned, just days after her campaign manager departed.

She is racking up the attacks on her opponent, 14 years her junior.

Her tactic of focusing on the big states should make sense, but remember if Obama keeps winning all the rest of the small states she could be out before the end of the race - unless the superdelegates save her.

Where them MPs?

2008-02-12T22:04:00.000Z

How come politicsjunkie aint been chatting about fascinating things going on in Westminster.

Well the reason for that is because they are all away on a well-deserved week's holiday.

Normal service should resume until next week!

Obama wins a Grammy!

2008-02-11T20:19:00.004Z

As the battle for the Democratic nomination continues to be the most closely-fought in decades, Senator Hillary Clinton has reordered her core team.

Her rival Senator Barack Obama won yesterday's Maine caucus by a wide margin, his fourth victory over the weekend.

The Former First Lady had been hoping to secure the state.

Last week she had to lend her campaign $5m (£2.56m) of her own money after it suffered "cash flow problems."

Senator Clinton has replaced Patti Solis Doyle, who led campaign since the start, with aide Maggie Williams.

She reportedly met with former candidate John Edwards, who has yet to come out in support of either remaining candidate.

The removal of her original campaign manager is intended to send a signal to donors and supporters that she is responding to Senator Obama's increasing momentum in the race.

At last night's Grammy awards Senator Obama won the spoken word award for his reading of his best-selling book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

All eyes are now on the so-called Beltway Primary, when Washington DC and surrounding states vote for a Democratic candidate for President.

Speaking to supporters in Virginia yesterday, Senator Obama damned his opponent with faint praise:

"She's a smart person, she's a capable person, she would be a vast improvement over the incumbent.

"What is also true is, I think it's very hard for Senator Clinton to break out of the politics of the last 15 years.

"Keep in mind, we had Bill Clinton as President when, in 94, we lost the House, we lost the Senate, we lost Governorships, we lost state houses. And so, regardless of what policies they wanted to promote, they didn't have a working majority to bring change about."

Senator Clinton still retains a tiny lead over Senator Obama in the number of delegates pledged to her and the support of John Edwards could be key ahead of the remaining primaries and caucuses.

She is trying to portray herself as the experienced candidate who can take on the likely Republican nominee John McCain.

Speaking to a rally in Virginia yesterday she said:

"Who can go the distance? I want you to think about this.

"If Senator McCain is the nominee for the Republicans, as it appears he will be, you know that they will do everything in their power to make this election about national security, about homeland security, and that is exactly what will happen. I look forward to making it clear that I have big differences with my friend Senator McCain."

Senator Obama beat two former US President's at last night's Grammy awards, both Democrats.

Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were nominated for best spoken word album alongside Maya Angelou and Alan Alda.

The title, The Audacity Of Hope: Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream,refers to Senator Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention:

"In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

"I'm not talking about blind optimism here, the almost wilful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it.

"No, I'm talking about something more substantial.

"It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.

"Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope."

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/politics/2005-6815.html

The Christian Right have no love for McCain

2008-02-11T19:40:00.001Z

He may be a war hero who invented oven chips, but it seems that Senator John McCain is not getting any love from the conservatives, Christians, and Christian conservatives in his own party.

This key section of the Republican party ushered George "born again" Bush into the White House twice in a row, but the results from the weekend primaries show that they still want former Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee to do the Lord's work from the Oval Office.

The Huckster, ably supported by leading intellectual Chuck Norris, took Kansas by two to one (a winner takes all state, boosting his delegate total) and Louisiana. Washington state is too damn close to call.

"If you look at where our votes are coming from, it's clearly from the conservatives," Huckabee said after this latest string of wins, neatly echoing what I just said. "I think that makes sense. I am the most conservative candidate left standing."

What does this mean for McCain? Well, as we can see, the conservatives are flocking to Huckabee, though in the long run they will end up voting Republican on election day - or not at all.

What Bush, or more correctly Karl Rove, was masterful at was energising Christian voters and using their established community networks to get out the vote.

With a candidate they mistrust, such as McCain, they are likely to stay home altogether.

If he has any sense, the front runner will recruit Huckabee as his VP running mate, and hope that the smooth-talking Southern preacher can get out the vote to beat Hillary/Barack on November 4th.

Obama has the big Mo

2008-02-10T15:09:00.002Z

It's all about momentum, and it looks once again as if 46-year Barack Obama has it.

He scored a series of stunning victories last night over his only rival for the Democratic nomination for President, that Hillary Clinton.

The most significant prize was Washington state, which sends 97 delegates of various sorts to the nomination convention later this year.

Obama not only won that state by a wide margin, as much as two to one, but also took Nebraska, the delegate-rich state of Louisiana and the votes of Democrats in the US colony on the Virgin Islands.

The Clinton campaign are confident they will win today's Maine primary, which is nice for them.

They of all people should know about momentum - after all, in 1992 it propelled Bill into the Oval Office.

The most heatening aspect of the Obama win in Washington is the excitement the candidate generates, especially among groups disenchanted with politics, such as young people.

As he continues to hoover up votes and delegates, the Clinton campaign must be worried.

They have nothing with which to capture the public imagination, beyond sensible trouser suits and the dubious promise of Bill Clinton back in the White House.

To give you just one example of the Obama's appeal, yesterday he addressed a rally of 20,000 supporters in Seattle.

The doors opened at 6am and had to close at 11am and thousands were turned away, all eager to see live the man who has inspired them so much.

The general impression from the caucuses up and down the state is of twice as many people as expected turning up, and all of them supporting Obama's candidacy.

It is called momentum, and Obama has it. Clinton supporters point to the upcoming contests. The so-called Beltway Primary on Tuesday, when DC, Virginia and Maryland choose.

Then Wisconsin the week after that - by that stage, hopefully, the Barack bandwagon will be a juggernaut.

March 4th is the day to watch. Texas and Ohio, both heavily populated and therefore delegate rich, will choose their Democratic candidate.

If Barack Obama can continue to ride the wave of popularity, he can clinch the nomination from under Senator Clinton's nose.

With Mitt Romney out of the race and Mike Huckabee looking increasingly likely to be pitching to do the Lord's work from the Vice President's office, John McCain is almost certain to be the Republican candidate.

A 71-year old WASP, a Washington veteran, a man of intergrity certainly, but will Americans really pick him over the hope of Obama or even the sensibly-dressed female candidate?

It seems that history will be made in 2008, and it will be the Democrats who make it.

There is no place for Islamic “divorce” in the UK

2008-02-07T20:20:00.000Z

A century ago, women across Britain asserted their right to vote. Today the Archbishop of Canterbury is suggesting we accept part of Sharia law in the UK.

Not the bit about killing gay people, but other equally controversial concepts such as allowing Muslim people to have Muslim divorces.

At first glance that might sound sensible, sensitive even. It isn’t. Under Sharia, women are judged differently from men, women are constrained in ways that are unacceptable in our society.

And that is the point – it is our society and its values are fundamentally incompatible with aspects of Muslim attitudes.

What is more worrying is that Muslim commentators have been suggesting some sort of ‘live and let live’ idea, where we Christians get on with life under our rules and let them take responsibility for their personal lives under Sharia.

That is unacceptable. Women – all women – in this country have equal rights with men in this country.

Those rights are set out and protected by Parliament. They are the only body in this country that makes laws, and they apply to everyone.

British Muslims, at least those who speak up for the community on TV and newspapers, seem not to have grasped that fundamental point.

Why the Archbishop of Canterbury is hawking this nonsense, under the nebulous cause of “improving social cohesion,” is entirely unclear.

I can think of nothing that would damage the fabric of British society more than different standards, different laws and different rules for different religions.

Gordon Brown talks a lot about Britishness, and to his credit his response was robust.

"There are instances where government has made changes - for example on stamp duty - but the general position is that Sharia cannot be used as justification for committing breaches of English law nor can its principles be used in civil courts,” his spokesman said today.

“British laws should be based on British values."

Hillary - experience? What experience?

2008-02-06T22:39:00.000Z

Hillary Clinton is keen to tell voters that she has experience - most of it as First Lady.

But it is a matter of fact that in the White House she did little except wifely duties, after being comprehensively shot down when she tried to reform health care.

She did not have access to the most sensitive documents, and so her experience is as great as that of Laura Bush or Bess Truman.

Either she is saying that she had a major impact on Bill Clinton, and therefore Americans will in effect be voting for a second co-Presidency, or she should stand on her own record.

Before the White House she never held public office - so her experience, given that she has denied that her husband will be a prominent voice in her administration, will amount to her inauspicious time in the Senate.

So which one is it?

Barack and Clinton both soar on Super Tuesday

2008-02-06T22:31:00.000Z

With the results from yesterday's primaries and caucuses in nearly half of the United States counted, it appears that the Republicans have chosen their candidate for President while the Democrats are still unable to choose between a woman and a black man.

Senator John McCain, the 71-year-old war hero and former Vietnam prisoner of war, took nine of the 21 states voting in the Republican contests.

The big surprise of the night was former Governor of Arkansas Mike Hucakee.

He won his home state and Tennessee, West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia. His brand of fundamentalist Christianity clearly appealed to Southern Republicans wary of McCain's perceived liberalism, and his campaign has received a significant boost.

Meanwhile Mitt Romney, who has spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money on his bid for the White House, took seven states: Massachusetts, where he was Governor from 2003 to 2007, Alaska, Utah, North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana and Colorado.

Many of the contests in Republican races are winner takes all, which explains why Senator McCain won 511 delegates last night while Governor Huckabee took 147 and Governor Romney 176.

The delegates gather at the party conventions at the end of the summer to formally nominate their candidates for President. The election is held on November 4th.

"While I've never minded the role of the underdog, and have relished as much as anyone come from behind wins, I think we must get used to the idea that we are the Republican party front-runner for the nomination," Senator McCain told supporters.

Just six months ago his campaign was viewed as a minor distraction from the rise of Romney.

However, despite poor results Governor Romney pledged to keep fighting and has no intention of dropping out of the race, while Governor Huckabee can hardly contain his glee at sweeping the South.

In the Democratic races, which took place in 21 states, American Samoa and among expatriate party members, the candidates are apportioned delegates based on how many votes they won.

This makes second place important in the overall race.

The results were close. Senator Hillary Clinton won eight states, including many with large populations and therefore a high number of delegates, among them the biggest of them all, California. It is thought that Hispanic support was vital to her victory there - 70% of them voted for her.

She also won in her home state of New York, New Jersey and Arkansas, where she was First Lady for 12 years.

Her rival for the Democratic nomination, 46-year-old Barack Obama, won his home state of Illinois and 12 others, among them some mid-Western states such as Kansas, Missouri and Minnesota.

These states, while they may not carry with them a large number of delegates, indicate that Mr Obama continues to appeal to white voters.

Despite taking 13 states to Senator Clinton's eight, she won more delegates, because of the populations of the state where she took the lead.

AP reports that Senator Obama won 562 delegates to Senator Clinton's 582. Overall she has 845 delegates to her opponent's 765. The winner requires at least 2,025.

42% of the total delegates to the Democratic convention were apportioned yesterday.

Senator Obama's momentum seems hard to stop.

"There is one thing on this February night that we do not need the final results to know," he told supporters last night.

"Our time has come. Our time has come, our movement is real and change is coming to America."

Meanwhile Senator Clinton, at all times emphasising her experience as a White House spouse and member of the Senate, said:

"Tonight in record numbers you voted not just to make history, but to remake America.

"I look forward to continuing our campaign and our debate, about how to leave this country better off for the next generation, because that is the work of my life."

All eyes are now on phase four of the Democratic race. On Saturday Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington state and the US Virgin Islands will hold their primaries and caucuses, followed by Maine the next day.

Next Tuesday is the so-called Beltway primary, when the states surrounding Washington DC, such as Maryland and Virginia, and DC itself, go to the polls.

In March, April, May and June Washington DC, a further 14 states and two territories will choose until on June 3rd Montana and South Dakota will hold their primaries. The key races will be in the populous states of Ohio and Texas.

While many commentators expect the race to have a winner atfer those two key primaries, the closeness of the candidates makes it possible it could be up to Democrats in Montana and South Dakota who runs for President.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-6769.html

Super duper Tuesday!

2008-02-05T22:44:00.000Z

So here we are - American Democrats and Republicans are going to the polls - its pretty clear that John McCain is going to wrap up the Republican nomination.

Great news. As I have said before, I just do not think America will vote for a 71-year-old.

So tonight will be most interesting to see if a woman or a black man will take the lead in the Democratic race.

Barack Obama has a knack of getting out the vote, particularly young people. In a few hours will will find out how many of the 20-odd states will back him.

His team are playing down any chance of a stunning victory, but the BBC reports that privately his inner circle are happy with his surge in numbers.

"The more the voters see of him, the more they like him," said one reporter. They have seen plenty of Hillary Clinton.

Exciting stuff.

Are the papers being homophobic?

2008-02-03T14:32:00.000Z

Derek Conway certainly thinks so. The disgraced MP has hit out at press coverage of his son Henry, one of the family members Conway paid a generous salary to for doing what would appear to be no work.

As soon as the story broke jounalists showed an unhealthy interest in Henry. He promotes a club night at a venue the Royal Princes like to go to. That's gold dust to the Daily Mail.

He is gay, out and by all accounts camp. The Sun loved that.

He has a Facebook profile - perfect "research" for the lazy journalists, who stole pictures and wrote shit 'profiles' of Henry with the crappy scraps of information they found online.

Even The Times and The Independent found time to comment on Henry's sexuality.

Is that homophobia? Well, it is hard to tell.

If the Conway child had been a female socialite, with a reputation as one of the best connected young people in London, who ran club nights in trendy venues, it is likely that would have got just as much coverage.

"MP pays socialite daughter" is perfectly plausible, especially if this fictitious creature was attractive.

However, there is something nasty about the newspapers' reporting on Henry. The smell of old -style homophobia that the British press used to be notorious for.

Even if Henry worked as a vicar in an inner London parish and gave all the money to the poor, the tabs and even the "respectable" papers would have mentioned his homosexuality.

Today his father hit out.

"One newspaper even tried to suggest that he'd had a sex-change on the NHS," he said.

"It is complete rubbish. These homophobic clowns think every gay wants to be a woman.

"Why should he be pilloried for being gay? He's my son."

Now while that is particularly low, and probably homophobic, it strikes me as no less serious than the shit everyone else unlucky enough to be ripped apart by the tabloids has to endure.

The way Henry has been treated is probably homophobic.

The way lots of other people are treated in ways that do not have a handy label, but are just as despicable. The conclusion we should draw is not that the British tabloids are homophobic.

They are complete bastards to everyone.

And as for Mr Conway, this quote caught my eye and stuck in my throat:

"He (Henry) goes out as normal people go to bed. It is portrayed as a gay lad bouncing round London; drink, drugs, whatever.

"It is hard to watch when you know he has committed no crime. "

No, you are the one who has committed the crime and caused your whole family to be thrust into the limelight.

The aspect of this whole sorry incident that most upsets me is the arrogance of Conway.

After more than 20 years in Parliament, he obviously has no respect for it or for his party or constituents.

He actually conceived this scheme and thought he would get away with it. No-one would know or care.

The other thing he may have done is stop MPs employing their wives - this is a grave mistake, as well as an insult to the many women who do an outstanding and dedicated job for not very much reward.

Will Conway have to resign before the next election?

My gut instinct is no - the worst of the storm is over, he has promised not to seek re-election and the last thing the Tories want now is a by-election just before the London Mayoral elections.

The expert speaks

2008-02-03T14:28:00.000Z

A good start to 2008's shortest month - a nice quote from me in The Observer:

Figures from the Office for National Statistics confirm the downward trend. They show that while 16,100 couples formed a civil partnership in the UK in 2006, at an average of 4,000 every three months, just 4,060 did so in the first half of last year. 'One reason for the decline may be that some gay people aren't interested in formalising their relationship,' said Tony Grew, editor of the pinknews.co.uk website. 'Some don't want to have all the formality of a civil partnership because they think it's the death knell of a relationship.'

Some highly political gays, such as activist Peter Tatchell, see civil partnerships as part of a process of 'assimilation' or integration into wider society that they reject in favour of a proudly 'queer' lifestyle. Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the gay rights lobby group Stonewall, said: 'There was a big pent-up demand from couples in long-term relationships to form a civil partnership, which is why so many did it early on after the law changed in late 2005, so a tailing-off would be logical.'

Summerskill pointed out that when civil partnerships were introduced the government predicted that about 11,000 to 22,000 would take place by 2010. 'But we have already far exceeded that number,' he added. There were 1,950 in December 2005, then 16,100 during 2006, and more than 4,000 in the first half of last year, according to the Office of National Statistics.

Grew said that the low rate so far of gay divorce - known as 'dissolution' of a civil partnership - and the long time spent together by many couples who form one, 'shows that gay people are treating them with due solemnity and respect. Generally, they take them more seriously than many people who get married. The people who go for it are older, have been together longer and have more committed relationships. That's why we won't see the 40 per cent or 50 per cent divorce rates we see in heterosexual marriages,' he said.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2251581,00.html

Bush shows love to gay Congressman

2008-01-30T22:23:00.000Z

I wrote this story today. It made me smile.

It was a moment of affection between two politicians, and in normal circumstances it would pass unnoticed.

But when one is the only out gay man in Congress and the other a President who has revelled in his hostility to gay marriage, their closeness raises eyebrows.

After his final State of the Union address to both Houses of Congress on Monday, President George W Bush greeted Congressman Barney Frank with a shoulder and head touch, as the two shared a personal moment.

Fox News commentator Brit Hume felt moved to point it out, without saying the word 'gay':

"Hold on a second, what we just saw there was an interesting moment, a moment of friendship and almost affection between the President and none other than Barney Frank.

"Who I think it's fair to say is one of the most liberal Members of Congress, also one of the smartest guys up there, but, uh..."

His co-host Nina Easton was quick to point out that Congressman Frank has co-operated closely with the White House as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

It later emerged that Frank had encountered the President before his speech.

On the phone to his boyfriend while waiting the Speaker's Lobby, Frank was approached by the President, who leaned in and said "tell him I said hello."

The affectionate exchange captured by the cameras after the President's speech was in fact the Congressman saying:

"Mr. President, by the way, the person I was talking to when you said to say hello was my boyfriend."

"Well. I hope you said how open-minded I am," was Bush's response.

"I considered telling [the President] I wouldn't marry him," Frank told the Boston Globe, "but then I thought, 'Nah.'"

President Bush has tried to introduce an amendment to the US Constitution banning same-sex marriage, while Mr Frank's home state of Massachusetts is the only one in the US to have legalised it.

Congressman Frank has represented the 4th District of Massachusetts since 1981, and is one of two out gay people in the House of Representatives.

Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Congresswoman, is the only lesbian in the House.

An outsider in Congress Frank, a Harvard-educated lawyer, has a sharp tongue and is consistently voted one of the funniest members of the House.

He came out in 1987, and his political opponents have tried to smear and unseat him on many occasions.

Many opponents thought he was politically dead after a rent boy scandal in 1990.

Attempts to expel him failed - the House voted 408-18 to reprimand him instead.

The people of his district stuck with him through the scandal - he won re-election in 1990 with 66 percent of the vote. In 2006 he ran unopposed.

In 1998, he founded the National Stonewall Democrats, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Democratic pressure group.

He has been a vocal and articulate defender of LGBT rights. Speaking out against the Federal Marriage Act, which would have amended the US Constitution to ban gay marriage, he said:

"We're told "don't take things personally", but I take this personally. I take it personally when people decide to take political batting practice with my life."

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-6713.html

Things move fast as Conway (sort of) resigns

2008-01-30T20:28:00.000Z

Well , it has been a turbulent few days for Tory MP Derek Conway.

There he are, revelling in his anonymity, a figure of intense apathy among his constituents, and then a scandal rolls into view.

First he was censured for paying his younger son tens of thousands of pounds in public money for "work" for which there is no evidence.

Then he had to make a grovelly speech in the Commons apologising for effectively defrauding the tax payer.

That should have put an end to it all, except revelations come to light that he may have also had a previous similar arrangement with your elder son. And his wife also works for him.

Suddenly Tory leader David Cameron is withdrawing the whip, while opponents talk of police investigations.

Today Derek Conway effectively ended his career, annoucing that he would be stepping down at the next election.

Dozens of MPs who employ family members are jittery. Most of the A List of Tory candidates will be descending upon Old Bexley and Sidcup looking to take over this plum safe seat.

Poor old Derek. Only a week ago he must have been pretty confident of his career. Now it's over

As one wit put it, perhaps he is leaving to spend more time with his staff.

Here is how he explained his decision:

I have had tremendous support from my local party, my family and friendsbut have concluded that it is time to step down.

I stand by what I havesaid in relation to the report by the Commissioner of Standards and do not wish to add to those comments at this time.

Since joining the Conservative Party nearly 40 years ago I have had the privilege of serving in public office since 1974 and have done so to the best of my ability.

I have advised the Chief Whip and the chairman of my local Conservative Association that I shall not seek to continue as the Conservative Party Candidate for Old Bexley and Sidcup at the next election.

Though not an original supporter of David Cameron for the leadership of my party, I believe that he has shown he has both the ability and the character to be Prime Ministerof our country and I do not wish my personal circumstances to be a distraction in any way from the real issues that have to be addressed.

John Edwards will be missed

2008-01-30T20:07:00.000Z

A significant day in the US Presidential nomination circus, as John Edwards withdraws from the Democrat race and Rudy Giuliani looking almost certain to pull out of the Republican one.

This leaves four contenders left - talk of Ralph Nader running again on an independent anti-corporatist ticket has excited no-one.

It is sad to see two candidates I could have felt quite comfortable seeing sworn in as President leave the field.

Giuliani has always been a friend to gay people, and as he took hits for it in Republican circles I respected him for not trying to tack Right.

He was an outstanding Mayor of New York, before, during and after September 11th, and his support for limited abortion marked him out as a man of principle.

I am more saddened by the news that John Edwards has given up on his White House dream so early in the race.

Initially I was unimpressed with him, taking him for a Tom Cruise clone with a strange voice. However, the more I saw him in action the more I came to form the highest opinion of his stance on poverty.

It is immoral and disgusting that millions of Americans, many of them children, live in poverty. I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were sincere when they said they would continue his work in office.

I think he would make an excellent Vice Presidential candidate, especially for Obama, and I also hope he comes out in favour of the Illinois Senator.

During the televised debate on Martin Luther King day earlier this month, Edwards certainly appeared to have more in common with Obama than Clinton and they made an effective team against her.

As for whether or not it helps Hillary or Barack on Super Tuesday next week, I don't really know enough to comment, except to say I hope that the progressives who were all for Edwards will recognise that Barack Obama is the candidate of change.

As for the Republicans, it seems increasingly likely that they will choose John McCain as their candidate. "Mad" Mitt Romney is disturbingly popular, but only with Republicans, and not even with all of them, on account of the Mormon thing.

McCain is a good candidate - for the 1988 election. At 71, he is by far the oldest candidate and was already 35, the age required to run for President, when the boy Barack was born.

He is a war hero, a fiscal conservative and a former prisoner of war. I have the highest respect for him - he is exactly the sort of figure that should be in the Senate.

I suspect that is where he will remain.

Conway scandal delights Labour

2008-01-29T19:51:00.001Z

Every Labour member I spoke today could barely contain their glee at revelations that Tory MP Derek Conway had paid his son close to £45,000 as a “researcher,” despite there being no evidence the boy had done any work.

Indeed, considering he was studying full time in Newcastle, some distance from both Parliament and his father’s outer London constituency, it is hard to imagine what substantive contribution he could have made.

To be sure, the scandal has taken the spotlight off Labour – in the last news cycle Gordon Brown was having to stand up for Alan Johnson in the face of another scandal about deputy leadership campaign donations.

The PM must have wished there had never been a deputy election.

The Conway scandal is much more serious than the Hain incident, and it is telling that it took David Cameron a day to decide to remove the whip from Conway.

A spokesman for the Tory leader was saying yesterday: "Derek Conway has apologised fully on the floor of the House.

"The whip will not be withdrawn. The proper punishment has been administered."

Today, the Leader of the Opposition said that he has reconsidered and apparently realised that the offence was so great (the offence being moving the spotlight away from Labour sleaze) that Conway would receive the ultimate punishment.

Wasn’t it David Cameron who solemnly declared just the other day that the PM had dithered in not removing Hain from office before the Electoral Commission referred his campaign donations to the police?

Now it appears poor Conway also had a similar arrangement with his elder son, Henry.

I am sure you have seen a picture of Henry. A very flamboyant-looking young man in my view.

Look, there he is with former Eastenders starlet and Cockney sparrow Martine McCutcheon.

He has variously been described as a fashion writer, a club promoter, a “socialite” and, in the inimitable words of the Daily Mail, “he is a regular at gay clubs frequented by Elton John and David Furnish, and once described himself as "blond, bouncy and one for the boys."”

Fabulous!

In any case, it appears that Mr Conway’s generosity will spell the end of a Parliamentary career that began in 1983.

We will have to wait and see if Peter Hain can clear his name – it is unlikely he will be asked to rejoin the Cabinet.

So far Harriet Harman, Peter Hain and Alan Johnson have been accused of improperly declaring donations to their campaigns for deputy leader.

Labour MPs must be hoping that Hilary Benn, Hazel Blears and Jon Cruddas were more diligent.

Caroline Kennedy comes out for Obama

2008-01-27T15:45:00.000Z

Here is the opinion piece Caroline, the only living child of former US President John F Kennedy, wrote for today's New York Times:

A President Like My Father.

OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.

We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama. It isn’t that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960.

Most of us would prefer to base our voting decision on policy differences. However, the candidates’ goals are similar. They have all laid out detailed plans on everything from strengthening our middle class to investing in early childhood education. So qualities of leadership, character and judgment play a larger role than usual.

Senator Obama has demonstrated these qualities throughout his more than two decades of public service, not just in the United States Senate but in Illinois, where he helped turn around struggling communities, taught constitutional law and was an elected state official for eight years.

And Senator Obama is showing the same qualities today. He has built a movement that is changing the face of politics in this country, and he has demonstrated a special gift for inspiring young people — known for a willingness to volunteer, but an aversion to politics — to become engaged in the political process.

I have spent the past five years working in the New York City public schools and have three teenage children of my own. There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged.

As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.

Senator Obama is running a dignified and honest campaign. He has spoken eloquently about the role of faith in his life, and opened a window into his character in two compelling books. And when it comes to judgment, Barack Obama made the right call on the most important issue of our time by opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning.

I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

Obama has to be the next President

2008-01-27T15:32:00.000Z

We always knew the race to the White House in 2008 would be exciting. With no incumbent President or Vice President in contention, the field in both parties is wide open.

I have always been a huge fan of Barack Obama, and I was heartened to read the opinion piece written by President Kennedy's only daughter Caroline in the New York Times today. It seems she agrees with me that he is a once-in-a-generation figure, a man who can bring hope and effect profound change in America and by extension the world.

Of course, my good mood is also because yesterday in South Carolina the wheels came off the Clinton bandwagon. For all the carping about blacks voting for Obama, his 2 to 1 victory over Hillary was a victory for the sort of campaign that the young African-American has chosen to run.

For the past week, Bill Clinton, like the 90s relic he is, has been indulging in attack dog-campaigning. He implied that Obama was untrustworthy.

He bitched about his lack of Washington experience, ironic coming from a man who arrived at the White House with half of the cast of the Beverly Hillbillies, and whose political knowledge extended no further than the backwater state he had been born in.

He compared him to Jesse Jackson in the 1984 and 88 primaries (subtext: he can win all the black votes he wants, only Hillary can take whites).

Bill squandered vast amounts of his political capital in his nasty campaigning - and it failed. It turned the voters off, and many in his own party are furious with him for adopting campaign tactics more associated with the Bush White House.

Meanwhile the most Presidential looking person in the race continues to be Obama. I suspect that many voters know he is up against Bill and Hillary in this election, and I think it can only work to his advantage.

People like the underdog and Americans, for all your negative opinions about them, do believe in their future, do think their country can be better, and do like to give hope a chance.

After all, the people who should know that most are the Clintons.

As we move towards Super Tuesday, it is Bill and Hillary who increasing look like the establishment couple, and Barack and Michelle who most resemble America in the 21st century.

Gordon shuffles his cards

2008-01-26T00:20:00.000Z

Peter Hain's resignation in the wake of the Electoral Commission's decision to ask the police to look into donations to his deputy leadership campaign is overdue.

The revelations ruined the government's attempt to gain the upper hand in the New Year, made the whole party seem sleazy and thrust the loans/donations rows back into the public eye.

The PM talking about 'incompetence' really did not help matters.

With his departure comes lots of news stories about the new generation of Labour leaders - Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and James Purnell all favoured with high-profile roles.

But when you look across at the shadow Cabinet, it still makes a lot of Brown's team look like old hands.

Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Theresa Villiers and Nick Herbert all became MPs at the last election.

As did the new Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg.

The challenge of the next year for Labour will be to demonstrate to the electorate that they are dynamic and capable of profound change.

It is not even an issue of age as such - after all Ruth Kelly is not yet 40, but it feels like she has been at the heart of the government for many years.

Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander and Ed and David Miliband are all young, but not in any way new. That being said, there does not seem to be a serious rival to Gordon Brown among any of them.

For a decade the Labour party and the public knew that Tony Blair would be succeeded by Gordon Brown. But who will be the next leader?

For the rising stars, the next twelve months will be critical in establishing themselves not so much as the heirs to new Labour but as someone who can take on David Cameron and win.

The cabal around Ken

2008-01-25T00:10:00.000Z

Although I think he has done his fair share of bad things, I am a bit of a fan of Ken Livingstone.

Why?

Because he is a proper Londoner. He likes a drink of whisky when he is answering Assembly questions? Good lad.

He accurately reflects the cheeky, lairy and cocky instincts of many of us in this city.

Channel 4 did their best with their expose documentary about Ken to dig some serious dirt, but I have to say that if all they could find after eight years in office was a bit of boozing, a streak of arrogance and some dodgy loans to dodgy community projects, then Ken must be cleaner than I thought.

The most hilarious part of the "expose" however, was the revelation that Ken had surrounded himself with a cabal of former Socialist Alliance comrades and - get this - employed them AND paid them salaries.

As I lay in bed this morning listening to Ken on the Today programme, I was amused by the thought that, in adopting the same alarmist tone that Martin Bright did in his Channel 4 hack job, you could make anyone sound sinister.

"A member of a tiny elite who think they are born to rule, he siezed control of the Conservatives when they were at their lowest ebb.

"Vandalising this once-great party, he moved quickly to surround himself with like-minded cronies.

"Committed to fanatical market solutions, he has learned, at least in public, to temper his hard Thatcherite views.

"However, with his gang, their committment to capitalism and the overthrow of the Blair/Brown consensus remains undimmed.

"There is Boris, a fellow member of the secretive Bullingdon Club, on over 60k a year in a sinecure job for life as MP for Henley.

"Two-brains Gove, feared for his ability to rip opponents apart.

"The intimdating figure of Nick Boles, a man who manipulates policy to suit the new, rightwing agenda.

"All of these men were close to Cameron as he plotted his rise to power, most of them given highly-paid jobs at Westminster, the better to advance their leader's cynical agenda."

Easy.

Why we should pay MPs £100,000 a year

2008-01-23T19:38:00.000Z

Tomorrow MPs will get to vote on their own pay rise. Nice work if you can get it.

They are likely to ignore the advice of Downing St for prudence and a 1.9% rise and vote themselves the 2.8% recommended by the Senior Salaries Review Body.

At present MPs get paid £60,675.

I think they deserve more. In fact, I would suggest that they get a much bigger rise than that – perhaps bringing them into line with GPs, who are routinely earning £100,000.

However, there are two caveats attached to this pay rise. For a start, at least half of them need to go.

There are an astonishing 646 MPs at the moment.

All political parties are full of useless, faceless nobodies cluttering up the benches. We need bigger constituencies and less MPs.

By all means increase their office expenses, as long as they prove they are employing researchers for their researching skills.

You do see a lot of suspiciously hot young boys and girls floating around the corridors, in addition to which the vast bulk of researchers have solid party connections, as opposed to solid casework skills. Let’s not even begin to discuss the levels of nepotism attached to many jobs in Parliament.
The second caveat is that no MP should be allowed to accept money from any outside institution. Back in the day being an MP was kind of like voluntary work.

Gentlemen would attend to their profession (if they had something as common as a profession) in the mornings and then spend their afternoons and evenings at the House ruling over the British Empire.

In fact, the very first regular salary for MPs was instituted in 1911 to benefit the newly-elected Labour members who were in actual need of an income – until then all members had to be financially secure enough not to require payment.

The situation these days has completely changed – why on earth is it deemed acceptable that MPs can have paid interests outside Parliament and those of the people who elect them?

Why should former Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, while still the sitting MP for Leicester West, be taking money from Boots and private equity company Cinven to “advise” them?

Why should Tim Yeo be a paid director of Univent plc, ITI Energy, Eco City Vehicles plc, AFC Energy and Groupe Eurotunnel SA, as well as MP for South Suffolk?

Why should it be OK for Doug Henderson to be on the board of McDonalds as well as claiming to represent the best interests of his constituents?

The Register of Members’ Interests is one of the most depressing documents anyone with any belief in real democracy can read.

MPs should have one job – representing their constituents. If an increased salary and increased expenses are not enough for them, then they should leave politics and find something more lucrative to do.

Even those who are very politically aware would struggle to name more than 100 MPs. In other words less than one sixth of them are making any sort of impact.

For every John Bercow or Gywneth Dunwoody there are a dozen non-entities, lobby fodder for their parties who have contributed nothing to our political process.

People who have trouble getting recognised in their own front room. I think we deserve a leaner, more efficient House of Commons with better pay and conditions for the 50% of MPs who would remain under my excellent plan.

Thatcher wheeled out to vote against gays

2008-01-22T22:12:00.000Z

You can always tell that the forces of conservatism are on full tilt then they wheel out their beloved icon and former Prime Minister to vote in the Lords.

Yesterday, in a doomed attempt to block perfectly sensible proposals to allow same-sex couples to be recognised as the legal parents of children conceived through the use of donated sperm, eggs or embryos, Baroness Thatcher was seen wandering through the lobbies accompained by arch-acolytes such as Lord St John of Fawning and the skinhead Tebbit.

The proposal means that a lesbian lady who gives birth and her civil partner will both be recognised as the parents of a child conceived through assisted reproduction.

Two men will also be able to apply for a parental order to become parents of a child conceived through a surrogacy arrangement.

This modest change in the law is like a red rag to the homophobic bulls of our public life.

I suspect the hand of shady organisation the Christian Institute in the mobilisation of La Thatcher (she’s 82 and by all accounts her once powerful intellect is tragically denuded.)

What was heartening about last night’s Lords vote on the Embryology Bill was the kicking the "need for a father" brigade got – their amendment was defeated by 60-odd votes, which in Lords terms is a disaster.

The family values campaigners, who of course are attempting to weaken the tens of thousands of non-Waltons families that already exist in our country, pulled out all the stops and fell flat on their face.

It certainly seems to have put their nose out of joint – only a few hours ago, in a debate on the proposed new offence of incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation, one of the more … errr … colourful members of the House had a big rant about gays having too much influence on the government. Read all about it here.

It must be a dark time to be a member of a sect such as Christian Institute – like a sort of a reverse Midas touch. Everything they touch turns to turd.

Still, at least Jeebus is on their side. Or something.

It's a shambles, Darling

2008-01-21T19:07:00.000Z

Time was that economic competence was the mark of this Labour government.

But today, with shares hitting lows not seen since 9/11, record defecits in December and most of all the continuing balls-up that is Northern Rock, it seems that Brown is no longer the master he once was.

The shameful spectacle of 25 billion pounds being pumped into a dodgy bank has not been helped by the Chancellor and Treasury's seeming lack of an exit strategy.

His latest suggestion is to convert the money into bonds and sell them to investors.

It is pretty clear that they should have let the bank die, and tough on those who had left their savings with the bank, or nationalised the thing in the first place.

While it would have been hard on those people who had deposited money with Northern Rock, the fact is that putting your money in the bank is not 100% guaranteed.

Similarly, pumping tens of billions of pounds into the coffers of a private financial institution was madness and there is no clear route out for the government.

It seems that Alastair Darling's promotion to Chancellor was a poisoned chalice. Meanwhile the Tories and Lib Dems are crowing from the sidelines.

The increasinlgy impressive George Osborne pointed out in the Commons today that not since the nightmares of the 1970s has so much public money been funnelled into a British company, and never on this scale.

Even in the best-case scenario in which Northern Rock's debt is all paid back, albeit over at least five years, the Labour government's reputation for economic competence is ruined forever.

politicsjunkie returns!

2008-01-20T21:49:00.000Z

After a year away from blogging, I have decided I can’t live without it.

While editing PinkNews.co.uk, Europe’s largest gay news service, continues to be an exciting way to pass the working day, I find I do not get enough time to comment – and as you know I do love to comment.

In honour of the re-commencement of my blog, I have reproduced some of the best of the interviews and comment pieces I have written for PinkNews.co.uk in the past twelve months.

2007 was a great year for me – the first time I got to interview Cabinet ministers, my first visit to 10 Downing St, my first (and so far only) experience of seeing Tony Blair speak in the flesh.

I was particularly lucky to be able to interview both candidates for Lib Dem leader, all six of the contenders for Deputy Leader of the Labour party and receive a nomination for the Stonewall Journalist of the Year award.

Some person from The Independent won it.

A personal highlight was the party conference season – my first as a political journalist.

I guess I was not prepared for how much fun they are, and how much alcohol is consumed.

I can’t wait for 2008.

Yet there is so much to think about before then.

A London mayoral election that is already too close to call.

A Presidential election in America that could bring real change or more of the same.

A critical year for the Prime Minister.

Can he turn around his image and his party, pick up some council seats in the May elections and push forward into 2009 ready to win an historic fourth Labour term?

And what of Nick Clegg? Always a favourite of mine from the day he gave me one of my first high-profile interviews, he is yet to make a significant dent in the public consciousness.

Will the new confident Tory party squeeze the Lib Dems firmly onto the sidelines? Or will Cameron also falter, his new sheen dulled by the daily rough and tumble of Parliamentary politics?

And when IS Michael Martin going to stand down as Speaker?

Who knows – one thing is for certain though – with a new occupant of the White House to be chosen, and in the most wide-open race in decades, 2008 is going to be a political year to remember.

December 07 - Interview with Nick Herbert, Shadow Justice Secretary

2008-01-20T20:15:00.000Z

The 2005 intake of MPs contained the usual mix of the good, the bad and the barmy. There were dozens of new Conservative MPs, a brace of freshman Lib Dems and hardly any new Labour faces at all.

The new Tory boys and girls were instrumental in propelling David Cameron into power, and he has rewarded the best and the brightest with seats in his Shadow Cabinet.

Nicholas Le Quesne Herbert is one of two Nicks who first sat on the green benches two years ago to keep an eye on in the years ahead.

Great expectations follow them around the corridors of Westminster.

While Nick Clegg is the clear favourite to become leader of the Liberal Democrat party later this month, Nick Herbert is making a name for himself as one of the new stars of the Conservative frontbench.

As Shadow Justice Secretary, he speaks for his party on diverse topics such homophobic incitement, prisons, constitutional reform and the funding of political parties.

The first openly gay man to be elected as a Conservative MP, he is destined for a frontline role in any future Cameron administration.

When we met in his Commons office the government was under siege over dodgy donations, and the new Tories were getting their first taste of just how badly the next few years could go for Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Nick was, unsurprisingly, in a good mood as we talked gay rights, the future for party funding and how it feels to be a minority MP.

Let's start with the government's woes. What is your take on the donations scandal?

It appears that Labour has systematically attempted to undo or evade its own party funding laws. This will dismay the public.

What is doubly serious is not only that the law has been broken, as the Prime Minister said, but there has been a systematic attempt to evade the law by the party that was parading its high moral credentials in introducing this legislation, beating up all the other parties at the time for their approach to this matter, and yet has sought to evade its own legislation not once but twice.

Labour's chief fundraiser, Jon Mendelsohn, who was appointed by the Prime Minister in June, learned about Mr Abrahams' proxy donations last month, but was unaware that they were illegal. Is that credible?

It is completely incredible that those people who are officials involved in this fundraising effort do not understand the law.These are now matters for criminal investigation but in my view these are very serious indeed.

What do the Tories propose by way of reforming party funding?

We have called for a cap on all donations from whatever source, of £50,000, and unfortunately that is not possible. Labour is refusing to agree to that because they will not cap union donations.They should rethink that policy urgently.

It is clear that we need to build public confidence in the way in which parties are funded.The union bosses have control over these funds and we just think there should be one rule that applies to everyone.

But what about your own party. Are you entirely confident your own house is in order?

We are absolutely sure our own house is in order, that has been made clear. We know who all our major donors are.

We go through all the proper compliance procedures, but we have said let's have a cap on donations so that no party has to be reliant on major donations.

And what about public funding for political parties?

We are much more interested in reducing the cost of politics and that is what David Cameron has made clear.

Speaking of David Cameron, you must be very upset that his trip to Washington DC was overshadowed by this awful government scandal?

Well, all Shadow spokesmen over the last two or three weeks been making major speeches, I made a major speech on prisons, which are all receiving far less attention than they might otherwise have done.

I proposed to sell off our Victorian prisons. That was a fairly radical thing to suggest, but the government has found itself in such difficulties. That's politics.

Let's turn to incitement to homophobic hatred. At party conference in October you said that you'd wait to decide on whether to support it until you saw the amendment.

The government's now brought the amendment forward. Tell us what you feel about the government's proposals needs finessing or changing?

Well firstly just to make it clear, in committee the government's amendment went through without a vote, and the official opposition broadly supported the approach.

We think that hate crime has no place in a civilised society and inciting violent hatred against gay people plainly is totally unacceptable. The question is where criminal law should be drawn.

You and I would agree that when people say things which are abusive or insulting about gay people that that can be hurtful and wrong and in our eyes unacceptable but that's not to say that it should always be a matter for the criminal law.

I think that where there seems to be a consensus is that we must just make sure the law is drawn in the right place so that it's outlawing those acts which incite violence but is allowing free speech.

It's what Stonewall describes as "temperate comments" and that's what I think we are all trying to achieve, I don't think there's any disagreement about that between the major parties. We tabled our own amendment which had a very similar effect to the government and the minister said that she welcomed much of the amendment.

This matter will come back to the floor of the Commons I suspect, and I think that there will be Members of Parliament who are simply seeking reassurance that free speech is not going to be outlawed.

That people who have very strong religious conviction are going to be able to express disapproval of gay people. You know, I wish they wouldn't, of course. I think they're wrong but I think they must be allowed to hold those views and express them in a temperate way, provided, that is totally different, to someone seeking to incite hatred that is going to lead to violence against a community by spreading really vile literature and so on.

You seem to be saying that the lessons from the Race and Religious Hatred Bill have been learned.

I think the government has learned them and that's why they've modelled the provision more on the religious hatred side but we will just need to make clear, now it could be through guidance. It may be that the government's amendments doesn't require any further amendment.

We don't want to see the protection that the government is offering significantly weakened.

What we want to see, ensure is that free speech can be protected. It may be that that can be done in the form of guidance and so on. So I think it will need further debate, but I think also there is good will on all sides to try and get this measure onto the statute book.

Those two groups normally referred to as Christians and comedians will still be able to express their views, mock, insult or abuse?

Yes, as you know insulting or abusive words are out of the protection and that I think is a major difference between the racial and religious hatred legislation.

It should give the protection which the church seeks and comedians and so on seek. Now that means that they are going to be able to say things that makes us very uncomfortable, but we must engage with them and recognise that actually what we are trying to protect here is a decent civilised society and one of the qualities of a decent civilised society is that it protects free speech, except where that free speech really has to be criminalised.

It seems to me there has been an almost a wilful misunderstanding of legislation as it affects gay people. There seems to be a similar kind of misunderstanding of IVF provisions. Where do you think that misunderstanding about 'gay' legislation comes from and does it amuse or frustrate you when you read reports that are so wildly inaccurate?

It doesn't often amuse me. Sometimes its because proposals are made without the detail yet being available and I think that was the case in relation to the government's proposal on incitement to homophobic hatred.

I think people thought that it was going to be a wide-ranging offence that would prevent them from saying things that were perhaps comment on the basis of their Christian belief or some kind of joke.

As people see how the legislation is drafted they will become rather more reassured.

How do you feel about being a minority MP?

Am I a minority MP?

Well you are, aren't you? You're a gay MP and that makes you a minority MP in the same way that if you were black you would be a minority MP, or a Muslim, you'd be a minority MP. So clearly you don't think of yourself as a minority MP?

No I don't. I think of myself as an MP as a constituency Member of Parliament doing my best to represent my constituents in West Sussex.

I don't like labels that put people into a box and I think I've always taken the view that I wanted to be selected on my merits. I wanted to be elected on my merits and I think I was.

I want to be able to say things without people putting a label on and I think that's what a lot of gay people want. They just want to be treated as equal people in a society in which we live. They don't necessarily want to say, I'm different. Please treat me as different.

Rather the reverse, they want to say, I'm the same. Please treat me as the same. But having said that, the one thing that I have come to realise since I was elected as an out gay MP is that it's very important to other gay people.

Much more important than I realised. And I've come to realise that through the emails and letters that I get from individuals, including young people, including people going through school, including people who are actually trying coming to terms with coming out at a much older age.

Not just people who are Conservatives but often people who are, not surprisingly, in my own political party, they write and they say thank you for being out and open, because you've given me great hope that I might one day be able to be a Conservative councillor or a Conservative MP, or just be whatever I want to be in my community, without people thinking that there's anything wrong with that.

I've really come to understand that.I think initially I was trying to say, "yea look right I'm gay, next question," but actually it does matter, it matters to other people because we still live in a society where people feel inhibited about being open about their sexuality.

I've realised Alan Duncan (the other out gay Shadow Cabinet member) and I do have an important role in the Conservative party in making people say "look the Conservative party has changed, it doesn't matter if you're gay or straight, what matters is that you're Conservative."

You've had a pretty rapid rise to power.

Well I haven't got power yet.

Well, you know, influence. You're in the Shadow Cabinet and you've only been in Parliament for two years and a couple of months. What do you ascribe that to?

(Laughs) You'll have to ask others. I think I've been incredibly fortunate, you know I was selected at the last moment for a constituency in a fantastic part of the world.

I live in Arundel which is just a great town for anyone who's visited it. I feel incredibly privileged to be an MP, but I feel really privileged to be representing Arundel and the South Downs, it's a great part of the world and I'm very lucky and I also feel lucky because I've kind of come in to this just at the time when the political sands are shifting.

We have a new leader who has transformed the position of the Conservative party.

You mentioned your constituency, I was having a look at your schedule which you've very kindly put on your website. It seems that you're going to two Christmas parties in the next few days. How many Christmas parties does a conscientious constituency MP have to go to?

I don't know. But I think I'm doing about 20. By the time I get to Christmas, I'm never going to want to look roast turkey in the face again that happened last year.

The truth is if you're like me and really enjoy Christmas, I actually think that it's good fun, I have the opportunity to do it 20 times over.

They've started already, they started in November. I have a very busy life in the constituency, going to community events, going to my local party events.

There's a very strong sense of community in the villages I represent and it's a very big constituency so there are lots of villages in it so there are always things going on.

Apart from the great, huge enjoyment of being an MP is that you do four days a week up in Westminster, that's kind of intense and everything, but then you are down in the constituency doing the community work and it's actually that side of things that I really look forward to.

Talking of the constituency, well I get asked a lot if you've got a boyfriend, but I understand you do have a partner called Jason?

Yeah.

You've broken a lot of hearts there Nick.

That's very kind of you!

Does he have to do the role of the constituency wife?

Well I think a lot of the younger MPs of whichever party, whether they're gay or straight, it's very likely that their partners will be working, will have their own careers.Jason certainly is, he's a solicitor so he has his own career.

He often jokes about making vol-au-vents and so on, but the truth is since he can't cook to save his life, so it's plainly not true.

Jason was welcomed by the local party from the minute that I was selected and he supports an enormous number of the local activities, comes along to them and he's just treated as anybody else is treated.I think it's one of the marks actually of the way in which the Conservative party really has changed.

We haven't had an iota of criticism or rejection, rather than the reverse. He'll be coming along to one of the lunches that I'm going to tomorrow and they've specifically asked him to.

Do you think that model of the constituency wife is a little bit outdated?

What I think is outdated is the idea that you might have a partner and you are the principal person and your partner is the secondary person.

That's completely an outdated model. I think that being an MP is a job where I would find it very difficult to do without the kind of support that I get from him and I think a lot of MPs would say that about their wives, their husbands and their partners.

How long have you two been together?

Eight years.

Were you out at university, after university?

No, not at all. I mean I think that like a lot of people I was kind of crap about this, you know, really, really crap about this. And the thing is of course, once you're out, it's so easy to forget just what a huge deal this is. And at whatever age you are.

When I got around very late in the day to telling my friends, family and so on, and the funny thing was that a lot of my friends just said "Yes, right, well we kind of guessed that, you know, it's taken you a very long time to come right to telling us."

For a lot of young people and for old people it is still the most difficult thing to do and people need a lot of support and so on. Be reassured that it may seem the most difficult thing, but coming out will make you feel honest, powerful and liberated.

Do you feel now that the Tory party is there in terms of being fully accepting of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people?

I think the party, I think we really are getting there.

We hear different things from the Tories in the House of Lords every time they talk about gay rights.

I think it is self-evidently that the party has moved. You have two out gay MPs both of whom happen to be in the Shadow Cabinet. You got the stances that, the frontbench led by David Cameron. we took on the sexual orientation regulations, the stance that we have taken in relation to this incitement to gay hatred provisions.

Still the bulk of the party, the majority of the party it would appear, voted against.

Actually most people didn't vote that day, because the vote was not expected and people weren't there, as I explained at the time.

Surely, the important thing is the signal that the frontbench was sending. I see among my own intake, which is about 50 conservative MPs who were elected last time, a change of attitude.

And I think it's fair to say that some of the recent legislation has raised very important issues about freedom of religious conscience. Both the Sexual Orientation Regulations in respect of gay adoption and the current regulations in relation to current bill, incitement in relation to free speech, and you shouldn't dismiss that.

And there are plenty of people, including gay people, including people who are otherwise very sympathetic to the gay rights agenda, who have concerns about this legislation, that it should not go too far, that it should be balanced, should protect free speech, should protect freedom of religious expression.

I didn't think myself that the sexual orientation regulations as it applied to gay adoptions was an easy issue to decide, because it appeared to involve competing rights.

I think that it's quite clear that we are a party that is changing its attitudes towards gay people and I am very proud of the fact that we are doing so and have a leader who is determined that is one of the things we should do.

Read an interview with Lib Dem Justice spokesman David Heath here.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-6306.html

November 07 - Interview with Justice minister Maria Eagle

2008-01-20T20:04:00.000Z

The government's proposal to create a new offence of incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation has not been met with approval by some leading gay commentators.

Well-respected opinion-formers such as Times columnist Matthew Parris and Independent journalist Johann Hari have questioned the need for new laws. Parris said that the gay community does not need protection from ridicule.

Rowan Atkinson, the star of the inexplicably popular Mr Bean films, has publicly fretted about the implications of such a law on the freedom of comedians to mock gay, lesbian and bisexual people.

The minister piloting the relevant amendments to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill is the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice, Maria Eagle.

The 46-year-old MP for Liverpool Garston has held various junior ministerial posts since 1998, and when we met in her spacious Whitehall office last week she was keen to highlight the work done on gay equality in the past ten years.

As the sister of the only out lesbian MP, Maria Eagle has a particular understanding of the experience of the gay community. The proposed incitement to homophobic hatred law has been discussed for some time.

The Liberal Democrats made its introduction a manifesto commitment in the 2005 elections.

The passage of the controversial Racial and Religious Hatred Act in 2005 and 2006 led gay rights campaigners to increase their campaign to have their community granted an equal level of protection.

I put the three main arguments put forward in opposition to the government's homophobic hatred provisions to the minister.

The first is that as incitement is already an offence, the new law is unnecessary.

"There is existing legislation about violence against individuals, provisions within the current law that will enable the Criminal Justice System to take a dimmer view of those who get engaged in violence against an individual because of their sexuality," she replies.

"If you go and attack someone because they are gay then that is an aggravating feature of the violence offence. That's true.

"But I think that the evidence that Stonewall gave to the public bill committee got to the point on this.

"Because there is no incitement provision at the minute, there is a gap.

"If you go around inciting hatred against a group of people or an undefined group of people on the grounds of their sexuality, that isn't against the law. We think it should be."

Christian activist groups such as the Evangelical Alliance claim the new law will leave them "living in fear of prosecution" for expressing their Bible-inspired beliefs about homosexuality.

Muslim groups have also criticised the law for the same reason. Ms Eagle confirms that groups have made representations to her on the issue. She insists that the new law will not have any such effect.

"It has not been our intention to outlaw people expressing their views, whether they be Christians or comedians, about the way other people live their lives.

"You can have protection against incitement to hatred and at the same time protect people's right to express their free views. It's a very important factor of our history and heritage, freedom of speech, and I hope we can do it right."

Concerns about freedom of speech led to a rare Commons defeat for the government in January 2006 over the Racial and Religious Hatred legislation.

Lib Dem peer Lord Lester introduced a clause in the House of Lords which had the effect of seriously restricting the way in which the incitement law could be used.

The Blair government lost a vote on that amendment in the Commons.

Provisions referring to "abusive and insulting" language and behaviour were removed from the law, and prosecutors now have to prove intent to stir up religious hatred, rather than just the possibility of doing so.

Ms Eagle says the homophobic incitement proposal differs from both the race protections in the Public Order Act and the recent religious protections.

The homophobic amendments target threatening behaviour or words that are intended to stir up or incite hatred but not those that are judged as "likely to."

"We are aiming at threatening words and behaviour that are intended to incite. It is very clear from that what we do not want.

"We are taking out abusive and insulting, but we are applying the offences to threatening words or behaviour.

"Partly because that way of expressing ourselves in (the Racial and Religious) legislation was never what we wanted as a government. We did not support it. It only ended up in there because we got defeated.

"I think that in respect of sexuality in particular it would be most inappropriate to have a caveat saying you are allowed to go and abuse and insult gay people."

To bring some clarity to all of this, I presented two high-profile examples to the minister.Stephen Green, the Christian activist, likes to hand out leaflets at Pride events carrying quotations from the Bible stating that homosexuality is wrong.

He's been arrested under public order offences before. The BNP has in the past handed out leaflets in a council estate saying "All gay people are paedophiles."

Would both or either of those be covered by the proposed incitement law?

"I think it depends not only on the intention, which is a key part of the offence, and that will be a matter for the judgment of the individual investigating officer," Ms Eagle explains.

"Police officers make those judgments all the time and CPS make those judgments.

"Obviously the context is going to be important. If you are a preacher and on Sunday morning you tell your sermon of your beliefs and the beliefs of your denomination about gay people then that's different to going and standing outside a gay club and using threatening words and behaviour.

"The intent is the key. That is very clearly unacceptable and that's where we are pitching the offence."

The third objection to the law focuses on its practical purpose. When he announced the proposed amendments, Justice Secretary Jack Straw said of the proposed incitement legislation:

"It is a measure of how far we have come as a society in the last 10 years that we are all now appalled by hatred and invective directed against gay people, and it is now time for the law to recognise the feeling of the public. "

In other words, it is symbolic, a sign to the gay community that their concerns are listened to by the government, but just another new offence to add to the thousands already created by this Labour administration.

"The law lays down a line beyond which it's not possible to go without being on the wrong side of the law and you are subject to being prosecuted," the minister asserts.

"The law as a side effect can send signals, yes, and I think that can be important in areas like this about equality.

"But I am trained as a lawyer and I am not myself inclined to see the law as something that is just sending signals.

"It's putting down a line in the sand, on this side of the line what you do is lawful; on the other side it's unlawful. That's what the law does.

"If it sends signals as a result then that's also important. It's not a cosmetic exercise. I don't think it's right to change the law as a cosmetic exercise."

The leading contender for the Lib Dem leadership supports the proposed new law, while the Tory Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Herbert has stressed "the right balance between freedom of speech, ensuring that the offence must be intentional, and covering threatening language only."

The minister says she expects amendments to be brought forward, and concedes that the Lords are unpredictable, but expects "widespread support" from MPs for the incitement law.

There are proposals to include trans people and the disabled in the proposal, but the government requires an evidence base to make the case for their inclusion.

"One of the things you need to do if you are impinging upon free speech is be able to show for human rights reasons that there is a good reason for that to balance against the free speech rights," Ms Eagle explains.

"I've had some representations as you might imagine as a result of this. Anyone who wants to talk to us about this please do. We do, in order to impinge on free speech in this way, need to show that there is a reason."

The new Justice department, of which Ms Eagle is one of six ministers, takes responsibility for the criminal justice system in England and Wales.

She concedes that parts of the system have been slower than others to tackle homophobia and homophobic attacks, but claims that the specific needs of gay, lesbian and bisexual people are being taken seriously.

"Since the 2003 legislation that made an aggravating factor of homophobic motivation in attacks, the criminal justice agencies, be they police, the judges or the CPS have to take that on board.

"It's partly training, partly cultural change in society. I think we have seen a lot of that, but which is the chicken and which is the egg I'm not quite sure.

"One of the reasons why we have seen such cultural change is a general increased level from younger age groups of tolerance, but in order to promote that you have to have a way of tackling intolerance, and this is part of that."

Ms Eagle knows more than most about intolerance.

She has been a Labour member since her teenage years, and her sister Angela made the headlines and gained the respect of many by coming out as the only gay woman in Parliament soon after the 1997 election.

The sisters first attended party conference in 1980 – "you never had to queue in the ladies, put it that way, as there weren't very many women there," she recalls with a smile - and they are the only pair of female twins ever to be elected to the Commons.

The minister embraces the change in British attitudes since the days of Old Labour, not least the fact that the Tories are now keen to stress their gay-friendly credentials.

"You wouldn't have thought that ten years ago, or five years ago, and I think that's good. Tolerance, diversity and equality have always been at the heart of the Labour party and its politics.

"Far more gay and lesbian people are happy to come out now, they are able to do it without having to live their lives hiding away, and that's got to be good for the health of individuals and society generally."

Many MPs and others in politics are yet to step out of the closet.

When I mention that her sister is the only lesbian MP the minister corrects me by saying she is the only one "out," indicating there are others who have thus far not been so brave.

Given the attention Angela Eagle's announcement received, it is understandable why other women have not followed.

"It was a tough thing for her to do," recalls Maria.

"I supported her very much. The previous female MP who had done that, or rather had that done to her, was Maureen Colquhoun, who had a terrible time.

"She was deselected by her own party, the national party had to say hang on, you can't do that to her, reinstated her, and she lost.

"So obviously we were worried about it, but to be honest she prepared it so very, very well, she picked the time perfectly and it came off as well as you could have expected.

"That isn't to say that my father wasn't door stepped, that I wasn't door stepped, our neighbours weren't door stepped, our old head teacher from when we were five wasn't door stepped because, they all were.

"I saw it from being a supportive sister with Angela, how much guts and preparation and everything it takes. It's the same for everybody who decides to come out in their lives. Alright it's not always going to be on the front of all the newspapers but for every person who does that it feels like to them.

"There are gay and lesbian people at every level of every organisation, and I think whether or not they are out is a very personal choice.

"Some people do and do so at an early stage, but I have never talked to a gay or lesbian friend who has not found it to be one of the hardest things they have ever done, and I don't think its right to force people to declare themselves. It's the same with disability.

"When I was a minister for disabled people we had all these arguments and discussions. I just don't think that when you have discrimination, which we still do, that it's right to force people to declare a disability, or their sexuality.

"I am the only person who got forced to declare my sexuality that I know of because of course when Angela came out everybody had to report that I was heterosexual.

"It's quite amusing , when you look at a lot of the information sheets you get about MPs, you get a lot of "Maria Eagle, the heterosexual member for Liverpool Garston."

"Why don't you say everyone else is heterosexual as well, but its just one of the consequences of being a twin."

Despite all that information identifying Maria Eagle as the straight one, she reveals that even the Speaker has mixed them up.

"People just think of us as "the Eagles." Sometimes I wish I had a pound for every time I get mixed up with my sister, because I'd be very rich."

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/opinion/2005-6149.html

November 07: Nick Clegg interview

2008-01-20T19:32:00.000Z

This article was first published on 15th November 2007. Nick Clegg beat Chris Huhne to become the Lib Dem leader on 18th December 2007 by just 511 votes.

Since winning Sheffield Hallam in the 2005 general election, Nick Clegg has made a major impression on Liberal Democrats in Parliament and across the country.

Tipped as a future leader before he even entered Westminster, in the wake of Sir Menzies Campbell's resignation he finds himself standing sooner than was imagined.

Age did it for Ming, and 40-year-old Clegg is the frontrunner in the contest to replace him. Like his opponent in the leadership race, Chris Huhne, he attended the private Westminster School.

After Cambridge, and post-graduate degrees at the University of Minnesota and the College of Europe in Brussels, he joined the European Commission in 1994.

A high-flyer, he became a senior adviser to Sir Leon Brittan, the Thatcher-appointed Vice President of the Commission, and then MEP for the East Midlands from 1999 to 2004.

As his party's home affairs spokesman he has become a prominent critic of the government on civil liberties and a vocal opponent of ID cards and increased pre-charge detention of terror suspects.

In an exclusive interview Nick Clegg explains why he is the heir to Ming, how to tackle homophobia in eastern Europe, and where the Lib Dems could take seats from Labour at the next election.

How is the campaign going?

Good. The whole contest gives us a really good opportunity to do what, frankly, we haven't been doing enough of over the last couple of years, which is speaking to people beyond politics and starting to really showcase what the Lib Dems are about. I am all about expanding the appeal of the party.

Why are there so few out gay MPs?

There are too few women, too few gay men and women, too few black and minority ethnic MPs, all roughly for the same reason. This whole place, Westminster, looks like a 19 th century boarding school, acts like a 19th century boarding school, so frankly it speaks a language utterly alien to anybody who does not fit that conventional mould.

In 2005 the Lib Dems had a manifesto commitment to make incitement to homophobic hatred a crime on a par with religious hatred. What is your view?

I am absolutely in favour of that. I pushed it very strongly has home affairs spokesperson; I passionately believe that there is a real problem. I have heard some people claim that it is not an issue – it is.

There is a real problem with homophobic violence. That is unacceptable and what we did with religious hatred bill shows that we can strike the right balance between making sure that hateful crime does not take place but at the same time protect people's right to free speech.

Several gay commentators, such as Times columnist Matthew Parris, object to the law.

I have become persuaded by the evidence put forward by Stonewall that this is a real issue. I accept there is a much more theoretical argument about where the law affords protection to particular groups.

I still think the evidence from Stonewall is compelling. Matthew is an old friend. I understand where he is coming from, I just disagree with him on this particular issue and under my leadership I will make absolutely sure that we are at the forefront of getting the balance right with this legislation.

Homophobia in some of the new EU states is a huge problem. Gay rights marches are being banned in Poland and in Lithuania. As a former MEP, what do you think we should do about it?

Bluntly, I do not think we were tough enough on the Copenhagen criteria in letting them in without challenging this. And it is not just homophobia.

If you look at the persecution of the Roma in parts of central and eastern Europe, it is grotesque.

We need to use every single avenue possible – political, in press terms as well to throw a spotlight onto behaviour that is simply incompatible with the criteria these countries signed up to when they joined the European Union. The EU is not an economic club, it is a club of values, and I passionately believe that, of liberal values.

Are you confident they will come round to our way of thinking?

If you look at the grand scheme of things, there is progress. Sometimes it goes backwards, but on the whole, judicial independence and a spreading of liberal values is going in the right direction, but is not moving as fast as I would like.

If you become leader will you increase online campaigning?

Oh yes, hugely. For the obvious reasons. I am part of that generation that increasingly does not rely on ink and paper for my information. I take a train in every morning into Westminster, when I am London during the week, and I get my news from a little hand-held PDA. That is now the way people increasing get their information.

What is it you can bring to the party as leader?

It is a number of things. If you look at the work I have done in the home affairs capacity for the party, I think most people recognise that I am one of the leading campaigners in this country on some very important issues: prison reform, talking in a smart but compassionate way about immigration, being a progressive voice on civil liberties.

I have always tried to do it in a way that is straight, plain speaking and has real substance to it.

But you do not have the gravitas that Ming was praised for.

I am someone who has taught at university on policy, I used to work as an international trade negotiator, I used to manage major aid projects in some of the poorest countries in Asia. I think I have got the experience and the background …

The perception of some people is: he has only been in Parliament for two years, he is the new boy, young, charismatic, good looking, but we do not know what he stands for ...

I will tell you a story to illustrate it. About seven years ago when I first thought that I might want to make the transition from the European Parliament to Westminster, I came to this building to meet some senior Lib Dem MPs.

I said that no one had made the leap from the European Parliament to Westminster before, do you think I can do it.

And all of them said to me that your problem is that you are too interested in policy substance, you keep producing all these books, I have written books on world trade, education police, reform of the EU.

They said, you are just a bit too interested in substance and not interested enough in the presentational side of politics.

So to be told a few months later that maybe the reverse is the case shows how fickle, frankly, people's judgements are. I am totally self-confident that I marry an ability to be able to speak to people like a human being and crucially communicate with people beyond the Westminster bubble, but do so with a real sense of credibility and substance.

It is one of the most dangerous jobs in British politics, being leader of the Lib Dems. You are confident that there are not any skeletons in the Clegg closet that are going to jump out.

I doubt my teenage years merit a great deal of scrutiny by those who are easily shocked! I am not for one moment pretending I am an unblemished human being but I wouldn't be stupid enough – not for my own sake, by the way, but for the sake of the party – to put myself forward if I did not feel that I can do so with a clear conscience.

Being leader does put a big strain on your family – is that something you have discussed with your wife?

Oh yeah. I would say this, wouldn't I, but Miriam is an extraordinary woman. She has her own full time career. We have two small children; we both work more than full time and we share childcare very easily. I am as much a primary parent to my children as she is.

The way you do that is being very organised and sheltering the kids from politics. I do not think you will ever see me use my kids for political advantage and above all saying no sometimes.

It is not their fault their dad has gone into politics.

Are you the nasty party now?

No, I don't think we are. We have had a really rocky time of it obviously and there have been some ructions, some self-inflicted, some not.

Frankly my only concern now is to draw a line under what has been a slightly introverted time in the parliamentary party and start talking outwards again.

That is why I am so pleased that the vast majority of the colleagues in the parliamentary party, who know Chris and myself the best, have declared in favour of me.

Not for some fatuous tally or head count, but because I think any leader of this party is going to have to be able to unite people very rapidly in order to make sure that there is no internal tensions so we can reach out to new voters.

It is going to have to be very rapid because of what is known as the Tory squeeze, that a third party with a resurgent Conservative party …

Can I just qualify that? Cameron's appeal is much more regionally constrained than large parts of the London-based media appreciate.

In the same way that you are a middle-class party with middle-class concerns?

Well you say that, but you watch. We are now a party which is representing north and south, urban and rural. The Conservatives have been beaten back to their English rural heartlands.

One of the reasons I am keen to lead the party is because I am an MP from the North, I cut my teeth in cities like Derby, Leicester, and Nottingham. I am the only non-Labour MP in Sheffield and south Yorkshire.

You represent one of the richest seats in the UK outside of the south east.

Well come and visit it. If you think Sheffield Hallam is paved in gold you have another thing coming. There are some real pockets of deprivation.

I am a very active MP for the whole of Sheffield. I campaign with Lib Dems across the city. You cannot but be shocked by the social divisions where in the poorest ward in Sheffield you will die, on average, 14 years earlier than someone in the wealthy wards just a few miles down the road.

The Conservatives are nowhere there. They are a meaningless political force in any urban area north of Watford. That gives us an enormous bridgehead.

I think the big gains that we will make against either party in the coming years will be in large measure against Labour in their urban heartlands. Look at our advances in Leeds, Newcastle and Liverpool.

And you don't think the Tory emphasis on social justice under former leader Iain Duncan Smith will work in those areas?

I think most people are pretty smart, and are not just going to be bought off with some new rhetoric and photographic blandishments from Cameron. They want to see where the beef is.

I still don't know where the substance is on his environmentalism, his social compassion.

How can you believe the Conservatives on social justice, when they want to distort the tax system in favour of marriage? Where is the progressive nature of a party that somehow thinks you can bribe people through the tax system to walk up the aisle?

Where is the progressive nature of a party that thinks you can turn immigration on and off like a tap? In a party that is extraordinarily introverted and inward looking when it comes to international relations?

And what about the charge that you are a middle-class party?

It needs to change. Which is why Simon Hughes has declared himself in favour of my candidacy and why I was with him in London South Bank University last week meeting a number of students from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

The Liberal Democrats cannot pretend to represent contemporary Britain until contemporary Britain is represented in us.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/opinion/2005-6067.html

November 07: Chris Huhne interview

2008-01-20T19:13:00.000Z

This article was first published on 10th November 2007. Nick Clegg beat Chris Huhne to become the Lib Dem leader on 18th December 2007 by just 511 votes and appointed his rival as the party's Home Affairs spokesman.

Much has been made in these first few weeks of the race to become leader of the Liberal Democrats about the similarities between the candidates.

Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne are both Westminster School-educated former MEPs with near-identical views nearly all the key issues.

Both became MPs as part of the Lib Dems strong showing in the 2005 elections. Both are English and will appeal to voters in key south and south east seats where the resurgent Tories are a major threat.

Indeed, Chris Huhne, currently his party's spokesman on environment issues, has a majority of just 568 in his Hampshire seat.

At 53, he is the more senior candidate. He ran against Sir Menzies Campbell in the last leadership election in early 2006, coming second, and is a former journalist and successful businessman.

Yet for all that his 40-year-old opponent is the favourite to win when the results are announced just before Christmas.

In an exclusive interview Chris Huhne explains why he should succeed Ming, why Sir Ian Blair must resign as Met police chief and why he is not convinced of the need for a new crime of incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.

How's the campaign going?

Not bad. I mean we're picking up. I think we're getting there slowly. I always thought we'd have a nice long campaign.

And you've been through it before of course.

And I've been through it before so I know about pacing ourselves which is quite important.

How soon after Ming resigned were you up and running the campaign?

Well it took a bit of time because really weren't expecting it at all actually and so...

Because your rival had a website up very quickly.

Well I'm told that. I don't know whether Nick had managed through foresight or whatever be preparing anything but certainly we weren't expecting it.

I was very determined that there would be no question of a sort of Michael Portillo phone line moment, so we didn't do anything before the resignation.

Many people are disengaged in politics because they think the main parties are quite timid in the way that they react to things like the environmental challenges. Do you think the place for your party to be is the radical party?

Well it is. I think the absolutely key role for the Liberal Democrats is to make sure we are not just radical in the sense of putting forward radical proposals on climate change for example, although we are, but actually we're the only party that's in favour of changing the whole system.

That's a really fundamental message because the pool of votes which we should be able to attract in are those 40% of people who aren't voting at all.

If we can somehow energise and give back a sense of trust and faith in the political process to those people, we can enormously increase the number of people who vote Liberal Democrat.

Half the population describes themselves as liberal and so we've got potentially a great pool to draw from but we're not getting our message across effectively.

Are you talking about changing the electoral system through proportional representation and localism?

Well I mean the whole constitution. Localism and proportional representation are the two key things. You've got to get power back to the people for them to understand that actually they can influence their own lives and the communities they live in.

And so localism is absolutely essential but obviously you also need fair votes, every vote has to count wherever you come from.

This is an area where the Tories have quite effectively come onto your ground, talking about localism returning, returning power down to as local a level as possible.

With proportional representation, don't you think that a coalition with either of the other main parties is the only way that you're going to achieve it?

You can get proportional representation either through winning an overall majority itself and then giving it away by introducing proportional representation or you can do it through cooperation with other parties.

I don't know which one of those will come but we have to be prepared for either and be very ambitious about the party.

Ming very clearly said it would be a precondition for him before he would consider any kind of coalition. Would that be your policy?

Well I wouldn't use the word precondition, I see it as slightly differently. I would say that actually any party leader who seriously wants to talk about partnership politics has to think through the political consequences of that and the system that we work in.

You can't have partnership politics if you have an electoral system that means very small shifts of votes can suddenly lead to casino-like effect on different parties.

You can't have partnership politics either if the Prime Minister of the partnership government is able to call an election at whatever time, potentially therefore putting a coalition partner at serious danger.

Inevitably if you begin to think of what is necessary for partnership politics you begin to think through the consequences of changing the system.

The system we have at the moment, first past the post, is designed to victimise partnership politics, it is designed to extrude it from the political process and have nothing to do with it. So we've got to change that.

But you won't use the word precondition?

I won't use precondition simply because it's not a bargaining chip. It's actually whether you're on the right wavelength. I mean it's even more fundamental than a precondition.

It's just basically, if you really want to have a partnership in normal times as opposed to a national emergency like war, then do you understand what the consequences are for the system?

In your 2005 manifesto the Lib Dems said they will make homophobic incitement an offence on the same basis as inciting racial hatred. Is that your position?

No, I'm very supportive on that and I very much like the work that Steven Williams has been doing on homophobic bullying in schools, and appointing a bullying mentor, I think that makes a lot of sense.

But on the specific issue of incitement - the Tories aren't sure what they're going to do about it. Jack Straw's very keen on it. I was wondering as a candidate for leader, what's your view is on this specific provision?

Well I think that incitement for any violence is frankly it's already illegal. I'm not sure that taking in a further offence adds an awful lot.

But if it's necessary to do that then I'm up for it because I think frankly, you know incitement to violence, incitement to hatred and therefore potentially to violence is extremely dangerous.

I think it's quite similar to racial hatred in the sense that people cannot choose their sexuality and therefore it is innate. I think where you draw the line is on those issues where you can't, where you don't want to chill free speech on issues.

Where people can makes decisions legitimately about what they're saying and doing. I wouldn't want to go so far as to act as an obstacle in the law to freedom of speech but I would want to protect people who are targeted because of race or sexual orientation, anything which is an innate part of their character.

So would you say you're open to the argument?

Yes.

Jack Straw and the Labour government whenever they talk about this piece of legislation, constantly talk about it sending a message and it being a gesture. I was wondering what you felt about that given that the Lib Dems have always been critical of how many new laws we have.

In general I'm not in favour of using the legislative process to send messages. I mean I think there is a role for the government of making it clear, I don't know if you have to pass a law to do so.

But there is a role for government clearly in making it clear what is acceptable and civilised behaviour and what isn't.

I look with consternation at the fact that we have 3400 new criminal offences since 1997 and you know many of them are frankly completely redundant because they merely repeat things which were already illegal.

I just don't see the point of them other than as a press release.

It seems an awful odd way of going about attracting press attention to limber up the Treasury solicitor into coming up with yet another draft bill on something or other.

Are you the nasty party now?

No, of course not. Nobody in their right mind would spend a lifetime in Liberal Democrat politics unless they cared passionately about the values that we put forward about fairness, about the green future for our society, about decentralisation, about civil liberties.

Having been active in our politics since the early 1980s, having been through periods when our poll ratings were so low that it was within the margin of error and one pollster actually just had an asterisk because they couldn't find any Liberal Democrat supporters at all, it's astonishing to suggest that we are the nasty party because we are in any way motivated other than by belief in our values.

You mention the 1980s there and that leads me onto your reputation, your City days when you were a petrolhead. How much of that is true?

Well I wasn't a petrolhead. I mean I had a...

Tell us what cars you had.

I actually...

It's nothing to be ashamed of Chris, everyone was doing it in the 1980s.

The truth is that I started getting interested in global warming as an issue in the late 80s and I wrote columns in The Guardian about it and then in The Independent.

I also wrote a book called Real World Economics in 1990 which talks about global warming as being one of the greatest threats that we face.

But in terms of personal behaviour you still have to make ridiculous compromises. I mean I still fly around and buy my offset because we're in an economy which is in a process of transition.

All that stuff about cars is frankly nonsense, because I had a company car when I went to The Independent, which was a standard issue BMW.

I didn't have any choice about it, I actually a nice Alfa Romeo is what I really wanted, but they said I had to have a BMW because of the resale value.

It's something that the press obviously enjoy talking about. It leads me onto something else. You remember the 1980s and you were a professional by that decade already. Nick Clegg and David Cameron were still at school.

Age was an issue in Ming‘s resignation. Are you not worried that you might be a bit too old? You know, you're as old as Gordon Brown, you're a good 15 years older than...

13 years older than Nick. I am 13 years older than Nick. That's obviously up to people to decide in the leadership contest.

I am very lucky in that I look younger than I am. I am very energetic, I'm very fit, I usually leave anybody with me panting after running up the stairs so I don't think I have any problems with energy levels and I wouldn't undertake this job if I didn't think that I was able to lead the party very vigorously.

I also think that the background of having been in business and having built up a business and employed people and created wealth and having 19 years in journalism is, actually has some advantages.

A lot of people want, crave these days authenticity in politics and one thing which is tremendously suspicious for many voters is the fact that people come into politics at a very young age without any experience of the real world.

They're not necessarily on the same wavelength as most voters and they don't necessarily understand the same sort of concerns, the insecurities that people have to face in the normal working environment.

I do, I've been there, I've done that, I've bought the T-shirt and I think that that's actually, particularly against both David Cameron and Gordon Brown, quite an important point. David Cameron's only spent four years outside the Westminster bubble in his life, when he was working as a PR advisor for Michael Green at Carlton.

And Gordon Brown similarly, similar period when he was a researcher on Scottish telly. So, I think that's actually quite a strength.

Well as you've said you have experience running an organisation, you've had experience running a business. With the Met police what's your view on their chief executive? Do you think Sir Ian Blair should resign?

It seems to me that it's pretty inevitable, he was clearly where the buck stopped, that was the decision and I think he has to go and it does worry me actually that in a lot of government departments there is a sort of culture of impunity where people do not take responsibility for their own mistakes.

And you'd expect that same high standard across the board from all your Liberal Democrat ministers and ministers in other administrations such as Scotland?

Yes, I think you do. If somebody's responsible for a really crass error, the signal you send out if you leave them in post is that it doesn't matter making crass errors and so you're actually inviting people in future to make the same sort of mistake as there's no problem from their point of view if they do.

You're a former MEP. One of the things that we report on regularly are countries who have joined the EU but don't seemed to have fully understood their social responsibilities towards gay people.What can we do about that?

The role of the EU in instilling liberal values into central and eastern European transition countries has been absolutely crucial.

I can remember people saying we only need the EU for peacekeeping, mainly for the environment, global warming.

I can remember when I was doing country risk work the Prime Minister of Slovakia set out in a very brutally nationalist way to persecute the Hungarian-speaking minority in Slovakia - 440,000 people.

He even went so far as to change the local government boundaries, to put them in minorities, to remove the right to educate their children in Hungarian and so forth.

And frankly if he had gone on, it would be almost inconceivable that the Hungarian state next door to Slovakia would not have had to intervene because of the political pressures on them.

You could easily have had an appalling mess like Bosnia and Serbia and Croatia. So, the EU response was you go ahead and do that and you'll no longer be entitled to join the EU, this is not acceptable behaviour, it was very firm and it stopped it.

We need through that gradual process of trying to send very clear signals, grading them obviously depending on what is acceptable behaviour in a civilised liberal democratic state and what isn't.

One of the most moving things of my entire career was going and visiting all of the central and eastern European countries when they first came to the capital markets in the 1990s and giving them ratings.

I realised just how much they wanted to be a part of the European democratic family and all that meant. And you know, particularly somewhere like Lithuanian or Latvia or Estonia, which had been gobbled up by the Soviet Union after their very brief moment of independence and suddenly actually becoming a country which is able to have their parliament and traditions and so forth, it's actually very moving.

And I think it doesn't take very much to move them on. I mean in the case of Poland I think it's also a thing you have to remember which makes it a rather special case.

Poland as a state didn't exist from the partition at the end of the 18th century between Russia and the Hapsburgs and the Prussians right the way through until after the First World War.

The institution that became the vehicle for Poland's cultural identity was the church.It was terribly important in preserving the cultural identity but a certain amount of baggage went with it.

And the baggage is taking a little bit of time to shed. But some of the more staid and conventional attitudes, traditional attitudes towards gays, follow ineluctably from some of that history. It will work its way out. And we don't need to speed it up.

Are you going to change the name of the party?

No, well I have no intention of changing it. I'm a social liberal and that means, I came through the SDP but in fact my history in terms of my family, my grandfather couldn't be more liberal.

He was named William Ewart Gladstone Murray, so you could imagine the kind of family he was born into.

If he wants it will there be a place for Ming on your front bench?

Oh absolutely, we are enormously indebted to Ming for stabilising the party and to making sure that we are getting more professional with the policy and with the organisation and he has a fantastic amount, I think, still to bring.

He was very hard done by, by the press in particular. There is undoubtedly an element of ageism in the whole attitude towards Ming and I said the same about Charles.

One of the things which I think any leader of the party must feel is that we have an enormous amount of talent within the Parliamentary party, we've got plenty enough talent to run a government in my view, and we need to be much more ambitious.

We're not going to take any nonsense, any condescension about the Liberal Democrats because we've actually got a fantastic front bench with a talent that we've got, Ming and Charles, all the other, Nick, Vince, all the other talent, David Laws.

We've got fantastic talent on the front bench and we can run a government. We should not hide our light under a bushel, we need to get out there and persuade people.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/opinion/2005-6006.html

October 07: Michael Gove on homophobic bullying

2008-01-20T18:52:00.000Z

While many in David Cameron's Conservatives are recent converts to gay equality, including Cameron himself, there are a few who spoke out long before it was fashionable.

The Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Michael Gove, was urging the party to break with the past long before he took his place in the House of Commons.

Elected in 2005 to represent the true-blue constituency of Surrey Heath, Gove is a clever, articulate Scot, a former Times journalist and new Tory through and through. He used to share a flat with prominent gays Ivan Massow and Nick Boles, and during his time as a columnist he spoke out in favour of gay equality and even praised Will & Grace.

"Sexuality is incapable of being swayed by "promotion" in schools," was his common sense take on the hated Section 28 in 2003, when the Tories were still supporting it.

"You can no more "promote" the idea of becoming gay to a testosterone-fuelled, Key Stage 4-taking, FHM-reading, Jordan-ogling male teenager than you could have persuaded the young Graham Norton to make an honest woman of Ann Widdecombe," he continued.

"The intractability of your sexual orientation, and the folly of trying to change it to fit in with social pressure, forms one of the running gags in Channel Four's marvellous comedy Will and Grace.

"As the title itself prompts us to realise, your sexuality is not a simple matter of free will. It is something beyond your power to effect. Like the operation of divine grace."

The party, under the quietly suicidal leadership of Iain Duncan Smith and later the spine-chilling Michael Howard, continued to wear prejudice against gay people almost as a badge of honour until the arrival of David Cameron.

Gove, who is married with two small children, has risen quickly through the ranks since becoming an MP, making a name for himself as a quick-minded debater and as someone skilled at making simple statements about complex ideas.

Just before the summer, the first major ideological crisis for the "new" Tories was over grammar schools. The party's then-Education spokesman David "two brains" Willetts made a complete hash of explaining policy, seemingly announcing that the Tories no longer supported them, angering many.

Willetts was moved sideways at the first opportunity and replaced by Gove. At 40, he is a central figure in the Notting Hill set that surrounds Cameron.

He was promoted to the frontbench as soon as Cameron became leader, and in July was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet, one of a handful from the new intake at the top table.

He shadows Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and has been a vocal supporter of new guidelines aimed at tackling homophobic bullying in schools.

I spoke to him about faith schools, the importance of sex education, double standards at the BBC and what age to start teaching kids about gay relationships.

What was it that spurred you to give the new guidance on homophobic bullying such a strong endorsement?

Michael Gove: The first thing is that bullying for all is a significant problem, a growing challenge, and it reflects some of the weaknesses, the broader weaknesses and challenges that society faces overall.

Two things I think reflect the way society has changed, and has shown up in the way bullying manifests itself, and that is as Britain has become more multi-ethnic and more multi-cultural, there is a real danger that there is a racially prejudiced tinge or a culturally prejudiced tinge to bullying.

I think that people are rightly aware of that, though as ever the government has a role to play in disseminating guidance, which helps people deal with some of the cultural challenges.

The other thing that's a related challenge is that as society has grown up and become better able to deal with sexual diversity, there are still taboos to be tackled and difficulties that need to be dealt with when it comes to adolescent sexuality.

In particular I think it's the case that society is still finding it difficult to work out how to deal with young people below the age of consent who are attempting to deal with a sexual orientation that is not the majority orientation.

That requires some sensitive handling.

You can't pay attention to popular culture and what's happened in the last ten years without being aware of a nasty edge to bullying and intimidation and sometimes it can have a homophobic element to it.

Many of us will remember the controversy around Chris Moyles, the Radio 1 DJ.

I myself do not believe that Moyles meant to be malicious. I'm sure that he regards himself as an equal opportunities tease, as it were, but what he's doing is picking up on the fact that 'gay' as a word has been used to intimidate in a pejorative sense, and without having to go into details about language, there are other examples of that. It's a complicated area.

I wanted to pick up on racial bullying. There are actually legal requirements surrounding racial bullying - schools are legally required to record it and the authorities are required to deal with it.

Homophobic bulling just gets 'guidance,' which is voluntary. One of the concerns about guidance is that at present 75% of gay and lesbian pupils at faith schools are bullied.

A much higher figure than in other schools. I want to know how you feel it is going to be possible to present guidelines to a Roman Catholic school or a Muslim school, when clearly they have views that are going to clash with that.

Well it is going to be tough, it is going to be a challenge because I support faith schools. I also support the right of individuals to believe, if they wish to, that homosexual behaviour is a sin.

The basic nature, the basic compact of British society is that you can believe what you like. But schools, if they are funded by the state, have to be a prejudice-free zone, they have to be zones where you respect the moral and ethical codes of the great religions, but it's also the case that there are basic minimum standards that have to be upheld.

That means when it comes to the treatment of women or to the treatment of anyone who might have a different sexual orientation from the majority, or from that prescribed as "optimal" by the faith, they have to show they are sensitive to those needs and respectful of them.

Now, I am not in a position to speak definitively about how you can negotiate those boundaries, but the one thing that I'm clear about is that there's a compact.

Faith schools have an ethos that's influenced by their faith and they have the right to insist that when it comes to appointments, people subscribe not just to the ethos but also to the religion.

They can be clear about what they consider to be the highest ethical standards, but at the same time they have to also be clear that if there are examples of behaviour which are prejudiced or intimidatory, based on someone's sexual orientation or their gender or their cultural background, then that's unacceptable.

The contract that comes if you're state-funded.

Exactly, and as I say these are uniquely sensitive areas because the contract at the heart of British society preserves the right equally of a fundamentalist Muslim preacher to hold certain views and of a militant atheist to hold his views and we have to hold the line between them but with institutions like schools have that challenge to respect both.

What the faith expects and also what society expects.

What part does sex education play here? Surely it is a mechanism by which ignorance can be defeated?

Yes, I think that one of the things I am cautious about is prescribing in detail every aspect of the curriculum. I think that teachers find that a great deal of prescription, often very well meaning, constricts their freedom to teach in the appropriate way.

I think that what you need is a light-touch curriculum, clear boundaries, proper inspection from Ofsted, and that can provide the groundwork.

Of course sex education and the other things that the curriculum has, such as PSHE, which is this broader menu of teaching, which covers personal and sexual developmental and health issues - there are things which can be taught there.

There are also things that can be taught in citizenship, so that people can understand the diverse nature of Britain, why we are where we are, and the respect that we have towards people from different backgrounds and who follow different lifestyles.

So you think they should be teaching civil partnerships in citizenship classes?

Well the key thing is that I wouldn't prescribe a particular model of teaching these things.

But I do think that one of the things is that sex education is there first to provide young people with an understanding of human biology and also to provide them with the tools and the knowledge to be more aware of their own bodies and the risks they can run.

A good school will teach children to respect themselves and their own bodies. Not just through sex education but generally through the way in which discipline is enforced, the way in which boundaries are set.

Doesn't that mean that faith schools can just not teach civil partnerships and not teach homosexuality as an acceptable thing or even mention it, a Roman Catholic school doesn't have to teach that...

You are quite understandably trying to draw me in to prescribing the curriculum. There are certain minimum standards that one should have ....

Isn't why civil partnerships exist a key part of citizenship?

I think that there are a variety of issues here. I believe that Britain is a better, healthier and a more advanced society because we deal with discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, and civil partnerships are part of that.

But I also recognise that British society is a delicate contract. I recognise that in order for diversity to work you've got to be firm and clear about what is acceptable.

You've also got to be open to negotiation with minority groups about their beliefs. More broadly, with the curriculum, it is also clear in my mind that there should certain things that we expect, but how schools achieve them should be up to them. Because to specify that a Roman Catholic school should teach precisely this set of ethics in this way in order to ....

This is not an ethics issue, this is a citizenship issue.

We have two forms of commitment in this country, marriage and civil partnerships, this is not a moral issue.

It is one of the basic things - if you are going to teach them about how to be good citizens, how to vote, what voting is about, but you are not going to mention that we should be proud of the fact that we have created civil partnerships, the most important legal contract that two people can have ....

You are inviting me to re-write the curriculum ...

I'm asking you whether it's something that you think should be taught in every school.

You're inviting me to step into an issue which I don't want to step into in the way in which you're inviting me.

Would you hope that it's something that every school would teach?

Again you're inviting me to .... look - the key thing is, I respect the autonomy. I'm a believer in both choice and autonomy.

I have clear views, but I do not believe that it is right for me to use the education system to impose my views in every area. Both as an individual and as a politician I think that civil partnerships are a good thing.

But it is important that I do not use the curriculum as a way of advancing these things. People should develop in education a practical tool to be able to engage with these issues so that they can then challenge prejudices and ethical positions.

I know you have only been in parliament since 2005, but that's a massive change from your party's position in 1988, when you were stomping round telling local authorities what books they could and could not take into their schools, and telling them that homosexuality under no circumstances was to be "promoted."

I personally am on the record saying that I thought that Section 28 was a foolish piece of legislation.

Do you understand the point about the chilling effect across the education system, to the extent that teachers would not know how to react to gay pupils and did not know how to help them?

I completely understand the effect that it had. One of the reasons why there is the religious hatred legislation in the form which it was brought before us is precisely because they believed that it would have that chilling effect.

That even though Salman Rushdie might not have been prosecuted under that legislation, the publishers might have felt that it was inappropriate. And so I entirely understand that.

I also think that as well the chilling effect there's a direct link between an environment in which Section 28 was part of legislation and the fear that adolescents and children may have had in discussing questions of their sexuality, their lack of confidence, their concern, their worry, with an appropriate authority figure, so yes I do.

I also understand why people with traditional ethical and religious views wanted to ensure that they were able to choose schools which reflected their value system and I think that it's important that we respect that right.

I'm one of those people who takes a view of sexual diversity which is different from traditional religious teachings, but I respect what those traditional religious teachings bring to the country.

What age do you think it's appropriate to learn about same-sex couples? Is it appropriate at primary school age?

Because the sexual development of young people has become a heavily fought-over area, the one thing I'm anxious to do is strike an appropriate balance between ensuring that children who either come from non-typical backgrounds or are developing in a particular way are given support and protection.

But I also think it's appropriate to recognise that there are many parents who are worried about the premature introduction of sexualisation, not just into the classroom but into their children's lives.

I think that there is an issue, everything from the way in which children's fashion is marketed, the way in which make-up is marketed to girls, to the way in which even for young boys, children's fashion and certain roles are assigned, which are encouraging children to grow up more quickly.

I absolutely share the concern that parents have and I think that while it is important that we counter prejudice, it's also important that we recognise that it is quite right for parents to say, "I want my children to be protected from some of the inevitable complexities of adolescent life for as long as possible, I want them to enjoy and cherish their innocence away from the premature drive towards introducing that sexual element into their lives."

As a social element rather than a sexual element, there is what is called the BBC test. When a footballer gets married, (Children's BBC news programme) Newsround can't shut up about it.

When Elton John or John Barrowman from Torchwood gets 'married,' they couldn't possibly mention it because it has moved away from being a social thing to a sexual thing.

I appreciate that and I think one of the things is that society is moving and has moved in a way which is much more understanding of sexual diversity.

The fact is that over time we are becoming more and more relaxed about these situations, but it's also important that in human relations there's always a desire to lay down hard and fast rules.

Sensitivity is required. There are people, to move it into a different area, there are people, particularly older people, who are not racist, but whose discourse and conversation wouldn't pass muster as being as respectful of difference as they should be.

If people can be offended, in particular, as I say, by older people who use a form of language which is inappropriate, I would say that rather than getting on your high horse about it, one should just recognise that there is a difference between the use of inappropriate and insensitive language and active prejudice.

And most of us know when we see it. In the same way I think that it's appropriate to recognise that when institutions are being well meaning and respectful, or when there's an extra edge to it, it's incumbent on all of us to use our judgement.

I am in the fortunate position of not having been a victim of prejudice, and not having had to go through the travails that people whose sexuality has been a source of prejudice have had to.

So it's relatively easy for me to say you should be a bit more relaxed about it, because I haven't been in the firing line, but the one thing that I would say is that it's important that we as a society develop that sense of being prepared to acknowledge that if things are broadly moving in the right direction, that's a good thing and patience can be a virtue as well.

Has having gay friends helped with you with that process of understanding?

Yes absolutely. I wouldn't say that I was anything other than broadly typical of my generation. I was part of a generation that at university it was natural and normal to have gay friends and I had friends, both gay men and lesbians, coming out at the time.

Therefore I'm part of a generation that finds it difficult to understand many of the arguments that were being made by people older than us against equality.

But at the same time one of the things that I've always tried to do, it doesn't apply in every area, but one of the things that I've always tried to do is understand if people are generally well meaning but they appear to have a prejudice or a block in one particular area it is sometimes appropriate to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I think that would mark me out from some others.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/opinion/2005-5827.html

October 07 - Trevor Phillips on the Equality and Human Rights Commission

2008-01-20T18:41:00.000Z

Trevor Phillips meets me in an office he has just moved into. The L-shaped sofa came from his own home; his framed Martin Luther King montage sits on the floor waiting to be hung. A small silver bust of Lenin on his desk catches my eye.

The new public body of which he is chairman, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, only came into being a few days before we met. There are boxes everywhere, as staff from the Commissions for Racial Equality, Equal Opportunities and Disability Rights, along with some new faces, move in.

Phillips' office, at the end of an open-plan room, has a fine view of London's City Hall, with the Tower and the City itself in the background. As we discuss the new commission, I cannot help but wonder if Ken Livingstone can see into the EHRC offices from his mayoral lair in the distinctive building on the banks of the Thames known to its detractors as The Testicle.

Ken is not a fan of Phillips. The two clashed bitterly over comments that Phillips, a former journalist, LWT executive and TV presenter made about the failure of multiculturalism. While waiting in reception, as builders and maintenance people trudged in and out, I noticed that I was not, in fact, visiting the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, but the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Could the scores of stories I had written in the past year about the new CEHR all be wrong?

Being a stickler for a correct acronym, I tackled the CEHR vs. EHRC issue first. Phillips assures me that all references to the CEHR were correct - that is the name of the institution in the Parliamentary Act that created it. The change of name was meant to change the emphasis, he explains.

"We want people to concentrate not so much on the bureaucratic institution but more on what we do.

"It's basically a trivial thing but I think it's important when people talk about us to talk about the Equality and Human Rights Commission, because nobody cares if we're a commission, or a council, or a commune.

"It wasn't something that we spent a great deal of energy on, in a way, because it's pretty obvious."

With the name sorted, the next thing to consider is how this commission is going to operate. MPs have fretted over whether the EHRC is properly funded. Gay rights advocates complain that the commission's responsibilities for gender, race, age, religious and disability discrimination will leave sexual orientation as an after-thought.

Trans activists are annoyed that their needs are seemingly not addressed by the EHRC, while disabled gays complain that the needs of "multiple identity" people are bound to get squeezed out by the more established concerns of the so-called legacy commissions.

Phillips is keen to stress that the first days, weeks and months of the EHRC are about listening and learning.

"We are inheriting a lot from the existing commissions and we don't want to pretend like we're the new thing, like we've discovered everything, and that everything that happened before wasn't any good.

"Bearing in mind though as a commission we're going into completely new ground.

"For example, Stonewall is ahead of us. We're going to depend a lot on them to guide us.

"Secondly, before you start boasting about how wonderful you are I think it's a good idea to make sure that the phone's working.

"So first priority is to establish the organisation as a credible, effective source of guidance and so on before we start sending up fireworks.

"I think it would be arrogant to suppose that our staff, most of whom have come from the legacy commissions, have the level of expertise, subtlety and sophistication about the new strands of religion and sexual orientation as they have about race, gender and disability."

The first serious challenge for Phillips and EHRC is the new Single Equality Act. He calls the government's Green paper "rather timid" and it is up to the commission to ensure there is equality of protection for not just all groups but all citizens.

"If your great Equality Bill is about letting people buy drinks at the golf club bar, excuse me, but don't waste my time.

"Happily I think the new ministers have a greater and deeper ambition - Harriet Harman has been completely clear about this - we think that actually the opportunity of the Equality Bill should be more than to deal with some really specific situations.

"What it should do, rather like the Human Rights Act, is to enshrine certain values in British law.

"The value we think, since Gordon Brown wants to have a new constitutional settlement, of the Equality Act, is to say the that number one plank of a new constitutional settlement in this country, is for greater equality."

In the preparations for the EHRC, the word "strands" came up constantly. The commission is tasked with enforcing equality legislation on age, disability, gender, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation and transgender status, and promote human rights.

Phillips emphasises the human rights aspect of the commission's mission.

"The whole point is not to think of us as an organisation of six joined-up bits which are somehow under the same roof.

"We're interested in all kinds of discrimination and inequality, even if it doesn't involve any specifics in the legislation.

"For example, we've become very interested in the issue of carers, but obviously the six protected groups are going to be our priority because that is what is in the law and what we have to deal with."

On trans rights, he points out that the EHRC is committed to advancing the rights of all and the commission must listen and learn from the people who know the problems and challenges.

"I have to say, working with (trans activist) Christine Burns has taught me a hell of a lot. I mean, just being around her.

"To be completely blunt about it, given the background that I come from, a Methodist Caribbean family and all the rest of it, someone like Christine is way out of my ken, frankly, but actually it just goes to show the most important thing, the most persuasive thing for people, is to meet people. Real people."

Phillips was a controversial choice to head the EHRC. He has been outspoken on the failures of multiculturalism, of which he had been a vocal supporter, during his time as head of the Commission for Racial Equality. His talent for generating headlines is undeniable.

Born in London on New Year's Eve 1953, of Guyanan parents, he went to secondary school in Georgetown, Guyana and returned to the UK to study chemistry at Imperial College London.He became involved with left-wing politics, ultimately being elected President of the National Union of Students in 1978.

A distinguished career in television followed. At London Weekend Television he rose from a researcher to Head of Current Affairs as well as presenting The London Programme and documentaries. Close to Tony Blair and a passionate believer in the New Labour project, he left TV to return to politics, being elected to the London Assembly in 2000. He was its chair until he resigned in 2003 to take charge of the CRE.

After three years in the job he warned that the UK is "sleepwalking into segregation" because of the accepted wisdom of multiculturalism.

The response was suitably inflammatory – Ken Livingstone accused him of pandering to the right.

"When he was appointed to run the CRE, it did an awful lot of work taking up genuine cases," London's Mayor told the BBC. "What he did was turn it into a vast press department and wound down all the legal work.

"Ever since then he's gone so far over to the other side that I expect soon he’ll be joining the BNP."

His first controversy as head of the new commission came before they even opened for business.

He caused outrage among traditional historians with his comments about recalibrating British history to better reflect the contribution of ethnic minorities.

"When we talk about the Armada, it is only now that we are beginning to realise that part of it is Muslims - actually it was the Turks who saved us because they held the Armada for a few weeks, on the request of Elizabeth I," he told a Labour party conference fringe event.

"Let's rewrite that story, let's use our heritage to rewrite that story so that it is truly inclusive."So that we have an identity which brings us together and binds us in the stormy times we’re going to have."

Phillips response to the criticism is characteristically unapologetic.

"Besides the fact that black men shouldn't have much to say about English history because what do I know? I can't read the English language, my ancestors were nothing to do with the English Empire. Oops, never mind, they were slaves."

Phillips asserts that he merely "calls it as I see it.

"I would say to my colleagues when I'm chair of something, the only qualification I would expect from anybody else is whatever else they're doing in the organisation they're better at it than me.

"So we've got a fantastic leadership team all of whom are better at corporate management, policy or law than I am. My job is to lead the team. Controversial?

"That's what you have to decide with these kinds of jobs. Whether to put these things politely where nobody can hear them, or the truth spoken as the truth.

"I think the value of having a chair who is prepared to deal with difficult subjects and dilemmas is that people will know that the organisation is honest.

"The fact is that we deal with the most explosive territory in British public life, other than perhaps war.

"There are questions which we will keep bothering people about, for example now we can read people's genetic material.

"What are we going to say when insurance companies say they ought to be able to load somebody's premium for a condition that they are predisposed to get, but may not get later in life?

"To me that's an equality issue. These are big moral questions and to dance around them as though there weren't a decision to be taken around them I think is dishonest."

DNA testing, carers, trans rights – no one could say that Phillips lacks ambition for the EHRC.

But the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities want protection and there is considerable concern that sexual orientation and gender identity will come a poor second to race and disability. What can we expect from the commission?

"I think the priority is, because we've discussed this as commissioners, we think that in the first year we have to put a big push on hate crime and on bullying, which I think is related to this issue on sexual orientation.

"There are many things which are important, but the thing which matters most for gay and transgender people is to be able to be safe and that means we have to get a focus on hate crime and make sure the police and local authorities know what they're doing and that people are protected."

The CEHR exists to serve the public, and has a helpline and offers advice through its website.

Will it, like its legacy commissions, be taking forward test cases? What can a gay complainant expect from them?

"You would expect exactly the same response that anybody that comes to us with a complaint of discrimination under any of the anti-discrimination legislation.

"So as far as the complaints issue and dealing with the individuals concerned I think we've got the service out there, the website where they can get information, we will take the calls, and if we think the case if meritorious then we will take the case.

"A lot of people who were anxious about the commission talked about the case work and all the rest of it.

"I understand why they're anxious about that and I want to make it absolutely clear we are not going to resile from supporting legal case.

"But people need to know that going through a case of discrimination when you are the victim, it's not a laugh.

"It's hard on you; it's hard on your family. In the workplace you may end up winning but none of your workmates may talk to you.

"Rather than put people through that I would rather people prevent it from happening.

"My point is, the reason we are here is because we don't want to have people to be heroes in order to tackle discrimination. It's our job to try and prevent that."

For all the talk of equal rights for all, the much-praised Sexual Orientation Regulations are civil and not criminal prohibitions.

Any determined Christian business owner is free to discriminate as much as he likes, and the worst he will suffer is a fine.

Phillips, unsurprisingly, does not share my pessimistic analysis."First of all it's better to have the legislation than not have it. Secondly, any piece of legislation is only as creative as those who use it can be.

"Let’s say you're broadly right about contempt and fines and so on.

"I think that in the arena of gay bashing or slurs in the workplace, what fine a court may hand down is important, but what is more important to people is being shamed and we will do our best to shame anybody.

"Let me put it as crudely as I can do it as a public official. If somebody is guilty of discrimination of any kind, and with sexual orientation we usually know what it's about with sneering and contempt and all the rest of it, we want them not to be just be punished by the court but frankly to feel the contempt and hatred that they have visited on other people.

"They can argue what they like, but there's a law now and frankly if these people want generally to pose as they often do as the decent and moral people in the community, perhaps they should remember that the first elements of decency in a liberal democracy is the rule of law.

"As far as I'm concerned there isn't a conflict here.

"There is a law. Your faith does not protect you. I understand what you are asking me but to be perfectly honest I haven't got time for it. If people want to use in my view, the mantle of faith to be bigots, I'm not buying it."

Toward the end of our meeting Phillips mentions two friends who are gay – former BP boss John Browne, who had to step down after he lied in court about where he met his ex-boyfriend, and EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, who was outed on national TV by a journalist.

"The fundamental reason for us being here is this. We are more diverse of a society as we have been before both objectively and subjectively.

"What I mean subjectively is, speaking specific to your readers, we are no longer in a time when it is OK and accepted that you should be quiet about your sexual orientation. We've seen how grotesque that can be.

"I have two friends who have been in public life in various ways, John Browne and Peter Mandelson. I have seen how quite incredibly difficult and cruel the suppression of identity can be.

"This is true when people were disabled when I was a kid.

"Disabled children didn't exist because they were invisible. We're in a society where that no longer is right or respectable, although over in the City the latest survey shows that a minority of people will admit to being lesbian or gay and let their colleagues know about it.

"It's our job to let the light in on all that and let it be OK to be different."

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/opinion/2005-5796.html

September 07 - Boris Johnson interview

2008-01-20T17:58:00.000Z

At this time of this interview Boris was one of the four Tories vying to become the party candidate for Mayor of London. He won the selection on 27th September 2007. The election for Mayor of London will be held on May 1st 2008.

When I meet Boris Johnson in a Westminster cafe it becomes apparent, immediately after he shambles in and launches himself into a chair, that 10am is not optimum Boris time.

As he puts it in his diary of the 2001 election campaign, Friends, Voters, Countrymen, it is "a pretty ungodly hour for someone accustomed to journalism."

The interview had been in the pipeline well before Labour activists started taking swipes at him over his views on everything from civil partnerships to climate change.

In fact, the day after Boris announced his candidacy amid chaotic scenes outside City Hall several weeks ago, his press officer enthusiastically agreed to an interview with PinkNews.co.uk

The month of August intervened, and when we finally sit down to talk about his views on gays and gay issues, he has been roundly condemned as hostile to the LGBT community by left-wing groups nervous about his bid for the Conservative party nomination for Mayor of London.

In many ways he is reminiscent of Michael Foot - sartorially shambolic, though the suits have got better - and the general impression of not really caring about bourgeois concerns like neatness.

In the words of one critic, he looks like he has to keep a pitchfork in his back pocket to deal with his straw-coloured mess of hair.

He also has that vagueness that Foot possessed.

Many of Boris' stream of consciousness responses trail off or come to a sudden stop, but there is an impressive intelligence to his answers. One thing is for certain - he is not afraid to question measures that some gay people take as an article of faith - a new law of incitement to homophobic hatred among them.

43-year-old Boris - the 'Johnson' seems somehow redundant - is one of four candidates for the Conservative party nomination for Mayor of London. Andrew Boff, an IT consultant and publisher, joins Kensington & Chelsea councillors Warwick Lightfoot and Victoria Borwick in the contest, which has been opened up to the public for the first time.

All Londoners on the electoral register are eligible to vote by phone or postal ballot.

This "open primary" of voters closes on 26th September and the Tory candidate will be announced soon after. Boris, the clear front-runner, stakes out his message to London's gay community pretty clearly - he is a libertarian.

He thinks Section 28 was a bad idea, he voted in favour of civil partnerships and he will "fight against" homophobic attacks. That probably means he will attempt to use his powers to combat them, but could just as easily mean he will pile in, head first, to bash the homophobes himself.

That's the thing about Boris. He claims he is always being misinterpreted.

The many hundreds of articles he wrote in his years as a rightwing journalist and columnist do give his opponents easy pickings, he admits.

"I am on record with loads of provocative articles about loads of things, but if you take the article as a whole, they always amount to robust common sense," he claims.

He laments the tactics of Labour activists, who have pre-empted even his selection as Tory candidate by producing a 17-page document highlighting a range of those provocative statements from his pre-2001 journalism.

One quote in particular, taken from his 2001 book Friends, Voters, Countrymen, has angered and upset many gay people:

"If gay marriage was OK - and I was uncertain on the issue - then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog."

This infamous passage actually refers to an incident where Boris was jogging and was verbally assaulted by "three youths."

He challenges them, they respond that they had formed a bad impression of him from a TV appearance, and he wonders if comments he once made on BBC current affairs programme Question Time (see above) were the reason they disliked him.

"What I was saying was that I am generally a libertarian," is Boris' response.

"What they are trying to do is they are trying to invent a character or create a turnip ghost, a kind of scarecrow figure they can attack because its much more convenient to have some sort of crypto-fascist, foam-flecked, Norman Tebbit-type Tory instead of me.

"They have gone back through thousands of articles, millions of words, to try to find a few phrases that they can take out of context to demonstrate I am something that I am not."

But clearly comparing a loving gay relationship with "three men and a dog" is in any context insulting.

He disagrees, and denies that such comments imply that civil partnerships are not equal to marriage and are instead are just a sort of contract.

"No, no, no, no, no," insists Boris. "I am genuine - I come from a family, I have Muslim ancestors, my ancestors believed in polygamy and I believe in loving relationships between all sorts of people to be valid, I really do."

He pauses for a moment, suddenly aware that he might have caused even more outrage. "I don't want to get myself into more trouble than I need to be," he adds.

"I am in favour of civil partnerships and I voted in favour of them.

"I was cycling up Shaftesbury Avenue the other day and there were two guys in a rickshaw who had just got married and they said, "Hey Boris we just got married" and it was wonderful."

On Section 28, which in fairness he did vote to repeal on one occasion, the incumbent Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has directly attacked his record.

"He struck a stance in support of the anti-lesbian and gay Section 28 and now wishes to be seen as supporting London's diversity," Ken said.

Again, in this race, the 'Livingstone' also feels slightly redundant.

The aforementioned 17-page report from left-leaning think tank Compass also highlighted some comments from Boris, written before he became MP for Henley in 2001 that appear to support the aims of Section 28.

"Slowly Labour is winning the battle it really cares about, the Kulturkampf, adjusting what can be said, and what cannot be said... Homosexuality is to be taught in schools." The Spectator 29 April 2000.

"I am not sure how widespread this new right-on mood really is. Metropolitan opinion was wrong-footed over Section 28." The Spectator 29 April 2000

Boris accepts the historic anger of gay people over towards the Tories over Section 28.

"I disliked all that (the way the Tories acted in the 1980s) and what I disliked about it was the way they were trying to whip up people's feeling of identification with the Tories by trying to make them hostile to another group.

"I hate all that stuff. In a way this is also my objection to the way the current incumbent is running London. It's all about trying to build up loyalty by trying to bash other groups."

I suggest that this would be a perfect opportunity to apologise to the gay community for Section 28.

Surprisingly, given that he has probably apologised more times than any other mainstream politician, he rejects this relatively easy option.

"I hate all this gesture politics. I am not convinced of the political value of endlessly apologising to absolutely everyone.

"On Section 28, what it was trying to do, what the whole argument was really about was about homophobia and tolerance.

"It wasn't really about the practicalities - it was about what you thought about it. It wasn't ideological - it was personal and I dislike it because I think all human hatreds are, when you dissect them, all irrational human hatreds are always really about your own feelings about yourself in some way.

"Anyway I think it's all bollocks and the sooner we get over it the better."

The existence of LGBT liaison officers within the police seemed to be news to Boris, but he is keen to praise the Met generally.

"I didn't know about those community support officers working specifically with the gay community but I'm in favour of safe neighbourhood teams and teams of community support officers that work with communities of all kinds.

"I think it's a fantastic way of improving everybody's sense of security on the streets of London."

Many groups, among them Stonewall, argue that attacks motivated by hatred of gay people should be covered by a new homophobic hate crime law. Boris takes a different view on the likely effects of such a law, especially on people's right to criticise homosexuality.

"Of course I want everybody to feel safe, and I deplore homophobic attacks, I think they're outrageous and disgusting and I will fight against them if I'm lucky enough to be Mayor.

"The point I'm trying to make to you is I loathe acts that encourage hatred of groups. But sometimes the very measures we take can kind of stir things up rather than produce harmony.

"What I worry about is that you have erosions in free speech that I don't think anyone in the gay community would ultimately support. We are all basically, what we want is for people to debate freely and rationally and not to succumb to bigotry."

Ken has, of course, been very vocal in his support for the gay community. Boris says that funding for Pride London will continue if he becomes Mayor ("The idea of gay Pride seems very good. Right on!") and the community generally is one he stresses his support for.

"London has a fantastic record of being attractive to gays around the world and being a place gays feel they can come and be safe and where they will have a tolerant society. That's what I want."

He even tacitly agrees that the office can be used to encourage other cities to become involved with the global struggle for gay equality, while making clear he will not have a "foreign policy" like Ken Livingstone.

"I'm not in favour of the Mayor intervening on every matter of global controversy but yeah I think there are things he can do to improve people's lives elsewhere."

A lot has been written about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson's background.

Eton and Oxford-educated, he has been close to party leader David Cameron since university.

The seemingly bumbling Boris has been editor of The Spectator, Brussels correspondent and later a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, and MP for Henley since 2001.

Michael Howard fired him from the frontbench in 2004 amid accusations he lied about his extra-marital affair with journalist Petronella Wyatt. Brought back to frontline politics by Cameron, he has proved popular as shadow higher education minister.

His many TV appearances have added to the public perception of Boris as a sort of Bertie Wooster-ish genial buffoon, but that convenient caricature conceals an ambitious political animal.

He did not bumble into a high-profile political career – indeed in his 2001 diary of his campaign for Parliament, he says he "always knew" he would become an MP.

Despite his early ambition, he smoked cannabis in his youth. Today he takes a traditional Tory line on London's established drug culture.

"I'm deeply against drugs. I loathe them. I think they destroy lives and they've changed since my last experiences of cannabis, which were a long time ago.

"I don't want the police to concentrate on rifling through the sock drawer of every student in the hope of finding a rabbit dropping of cannabis resin.

"I think if they do find it they should take action and I don't think they should be tolerant but what we want are serious crimes to be dealt with as well, and that was the point I was trying to make about cannabis.

"I have to accept as someone who took it years ago is that the drug has changed and it's far more potent and everything I read now tells me it has much more damaging psychotropic effects and it's a much more effective gateway drug than it used to be.

"I think most people strongly disapprove of drug culture. I don't think anybody really wants to see London turning into anything like Amsterdam was a few years ago, last time I was there, with a really sleazy atmosphere and lots of places really suffering from the tolerance of drugs."

A few months ago, the smart money was on another Cameron ally, Nick Boles, winning the Tory nomination for Mayor of London. Unfortunately, Boles dropped out unexpectedly when he was diagnosed with cancer, from which he is expected to make a full recovery.

Boris denies his very late entry into the race was David Cameron's idea, and claims he had thought of running for Mayor before Nick Boles withdrew from contention.

"I wont deny it had crossed my mind but I am a friend of Nick and a supporter of Nick and I was very, very sad when he had to pull out - and he encouraged me to do it."

As for his own credentials, as the only candidate for the Tory nomination never to serve in local government in the capital, he has come under fire as a carpetbagger.

"Well I've always loved London. I've always thought London was a fantastic place. I lived in London on and off most of my life.

"And I remember when the idea (of an elected London Mayor) was mooted years ago by my predecessor, actually, Michael Heseltine, thinking my God that's a good idea - we do need a spokesman, the place does need a voice."

A voice silenced by Margaret Thatcher when she abolished the Greater London Council.

"I think it is a bit unfair to blame me. I was at school."

It's a fair point. Boris is well known for his devotion to cycling around London, but of late he has been more concerned with buses.

"I do take the bus when my bike is stolen, as I take the tube. I normally, every day I ride a bike. I've taken all sorts of buses across London recently.

"I used to take the 277 every day. I used to get off at Canary Wharf, with my friend Yvette Cooper (now the housing minister).

"She used to sit next to me on the top deck. Me and Yvette Cooper – God, we used to slug each other, we'd have these ferocious arguments."

Boris has made some strong statements about safety on buses, a big issue for many Londoners instinctively scared of gangs of teenagers who get free travel. His law and order stance is designed to appeal both to natural Tories and older voters.

"Most under sixteens are great kids, but there is a problem," says Boris, warming to his theme.

Weeks of meeting disgruntled bus passengers has galvanised his view that this issue is a vote-winner.

"Travelling around London quite a lot on the buses, talking to loads of, particularly elderly people, it's the biggest issue that's being raised with me at the moment.

"And this is something that's directly in the power of the Mayor to sort out.

"I don't understand why people say the office of Mayor holds no power - he has huge direct power over things like that and there are things I could do immediately if I was lucky enough to get the job on day one I think to elevate the problem of kids abusing their privileges.

"We should take away their right to free travel if they are abusing it and we should take it away for a good long time and that would be a good deterrent."

Of course a policy towards youth crime and unemployment needs to be as much stick as carrot.

Boris is on-message with his proposed solutions for London's disenfranchised teenagers, echoing the sentiments of new Tories such as Shaun Bailey, the party's candidate in the Hammersmith parliamentary seat.

His suggestions range from male role models to old-fashioned respect for authority. "When I was a child there was a real difference between children and adults from the one that there is now.

"I mean there was no question. When I was a child all adults were given automatic respect, I don't mean to exaggerate but you know what I'm driving at, it was a different thing.

"There was more nervousness of adults, people were reluctant to shout at adults to insult them, children are much more confident about things today, which in some ways is a good thing - I'm not saying all the change has been completely bad.

"Because in many ways it's been a liberation, but the trouble is that there are too many kids that simply don't have any understanding of what the boundaries are in their lives.

"They don't have any rules, they don't have any figures of respect, they don't have any role models that they can identify with, they don't have any idea of what it might be to be a grown up human being with a productive interest in the rest of his or her society."

Boris has been heavily criticised for his comments on race.

References to "smiling piccaninnies" in some of his journalism have been used as evidence of his unfitness to lead multicultural London.

Doreen Lawrence, mother of murdered teenager Stephen, has condemned his candidacy.

None of this stops Boris from offering advice to the city's ethnic communities suffering from gang violence.

"There are considerable funds available to the Mayor, to support wonderful organisations like Kids Company, which is run by Camilla Batmanghelidjh, which has 11,000 children on its books and they are working with children who could so easily turn to crime and they're giving them an alternative vision of their futures.

"And they are saying 'you don't have to be like your older brothers, you don't have to be like your uncles, you don't have to feel so frightened about the world that you have to be in gang, there are other ways of being successful than just having this or that tracksuit of pair of trainers' and that's the way forward.

"I think you've got to work with the kids when they're a very young age, you've got to work with the parents and I think that there is great scope for expanding the whole safer neighbourhoods idea and using the networks that are being built up to reach out into every part of the community.

"Also I think the Mayor has a big job, and a potentially wonderful change we could have, is to get more males, black, white, don't care, teaching in primary schools, in London. And the ratio now is really dismal.

"It would make a huge difference I think to young males positive self-identification, if they saw someone teaching them who they could identify with.

"I think that young males learn in a different way from young girls - young males learn in a quite competitive way sometimes and they want to pit their wits against the teacher and if they see a male teacher that they can identify with and they think that's a figure of respect and he knows things and I want to be like that, then that's a fantastic thing.

"I would love to see far more black male graduates particularly."

Boris' comments about Papua New Guinea being over-run with cannibals caused anger, while an article he published while editor of The Spectator accusing Liverpool of wallowing in "vicarious victimhood" forced him to make a personal visit to the city to apologise.

Londoners seem split between those who think Boris' gaffes would make the city a more interesting place and others who cringe at the thought of the havoc his well-established ability to say the wrong thing might unleash.

"I don't like the term gaffes anyway but I reserve the right to keep a sense of humour," he says.

"I think it would be a good thing for a lot of us if we keep a sense of humour about some things.

"But please don't be in any doubt about the seriousness with which I'm approaching this. I'm fighting extremely hard. I'm trying very hard to get the Conservative nomination now and I hope I can win next year."

One of Boris' opponents for that nomination, Andrew Boff, expressed the Tory party's antagonism to the Mayoral organisation that Ken Livingstone has built around himself as London's figurehead by suggesting that City Hall be turned into a gay club.

Boris does not make quite such a generous offer, but still has a message for the gay community.

"I certainly think that are substantial savings that can be made in City Hall and I'm going to make them, I hope, if I get elected, and I look forward to using the proceeds for all sorts of wonderful things for Londoners

"But I think primarily what most people in the gay community would want is a greater sense of security on the streets, better transport and they'd want people to have better access to housing.

"I think the gay community has got enough energy and enterprise to build its own club, another big club, without some subsidy from me."

We asked Boris quick-fire questions about his London. Here are his not very quick responses.

Let's talk about your favourite places in London.

Oh man, then I'm just going to cheese off everybody else, that's the trouble. Everything I say causes immediate anger.

Neighbourhood: Greenwich.

Shop: There are a couple of cheese shops that I'm not going to name for fear of causing a riot. I mean London is incredible, one of the reasons doing this would be so exciting if you think how much better it is from the city I grew up in.

We never had shops selling cheese like this from all over the world. The quality of the food is so much better, the quality of the restaurants is so much better.

Everything is wonderful, well not everything is wonderful - that's what I hope to improve - but it is a joyous place now.

Street: My favourite street is Shaftesbury Avenue, without the traffic. It's beautiful sometimes.

So many people are frightened of it (cycling) but I think roads in London are safer than roads in the countryside. You'd be mad to cycle in the countryside.

The other thing is that people get their bikes stolen and that is something that I can crack down on and I will crack down on.

People snigger about them (decoy bikes) but it will make a huge difference.

Bridge: My favourite bridge is Hammersmith bridge.

Building: The British Museum.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/opinion/2005-5535.html

September 07: The Tories advertise in the gay press

2008-01-20T17:51:00.000Z

For a few weeks in September 2007 the Conservative party ran a series of adverts on PinkNews.co.uk. It was the first time the party had advertised in the gay press. I wrote this editorial defending my decision to take their money.

The Conservative party is well-known for its ad campaigns. From the iconic 1979 "Labour isn’t working" posters, to the "Demon Eyes" of Tony Blair in the 1997 election campaign, through to the "Five Pledges" of Michael "are you thinking what I am thinking" Howard in 2005, never let it be said that the Tory party were short of a strategy.

Some, of course, more successful than others.

Today marks a new stage in the party’s attempts to disseminate its message to the voters. For the first time, the Conservative party is advertising in the gay press - on this website to be exact.

The decision by the management team at PinkNews.co.uk to run this advert and take the revenue that comes from it should not be seen as an endorsement of the Tory party.

We are proud of our ability to engage with all political parties and interest groups, even the ones, such as Christian Voice, with whom we profoundly disagree.

The Tory adverts on PinkNews.co.uk are part of a wider internet strategy that has seen the party buy ad space on social networking site Facebook, on zeitgeist gossip portal Popbitch and even on NHS doctors' websites.

The aim, we suppose, is to try to reach the places billboards and traditional "dead tree press" adverts cannot.

The political parties are prohibited from advertising on television, so the net is a new opportunity for all of them. A casual glance at the millions of words written about the impact of the internet on the American political process should convince even the most hardened cynic of the growing importance of net campaigning.

From ObamaGirl to YouTube clips of a Republican candidate in drag, to the groundbreaking Democratic Presidential candidates Logo debate for the gay community, it is clear that online is the place to engage with disaffected voters, particularly younger ones.

We are aware that some of our readers will be angered that PinkNews.co.uk has decided to take adverts from the Conservative party.

We can only stress that we look forward to the day when all the parties see the value of advertising on our site and understand the value of the unique access to clued-up, engaged and switched-on gay and lesbian readers that we can offer.

We will never endorse a political party or try to tell our readers how to vote. By the same token, if advertisers, from retailers to charities to pressure groups to political parties, want to reach our readers, we will make a judgment on their product and decide whether or not to let them on our site.PinkNews.co.uk is a work-safe website.

We do not publish images of naked men (or women) because we think it is possible to present information to the gay community without having to use sex to 'sell' our product.

We would never run an advert from anyone that seeks to harm the gay community.

There will be no adverts for ex-gay movements on PinkNews.co.uk.

20 years ago, by the same logic, had we existed, we would have struggled to accept adverts from a Tory government determined to demean and belittle gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

However, the messages that the Conservative party in 2007 want to share with the gay community are ones we feel comfortable with.

June 07: Ken Livingstone on Pride London

2008-01-20T17:42:00.000Z

Ken, tell us about your first Pride.

The very first lesbian and gay march I did, it was in the late 1970s and Tom Robinson was the lead speaker at Trafalgar Square. It was the first time I spoke on the plinth at Trafalgar Square. It was miserable grey day, late winter, early autumn. A grim, grim day.

I was the GLC member for Norwood in 1973 and by sheer coincidence the gay liberation front squatted in my constituency in 1973. Just as I got elected. They were great fun, completely mad in retrospect. They made Peter Tatchell look conservative.

And that traumatised the local political establishment because they thought this was a diversion from the real issue of class struggle, comrade.

The gay liberation front had a horse, and the candidate rode on the horse through the streets and then on polling day he was carried around in a coffin, to represent the death of democracy.

I remember a lot of the hard Left thought it was an outrageous undermining of class struggle.He came to the count in the coffin. So it was good fun, it was a good start.

A lot of people have been critical of your public support for gay rights because you had the homophobic Mayor of Moscow at a press conference in front of the world's press a few months ago, and you chose not to say anything to him. What's your response to that?

Well, I mean, when you've got the mayors of Paris and Berlin, who are gay, you really can't outdo them. And I thought they handled it very well. The most important thing about that press conference was that everyone saw it and what they saw was Mayors of two of the greatest cities in Europe, openly gay, and here's the Mayor of Moscow doing this appalling number.

And he's under huge pressure, I'm not saying this is an area you'd like to go down voluntarily, but you've got the grand Patriarch of the Eastern orthodox church and the Grand Mufti of Moscow, the Chief Rabbi in Moscow.

The only three things these religions agree on is that “perverts” shouldn't march through the streets of Moscow.

So you have sympathy for his position?

No, no. I don't have any sympathy for his position. But he's under huge pressure from the religions and what I noticed was, I mean the Tories put down a motion to say you must promise never to meet the mayor of Moscow here again, but overlooked the fact that the Israeli parliament voted by 2 to 1 to ban gay marches.

You've got London, Berlin, and Copenhagen and Amsterdam, and San Francisco, New York, but these little gay friendly jewels are floating in a great effluence of homophobia, and the vast majority of gay people in the world are still risking if not their lives, a savage beating.

We've had this huge influx of Poles into London over the last 15 years, and then you see the Polish government and these homophobic twins who run it, and you think, perhaps all the Poles who come here are fleeing them. If you were gay or lesbian in Poland, where would you want to be? You'd want to come to London.

Surely the bravest thing to do is stay in your own country and change things there?

Yeah. For lesbian and gay campaigners here, fifteen years ago, I mean, you were putting your jobs on the line. One of the first things I got involved in was a schools inspector in the ILEA back in the early 70s who came out as openly gay and immediately people said, this man can't be allowed into schools.

He's clearly going to abuse the children, and that was one of the first cases I took up.

Anyway, I've gone on a great diversion and forgotten you're original question. I think you've answered it.

Would you accept an invitation to Moscow Pride next year?

As long as it doesn't clash with my election. When is it?

May.

There may be a small problem, I've got to fight off the hordes of reactionaries and get re-elected. But listen, I'd be happy too. When I'm in Moscow... this came up. You're talking about what happened this year. Last year in Moscow, and the whole issue came up again, and I was able to say, 'no, no, you've got to accept that lesbians and gays have equal rights, and they should have a march.'

So we've done all this, it just didn't get mentioned until this year when it became a much bigger issue.

London Pride is obviously a big event that you fund. But it's a very inward-looking event. What I mean by that is, St Patrick's Day isn't an Irish only event. Do you think Pride needs to do more to become a true community event?

I don't know. I mean, last year as we marched through London, yes, every gay and lesbian from London is really there aren't they, but the majority of people lining that route are tourists, either from the rest of Britain or the rest of the world, and I suspect, not to the same degree.

Londoners all pile into St Patrick's Day because the Irish know how to party, they enjoy it more, and there's a strong element of that as well with Pride, and that will build up year by year. We'll market this, I mean Visit London markets it actively and it’s a great day out for people.

Do you think it could do more to include the whole of the London community?

I'm not going to be in the position of how telling Pride how it should organise itself, we're here to support it. And that's a debate which has to happen within the lesbian and gay community. I think we're doing quite well actually in London.

Though obviously more women and more black people need greater representation at Pride.

Well, I mean exactly the same argument is made about the environmental movement.

Why aren't there more black people in it.The same was said of the peace movement twenty years ago, why aren't there more black people?

If you're black and you haven't got a job and you've got bad housing and you're subject to massive racism, other issues get pushed back.

But we will get there.

I was speaking to Ben Summerskill of Stonewall earlier about homophobic bullying and he was saying they are now going to distribute the DVD, which you were very kindly involved in, across the country.

Has your impression of homophobic bullying at school been affected by the fact you now have kids?

Mine are only 3 and 4, they don't know there's sex yet, let alone homophobia.Bullying in schools is just horrendous at all levels, and there's a lot, my broad view, which we've really got to push, as proper anti-bullying.

Because it’s not just about being lesbian and gay, it’s about everything else. The scale of violence... when I was at school there was an awful lot of bullying, but people would kick or punch you, now they produce a bloody knife. It’s scary.

I remember when I was a kid I was so glad to leave school and go to work. I just hated it. Because I was very scrawny and slightly unusual, I was always getting beaten up as well. Kids are horrendous.

They're not fully human till they're well into their twenties.

Something you're going to push is the campaign against bullying.

The campaign against bullying, which immediately overlaps the fight against homophobia.

Because the suicide rate of kids is appalling. I grew up in a world where we were innocent, I didn't know sex existed until we were 11. It's just got … the pressure of kids, exams, have you got the money to afford the latest things that everyone else has. Add to that the fact that you're a different sexual orientation, and it's a nightmare

June 07: Harriet Harman interview

2008-01-20T17:21:00.000Z

This article was first published on 3rd June 2007.

The results of the election for deputy leader of the Labour party were announced on 24th June 2007. Jon Cruddas won the first round with 19.39%. Hazel Blears came sixth, Peter Hain came fifth, Hilary Benn finished fourth, Jon Cruddas came third, Alan Johnson came second and Harriet Harman won with 50.43%

Justice Minister Harriet Harman has something she wants to say to the gay community, particularly those who grew up during the Blair years.

"Young people, remember! Remember! Be afraid!"

Hoodies, perhaps? Terrorism? The threat of a nude Keith Chegwin returning to our television screens?

No – the resurgent Conservative party.

"I just want to say to those people that can't remember what it was like under the Tory party, they absolutely represent that dark part of politics which is quite comfortable with discrimination, with prejudice, and so it's like a warning.

"This is a dangerous moment."

In this six-way race for Deputy Leader of the Labour party, Harriet Harman is often touted as the Brownite candidate.

A former civil rights lawyer, she had a short and turbulent Cabinet career at the start of the Blair decade, and later returned to government as Solicitor General and now as a Justice minister.

That's a good place to start actually. She has of late been subtly critical of the style of Presidential government under Tony Blair.

The sort of government where the press pack knows the contents of the next policy announcement before Parliament, before the Cabinet, hell, even before the ministers in a department.

The poor civil servants probably only find out what they will be doing at work for the next few months from the free papers handed out at London tube stations. Or indeed where their office is or what it is called.

A case in point – the Lord Chancellor, Ms Harman's superior at the Department for Constitutional Affairs, recently revealed that he found out that the department was being renamed and reconfigured from, er, The Sunday Telegraph.

And he used to be Tony Blair's flatmate – God knows how he treats Cabinet colleagues he doesn't like.

Harriet, trooper that she is, concedes that she too found out from the papers that when she went into work the next day she would be a Justice minister and not a Constitutional Affairs minister.

"It's been discussed for a long time, the question of changing the boundaries of what used to be the Lord Chancellors Department and the Home Office.

"When I was legal officer at the NCCL we used to argue for a ministry for justice.

"It is not that people have not though through the detail but as to where I found out – yes, the Sunday papers."

For those of you not au fait with the acronym, NCCL is, or rather was, the National Council for Civil Liberties. They changed the name to Liberty. Acronyms are so last century.

Harriet Harman, 56, MP for the inner London constituency of Camberwell and Peckham, lawyer, campaigner, feminist, gay rights advocate, former scourge of the establishment, is now a member of a government trying to bang Islamic suspects up for three months without charge.
An administration full of lawyers who seem to have lost their respect for the law, some have argued.

Ms Harman, not surprisingly, disagrees. The climate is different these days:

"When I was at Liberty one of the things we argued for was a Human Rights Act and we actually now have that certainty, that if the government or Parliament oversteps the mark in terms of breaching an individual's human rights, then the courts are immediately there to ensure their rights are respected.

"That is not how it was before, you had to go to Europe, and it would take seven years, so actually we have done a lot to entrench new rights. I have been Solicitor General and now a Justice minister I see the change that the HRA has brought about."

But it is not all Shami-bashing.

"I think that Liberty plays a very important role but it's a different role from our role (at NCCL)."

Human rights, for gay people are, unfortunately, still a big issue, particularly for our friends in Poland and Latvia.

Gay rights marches being banned. Teletubbies being accused of promoting gayness to the under-threes.

Ms Harman seems an appropriate person to ask what can be done to help our gay brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe.

"We should take, very strongly, a human rights perspective.

"It is people's right to demonstrate, right not to be discriminated against, the right to have family life, which is protected in the European convention, and therefore this is not a question of diplomacy or European policy.

"It is about our commitment to people's human rights wherever they are."

It is a this point in our meeting, held in the ghostly calm of a House of Commons on its mid-term break, that Harriet feels moved to speak out.

"I have got something I want to say!

"While we have still got a long way to go in this country, in terms of homophobia and homophobic crime and discrimination, we must never lose sight of how far we have come and take it for granted such that we feel that we can take the risk of a Tory government.

"The fact is the Tories are now agreeing with us, but we have got to remember that it was Labour who fought against Section 28, fought for civil partnerships and fought for a right not to be discriminated against on grounds of sexual orientation.

"What we did is said 'we are in government, we want to be in government to do these things.'

"The Tories argued against to begin with. We had taken a strong lead, we have changed the weather, and the Tories come on our ground.

"Without Labour being in government we would have still been in the climate that the Tories left us with ten years ago."

A recent poll for PinkNews.co.uk bears out her concerns. 534 of our readers took part in a poll in May.

Asked how they would vote if a general election were called immediately, and given the choice between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Lib Dem leader Sir Ming Campbell, 40% selected Campbell, 33% Cameron just 27% Gordon Brown.

"The Tories have not really changed, they just want to win power, so therefore they are saying the latest thing they think people want to hear," continues Ms Harman.

"Outside, the Tory party is the same old nasty party. They have licensed David Cameron to say things that they hope will make him popular with groups who previously wouldn't have been seen dead having any dealings with the Tory party.

"This is a dangerous moment for people lulled into a false sense of security. A Labour government is the only way we can be sure this agenda is safe where we are, let alone moving forward."

At this point I feel moved to point out that there is a widespread perception among gay people that Gordon Brown has a problem with the gay rights agenda, albeit just a perception. As the Brownite candidate, Ms Harman first tries to go wide:

"But this is about the party, it is a question of who stands where, and the Labour party is firmly committed to the agenda of gay rights.

"The Tory party is firmly opposed to it. They are biting their tongues because they have allowed Cameron licence.

"They have bet the shop on this basically. They are allowing him to say anything because they want to get into power.

"This is not about the inclinations or the preparedness of Cameron, this is about the Labour party and the Tory party and we are the party that believes in equality and that will fight against prejudice and discrimination. "

So I try again. "You are the candidate closest to Gordon Brown - is he as committed to the equality agenda as Tony Blair was?" I ask.

"I am sure he will be. Absolutely. In terms of his work as Chancellor of the Exchequer, it has not brought him front of house into these debates.

"Not least because he had to be relatively circumscribed in what he did to avoid the two leaders problem.

"If ever he came out on something then it would be like 'oh is this different to Tony Blair, is he saying more or less than Tony Blair.'

"Because he was such a huge figure in the Treasury he had to be more circumscribed in what he said, and indeed Tony Blair still is the Prime Minister.

"I would want to reassure people that Gordon is very much part of Labour's equality agenda."

Still, David Cameron has spoken in favour of civil partnerships, backed the slow trickle of Tory representatives out of the closet, and seems to be making the right noises.

The effect of all this is most notable with the younger gay population. Ten years is a long time to be in government.

Anyone born before 1985 would be hard pressed to even remember Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.

In the PinkNews.co.uk poll 51% of respondents who were too young to vote in the last election rated David Cameron as the best leader of our country, hence Ms Harman's warning to gay youth that he is a dangerous man.

"David Cameron is saying what people want to hear, he looks as though he is the appeal to modernity, because he is relatively new, don't be fooled.

"He will say anything that you want him to say there but there is the question of where are his roots.

"My roots, going back 30 years, we are used to facing the howls of the Tories and the lynch mob of the right wing for even making these arguments and that is where we come from.

"We steeled in that, it is part of our politics. It's about consistency and belief and what your politics is made of."

So will a new Brown government usher in a new style, and how will it take on the Tory threat and their appealing new leader?

"We have got to bear in mind that, without over-stating it, the Tories are once again a threat, in a way that Iain Duncan Smith wasn't, William Hague wasn't and Michael Howard wasn't either.

"We have got to give him the benefit of actually taking apart his proposals.

"We have to be forensic in how we expose Cameron.

"For example, when he said that thing that he was going to support marriage. That was like a dog-whistle call to bits of the Tory party.

"Then, when pressed, it was, 'oh if you are on your third marriage, you still get the tax relief, but if you have lived together as a couple and brought up your children together but never married, you don't.'

"So what sort of signal does that send? So then he was challenged 'well what about civil partnerships?'

"'OK, no they can't get the tax relief' he said. 'Oh, but if they have children, they can.'

"Whereas if you are married, you get it irrespective of whether you have children.

"What we have got to do with Cameron is actually expose the fact that there is no commitment, no principles, and no practical policies."

In our interviews with the candidates for Deputy Leader, we have heard of their plans and aspirations for the role.

Is it a campaigning job? A conduit between the party and the Prime Minister? A Cabinet role?

Ms Harman starts with an obvious assertion: "The job involves making absolutely sure that Labour wins a fourth term. All of these things that we care about, we can't do anything about if we are not in government.

"The polls show very clearly that it is me plus Gordon which gives Labour the best chance for us to win a fourth term."

The poll in question is featured prominently on her campaign literature.

YouGov polled 2,000 people, though it is not made clear who commissioned the survey.

"If you add together Gordon and all the other candidates and you ask the voters who is most likely to make you feel inclined to vote Labour, across the board, the answer is: me and Gordon.

"Particularly with swing voters, who are not certain whether or not to vote Labour, and particularly with women voters."

The other candidates fare less well in this snapshot of voter sentiment.

Hilary Benn, very much the quiet one in this race, comes in second (12% with swing voters and 10% with women.) Among women, no one else polls above 7%

However, to win that unprecedented fourth term in office, the Labour party needs to be rebuilt – all the candidates say so.

"In my constituency we have 700 members. I don't just talk about rebuilding the party, I have done it, I have knocked on the doors. So I have the confidence to say to the party nationally I can help build the party, because I have shown I can do it on my own patch.

"If people can't do it on their own patch, how can they be expected to be credible when they say that everybody else should do it?"

Ms Harman was one of the earliest reshuffle casualties of the Blair years, serving just 14 months as Secretary of State for Social Security.

If she becomes Deputy Leader should she be back in the Cabinet for the first time since July 1998?

"If you are going to be strong for the party you have to be in the Cabinet, not outside waiting for people to come out in order to say what the party would like to happen.

"If you are leading a big department, delivering schools or hospitals, you can't deliver for the party."

Peter Hain, Alan Johnson and Hazel Blears backed the idea of a new crime of incitement to homophobia when they spoke to PinkNews.co.uk

As a Justice Minister, what is Ms Harman's view?

"We want to stamp out homophobic crime and things like acts preparatory, such as conspiracy, incitement, contempt; they need to be properly covered.

"I know there is an argument that there is a gap in the law, I would want to look at that.

"I also want to discuss with the prosecutors whether or not there is evidence and they just have not been prosecuting, or whether the law has been the problem."

Finally, we talked about the new Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Many have expressed concern that the new body will not be able to tackle its multiple responsibilities, among them racial, sexual and disability discrimination.

"The roots of, and the manifestation of discrimination and inequality in relation to gay and lesbian people are completely different from the roots of and the manifestation of discrimination against women."

Ms Harman keeps on-message, but seems to accept that it might not work:

"There is not one set of causes and one set of remedies.

"Tackling discrimination requires a forensic understanding of what is underpinning it.

"It makes sense for those places where there is a vulnerability to the breach of human rights to come together and to work together and to share, for example, legal advice, IT systems and personnel.

"But in bringing them together it's very important that we don't blur the edges of the sharpness of the different strands.

"To be effective we must not lose sight of the different strands and if that means having a separate committee to do with gay rights and homophobia that might be necessary but what we can't do is let people think that there is a general problem and a general solution."

At the very start of this seemingly endless campaign for Deputy Leader, Ms Harman got a lot of flak for saying that Labour "needed" a woman in the role. Surely that's discrimination?

"I think that a men-only leadership campaign would have been a very bad thing for the party. We are a party of 97 very strong women MPs and we would mask the women behind an all male leadership. I don't believe in men only politics full stop."

Given her closeness to Gordon Brown, whatever the result of the election it seems likely that Harriet Harman will be back in the Cabinet, only nine years after she left it.

In June 2007 Harriet Harman was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour party.

Days later new Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed her Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons and Labour party Chair.

She has subsequently been given the roles of Secretary of State for Equalities and Minister for Women.

June 07: Hilary Benn interiew

2008-01-20T17:10:00.000Z

This article was first published on 23rd June 2007.

"This is going to be a really, really closely fought contest and I genuinely have no idea what the outcome is going to be," Hilary Benn tells me when we meet.

The terrace of the House of Commons is the location for this typically relaxed Benn comment.

He is unique among the candidates for Deputy Leader I have spoken to, in that he arrived with no entourage. He exudes a sense of schoolboy excitement that he does not know who will win, as if he was just an interested observer in the race for John Prescott’s job.

Sipping House of Commons mineral water on a sunny June day, we chat amiably about the dozen or so Skype conversations the MP for Leeds Central has undertaken in the pursuit of second in command. Journalists and senior Brown lieutenants are deep in conversation a few tables away. Hilary Benn, the bookies favourite in the six-way contest, seems oblivious.

An MP for just eight years, Benn barely scraped together enough nominations to make it onto the list. Some said his father called in old favours to secure his son’s place on the ballot paper.

Whether that is true or not, what is for certain is that Benn junior surprised everyone by coming top of the list of nominations from the Constituency Labour Parties, who have a third of the vote in this contest.

"It took slightly longer than I would have liked, but I always said from the beginning that I was confident I was going to get on the ballot paper, and I did," he tells me.

Benn declines to explain his appeal to the party grassroots, instead stressing the common theme of all the candidates, the members:

"I think the party wants to be heard and it wants to be listened to. They want a chance to participate in discussions about what we are going to do in the future.

"The contest has been a wonderful process. Genuinely I think the party feels good about it, people have been coming to hustings, discussed a huge range of issues.

"People have been joining the party in large numbers."

Benn takes a novel approach to the much-discussed renewal process:

"Quite a good way of trying to frame the task we have got is to say, ‘supposing we hadn’t been in government for the last ten years.’

"If we were coming in for the first time now, what would be the priorities? What would a Labour government be seeking to do?

"That is why affordable housing has really come to the fore in these debates.

"I believe in a practical and a purposeful politics, if we are going to overcome cynicism and alienation, which I worry about.

"The best way you do that is when people see politics being relevant to their lives, helping them deal with their problems and realise their dreams and aspirations for the future, as opposed to being remote, distant and alienating.

"I represent a constituency, Leeds Central, where at the last election 54% of the electorate voted for nobody at all.

"Why is that the case? What do the constituencies with the lowest turnout have in common? Poor inner cities.

"Where will you see the highest turnout? Leafy suburbs. Why?

"Because more people in the latter type of constituency see politics as having a connection to their lives.

"The minimum wage and the increase in child benefit, tax credits and paternity leave, all came because of politics.

"They didn’t fall out of the sky one morning because someone was feeling generous.

"We worked very hard to make them happen but it’s about seeing the connection between that."

One of the problems for Labour is that the public have absorbed the positive changes in British life over the last ten years, and now are asking ‘what else have you got?’

The appeal of David Cameron’s Conservative party has alarmed many Labour MPs, especially those sitting on small majorities.

With the imminent arrival of a Prime Minister representing a Scottish constituency, many commentators are predicting heavy losses for Labour, perhaps even a loss of power. Benn is predictably upbeat:

"There is everything to play for at the next election. I genuinely do not believe that the British public are at the point where they have decided they have had enough of a Labour government.

"I am relishing the next election because it is going to be a choice between a person of undoubted substance, Gordon Brown, serious politician, serious times, strong moral core, thinks about issues and has shown himself to be radical on a number of things, and David Cameron, who can take his tie off as much as he likes, he can pose for photographs with people … all politics is what do you stand for, what do you believe in, what are your policies."

At a time when the Conservatives should have been sitting back and watching Labour expose their divisions, the opposition have instead been caught in an unwanted ideological battle over a core Tory policy.

Cameronite Shadow Education Secretary David Willetts gave a clumsy statement on secondary education, backing Blair’s cherished city academies while appearing to drop grammar schools altogether. Resignations, u-turns and an avalanche of bad headlines followed.

Benn points to this tussle in the Tory ranks as proof that the opposition threat is a mere paper tiger: "The grammar school debate. Honestly, I look you in the eye and I tell you, I haven’t a clue what their policy is on that subject.

"Now, if I haven’t got a clue, and you may not have a clue, and he hasn’t got a clue, what are the public to make of this?

"It has actually been quite illustrative, because it has demonstrated a lack of clarity about policy in one of the few areas where they were trying to have one, and it demonstrates that the Conservative party, as an entity, isn’t entirely sure that it wants to be taken in all the directions he wants to take it."

As attacks on David Cameron go, that was pretty mild. Benn is avuncular and often seen as a ‘soft’ member of the Cabinet, certainly in comparison to John Reid.

He rankles slightly at the suggestion that International Development is an easy Cabinet post, responding that two million people in refugee camps in Darfur and political infighting in Ethiopia is not soft-core politics.

Benn stresses that he served time as a junior minister at the Home Office, a hard enough job even if you aren't in charge of prisons. One of the disadvantages of being the son of Tony Benn is that people tend to imagine Hilary as just like his father.

He is philospohical when asked if a famous father is a blessing or a burden: "In the end I think it kind of evens out. Sometimes it meant that people were more friendly toward me, sometimes people were less favourably inclined towards me, in the end it can only take people so far.

"I am me, he is him, I am incredibly proud of him he has been enormously supportive of me but each of is ourselves."

Benn waggles his finger at me as he defends Tony Blair’s astounding assertion that it is the press who are to blame for public cynicism about politics and politicians.

"There is no doubt that the perception of spin has harmed politics in general. That’s why I talk about a more straightforward type of politics. My sense is that there is a type of yearning for that out there.

"Why have we got the problem? Partly down to us as politicians, partly down to you as journalists.

"Let’s put it in very sharp terms. Ask people about their most recent experience of using the NHS. 80% say good, very good or excellent. Ask people what they think of the state of the NHS in general, what answer do you get?"

Benn, 53, was raised in a household where the NHS was just one symbol of the collective power of the Labour movement.

His father was a leading member of the party and Hilary, one of four children, worked as a policy adviser in various trade unions for 22 years.

An unsuccessful Parliamentary candidate in 1983 and 1987 in Ealing, where he was a local councillor, in 1997 he was appointed a special adviser to Education Secretary David Blunkett.

He won a by election in Leeds Central in 1999, and by 2001 he was a junior minister at International Development. After a short spell at the Home Office, he returned to DFID in May 2003.

Five months later he was appointed Secretary of State for International Development, and in that role he grants aid to countries that criminalise homosexuality.

As a tax-payer, why should I gift money to help Jamaica, for example, where gay people are beaten, abused and murdered?

"We are trying to deal with poverty and part of what we are doing is trying to help them improve their policing.

"In the end, at International Development, I can’t pretend I am going to be the government of all these countries. We might as well tell the truth to eachother.

"You may be in a country where you have a rotten government. Should you be penalised twice over, once because you are poor and once because you have a rotten government?

"I don’t think that is the right approach. Those countries must answer for what they are doing and those societies must try and change in the way that we have made the change."

Homophobia has become an issue closer to home as well, namely in eastern Europe.

The Polish government repeatedly talk tough on homosexuality, with new laws to ‘protect’ children from gay influence, and the President predicting the end of the world if homosexuals are given equal rights. These are the people we are in union with.

What use is the EU if it cannot guarantee the rights of LGBT people?

"It is not an easy process, and I must say, seeing some of those pictures, and hearing some of those reports of what has gone on is pretty disturbing.

"But, as our society has shown, we have seen a transformation in your lifetime and certainly in mine. We criminalised people when I was born, up until we changed the law.

"I reflect on my own political life, my experience as a councillor in west London in the 1980s.

"Ealing council was by no means the first, there were other pioneers in London, but I remember the first time that we put adverts for teaching jobs in the gay press, saying we welcome applications regardless of sexual orientation.

"Some people were apoplectic.

"I remember about ten years later, I was standing on Turnham Green underground station, waiting for the District Line to arrive, and next to me was this large poster, urging people to join the police force. At the bottom it said ‘we welcome applications from people regardless of sexual orientation.'

"I remember that very moment thinking 'that is how our society has changed' and people do get it in the neck for being part of a pioneering process.

"We are profoundly different and profoundly better as a society as a result of that change and that is a combination of legislation, things we are really proud to have put on the statute book, but it is also social attitudes changing.

"Each society has got to make that journey, and politics can be both a powerful force in helping to make the change, and also use legislation as a bookend on social change, helping to solidify it within society.

"It is about each country standing up for the values it represents. It is about offering support to people who are trying to stand up for those values, and leading by example. Those are the things that we can do."

The votes for Deputy Leader are already in. On Sunday 24th June, Gordon Brown will be declared leader of the Labour party.

And once all the second preference votes have been cast, and perhaps third preferences as well, the party will have a new deputy.

Bookies, who after all make a living from correct predictions, think it will be Hilary Benn.

What is his vision for the job he is tipped to win?

"If this is about party members having a voice, a greater voice in what is being decided, then members want a voice on policy.

"Therefore if you want the Deputy Leader to be in part your voice then he has to be in Cabinet with policy responsibility, on the committees and arguing all of that.

"In the end it is ideas that will bring people back into the party, it is causes, passions, things we haven’t yet done. That is what motivates people to join political parties."