Tory leadership hopeful Esther McVey has come under fire from within her own party after she said it should be up to parents if they want to withdraw their primary-age children from lessons on same-sex relationships.
The remarks by McVey, a former work and pensions secretary, sparked a backlash from equality campaigners and one of her own colleagues, Justine Greening, who was the first openly gay female cabinet minister.
McVey told Sky News: “I believe parents know best for their children. While they’re still children – and we’re talking primary school [age] – then really the parents need to have the final say on what they want their children to know.”
She condemned parents protesting outside schools, but said: “The final say is with the parents. If parents want to take their young children – primary school children – out of certain forms of sex and relationship education then that is down to them.”
Greening tweeted her fellow Conservative MP, telling her “you can’t pick and choose on human rights and equality”.
“Children should understand a modern and diverse Britain they’re growing up in. [It] matters for social mobility too – you can’t be your best if you can’t be yourself,” Greening said.
Amber Rudd, McVey’s successor as work and pensions secretary, backed Greening, saying a “modern Tory party should not just be proud of our LGBT achievements, but champion them”.
Stewart McDonald, a Scottish National party MP, argued that McVey as prime minister could risk a return to section 28 legislation, which banned schools from teaching pupils about LGBT relationships.
Q&A What was Section 28?
Introduced by the Thatcher government, Section 28 of the Local Government Act stated that a local authority shall not ‘intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.
As well as the impact on LGBT pupils, it also prevented councils from funding much-needed lesbian and gay initiatives at a time when the community was struggling to cope with the Aids epidemic. Despite huge protests, and even a live interruption of the BBC’s Six o’clock news, it became law in 1988.
When Tony Blair’s Labour won the 1997 general election they promised anti-discrimination legislation, but did not make any specific mention of Clause 28.
The Labour/Lib Dem coalition in Scotland repealed Section 28 in June 2000, despite a huge advertising campaign supporting it bankrolled by Stagecoach tycoon Brian Souter.
Labour first attempted to repeal it in England and Wales in July 2000. But under a three-line whip, Conservative MPs opposed the move, and the bill was ultimately defeated by bishops and Tories in the Lords.
Labour’s new Local Government Act eventually took it off the statue books in September 2003, although at least one local authority, Kent, passed their own rules to continue to make it illegal to teach about same-sex relationships in schools under their control. This was finally outlawed by the Equalities Act 2010.
“An Esther McVey premiership would almost certainly lead to the return of section 28. This is her just laying the groundwork,” he said.
Meanwhile, another Tory leadership contender, Dominic Raab, said he would not want to make it more straightforward for trans people to change their gender, while insisting he wanted society to be “tolerant and warm to the LGBT community”.
“I certainly don’t think I want to make it easier. I think you need to be very careful with people of that age,” he said on Wednesday.
“I want everyone to feel comfortable in their own skin. But I do worry a little bit with some of this debate – whether it is in relation to vulnerable women in prisons or children in school – that we take a careful, balanced approach, because we need to be a society which is small-L liberal, if you like, which is tolerant and warm to the LGBT community.
“Whereas I also worry about the vulnerability of other people, whether it is women in prisons or children at a very tender age in school, so we need to get the balance right.”
Stephen Doughty, a Labour MP, said both contenders were part of a Tory leadership race where hopefuls were trying to “out-rightwing each other by promoting intolerance against the LGBT+ community”.