Word: labouring
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...which barred the "promotion of homosexuality" in schools and defined gay partnerships as "pretended family relationships." Such homophobia emboldened both gay-rights advocates and future politicians. "People came out who otherwise wouldn't have, and it woke up our heterosexual friends and family," says Michael Cashman, now a Labour Member of the European Parliament. In 1989, Cashman and actor Ian McKellen co-founded campaign group Stonewall. Around the same time, Cashman played the role of a kindhearted gay man on popular BBC soap opera EastEnders. As Cashman says: "We moved on and politics eventually followed." (Read: "Bad News...
...when Tony Blair's Labour government came to power, the ground was shifting. Chris Smith, the only out MP for 14 years, was named Minister of Culture. "The really astonishing thing was that no one pointed out a gay man had been appointed to the Cabinet," he says from Britain's Environment Agency, which he now runs. The same year in Exeter, a constituency in southwestern England, Conservative party candidate Adrian Rogers attacked his openly gay opponent Ben Bradshaw by describing homosexuality as "a sterile, disease-ridden and godforsaken occupation." Voters awarded Bradshaw the seat, in one of the biggest...
...Road Ahead For its part, Britain's Conservative Party has come a long way since Section 28, which the Labour government repealed in 2003. David Cameron, the Tory leader, apologized for the law at a gay-pride event last June. In October, the Conservatives even organized an official "gay night" at their annual party conference. Among gay activists, debate still rages over whether leaders who have not gone public with their sexuality should do so. Girard, the deputy mayor of Paris, knows several elected officials who keep their sexuality private. "By not accepting their homosexuality publicly, closeted politicians are holding...
Warmth, shelter and free entertainment: it's a compelling offer for Londoners facing a chilly age of austerity. But the capacity crowd that queued before dawn to attend Britain's seven-week-old Iraq inquiry as it prepared to welcome its first headline act, former Labour premier Tony Blair's communications supremo Alastair Campbell, sought more than respite from the cold. "I'm here because I hold this man partly responsible for that terrible, terrible war," explained a retired therapist, shivering in her tweed coat...
...inquiry is charged with identifying the lessons from the tangled processes that led to war and the serial failures to plan adequately for its aftermath. Campbell, Blair's most influential adviser from before the Labour landslide victory in 1997 until Campbell's September 2003 resignation, was at the heart of those processes and witness, if not co-author, of those failures. But spectators scanning his craggy face and acerbic testimony for signs of contrition will have been sorely disappointed. What they got was an unyielding defense of Britain's role in the Iraq conflict and a tantalizing hint of bigger...