A bill proposing a ban on so-called conversion therapy didn’t pass within the House of Commons on Friday after it ran out of time.
Quite a lot of MPs stood as much as speak throughout the debate on Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle’s Private Member’s Bill, including former Home Secretary Suella Braverman who said she feared she could be criminalised for teaching her children that “a person can’t be a girl” and “a boy can’t be a lady”.
Neale Hanvey, Alba Party MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, said that the ban proposed within the bill would have a “pernicious” effect on family life and that oldsters would have “a sword of Damocles hanging over their head” in the event that they tried to challenge their child’s want to transition.
“Being open and capable of speak freely with their child about difficult issues on the dinner table is one of the crucial vital roles a parent has, but this might snuff out the flexibility to facilitate such conversations,” he said.
He warned that the proposed ban would make non-affirming conversations about gender and sexuality “nigh-on unattainable”.
“Teachers, youth employees, nurses, doctors, social employees, church leaders and oldsters could be forced to think twice or refuse to entertain such a conversation, for fear of accusation and criminal prosecution,” he said.
Paul Bristow, Conservative MP for Peterborough, said that each Christian and Muslim leaders had raised their concerns at a gathering the day before the talk.
He said that the bill “risks silencing people for offering honest and good-natured support, often to very vulnerable people”.
“The bill also doesn’t comply with protections of the rights to freedom of speech and to religion set out within the European convention on human rights, as has already been said,” he said.
“That was considered one of the foremost motion points of our meeting yesterday. It cannot someway change into illegal for a priest or an imam to supply advice to a member of their congregation. Obviously, that might be unthinkable.”
Equalities Minister Maria Caulfield, speaking on behalf of the federal government, said that the bill “carries an absence of legislative clarity which risks unintended consequences”. She said that the federal government could be bringing forward its own draft bill after the publication of the Cass review, expected in the approaching weeks.
Other MPs argued that it will be difficult to legislate without clear definitions of harmful conversion therapy practices and transgenderism.
Miriam Cates MP said, “If it could actually’t be defined in law, how can we safely legislate for it? How can we ban someone from converting someone to or from transgender if you happen to cannot define transgender?”
Others identified that abusive practices are already illegal under existing law.
Braverman added that there was “an entire absence of verifiable, quantitative evidence demonstrating that harmful conversion practices are widespread or occurring regularly on this country”.
“There could be very little evidence that conversion therapy is a current problem on this country,” she said.
“The various surveys which have been quoted, equivalent to the national LGBT survey of 2017 or the Ozanne Foundation’s faith and sexuality survey, have severe shortcomings of their evidence base and the ways wherein they were compiled.
“A police freedom of knowledge request demonstrated that police forces throughout the UK, when asked whether or not they had received any reports of electroshock treatment or corrective rape between 2010 and 2020, responded with relevant data and confirmed that no police force had ever recorded any such grievance.”
As the talk ran out of time, the Private Member’s Bill was unable to progress and is unlikely to be considered further.
