Wednesday 18 June 2008

The Tories want to hear your views

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservatives' Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion, is coming to Bristol East on June 20th, 6pm-7.30pm, at the Black Development Agency. It's billed as the Conservatives 'wanting to hear your views'. So presumably if anyone wants to ask her about suggestions that she might be just a little bit homophobic, then they'd be very welcome.

As a Tory PPC in the 2005 General Election, the allegation is that she distributed leaflets in the Muslim areas of the seat she was fighting, saying that "Labour has scrapped section 28 which was introduced by the Conservatives to stop schools promoting alternative sexual lifestyles such as homosexuality to children as young as seven years old. Schools are allowed and do promote homosexuality and other alternative sexual lifestyles to your children. Labour reduced the age of consent for homosexuality from 18 to 16 allowing school children to be propositioned for homosexual relationships." In the white areas of the constituency - which has, I think, the highest BNP vote in the country - she is said to have distributed anti-immigration leaflets.

Obviously this is quite a topical issue in east Bristol, with the recent controversy when parents objected to certain books being used for anti-homophobic bullying lessons in a couple of schools. Would be interesting also to know how she thinks her views square with David Davis' mission to protect civil liberties - although of course in his case, that doesn't extend to gay or lesbian people either.

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