It took a little while to work out why this post at Conservative Home nettled me. It wasn’t the concept of “Left Watch,” for all its gesturing to ideological purity. It wasn’t the blanket criticism of state support of charities as “welfare,” as if we don’t get anything from those groups in return.
It wasn’t the presumptuousness of party activists drawing up a list of targets for aggressive defunding before they’ve even been voted into office (even though, in turn, the Labour party will almost certainly lose the next election).
It wasn’t even the painfully, patronisingly calculated claim that the Tory party could be insulated against claims of being anti-gay by spending exactly half of the money given to Stonewall and other groups “to genuinely good causes in that same field of work,” which infers that Stonewall’s work is neither genuine nor good.
What irked was the failure to recognise that Stonewall has been (admirably) critical of both Labour and the Conservative party – and that criticism of Tories has only been sharper because of their frankly dire record on the issue of gay rights.
What stung was the implicit suggestion that Stonewall’s activities are undesirably “political,” and political in the sense of partisan: that gay rights are not a generic element of human rights, relevant whether you happen to be gay or not, but the hobby-horse of a special interests group.
And frankly, f*ck that attitude.
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