Don’t Be Fooled! The Tories Care For You Just As Little As They Do Trans People.

For those reading this who are part of the LGBTQ+ community, the above statement shouldn’t come as a surprise. The blatant discrimination against our community has been pervasive in the Conservative Party for many years. Legislative acts like that of Section 28 which prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ during the height of the AIDs pandemic demonstrate discrimination isn’t just a mindset of the Tories, it’s a systemic symptom of their own doing. During times of strife, it seems that attacking the gay and trans community is simply part of the playbook for those on the right, that seeding division and sowing hatred for minority communities is a sure-fire path to deflecting accountability and picking up a few extra votes in the process.

Cut to today, we saw the conclusion of this year’s Conservative Party Conference, where it seems Rishi Sunak is pulling from that tried and tested playbook once again. “A man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense!” he exclaims in his speech to a room filled with raucous applause. These comments even seem slightly held back compared to those from our home secretary Suella Braverman, whose talks of pernicious ‘gender ideology’ and how ‘trans women have no place in women’s wards or any safe space relating to biological women’, are just further signs of her apparent anti-woke crusade and the road the conservatives are likely to keep heading down in the lead up to the next general election.

Words, when wielded by the right people, can be weapons. What the conservatives are doing is wielding them against some of the most vulnerable people in our society, all in a desperate bid to secure the votes of their loyal fan base as well as rile up the outliers for whom culture war topics will be the object that tips the scales. I’m sure their PR teams are backstage brimming their speeches with mentions of ‘the deep state’, ‘woke agenda’ and ‘invasions’ of asylum seekers, whilst omitting any actual economic policies or legislation to get us out of one of the worst cost of living crises this country has ever faced.

But yet it is trans people and members of the wider LGBTQ+ community that will suffer most from this tactic. These myths, and let there be no mistake — these are myths, simply work to perpetuate decade long falsities about a community that is desperately in need of help. Some studies suggest that young trans people are nearly 7.6 times more likely to attempt suicide than their cis-gendered counterparts, 41% have experienced hate crimes in the last year and polls on the general public show that intolerance for trans people is slowly starting to rise again.

Yet this doesn’t come as a surprise, not when our politicians wield such dangerous rhetoric against them for political gain — exploiting not just trans people but everyone else too. Often in the face of things we don’t understand, we chose to fuel the worst parts of ourselves; politicians like Suella Braverman understand how talking points like these will make people angry — and if its something to get angry about, it’s something to vote about. However at this point the LGBTQ+ community doesn’t need your comprehension, what it needs is simply your compassion.

But the conservatives will continue to lie. The slogan for their most recent party conference this year was ‘long term decisions for a brighter future’, a slogan that screams nothing but hypocrisy and double standards. You could argue that finalising HS2, the largest railway infrastructure the country has ever seen, fits that slogan perfectly. Yet Sunak announced that phase 2 of the project, that would link Birmingham to Manchester, is going to be scrapped. Instead they’ll invest every penny of that failed project, £36 billion, into improving the railways throughout the UK with an emphasis on connecting the northern cities.

Yet we’re left wondering — if they cannot be trusted to complete one project, after billions of taxpayer’s money has been wasted over the years, why should we ever trust them to honour their word and complete this project either? What stops it from simply getting axed as the result of political powerplay when ‘circumstances change’? The lack of accountability is the issue here, they make empty promises one day and U-Turn the next. Ironically, this is the exact criticism that has recently been hurled at the labour opposition.

More long term plans the Tories aren’t committing to include many of our net zero pledges in the fight against climate change. Phasing out the sale of new diesel and petrol cars by 2030 has been pushed back, as has the phase out of gas boilers as well as plans to make landlords improve insulation for their tenants. His reasoning is that the UK has been soaring ahead of the rest of Europe in its net zero targets, so now’s the time to put our feet back and call it a day.

The hypocrisy here is clear, Sunak is quite literally taking a short term solution to the existentially long term problem of climate change. Surely if the UK is taking the lead on meeting our net zero goals, surely that’s something to be celebrated by the country? The green industry is the direction the world is inevitably heading in, if we have any hope of ever meeting our net zero pledges then it has to be. Why would Sunak want to jeopardize our position as world leaders in this emerging market and send out a bad signal to international investors, if it wasn’t to pander to a demographic on the right who are suspicious about climate change and enjoy reading such headlines.

The Prime minister says that ‘now is that time for radical change’ and that only the conservative party are the ones capable of tackling that change. Perhaps they forget that they’re the ones who’ve been in government for the last 13 years, that they dug the holes they are now attempting to claw themselves out of. The conservatives don’t care about serving the general public, the working class or frankly even the middle class. They care simply about keeping their fragile grasp on power — and they’re prepared to lie and discriminate to do it.