The End Of The Affair

I was deeply troubled by the hatchet job which felled David Laws .It could hardly be clearer that he had no interest in fiddling his expense s , if he did he made a bloody awful job of it .His pivotal importance to the Nation surely out weighs the technicality some kind souls had thoughtfully researched.
One aspect of this whole sorry business that strikes me, is that the left showed no sympathy whatsoever for his sensitivities as a privately gay man. Iain Dale wrote a good piece which included some pertinent autobiographical material. It focused my mind on the personal difficulty that remains no matter how liberal society becomes . How would I feel if one of my own sons became a gay man ? Well I`m not sure , supportive I hope, but if the truth be known ,I also hope never to find out . Ken Livingstone’s terse remark that he could not understand the secrecy in this day and age misses the private from the discussion , friends you have known , lies you must have told, if only by omission . (Sunny Hundal was aggressively splenetic as usual. )
The affair seems to mark a final end to the Heston Blumenthal recipe of cabbage soup socialism and gay recognition . The estrangement had been going on for some time . Some years ago I went to a gay club which a certain Justin Hinchcliffe (…don`t ask ….) and witnessed a broad drag cabaret in which the object of ribald scorn was frequently teen-age mothers . The intrinsically amusing myth that young women have no idea they are getting pregnant , was treated with graphic contempt and the young gay crowd were clearly enjoying it .
Hardly a survey of course but suggestive . This is a survey ,”A Policy Exchange report from 2007, Living Apart Together, which found that 71 per cent of Muslims aged 16 to 24 thought that homosexuality was not only wrong but should be illegal” . For the left this presents a problem of competing victimhoods and at times the plight of Islam wins out .
Ken Livingstone, for example , entertained Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a fundamentalist who supports the right of Islamic states to execute gays. The death penalty indeed exists in six Islamic nations including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Sudan,4,000 homosexuals have been executed in Iran since the 1979 revolution.
The failure of the left to clearly condemn British Islam is one part of the separation a more important one is the very acceptance of homosexuality in all areas of British life.
Politicians have been slow on the uptake with remarkably few out and proud even now but the word has moved on Gay men are the proud possessors of the pink pound and as they usually do not acquire families or dependents they get a dreadful deal form the tax and spend left. Gay men I know are not , in any case ,interested in being victims any more or one trick ponies of any sort . They are often highly career orientated and if there is any generalisation to be made probably tend to the right .

To Bridget Jones it was obvious that the Conservative Party was just nasty and nasty especially to gays.That time is long gone and now it is the Labour Party whose resentment starts to show just as it does for the "bigots " of the white wortking class they once eulogised .