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Telegraph
6 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
LGBT Pride Month has become a pointless embarrassment
See if you can make any more sense of this than I can. The other day, the official Facebook page for South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue posted a photo showing three employees wearing face paint. Two were plastered with the rainbow colours of the Pride flag, and the other with the pink, blue and white of the transgender flag. And here's the message that ran alongside. 'We're proud to stand with our LGBT+ communities this Pride season and beyond,' it said. 'Fire doesn't discriminate. No matter who needs us, we'll always be there.' A noble sentiment. My only question is: what on earth was the point of it? I mean, of course the fire brigade will 'always be there' for LGBT+ people whose houses have caught fire. That's always been the case, even back in the dark, distant days when homosexual acts were illegal. To the best of my knowledge, no one calling 999 to report a blaze at their home has ever been ordered to state their sexuality. ('I'm awfully sorry, sir, but in that case we can't help you, I'm afraid. We only put fires out for red-blooded heterosexuals.') What this message was intended to achieve, therefore, is sadly lost on me. Still, no doubt there's more such bafflement to come. The whole of June, after all, is Pride Month. And what was once a vital means to campaign for equality has long since descended into an orgy of competitive virtue signalling by members of what the anti-woke Labour peer Lord Glasman has so memorably dubbed 'the lanyard class'. As in: the preening elitists who seize every chance going to parade their moral superiority. Here's another example. This week, Air Canada opened Pride Month by advertising its first-ever 'all-2SLGBTQIA+ flight'. In other words, every member of the crew was one or more of the following: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, 'queer', intersex, asexual, or 'two-spirit' (that is, someone who subscribes to the American Indian belief that the body contains both a 'masculine spirit' and a 'feminine spirit'). Congratulations to all involved, naturally. Again, though, I can't help wondering what the point was. It surely can't have meant much to the average passenger. In my own experience, at least, few holidaymakers refuse to board a flight until they've ascertained the exact number of ancient tribal spirits currently inhabiting the pilot. And to be frank, I don't see how it helped the staff, either. Since when has there been a shortage of job opportunities for gay air stewards? Back in Britain, even the head of MI6 has been joining in. In a statement, Sir Richard Moore announced that 'MI6 is proudly flying the Pride flag from Vauxhall Cross, alongside the Union flag, for the whole month of June. Your sexual orientation is no bar to you working and thriving at MI6.' Once upon a time, of course, it would have been. But how many people imagined that this were still the case, in 2025? And while we're on the subject: is it really essential for Sir Richard to declare on his social media profile that his pronouns are 'he/him', as if he were some blue-haired student, rather than the 62-year-old chief of the nation's foreign intelligence service? We already know he's a 'he'. The 'Sir' was a bit of a clue. Otherwise he'd be Lady Richard. In the United States, at least, times are changing. According to Newsweek, there's been a big drop in corporations jazzing up their logos in Pride colours. Perhaps their CEOs fear being ridiculed by Donald Trump. Or perhaps too many customers twigged that it was all just a load of empty spin (having noted, for example, how few of these corporations used Pride logos in their Middle Eastern markets). In Britain, however, the lanyard class remains scrupulously observant. Yet it's hard to avoid the sense that the wider public is starting to feel patronised. Of course homophobia still exists. Like all forms of prejudice, it always will. But under the law, people who describe themselves as LGBTQIA+ have the same rights, these days, as everyone else. So when a business preaches about inclusivity, it's difficult to see what it's trying to accomplish – other than to earn some easy applause. All of which is why Pride Month increasingly feels like a pointless embarrassment. No longer a platform for the powerless to speak out – but for the powerful to show off.
Telegraph
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Starmer's ‘thought police' turning off working class voters, says Labour lord
In his speech on Wednesday, he claimed Labour has isolated its core voter base by dismissing ordinary people who are simply 'in pain' by branding them as 'far-Right' or racist. He called for a 'cultural change' targeting the 'thought policing' of 'acceptable discourse' in order to win back the working class. 'It's been the case for the last 20 to 30 years that I would say that Labour culture has been a hostile environment for working-class people, because if you actually say what you think, you get condemned,' Lord Glasman said. 'And the inability to express the grief ... this is a huge part of the story, is that we see people in pain, and we call them far-Right or populists or nativists or racists or sexists, but no, they're just speaking.' He added: 'Obviously, the first part of the argument is that if we're a patriotic party that's pro-industry, pro-Army, pro-police, we will attract working-class support hugely. 'But there's got to be a cultural change where this thought policing of what is acceptable discourse, the power of HR departments, has got to be targeted ... to create a political space once more, in which the people who created our movement are allowed to speak.' He suggested that even Ernest Bevin, the former Labour foreign secretary, would be forbidden from standing for the party today because he would not be considered 'progressive' enough. A 'working-class insurrection' Last year's general election saw Labour win back dozens of 'Red Wall' seats that backed Boris Johnson to 'Get Brexit Done' in 2019. But any hopes of a working-class revival were dashed at the local elections on May 4, where Reform made huge gains in core Labour heartlands such as Durham and pipped Sir Keir to the post in Runcorn and Helsby. Lord Glasman said the 'only way' for Labour to get the better of Reform, which has declared itself as the new 'party of the working class', is to lead an 'insurrection' of his own. 'As Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows. Reform is a working-class insurrection against the progressive ruling class, and the only way to counter it is for the Labour Government to lead the insurrection,' he said. 'To celebrate the collapse of the era of globalisation, to embrace the space of Brexit, the renewal of the Commonwealth, the restoration of vocation, the primacy of Parliament, the integrity of our peace, the effectiveness of our Armed Forces, the protection of our borders, and the resurrection of Labour as the tribute of the working class.' 'Stain' on the political class Lord Glasman's 'Blue Labour' group, which leans Left on the economy but Right on social issues, has previously urged Sir Keir to go further on grooming gangs by launching a national inquiry into the scandal. On Wednesday, the Labour peer suggested perpetrators of historic child sex abuse should face show trials, referring to the purges of political dissidents carried out by the Soviet Union. 'Rape gangs systematically preying on young girls is what they call bang out of order. It is an abomination that must be purged from the body politic,' he said. 'The fact that it has been considered as s--- happens, rather than out of order, is a stain on me and the entire political class. It is time to resurrect more traditions from socialism, the purge and the show trial. 'The difference being that the accused in this case are not, by definition, innocent. It is a festering wound, it is still going on and it has not been stopped. The role of the televised trial is to witness the reason why it had not been stopped.' Dominant, not hegemonic Lord Glasman also compared the current Labour Government to the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, who led the Communist Party during part of the Cold War. 'When you win less than 34 per cent of the vote and gain 71 per cent of the seats in Parliament, it is more reminiscent of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev than the renewal of social democracy. 'The party is dominant, but it is not hegemonic.'
