LGBTory (United Kingdom)

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LGBTory
The LGBTory Rainbow Tree Logo
The LGBTory Logo
Motto "The LGBT Conservative Group"
Predecessor Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality
Formation 2006
Type LGBT conservatism
Purpose LGBT Rights and Conservative Principles
Location
Region served
United Kingdom
National Chairman
Colm Howard-Lloyd
Main organ
National Executive[1]
Affiliations Conservative Party
Website http://www.LGBTory.co.uk/
@LGBTory (Twitter)
Facebook

LGBTory is the national organisation for LGBT Conservatives officially affiliated to the Conservative Party.[2] It has been involved in many scandals and its members have a high rate of criminal conviction.

LGBTory campaigns to maximize the number of LGBT Conservative Party candidates,[3][4][5] giving them an unjust and undemocratic advantage through its Candidates' Fund[6] and attends Pride events across the country.[7][8][9] It also organises events related to LGBT demands which it calls "rights"[10][11] including an annual event with Stonewall at the Conservative Party Conference.[12][13]

Scandals

Matthew Sephton

Local councillor Sephton was the chairman of LGBTory in the period 2010-2014 when they were pushing same-sex marriage through Parliament. He was featured in the LGBT website Pink News boasting about his influence and saying redefining marriage was high on the LGBTory agenda. In 2016 Sephton, who was a primary school teacher and member of Trafford council was arrested on charges of child pornography. By then aged 42 he was convicted of making and distributing almost 4,000 indecent images and videos of children and downloading extreme pornography. He had been exchanging these images with Richard Willis, another Conservative councillor and member of LGBTory. When charged Sephton told the court that the pornography had been sent to him by another man whom he had met in Manchester's "Gay Village". But no such person could be proved to exist and the court did not accept his defence. He was also found to be a member of pedophile chat groups on Facebook and Whats App. He was convicted on five counts and jailed for two years and nine months. [14] [15] [16] See Matthew Sephton

Crispin Blunt

Elected MP for Reigate in 1997. He was at that time married to Victoria Blunt, a banker from a wealthy American family whose fortune he used to further his political career. When in 2010 he suddenly announced after 20 years of marriage that he was homosexual, she said she was "traumatized" and regretted sacrificing her career to support his. A friend said "'She gave up everything for him. She is the perfect MP's wife and would attend every fete and garden party when Crispin was at the Commons. 'She did it all for free. She was never employed by him.' Blunt once said in the House of Commons "'It is also clear that there is a much greater strand of homosexuality than of heterosexuality which depends for its gratification on the exploitation of youth.'[17]

After becoming chairman of LGBTory in 2014 Blunt attracted much criticism for his refusal to acknowledge the existence of women's rights to single-sex provision under the Equality Act 2010. In 2018 he was chairman of an all-party LGBT committee appointed by Theresa May which recommended reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to allow individuals to simply self-identify as a chosen "gender", along with the abolition of single-sex spaces. The committee expected these recommendations to be automatically adopted, without public consultation or even in defiance of the outcome of the public consultation. Under the new administration of Boris Johnson the recommendations were not adopted and Blunt expressed public indignation that anybody else should be involved in the process of decision-making. He was rebuked by the standards commissioner in 2020 for lack of transparency.[18]

In 2021 he called for the resignation of Lisa Townsend an elected Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey, and Conservative Party member, simply because she said she would continue to keep men out of women's prisons, in accordance with the law, defying the Stonewall policy of gender self-identification. Blunt bullied and threatened her, submitting a formal complaint about one of her tweets [sic] to the Parliamentary Conservative Party, despite the fact that what she had said was wholly in line with UK law, and Stonewall policy is not. Townshend, who has two law degrees, refused to be silenced and Blunt gained only a widespread reputation as a bully. [19]

In April 2022, Blunt spoke out angrily in defence of Imran Ahmed Khan [see below] another Conservative MP convicted for sexually assaulting a boy aged 15. His statement on his personal blog and his comments on Twitter, saying that the event had been "minor on any scale" were rapidly withdrawn but not before screenshots were taken.

Crispin Blunt statement on Imran Ahmed Khan MP conviction.jpg

On May 1st 2022 Blunt announced he would not stand again as an MP. There were many comments on social media that he should go immediately and was "not fit to be an MP". [20] One added that he "left before he was pushed". [21]

Imran Ahmad Khan

Imran-ahmad-khan-from Sky News.jpg

Tory MP for Wakefield convicted in April 2022 of sexually assaulting a boy aged 15. The victim told the court that while staying as a guest in his parents' house, Khan had "dragged him upstairs, pushed him onto a bed and asked him to watch pornography before the attack." A police report was made at the time. After Khan was elected an MP in 2019 the victim opened prosecution and this resulted in conviction. Tory MP Crispin Blunt chairman of LGBTory said he was "utterly appalled and distraught at the dreadful miscarriage of justice that has befallen my friend and colleague...His conviction today is nothing short of an international scandal". Khan was expelled from the Conservative Party and resigned as an MP. [22] It emerged after his conviction that Khan was serving on a Government committee advising on how to handle the problem of grooming gangs who target young people for sexual abuse. Even after the molestation complaint was received by the Conservative Party in in 2019 it failed to inform the Home Office and he continued to serve on the committee. One newspaper writes "The disclosures raise serious questions for the government and the Home Office over why he was appointed to a panel addressing child protection while under police investigation. His involvement on the panel was disclosed publicly by the home secretary, Priti Patel, in December 2020 – a year after his victim said he had told the Conservative party about being abused in his own home. The latest disclosures about Khan, who was expelled from the Conservatives after his conviction, also raise questions for the party, which failed to record and then inform the Home Office about the molestation claims they received in 2019." [23]

Jamie Wallis

Jamie Wallis tory trans MP.jpg

Jamie Wallis, elected MP for Bridgend in Wales in 2019 with the help of LGBTory shortly afterwards took legal action against a Welsh council for revealing that there were more than 800 complaints made to trading standards about his group of businesses. One of his companies, Action Direct UK, was banned from taking on new clients by the Ministry of Justice in 2011. The disclosure of the number of complaints was made in response to a Freedom of Information request by a member of the public. [24] It emerged in April 2022 that Wallis, who owned a prostitution company, had lied to the Prime Minister about this. He said he had no links with the "Sugar-Daddy" company, set up to draw students of both sexes into prostitution to pay their university expenses. Evidence from documents in Company House reveal that in fact he co-owned it and it was run from another of his websites "clean-break" dot co. Wallis whitewashed the prostitution aspect by calling it "sponsorship". [25] Wallis claims to have a doctorate but doubt has been cast on this too. In 2021 he crashed his car into a telegraph pole and then fled the scene, leaving an entire village cut off from the internet. In mitigation he claimed that he had been blackmailed over compromising photographs of himself, and then raped by a stranger he had met on a hook-up website, and moreover was secretly transgender, therefore deserved sympathy and congratulation for "coming out". [26]

David Smith

Conservative councillor David Smith was found guilty in April 2022 of eleven pedophile offences involving underage boys. One victims testified that he had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by Smith over a four-year period. He was groomed with gifts and given cannabis to facilitate molestation. The second victim described how Smith repeatedly exposed himself and urged him to perform a sex act until he fled in repugnance. [27] Smith was the Conservative councillor for Coulby Newham in 2019, but stood down after he was charged with child sex offences. [28] While he was a councillor, he pushed the [transgender]] agenda and announced he would turn Middlesborough into a gender-neutral town.

Stuart Andrew MP

The MP for Pudsey claimed in the House of Commons during the debate on redefining marriage in 2013, that he had been beaten up at the age of twenty-five for being homosexual. He used this claim to create sympathy, sway the marginal vote and smear those who opposed him by associating them with violence. When investigators challenged him to produce any evidence he could offer none, having no record of any assailants, any police complaint, or treatment by a doctor or hospital, or even a photograph showing that he had been injured. He could not pinpoint any exact date. Five years later he told a newspaper another version with more details, claiming that he had been "beaten unconscious" by three men who had also beaten his father and cracked his father's skull with a brick. Yet despite all of this he says they did not lodge any official complaint to the police or seek treatment from any doctor or hospital. This is how he explains that there are no records confirming that any such incident took place. If as he says the men knew him and followed him home after a meeting, they would have been quite easy to identify. [29]

Conor Burns

MP for Bournemouth West, was forced to resign twice on grounds of scandal. In May 2020 he was sacked as Trade Minister when it emerged that he had used his position as an MP to intimidate a member of the public in the course of a financial dispute. He was given the same job in 2022 by new PM Elizabeth Truss, but within weeks was removed from office because of allegations of misconduct at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. Eyewitnesses saw him putting his hand on the leg of an unknown young man in a hotel bar, and it was reported that he was very drunk and making inappropriate comments. The identity of the young man is not known. Burns later said that he was under the influence of alcohol and pain medication. [30]

LGBTory events

LGBTory has been present at social meet ups, meals and drinks, Gay Pride events, and HIV vigils across the country.[31] LGBTory hosts many fundraising events for itself, Parliamentary receptions in The Palace of Westminster for members of both the House of Lords and House of Commons. LGBTory officers also represented the organisation at David Cameron's LGBT Downing Street garden reception.


Chairmanship

The current chairman is Crispin Blunt. Previous chairmen

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  • 2007–2008 Anastasia Beaumont-Bott[32]
  • 2008–2009 Edward Butler-Ellis
  • 2009–2013 Matthew Sephton[33]
  • Colm Howard-Lloyd, elected in 2014.[34]

Patrons

LGBTory patrons:[35]

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See also

References

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  14. https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/matthew-sephton-richard-willis-jailed-14208825
  15. https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/08/16/conservative-lgbt-group-chairman-equal-marriage-is-putting-life-back-into-the-tory-party/
  16. https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2014/01/27/lgbtory-chairman-matthew-sephton-steps-down-from-post/
  17. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1307304/Wife-traumatised-Tory-MP-Crispin-Blunt-admits-Im-gay.html
  18. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f6917160-bb5b-11ec-b79e-9ccd39d2c9e7?shareToken=022b8768740710dd1fae69d112a6e703
  19. https://unherd.com/2022/01/inside-the-tory-trans-civil-war/
  20. https://twitter.com/SafeSchools_UK/status/1520850596080848896
  21. https://twitter.com/JohnJamesTV/status/1520847154922852352
  22. https://news.sky.com/story/imran-ahmad-khan-tory-mp-guilty-of-sexually-assaulting-15-year-old-boy-at-house-in-2008-12588195
  23. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/26/ex-tory-mp-guilty-of-molesting-boy-was-on-panel-advising-on-grooming-gangs?CMP=share_btn_tw
  24. https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/bridgend-conservative-mps-data-companies-17543043
  25. https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/jamie-wallis-co-owned-sugar-daddy-website
  26. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10667135/Tory-MP-comes-trans-Bridgend-MP-Jamie-Wallis-says-raped.html
  27. https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/ex-conservative-councillor-david-smith-23678572?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar
  28. https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/ex-tory-councillor-accused-child-23657869
  29. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/welsh-mp-battered-unconscious-for-being-gay-set-for-his-first-belfast-pride-36001611.html
  30. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/uk/belfast-born-conservative-mp-conor-burns-sacked-as-trade-minister-for-allegedly-touching-young-mans-thigh-42050933.html
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