Exposed by Lord Frost, the Tories’ betrayal of their foundations
by Julian Mann, TCW:
LORD (David) Frost’s prophetic speech in the House of Lords against banning gay conversion therapy sums up why Cameronite Conservatism has failed.
That diagnosis may not have been Lord Frost’s intention in his speech on February 9 during the debate on the second reading of Baroness Burt’s Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill. But his penetrating analysis of the threat to liberty in the Liberal Democrat peer’s Private Member’s Bill exposed the Conservatives’ 14-year failure to tackle the neo-Marxist authoritarianism that has swept through this country’s institutions.
The former Brexit minister who resigned from Boris Johnson’s cabinet in December 2021 because of the government’s ‘direction of travel’ said:
‘I have certainly not been persuaded by anything I have heard that there is a genuine problem with violent or coercive conversion therapy in this country. These things are, after all, already illegal. What worries me is that the effect of the Bill would be – as we have heard from many noble Lords – to criminalise a much broader range of actions and interactions. The consequence of that – and maybe this is one of the underlying purposes of the Bill – would be to reinforce a tendency towards control and conformity that is already very evident in our society. That is what worries me.’
He described three ways in which the ban would have this broader controlling effect: ‘First, it begins the process of giving legislative force to the controversial view that simply hearing opinions that you do not agree with can in itself cause harm and should therefore be made illegal. This is a damaging proposition anywhere, but it is particularly harmful in this area, where individuals differ and where, as we have heard, there is far from societal or expert consensus – thus free debate and discussion is vital if we are going to find the right solutions.’
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