Hazel Blears‘ expenses ’scandal’ has been splattered on the front pages of many tabloids and under a great many pairs of page three boobs for a greater many months now, weakening her position as a re-electable candidate in the traditionally Labour safe Salford and Eccles parliamentary seat. Boundary changes in the constituency have opened up opportunities for alternative candidates to have a serious electoral run towards backbencnhdom, paving the way for a fresh, young, Tory candidate. The New Conservative party machine, in a welcome move, has put forward Matthew Sephton, an openly gay candidate, and head of LGBTory, the Conservative party’s answer to the now popular party political Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender groups.
This is great news for those in Salford who want someone new, peppy and fresh, but as is always the case when opportunity knocks, we let in a little dirt as we tread on the carpet. Cue the lugubrious Richard Carvath, a self styled ‘pro-heterosexual‘ and prospective independent MP for Salford and Eccles.
Now I’m not exactly sure what a ‘pro-heterosexual’ is, granted that there’s a distinct lack of historical hetero struggle, and granted that heterosexuality forms the bulk of sexual make-up on the British Isles, I’m not exactly sure what the ‘pro‘ in ‘pro heterosexual‘ actually stands for. It’s quite obvious that Mr Carvath, in claiming to be ‘pro-heterosexual,’ is in fact, by insinuation, claiming that he is ‘anti-homosexual.’ But Richard struggles to leave things at rude and corrosive euphemism, as displayed by his attack on Matthew Sephton, the newly selected Tory candidate, on his personal blog, sighting in the title, dated December 7th, “Tories Select Homosexual Pervert for Salford and Eccles.” He writes,

Richard Carvath

“The Conservative Party has just selected homosexual Matthew Sephton as their candidate for Salford and Eccles.
As a rival [and pro-heterosexual!] candidate I welcome Matthew to the contest for Salford and Eccles.
Matthew’s own blog is heavy with pro homosexual pervert content: see here, here and here. I very much doubt that the vast majority of the Salford and Eccles electorate will want to be represented by a prominent homosexual activist – and one who neither lives nor works in the constituency.”

The article in question was reported to the police (presumably as hate related,) to which Mr Varvath received this letter from PC2401 Jacky Thompson,

“We have received a complaint today regarding concerns over the content of your blog article dated Monday 7th December 2009.
A reader of your article has made a complaint that the content is offensive and feels strongly enough to report this matter to the police. He wishes for you to be advised over the potential alarm and distress caused by your article. Whilst not taking this at face value and understanding the meaning of language and how it can be misinterpreted, it could be argued that the context of the comments made could be construed to be borderline criminal.
At this stage I feel it would be advisable for you to remove this from your blog thereby preventing misinterpretation.
Your assistance in this matter is greatly appreciated. …
Regards
PC2401 Jacky Thompson.”

Richard replied,

“Dear PC Thompson,
Thank you for your email.
There is nothing criminal about my blog article and so I have no intention of removing it for the foreseeable future.
Homosexuality is a perversion: that is both moral truth and medical fact. Therefore it is quite reasonable for me to refer to a person in whom the perversion of homosexuality is manifest as a homosexual pervert. Let me make it clear that I do not use the term ‘homosexual pervert’ as a pejorative term – derogation is not my motive in using the term; I use the term simply to convey the true nature of what homosexuality is because I believe that the truth matters.
I’m aware that you are employed by an organisation [GMP] which is politically in favour of homosexual perversion. I’m aware that GMP celebrates its association with the militant perverts’ organisation Stonewall. I’m aware of the secular humanist socio-political orthodoxy of ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ which GMP panders to.
My advice to you is to stop being a social engineer trying to suppress free speech and get on with genuine police work.
It is not a crime to criticise homosexuality and nor is it a crime to refer to a public gay political activist as a homosexual pervert.
Even if it were a crime I’m a British evangelical Christian so nothing and nobody is going to tell me what I can and can’t say in my own country. As a Christian I speak and act out of love – not hate – so my motive for referring to homosexuality as a perversion is love.
My advice to you is to get on with dealing with real crime like robbery, rape and murder and stop trying to suppress free speech.
Never has there been clearer proof of the vital importance of the Waddington free speech safeguard!
I am a parliamentary candidate and I will not tolerate being harassed by a politicised, pro-homosexual Police force.
Yours sincerely,
Mr. Richard Carvath PPC.”

Richard is no stranger to controversial views however. When asked in an interview with Salford Online about sex education, he commented that to be taught sex education in schools is akin to “grooming” and “sexualising” children. He went on to say,

“Sex education is a bit of a big misnomer, the idea that anybody needs to know, or be taught about the mechanics of it, or be taught about condoms or anything is riddiculous. Anybody who has had sex, which is probably most people, uhm, know full well, that you do not need lessons in it to know exactly what happens, and what goes where and all the rest of it, so it’s a bit of a nonsense anyway.”

These are not the only unfounded and dangerous views Richard Carvath has voiced publicly, in the same interview with Tom Rodgers, (which you can view in its entirety here, here and here) he goes on to say that homosexuality should be illegal and that social normative society is the only answer to British culture,

Tom Rodgers: “You’re standing as an Independent, where do you think your support base is going to come from?”

Richard Carvath: “I think my appeal is very broad, for the simple reason that people get a fair grasp of what I’m really all about. My politics are the politics of social justice, politics largely of common sense, traditional British moral standards, British culture and social norms way of life, so I think the appeal is very broad.”

Tom Rogers: “You’ve categorised yourself as mainstream, but there are some controvercial policies there, in terms of perhaps, homosexuality?”

Richard Carvath: “In terms of my position on homosexuality, you know, I think it’s a bad thing, it’s a bad lifestyle choice, I think there’s masses of social evidence that shows the negative consequences of folowing that lifestyle..”

Tom Rogers: [Interrupts] “I’ll stop you there. There’s masses of social evidence?”

Richard Carvath: “Well I’m obviously not briefed with, you know, a load of notes to bring with me on this, but uhm, if you look at the, uhm, any number of people, sociologists, psychologists people, doctors, people who are working in health professions, all of these people who compile statistics and evidence, and you can see from this that the homosexual lifestyle is charactorised by, uhm, desiece, degredation, loneliness, emotional problems, debt, uhm, premature [inaudible]. I mean, in terms of the health problems for example, I mean, you know, we’ve all heard of HIV and AIDS, and that is particularly a homosexual problem, uhm, but also many other things, such as, [inaudible] infections, uhm, systemic infections, uhm, there’s an awful lot I could say but it’s probably, you know, not the most pleasent thing for all of Salford Online. It goes without saying that the nature of, certainly the male homosexual act, causes allot of, uhm, physical trauma as well, which causes permenant lasting damage, which I’m not going to go into detail about.”

Tom Rogers: “These are obviously personal views of yours, do you think these actually have a place in political life?”

Richard Carvath: “Yes I do, very much so. It used to be the case in this country that homosexuality was illegal, and that was the case up until 1967, uhm, I would advocate basically returning to that position, uhm, I don’t think it does homosexuals any favours or society as a whole to encourage or condone what is essentially a destructive lifestyle.”

Tom Rogers: “So you would have them, do what?”

Richard Carvath: “I would like to go to a situation where homosexuality is illegal in principle and in the law, in practice, what that would mean would, it would mean that, uhm, you’d have a situation where homosexuality, homosexual behaviour, would uhm, would be illegal in public. So if there was obvious homosexual behaviour, you know, like cottaging, things in public toilets or Hamstead Heath, whatever, that would clearly be seen to be illegal, and also the promotion or manifestation I think in cultural terms of society. So homosexuals, if they still wish to, are still going to in private, uhm, what they want to do, but I think it’s about getting it out of public life, because I think it’s perhaps in homosexual’s best interests. Nobody is born gay, and there’s no evidence to support that claim, uhm, homosexuality is not genetic, or biological, or hormonal in origin, uhm, I mean the roots of it are complex, I mean, usually the child [inaudible], uhm, it’s surprising how many male homosexuals; the father is absent, and this goes back to why, you know, we need to go back to a society where, uhm, where mothers and fathers are there in the home. It’s mothers and fathers together, who bring up children who socialise into their natural gender role.”

Carvath claiming to run on a ticket of “social justice” is frankly as insulting as his pseudo science is laughable, and it seems his political opponents think as much of him. Writing for the Lesbian and Gay Foundation, Matt retorted, “As an unknown POTENTIAL candidate, Mr Carvath is an irrelevance in this election campaign.”

Gay rights advocate and writer for the Guardian and PinkNews, Adrian Tippetts, commented: “Name me one peer reviewed study that backs up this incoherent babble. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Another ridiculous claim: that being gay is caused by a troubled childhood and a distant father. This is extremist religious propaganda, long since debunked and certainly not supported by any scientific study, in any peer reviewed journal. It is totally rejected by every professinal body in the Western World. He doesn’t know what he is talking about and he isn’t remotely qualified to talk. When interviewed, he cannot even string a sentence together. I don’t believe that, even if he were to see the scientific evidence that supports the evolutionary explanations for homosexuality, he would have the intelligence to understand it.”

Richard’s ‘manifesto‘ (and I use the term lightly) is little more than a deranged attack on everything and anything that he personally has distaste for. He is like a rabid dog, frothing at the mouth, making up pseudo statistics as he goes, in a desperate bid to support his fatuous policy ideas. In the following page, entitled “Opposing Perversion, Depravity and Vice,” Richard whacks off to the prospect of returning to the types of homophobic prejudice (that he would clearly like to partake in) of the 1950s.

Of course these assertions crumble when held to the sunlight, as Liberal Conspiracy’s Unity demonstrates with comic clarity, scientific, and historical evidencing.
The real percentage figure of homosexuals is thought to be at least 5% of the global population, though some estimate a much higher 10%, whilst the British public, when polling data was returned from the Pew Research Centre in 2007, are 71% in agreement that homosexuality is a way of life that society should accept (not that we, as homosexuals, require acceptance in order to exist.)
And this is where things really did get muddled. At what point did a normative thinking heterosexual wake up and have it occur to him all of a sudden, whilst munching on his cornflakes and reading the morning’s Daily Fail, that it is his right, as a heterosexual, to prescribe the rights and restrictions of any other individual? What sort of cocktail of ignorance, arrogance and blind audacity does it take to assume the position of a celestial dictator on earth?
Richard Carvath thinks that he has the moral authority to tell us, as Nadine Dorries has before him, and as the Ugandan Government seeks to do so after him, what we, us, they, can do with their, our, your personal liberty. Mr Carvath must have some serious personal and internal conflict bubbling up and close to the surface of his skin to feel the need to vent so horrifically and disgracefully in this manner. Richard must have a huge egocentric personality to believe, even for a moment, that he has within an inch of a right to tell me what I can and cannot be, who I can and cannot love. Dick must have a real homosexuality, inferiority, insecurity complex to have to resort to making up ‘facts’ and ’statistics’ to support his false arguments and plastic fantastic moral standards.
What drive and determination it must take to keep plodding along in that manner, blinkers and all, choosing to ignore the empirical evidence that continues to slap him, again and again, hard and fast in his bloated, patchy, red face. To practice and preach such vile hatred towards your fellow brothers and sisters, to condemn them to a life of persecution and misery that they have been afforded not to have to endure by decent and well wishing parliamentarians, activists and the silent majority before them.

Perhaps Richard, if you’re reading this, you’d be better focussed on your industrial cleaning business to make a change in the streets of Salford and Eccles. Bring on the ballots!

For you, Ricky! <3

I wrote a couple of weeks ago (read it if you haven’t) about the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, morbidly nicknamed the ‘Kill the Gays Bill,’ which outlined, in no uncertain terms, the fate awaiting those who are unlucky enough to be born both Ugandan, and gay. Amongst the cruel ‘legal’ consequences that are proposed, are death for the ‘crime’ of “aggravated homosexuality,” and three years imprisonment for those who know of a gay person’s whereabouts but (in an Orwellian move) fail to report it to the authorities within 24 hours.

The bill, despite receiving frankly pathetic, suspicious, and shameful coverage from all but the Guardian in British media, caused a stir in the international community, which resulted in condemnation, calls for protection of the half a million strong Ugandan gay population, and, in a surprising move, the Swedish government to threaten to pull financial aid from the nation.
The calls have not gone unheard either, reporting yesterday, Bloomberg’s Fred Ojambo wrote,

“Uganda will drop the death penalty and life imprisonment for gays in a refined version of an anti- gay bill expected to be ready for presentation to Parliament in two weeks, James Nsaba Buturo, the minister of ethics and integrity, said.
The draft bill, which is under consideration by a parliamentary committee, will drop the two punishments to attract the support of religious leaders who are opposed to these penalties, Buturo said today in a phone interview from the capital, Kampala.
Ugandan lawmaker David Bahati presented a private member’s bill on Oct. 14 which sought the death penalty and life imprisonment for gay people in the country. The Ugandan government supports the bill because homosexuality and lesbianism are “repugnant to the Ugandan culture,” Buturo said. Still, it favors a more refined set of punishments, he said.
In addition to formulating punishments for the gay people, the bill will also promote counseling to help “attract errant people to acceptable sexual orientation,” said Buturo.”

Buturo said that the new draft of the now, presumably, ‘Cure the Gays Bill,’ will find itself before parliament within two weeks, which has led to many critics of the legislation to fear it’s full inception early on.

James Nsaba Buturo

Despite the removal of the death penalty, the bill is still a lethal blow to the gay community of Uganda, allowing life imprisonment, extradition from another country on suspicion of homosexual behaviour, and, owing to the dreadful way in which the bill has been constructed, the potential for manipulative abuse in the form of heterosexual affection, eg: two straight men hugging.
If that doesn’t make your skin crawl, consider the political corruption that could (and very likely will) surround the private show trials that are explicit in the bill’s text, and the media blackout that will be enforced when cherry picked political opponents find themselves sat in a court of Ugandan law on suspicion of love for the same sex.

The language used by the Ugandan minister of ethics and integrity is very telling also, favouring a “more refined” set of punishments, “counselling” and (according to Pink News) “gay cure therapies.”
It is not so much what Buturo is saying, as much as it is what he is not saying. There are no plans explicitly laid out for the fate of innocent gay people in the nation, only a shady and ominous suggestion towards pseudo science therapy and a life inside a two by two cell. The mere suggestion that the Ugandan authorities will attempt to cure homosexuality not only has zero foundation in scientific study, but has not been so openly and unashamedly acknowledged since the days of Action T4 in Nazi Germany. The potential for torturous, guinea pig like experiments is a very stark reality that we must all sober up to, and should, in many ways, be more concerned about than we were before.

This legislation is paving the way for politically and religiously motivated hatred, sham trials, press blackouts, prejudiced and homophobic, delusion fuelled, sick, torturous experiments, and damage to generations of gay people to come.

It would be very easy for us, at this point, to jump aboard the ‘Shouldn’t, Wouldn’t, Couldn’t‘ band wagon of Western democracy at this point, and look, with a sly glance, in shame, at the Ugandan parliament whilst whacking off to our own superior liberalism, but as per usual, the mix is a little more toxic than first impressions might suggest.

The bill is an American conservative evangelical sponsored piece of legislation. In a press release reported on publiceye, Tarso Luís Ramos, Political Research Associates (PRA) executive director, writes as part of an investigation into the ‘Influence of U.S. Religious Conservatives in Promoting Homophobia in Africa’,

“Just as the United States and other northern societies routinely dump our outlawed or expired chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and cultural detritus on African and other Third World countries, we now export a political discourse and public policies our own society has discarded as outdated and dangerous. Africa’s antigay campaigns are to a substantial degree made in the U.S.A.”

It also emphasises, “The investigation’s release could not be timelier, as the Ugandan parliament considers the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. Language in that bill echoes the false and malicious charges made in Uganda by U.S antigay activist and Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively that western gays are conspiring to take over Uganda and even the world.”

Rev. Kapya Kaoma, PRA Project Director, writes, “The U.S. Right – once isolated in Africa for supporting pro-apartheid, White supremacist regimes – has successfully reinvented itself as the mainstream of U.S. evangelicalism. Through their extensive communications networks in Africa, social welfare projects, Bible schools, and educational materials, U.S. religious conservatives warn of the dangers of homosexuals and present themselves as the true representatives of U.S. evangelicalism, so helping to marginalize Africans’ relationships with mainline Protestant churches.”

“We need to stand up against the U.S. Christian Right peddling homophobia in Africa,” said Kaoma, who in recent weeks challenged U.S. evangelist Rick Warren to denounce the bill and distance himself from its supporters. “I heard church people in Uganda say they would go door to door to root out LGBT people and now our brothers and sisters are being further targeted by proposed legislation criminalizing them and threatening them with death. The scapegoating must stop.”

This isn’t the first time that Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries, a conservative Christian organization in California, has found himself up to his neck in allegations of such hatred. The author of ‘The Pink Swastika,’ his book, based on supposed links between homosexuals and the Nazi Party, which were dismissed by historians as a total fabrication, has been so consumed with blind hatred for homosexuality, that the man, a the former state director for California’s branch of the American Family Association went ahead with Don Schmierer and Caleb Lee Brundidge, two other far right nutbags, to create Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

Scott’s world view, one in which he sees a threatening global gay rights agenda as an evil and infectious disease that is spreading fast around the globe, is a dangerous delusion that has led him, and many others in his home nation, and elsewhere, to prescribe the harshest, most cruel and torturous part of the human condition on our brothers and sisters, in the name of Godly righteousness.
The potential for this evil has been realised time and time again, we have borne witness to the greatest evils of mankind, and this new proposal, with or without the death penalty, is nothing short of religiously prescribed genocide.

If New York’s lady liberty stands for anything at all in this cruel and modern world, it is surely against the madness and slavery peddled by evangelical nutcases, who are hell-bent on the eradication of an entire community, whose only crime is love. Should her copper and steel lips stay sealed, her glassy eyes stare blindly out into the ocean, we will know that this day was the day that Liberty stood in silence on our shores, as well as on theirs.

The question of how to tackle the rise in gun crime is an issue that affects many in Britain. Most of us live in areas of the country that are seldom plagued by the realities of what this question actually means; the Russian roulette of stepping outside your own front door, the fear that prevails in an area choking on the fumes of ‘postcode’ gang warfare. But for those caught in the middle of the relentless and vicious cycle of weapon dependency, the imagery this question creates is not far out of reach.
Recent statistics reveal that, in the capital, there has been a 17% rise in gun crime since April; a sobering figure that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the London Metropolitan Police Service.

As of November 9th a team of 18 officers, armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, will permanently patrol the three boroughs of Tottenham, Brixton and Haringey. The move is the first of its kind outside of Northern Ireland, a place known for its notoriously violent history with the IRA, and has raised concerns about the state of policing in Britain.
Those who regularly call upon the images of newly erected CCTV cameras, restrictions of the freedom of speech, new laws prohibiting the photographing of police and various other restrictions and enforcements will of course have a field-day with the news, but even for those of us who approach the state of affairs with a more restrained view will find it hard to swallow the sight of a neighbourhood bobby carrying a machine gun.

The weapon of choice, a German rifle capable of delivering 800 rounds of live ammunition every minute will become a regular sight in the three London boroughs, as the CO19 (Specialist Firearm Command and British equivalent to the American SWAT teams) patrol the streets, on foot and on motorcycles, in a bid to reduce gun crime throughout the area and to carry out “weapon sweeps”.

It isn’t the first time that the CO19 branch have made national headlines; most notably when the Police department were dragged through the dirt over the shooting of an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, at Stockwell station in 2005.
Whilst we aren’t likely to see a repeat performance of the Menezes case, the introduction of heavy arms cops in a public place is a grave cause for concern, and has sparked staunch resistance from senior politicians, journalists and anti gun campaigners alike.

Brian Paddick, the ex deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service and Lib Dem candidate in the 2008 London mayoral elections, speaking on Friday’s Today programme said; “If there is an escalation, if criminals start to carry guns because the police are carrying guns, how do they know which police officer has a gun and which doesn’t have a gun?” He went on to say, “There is a tradition of policing in the UK, policing by consent, not by force, policing with the support and the co-operation of the public. There is a danger of further distancing the police from the public.”

Jenny Jones, former chair of the Green Party and member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, went further than Brian Paddick, writing in The Guardian; “We’ve heard that this change was done without authorisation from senior ranks or from the Metropolitan Police Authority. Not to mention leaving out the normal practice of testing such changes by consulting local area representatives on the possible social impact. The justification being used for this unprecedented move is that gun crime is on the increase, apparently the borough police themselves asked for the patrols. But I suspect that the commissioner, the mayor and the police authority will not support this reasoning. Decisions of this magnitude need thorough debate.

She continued, The change was also made without any discussion of the rules of engagement – exactly how does one use a Heckler & Koch at 800 rounds per minute on densely populated housing estates and streets if you meet a sudden threat? This move has all the necessary ingredients of a tragedy waiting to happen. Reactive armed policing is very different. There is usually some foreknowledge of numbers, range, area etc but unexpected encounters with gunmen can make for unpredictable outcomes. Even highly trained officers can make mistakes. Guns are dangerous weapons, even in skilled hands.

Ms Jones wasn’t far wrong either, the BBC reported that a spokeswoman for Boris Johnson had said; “Armed police have a role in certain circumstances but that should be the exception not the norm”, but Mr Johnson stopped short of denouncing the plans, his spokeswoman saying; “The mayor was concerned by reports about the use of armed officers but has been reassured by Sir Paul Stephenson there is no intention of using armed police in routine manner.”

The Home Office declined to comment, saying that the operational use of firearms was a ‘matter for local forces’. The Evening Standard reported that members of the London Assembly demanded that Mayor Boris Johnson call an emergency meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority, the capital’s police watchdog.

In defence of the plans, Chief Inspector Neil Sharman of CO19, said on Thursday that the move was a “more proactive approach to deal with weapons on our streets”.

It’s certainly proactive, the no-nonsense approach is a sure move away from the current trend of combating gun crime in Greater London, but how effective will a police strategy like this be? There are claims that increasing the use of armed forces in the past, in similar operations elsewhere, have been largely successful; and I’m sure many totalitarian states would agree with those comments, though how the long term damaging effects of a bullet bobby on the beat will play out, remains to be seen.

The methods that have presided in the past have been largely peaceful and looking long term. A campaign of targeted advertising that both builds trust in the local communities by increasing the awareness of facilities for reporting crime, and threatens those that have little regard for those communities with prison sentences, have proven widely successful in increasing the reporting of crime. Policing however has had a tough time in knowing what to do with the issue. Stop and search has been one of the options taken by the Met and has had mixed responces. Some people feel that the active policing makes them feel that more is being done about gun (and knife) crime, whereas others have said that the methods are intrusive and create distrust.

Whatever the census however, I cannot for the life of my imagination picture a scenario where a police officer would either need to use a sub machine gun, or where, if he encountered gun crime, the use of an 800-bullet-a-minute firearm would improve the situation. I can see the headlines now, “Police Officer Sprays Bullets At Defenceless Crowd”, “Police State Turns Brutal”. As Jenny Jones pointed out in her article, even the highly skilled and well trained make mistakes, and the stakes can only get higher when you employ heavier weaponry.

I’m sure that the Metropolitan Police Service has well intent with the recent measures, but perhaps they should pay more attention to their own anti gun crime campaign posters, and think of a longer term strategy to tackle gang crime that is both forceful and has the backing of the community.  The Met will rue the day that they lose the trust and support of the people, and so will we.