 Edrydd, mae'n gwerth i. Maen nhw'n meddwl gynnau. Yn gych chi'n meddwlraeth. Cyn ni'n meddwl gynnu? A'i gael i. Cynnau. Rwy'n meddwl, ein lle. Mae'n meddwl yn cyflawn fawr yn teulu. Rwy'n meddwl i'r gwaith. Rai'r dddangos hefyd ar y gyrdi, mae nid o'n meddwl ar y gyrdi. Mae'n meddwl am yr ystyried. Yn ymddangos gyda chi i hyn monitorau. Mae'n meddwl gwrs mewn awr, Ond yw'n braf i'r holl o eich bydiad ar gyfledd Y Festival, yn roi tyfnwyr Y August a rydyn nhw'n gwybod i'ch gwneud i'r newid o'r gweithio a gwybarthol i'r parliant ar yr Y Festival o charts, a ond ac yn gwneud yn y sefyll y gallan iawn. Felly, rydyn i'n gweithio i mi rôl, y byddwch chi ddim yn ddelwyd i'n mi. Dwi'n sgwrdd ei ddwyd, ac hynny'n i'n mynd i'w brandedd i'w ddechrau meddwlol yma, i ym Mace. Nid yw'r Chyflwyr i'w ddweud i'u gweld, I fell off for my bike he gemeinsam ago, I'm all bandied up brews and broken and this is my first day out of the house for a while only to come to talk about session twenty eight. I really am a glutton for punishment I'm a Conservative MSP I should add so it will make more sense in a minute so I'm Jamie Greene I'm member for the west of Scotland region this is my second session of the Scottish Parliament I got re elected in 2021 and I've been the convener and it was actually the founder of the Parliament's LGBT plus cross-party group. The reason I would say that, surprisingly, is when I joined the Parliament, I thought there would have been one and I was just going to turn up and join it. I didn't realise there wasn't one, so I took it upon myself, rather controversially, to set one up. With the amazing support of the equality network, who Tim leads and you hear a lot more from Tim shortly, how we've been the secretariat of that group, we've gone on from strength to strength over the years. We've had a genuine good cross-party effort. We've had a lot of good support from MSPs from right across the political spectrum, and many of our cross-party group members have gone on to become Government ministers and cabinet secretaries, and they've had to leave the group. I currently co-convene the group with Maggie Chapman of the Greens. Prior to that, I co-convene it with Patrick Harvie of the Greens. Obviously, it's been an interesting journey for all those last couple of years, but I'm always grateful for the support that I've had. We'll maybe talk a little bit more about that as well. People are welcome to join the group if you're interested, but the topic of today is section 28. This is nearly the 20th year, the 19th year that the Parliament has held the Festival of Politics. A lot of people are asking, in today's world, do we still need to hold a festival of politics when there's so much else going on outside of the Parliament in Edinburgh? The answer to that clearly is yes. There are still issues that, like we're going to discuss over the next hour and a half, are clearly historical issues, but we still have irrelevance today, and we'll get into a little bit more of that. I want this to be a fairly interactive session. It's not just a bunch of panellists talking to you. I should also tell you that this session will be live streamed, and I believe that it is recorded as being streamed on the Scottish Parliament's SPTV. If you are interested in what's being said and you are of a social media nature, you can tweet or X at VisitScotParl or via our Instagram account, and I have no idea what the hashtag is, but you can make one up. However, I should tell you that whatever you do say may be taken down in evidence, and as I've learned the hard way, it used against you in the future. We're very lucky to have a really good panel with us today. I'll let them introduce themselves because you'll hear enough from me later. We'll start with Tim. That's great. Thank you. Can you hear me okay? So my name is Tim Hopkins. I use he, him pronouns if you want to refer to me at all. I'm the director of the equality network. The equality network is one of the LGBTI campaign groups in Scotland. We've been going for 26 years. We started just before the Scottish Parliament started, and that meant that we were involved in the campaign to repeal section 28. That was in 2000, so 23 years ago. But I've been involved in what was then called lesbian agai, or at best lesbian gay and bisexual campaigning, right from the kind of mid 1980s. So I was involved in the campaign to try and stop section 28 when it was first introduced. That was in what was introduced in the at the end of 1987 and passed in May 1988. So this badge here, that says ban clause 28 dates from 1988 from that campaign. And then we had another campaign, which this badge dates from in 2000, which was the campaign to get this parliament, not in this building at that point, but to get this parliament to repeal section 28. And, well, I've got loads, so I can tell you about both of those campaigns. Our next panelist, Jim. My name is Jim Wannell, and I've been active in lesbian and gay political campaigning since talking to Tim about this. Memory gets a very, very hazy. I think about 1790. I was on lesbian and gay switchboard in Glasgow, and that was the first thing that community organisation I became active in. I was also active in the campaign to prevent section 28, the Glasgow committee. And we had the first ever march in a public demonstration in Glasgow around lesbian and gay issues in probably 88, but it might have been 87. Janey Buchan was there, and Ian McKellen came and spoke and did a really powerful soliloquy about strangers and Icy strangers, and it's a Jacobean soliloquy, and it's a very powerful event. I also attended the first major national march in Manchester, and to those of you of a certain age, and I'm looking around, there's not that many of us of a certain age, but Brookside was a very, very popular programme in the 1980s. It might have been popular in the 70s, I can't remember when it started. And the cast of Brookside attended that march from the balcony of Manchester City Hall, which was very supportive of the campaign against section 28. Thousands of gay men and lesbians started shouting, Sheila, Sheila, Sheila. It was a massive chant because the actress who played Sheila was one of the big signatories against section 28, and she appeared on the spoke, actually, that rally. Lots to say, and hopefully it won't be boring, but please don't pin me down in dates because, as you can see, I can hardly remember any of the years at this point, but lots to say about section 28 and lots to say about the culture that thrived, the swirling around and a cesspool of our own making culture, which thrived during the 1980s, from which section 28 emanated. Thanks, Jim. Of course, we're looking at section 28 as it was introduced in the UK Parliament. We're going to look at the context of here in Scotland and what it meant to education here in Scotland and how that's changed over the years, which leads us nicely into an introduction from Rona, who's here representing the Thai campaign, who I'm sure many of you are familiar with are a good work. Thank you. My name is Rona Hampton. I am a programmes and delivery officer for Thai Time for Inclusive Education, which is a Scottish educational charity, which works with specifically LGBT inclusive education and came out of the Thai campaign and the work of Thai's co-founders and directors Jordan Daley and Liam Stevenson. I'm also a qualified history teacher myself. I taught in secondary schools until I began doing this role full time. I'm not here to talk about my personal experience too much with section 28. I'm a little bit younger, but my expertise is around where LGBT inclusive education is in Scotland today, what we're doing to try and push aside that legacy of section 28 and how we are supporting LGBT young people in our schools today to try and make their lives and their experiences an education better. Thank you very much. I guess we'll start from the beginning. I'm going to take it that there's a broad understanding that people understand what section 28 was all about beyond just the headline or the words and the numbers, but I think it might be helpful if we do go back in history, perhaps even for my benefit. I was eight years of age when it was introduced, so don't blame me, but it isn't really important that we do understand where it came from and also the context in which it was introduced and the subsequent repeal. So a little bit of a history lesson I think which will set the scene so we can look at some parallels I think with today, which is really important. Just to let you know how you can involve yourself in the conversation, we are going to have a bit of a chat amongst ourselves. I've got a few questions for the panel to get as much out of them as we can, but equally I would like you to get involved as well. So I'm going to dedicate some specific time, it's probably about the last half hour or even more perhaps, where it's just time for you to ask questions and speak and share your thoughts, feelings and views as well. So if you do have questions based on what you're hearing during our discussion, jot them down or park them on your phone or on your head and please do ask lots of questions. Is there a roaming mic kicking about when they get to that point? Yeah. So rather than do that during the chat, we'll do that at the end, it's easier for the chat and the audio. But if something really does grab your attention, just put your hand up and wave furiously at me. If you do get the microphone to speak, please introduce yourselves, you don't have to, but for example if you do represent an organisation for example or you have a specific interest in the subject, do share it with us. If you don't, prefer the anonymous, that's perfectly fine as well, given that we are streaming the meeting. Tim, I'm going to start with you and I'm going to respectfully ask, because I know we've been in a lot of meetings over the years, to keep it succinct and specific, what on earth was section 28? Okay, so section 28 said, a local authority shall not promote homosexuality and shall not promote the teaching in schools of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. Exactly. So we can talk about what impacts that had. Only one, there was only one case that went to court about it and that was right at the end of its existence in Scotland in 2000, but it had much wider effects and Roderon Jim are better qualified to talk about those because the main effect was in schools. I'll maybe say a little bit about the background to how it happened. So if you look at the figures, there's been research done for a long long time in the UK about people's attitudes towards homosexuality and the basic question is, do you think homosexuality is wrong? And if you look at the percentage of people who think homosexuality is wrong, in the 1980s it was actually going up and the worst point was 1987 where it was a large majority, something like 75% of people thought homosexuality was wrong. And that was the background for section 28 that was introduced at the end of 1987. So why did that happen? I think there were three reasons. One is a backlash against what people called the permissive sixties. So in the 1960s there were socially liberal moves in a number of areas. There was the decriminalisation in England and Wales, but not Scotland of sexual relationships between men. There was the decriminalisation of abortion and so on. But in any change like that is difficult and you get a backlash. So that was the first factor, the backlash against the permissive sixties. The second factor unfortunately was HIV. HIV was, I have to say, it was a gift to people who were homophobic because they could say this shows that we were right all along and they did say that. There were dreadful things said. And the third reason is political expediency. The Conservative government in the 1980s wanted to find ways to bash labour and labour had adopted in the mid 1980s a platform of supporting lesbian and gay rights. And the Conservatives thought this is a good way to bash labour and they talked about the loony left. The loony left was the term that was used then in the same way that woke is used to attack people now. Margaret Thatcher made some dreadful speeches at one party conference. She said, children who ought to be taught traditional moral values are being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay. And that was the background for the introduction of section 28. So the Tories used it as a way to bash labour. So you talk about the context there and people's views of the world. The briefing that I had was that in 1983 in the social surveys, 50 per cent, so half of the British population, believed that sexual relations between two adults of the same sex was always wrong. Not a little bit wrong or maybe sometimes wrong, but always wrong. That same survey four years later had risen to 64 per cent and, as you say, went higher and higher as the 80s went on. It's interesting that you make the three links between the general wider context of just social values do change. There were all sorts of horrible views of all sorts of groups of people for a long time, which over time changed, through change. The legacy of that was difficult and that was a contextual societal thing. But I'm interested in the last two points. One is your belief that this was fuelled by the HIV pandemic at the time. Secondly, this relationship between national government, which actually was doing quite well at the time and probably didn't need niche issues to fight. Why was there a need for a culture around the 80s when they were polling so high and winning elections? Or is it the fact that 75 per cent of the population weren't homophobic but were a little bit homophobic or it wasn't always wrong, but it felt a little bit wrong? Was that just political expediency in its truest form, in the sense of the here's votes? This is how we get people on our side. I think that it was political expediency and I think that one of the reasons for it was that they realised that the Labour Party was disunited on the issue. I remember newspaper headlines from the late 1980s where the general secretary of the Labour Party was quoted saying, front page of the newspapers, the lesbian and gay issue is costing us dear amongst pensioners. The Labour Party were having internal debates about the extent to which they could support lesbian and gay rights. In fact, their chosen candidate in a by-election in Bermondsey in London where I was living at the time in 1983, their chosen candidate was Peter Tatchell who I'm sure many of you know who Peter Tatchell is. The Labour Party disowned him when he was outed as gay. The Labour Party disowned him and he lost the election to the Liberal Democrats in what was previously a safe Labour seat. Labour were divided on this just as they are now about trans equality. That was a gift to the Conservatives because Labour were divided on it. How much of that do you think, sorry to press you, but how much of that was inherent, genuine, heartfelt, social, moral, religious, homophobia versus just political opportunitism? I ask that because we are going to look at the parallels between then and now. I remember people saying at the time that Margaret Thatcher is not homophobic, she's got gay friends and that may well have been true, but that didn't stop her making speeches like the one I quoted earlier on and it didn't stop her supporting the introduction of section 28 and attacking Labour over these issues. My answer is that for her it was expediency. Obviously there were quite a lot of MPs and certainly religious leaders and so on for whom it was a much more fundamental dislike or disagreement with same-sex relationships. Thankfully that has changed and I'm hoping that one of the positives that will come out of today's session is that things have definitely changed, but not in every area, as I'm sure we'll come to talk about. Jim, you were a teacher at the time, I understand, as well as an activist. Were you a teacher before you were an activist or were you an activist because of what happened? No, I was active in the lesbian and gay movement from 79 point of left university. I began teaching in 1988, so that was just after the introduction of section 28, so my teaching career began as section 28 began as part of—we both myself as a teacher in section 28 of the same birth period culturally were akin. What did it mean, though? I mean, so the terms explanation of the technical, what it actually meant was that you couldn't—what was the phrasing you couldn't promote same-sex? Couldn't promote the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship, which is pretty horrible if you think about it. How do you best undermine and attack lesbian, gay and bisexual people? What makes us as lesbian, gay and bisexual people different from everybody else? Well, the only thing that makes us different, really, is that we have same-sex relationships. So to say that our relationships are unacceptable and pretend relationships is a fundamental attack on lesbian, gay and bisexual people, and that was quite deliberate. How did that filter into schools? The conversation tended to focus around what this meant in the teaching environment. I appreciate that there was a link between local authorities being responsible for education and materials and resources and so on, but also teaching methodology, curriculum and practices. I presume at a time when there was an increase in more of a social element to education where people were starting to learn about sex ed and relationships, drugs, et cetera, which are things that were deemed to be quite appropriate to be teaching, but back then probably were quite controversial to be introducing into schools, which I presume were just places for learning how to read, write and that sort of thing. What did section 28 actually mean in a teaching environment? Section 28 was extremely effective as a piece of legislation in censoring, causing self-censorship within the education system, completely ineffective legally. I apologise to anybody who is a lawyer president, but I think that even a layperson could look at those words and think that I could probably put quite a good case against what is legally a pretended family relation. What could that mean? As Tim mentioned, there was one instance, a Glasgow City Council, where a case was taken against the council. Interestingly, in that instance, the council immediately withdrew funding. I was chair of the HIV and AIDS project, Faced Scotland at that point, and we had teams of workers and it was a very difficult position for us to receive a letter immediate withdrawal of funding. That is because the local government, the council, was frightened of what that might mean. Teachers, likewise, were very frightened of what it might mean. Consecretly, what they did was not deal with it. That is basically the way that I tried and tested teacher method when you are not sure what you are doing, just do not do it. That meant that lesbian and gay issues within the curriculum were zeroed. It meant that lesbian and gay teachers felt very, very intimidated. I think that you have to be aware of the fact that, at that point—I know Rowna is going to go on and give us some really good news about some of the great things that Ty's been able to do and is delivering in the education system—even employment rights, it was completely legal to dismiss a person on grounds of homosexuality. That was all the kinds of cultural things that we lived with around equality and around equal rights that did not exist. What did exist was that if a local authority had said in its policy structures—the GLC was one, Glasgow Strathglad Regional was one—and after that, Glasgow City Council and other local authorities, if they voluntarily said that they would not dismiss somebody for being gay or lesbian, that gave you protection. When I was a teacher, I was protected, but other workers were dismissed. In fact, there was quite an interesting case that went to employment tribunal. It was just evidence of the culture at that point. The dismissal took place on the grounds that the person was gay and it was manifestly obvious that prejudice against homosexual people would damage the business. Lawyers decided to defend that on the grounds of supporting the person who had been dismissed. On grounds of you have to prove that there is widespread prejudice against gay and lesbian people, consequently that would affect your business. It was not the lawyer's thought that it was not the case. It was the thought that it would be difficult to prove. However, the employment tribunal decided that it was manifestly obvious that there was prejudice and discrimination against gay and lesbian people. Consequently, the employer did not even need to prove it. It was just taken as a given. That kind of states where the country was. When I said earlier about swirling around an accessible of our own making, the national lesbian who gave pride march in 1984—don't quote me in any of these years, but it's around that time—had a large banner over in Kennington Park when it was a much smaller affair at that point. Those words were put across—they were at the very front of the march, if I remember rightly, because the chief constable of Manchester, James Anderton, had said that homosexuals were swirling around in an accessible of their own making. Later on, his daughter came out as gay, which caused family issues, but God works in the serious ways. Again, that is part of the culture in which section 28 took place. Section 28 was a bit like—if anybody speaks Gaelic and I have read the blog that I have done for the Scottish Parliament in Gaelic, I mention this—that in Alabama, sitting at the back of the bus degrades you, it makes you a second-class citizen and ensures that you, throughout your life, understand that you are not as good as everybody else. That is what section 28 did. It told gay and lesbian people that you are not as good as everybody else. You are most definitely a pretender. Your family relations are pretends. You are not real. Consequently, any mention of you is dangerous to the body politic, to good ordinance in society. That is what it did. It is a bit like sitting at the back of the bus. You get on the bus to your work and every day you are reminded and told that you are not as good as everybody else. You are certainly not as good as the white people at the front. That is what section 28 was about. It was about degrading and creating an atmosphere of discrimination. There is a really good documentary. I watched part 4 last night. We were watching it at home on Sky Atlantic—not Punt in Sky Atlantic but that is what it is on—called Last Call. It is about serial killer in New York. It sets the killing of gay men in a political context. It is really interesting. It is about what happens about how serial killers, why they kill gay men, but the political and social context that festers and creates disturbance like that. That is what section 28 was part of. It was part of social disturbance. It was part of social discrimination. It is part of a much bigger picture, which, luckily, we are no longer in. Anything like the same venom that was around at that point. I am sure that Rowan has got lots to say about trials that she still has. I know that I still have difficulties in schools, but not what it was like when I began teaching. Thanks for that, Jim. It is very personal experiences. It is interesting that you talked about the serial killer of the documentary. Those of us who remember the bombing of the Admiral Duncan, I remember going to it the day that it reopened when I was too young to understand the context of how they got to where they were in London at that time. I remember walking down Old Compton Street for the first time. I think it was 18. Possibly 17. Do not tell anyone. I still went in for a drink. It was definitely purple. It was vivid. My memory of balloons outside. It looked like a big party. I went in and went to the bar. I said, what are we celebrating? It is completely naive. They said it was their first day reopening after the bombing. I suddenly remembered. My first thought was that I better not tell my mother where I have been, not because I am in a gay bar, but because she will be petrified and terrified of what might happen. That was only in the late 90s, so the culture even then was difficult. Just before I move on to Rona, I want to ask you something specifically about this notion of how section 28 affected teachers and teaching. Is it the case that the advice, if you like, the legislation was quite specific, but the interpretation of it could have been quite vague? Were people just saying, look, let us not mention the word gay at all in a school environment, because what will happen is that we are going to have an angry parent come in and take us to court or I am going to lose my job? Was it just as simple as that? Or do you think that there was homophobia in the teaching environment amongst head teaching? Or did they just say, let us just stay away from that whole subject because we are petrified or breaking the law? I think that both things are true. I think that the effective section 28 educationally was to ensure, amazingly effective, for something that is so poorly drafted and so poorly constructed, really effective. Teachers follow rules, they just follow the bell goes and you get out of the staff room and everybody lines up, well come from that culture of order. Teachers are kind of ingrained in following that kind of structure and that happened with section 28. In terms of homophobia within education, absolutely manifest, continuous. When I was involved in the Scottish campaign for repeal, I was a head teacher by this point. I was put under a lot of pressure, like three, four phone calls, personal phone calls from the director, senior officials, get off the TV, stop doing this, you have to stop immediately. I distinctly remember a tense conversation because it is your career at this point. I did not think that I was going to be dismissed because I did not think that the cohoenys would do that and I did not think that they would want to do that but I knew that this was the end of my career at that point. The director never spoke to me ever again after this, he blanked to me at all meetings and I get further promoted but only when he is gone. I said to the deputy director at that point that this is a national emergency for my people and I thought of Chrysler if she would be a descriptor of our poor battered tribe, is what he called gay and lesbian people and Chrysler if she would be the writer. I thought of our poor battered tribe at this point and I thought about that both in the beginning of section 28 when we campaigned against it. The Labour Party supported section 28 at the very initial part of it and then it freaked and moved to position. Some of us remember that because I can see some faces who were as aghast as others were. Maureen Calhoun mentioned about Labour Party difficulties at the time. Maureen Calhoun was a lesbian MP who was deselected in 1982-1983 on grounds that he cannot feel gay and lesbian candidates because if he does, he is going to lose. One of the reasons that Peter Tatchell lost them berns, he was the official Labour candidate, was that a real Labour candidate stood and got about 8,000 votes or something like that. In other words, the Labour Party votes split into two groups, apparently real Labour, which was homophobic Labour, which had a good wealth of support and the Tatchell official Labour campaign, which was denigrated by the official Labour leadership in various ways. Within education, education mirrors culturally the country that we live in. We get an education system that is kind of like what our country is like, and our education system is homophobic. Our practices as teachers were homophobic. In my view, and it is a personal view, but I can back it all with evidence, it was not a career move to be gay or lesbian within education. Practically all people I knew, and there were lots of them who were gay or lesbian, who were teachers were closeted. I remember during section 28, the second one, when we repealed it in Scotland, I had a teacher who was gay. I knew she was gay. I saw her in the corridor, I was kind of a bit like a notoriety person, a bit like Quentin Crisp, an association with John Mannell. Sometimes people would jump to conclusions. I knew her and I knew she was gay. We were alone in the corridor, and it was only me and her there, and she pretended still that she didn't know me. I kind of thought, look, nobody else here but you and me, I mean, I'm not going to go in there and say, by the way, she's a lesbian, I'm not going to do that, but that level of ingrained discrimination meant that people felt so repressed and uncomfortable, even on a one-to-one basis. Nobody else there, I can't really recognise that he knows I, he's seen me out with my partner out drinking in gay bars, so I just can't do that. I can't make that step forward. That's my education, and that would be 2000, 2001. We're not talking about 35 years ago, we're talking about much more recent times. Culture change takes ages, Rowna knows that better than anybody else because she's working in the system, just now. It takes a long time to shift the big barge of culture, and within that section 28, fed that amongst teachers, if fed just as you're saying, that sense of don't touch this again to trouble, bad for my career, a lot of things are true. If you did touch it, it would have been bad for your career. It would have caused you grief. You probably would have been told, don't dare do that again. My cousin was gay, and she became out as gay, and this would be early 90s, maybe late 80s, times are a bit hazy. What happened then was that she was taken before the education committee, and the education committee responded to her, she was an excellent teacher, superb teacher. What they said to her was they could find no evidence against the research in her entire career. Purely on grounds of being gay, that was it. There wasn't really much else to be done. Their response then, sometimes psychologically the words people use tell you everything about their approach. We could find no reason to proceed with dismissal. In other words, we have been looking for a reason to find a way to get rid of you, and we can't find it. Sadly, we're going to have to keep employing you. That says something about what education was like and what teaching was like. I spoke at the EIS conference in 2000-2001 at the repeal campaign, and we knew that there was a vociferous element within the union that was for section 28, active and spreading amongst the union. I remember speaking at the EIS conference, and I told the EIS conference that Scotland is watching us as teachers to see what we think about repeal, and if you vote for repeal tonight, Scotland will listen and think that teachers have got a viewpoint, which is contrary to what Souter and Keep the Claws were saying, or if you vote for keeping section 28, Scotland will also listen to that, and that will vote for repeal. The group for section 28 was heavily marginalised, because I knew during the day that they had more support than they finally got in the final vote, which was testament to the work that we did. There's a group of us who spoke for repeal. One of the things that I said was that I'd been on the lesbian and gay switchboard from 1798, and I remember one night being on the lesbian and gay switchboard with somebody else on the team who was an older guy than me, a young chap at the time, and he got exasperated with me doing my usual sort of leftist thing about joining a union, joining a political party, you know, gay and lesbian people need to get active, blah, blah, blah, and he snapped at me because he basically had enough of this young guy who knows nothing, and I didn't have the life he'd led. He'd probably been his 50s at that point, so this is kind of 80s, so he would have been born in the 30s relatively, lived a different life from me, and he said, what you don't understand, Jim, might have been more pleasant than I don't know where he even used my name, but what you don't understand is they hate us, they've always hated us, he meant straight people, and there's nothing you can do about that, nothing. All we can do is build our own organisations, like switchboard and other things, community centre or whatever. And I said to EIS conference tonight, prove them wrong, because I don't recall anybody else who was gay or lesbian at that conference. Prove them wrong, and they did, and they did prove them wrong, because that is not the case, that every straight person hates every gay or lesbian person, not true, but it filler that sometimes. Thanks for that. That sounds utterly depressing, Rona, is it still as bad as it was? Prove it was wrong. Yeah, I certainly think it's not, I can say it's as bad as it was. I really genuinely wish that I could sit here as on behalf of Ty and the people currently out doing this work in schools to try and help LGBT inclusive education to roll it across the country. I wish I could sit here and say that it's all better, things are so much better, and it's all good news, but, and there certainly is good news, and I will get that in a moment, but I think it is important to first establish where we currently are in Scottish education as someone who is obviously working in this field. I think, as Jim said, culture is very slow to change. I think school yards and school communities are especially slow. I think sometimes what people forget is that for children, the people who are most present in building their world view is their parents, and that means you're usually talking one or maybe two generations older than that young person. I think it's very easy for us to look at children and young people today and think, oh, they're so progressive, they know so much more, look at our culture that they're growing up in, and of course that has an important impact. But ultimately, when they're young, what they're hearing, the people they're hearing from the most are people who are 20, 30, 40 years older than them, and that's where you can get this real delay sometimes in things that we see in our culture and how that is filtered down to young people. Certainly by the time young people are moving up into mid-late secondary, they are far more absorbing things from the culture around them, from their peers, from their friends and celebrities on the internet, but for young people in schools when we're talking about where some of the homophobic language, the homophobic behaviour sit in in primary schools, it is young children who are eight, nine, ten years old who are starting to hear things that we would like to hope were left far in the past. Homophobic language, the very class at like, oh, that's so gay, it's still incredibly prevalent in schools across Scotland and the UK, I'm sure. We certainly have been in schools doing our work where we have heard slurs thrown around and often not even us, you'd think maybe us going into a school would provoke this behaviour, but no, I've watched three school corridors where I've just heard it from one child tunnel or a young person really, teenager, tunnel or teenager, not because we've provoked it but because that is just what the school community is still like and of course teachers are not accepting this behaviour in most cases, teachers are often trying to do a lot to combat this kind of behaviour, prejudice, discrimination, but unfortunately it is still present in our schools, especially for schools who have not yet started that full journey of moving towards LGBT inclusive education. What is inclusive education? How do you structure that? What does that actually mean? So in Scotland, LGBT inclusive education is a quite specific term, it refers to a Government policy area around how LGBT people, topics, themes and history are included in the curriculum. So when we're talking about LGBT inclusive education, this isn't about sex ed, it's not about teaching about healthy relationships, that is of course really important and it is vital that young people get that knowledge whether they are straight, whether they are cis, whether they are LGBT, but that's not specifically what would be by LGBT inclusive education. LGBT inclusive education is referring to the broader teaching of themes, topics, people, successful icons or role models to young people and it runs right from early years in primary education right up through the end of secondary. It's things like giving young people and children an understanding of what is prejudice, not just towards LGBT people but in the broader context. What is prejudice? What is discrimination? How might you come across these views? How do you interact online? What are you hearing in the world and how does that maybe start to shape your view? Understanding more about the basics. What is an LGBT person? What does that mean? And some actual examples of people like for example en masse, you might learn about Alan Turing and the great work he did and you will find out that actually in his life he experienced extreme prejudice that led to the end of his life despite the incredible work he had done to help Britain during the Second World War. You might learn about sports idols like personal I love Billy Jean King but maybe someone more modern as well like Tom Daley and learning about how LGBT people contribute so positively and broadly to our society in general because I think the big thing for young people is that they so often don't hear the words LGBT, they don't hear about LGBT people. They might know a name, they might know who Tom Daley is but have they actually ever realised that he is a gay man and by making sure that LGBT people themes, topics and history are included in the broad education not just in PSE, not just in kind of sex ed but actually in their proper and relevant and meaningful place throughout the school curriculum, we make sure that young people both LGBT young people and young people who are cis or straight understand that LGBT people are just a normal part of our society that we are not something to be afraid of, not something to make fun of and not something to be scared of being associated with which is so often what leads to the more active bullying behaviours and language that unfortunately we do still something to see in Scotland schools. Tell me do you think and I should say you guys do great work. I remember just after being elected in 2016 and when Liam and Jordan turned up on the scene and there were, I described them once as the militant end of activism at the time but I think they had to be because no one really was listening nor did they have any money or resource and I remember them standing at the bottom of the garden lobby just as you'll see that in the main hall there with a big placard asking us to sign the pledge as we get asked to sign so many pledges every week and I was a bit unsure because you know obviously you know before politics I was involved in pride events and my own form of activism but you know you're always a bit nervous about putting your name to something because you don't know what that something actually is and I recall at one point most of the signatures on the board were from opposition party members there was very few government backbenchers signing that board because I think there was probably a bit of nervousness that they didn't want the governing party signing up to some policy that hadn't been discussed or approved or funded and it took a bit of time and not everyone signed it and I think at the time they only just got over the line in terms of a majority the majority of MSPs that signed the pledge but that certainly was a trigger it was certainly a you know a springboard to what happened next and in terms of formal discussions with the government about policy change and actually funding this properly because everything costs money so you know that was a bit of a journey and that's quite recent as well do you feel that that that activism is still there or is it the case with so many third party organisations the minute you get that government check you suddenly now have to to certainly soften everything down toe the line a little bit more so you don't annoy too many people in the teaching industry I think to be honest I might lose my job tomorrow if I suggested that my ties co-founders have given up their activist spirit I certainly think they haven't just in case there is anyone in the room who's not fully aware so the co-founders and leaders of director sorry of Thai are Jordan Daly and Liam Stevenson who led this grassroots campaign to get LGBT inclusive education as a national policy area where it was going to be consistent and make sure that every young person in scotland had access three access to them to an LGBT inclusive education and as you say I think that certainly you know because they kind of came up you know they were not people who had this long history behind them of of activism or activism in the area of just LGBT the LGBT community and you know I'm no doubt that probably contributed to the fact that things were maybe a little bit slow to get rolling as they had to sort of prove themselves and establish you know what they really stood for but I think also because of that they've not come to this as people who are activists for the sake of being an activist they came to this policy area and to this work because they felt a real calling to do it and I won't obviously go into their full story but I mean essentially the very short version is that Jordan at when he's when the campaign started was a 19 year old student who'd only just left school had experienced horrific bullying himself and when he spoke to Liam about this and they had become friends and Liam was a petrol tanker driver in his 30s he was not somebody who'd been previously involved with the LGBT community as a state man with a partner and a daughter it was all a bit foreign to him but just the injustice of that story of hearing what it was like to grow up as a LGBT person in Scotland it made him just decide that he was not going to allow that to continue either so they built the campaign from there and obviously you can you can read all about it if you want the full the full story but I think certainly there is once you once you kind of achieve that funding achieve that status achieve you know the goals of your original campaign I actually think if you ask them they would probably will say to they never envisioned when they started that they would be actually the ones delivering LGBT and class of education in Scotland as to be fair when I qualified as a teacher I would never have told you that I thought I would be delivering LGBT and class of education in Scotland but you certainly have to be aware of the environment you're operating in you need to make sure that you are pulling people in and not pushing people away because you can't go and change minds of actual teachers on the ground of young people on the ground if you're only going in and being super inflammatory and you know you need to do this my way or it's the highway you need to go you need to talk to people you need to build understanding between these different communities and understand what's going to work because we always say LGBT and class of education is not solely for LGBT young people it is for everyone I always say to teachers when I'm talking to them it's not the LGBT young people in your school who have a problem they are experiencing a problem but somebody else is putting it on them and it's that young person and you know obviously there's many reasons a young person might be lashing out might be engaging in bullying behaviours it might be that they have something going on that they need support with as well but ultimately this education is for everyone to make sure that the people who are engaging these bullying behaviours are no longer doing it because they have a better understanding of the community and the society around them and of course so that these young LGBT young people are experiencing a much better much more pleasant school life than many of us who went through school before this was a policy area had in our time in school yeah I would give you an applause but I can't so accept that as one yeah great no it wasn't a leading question of course I wanted to keep your job tomorrow no it's just it's really interesting to see how you know two people just coming together and you know in the days like the early days of outrage for example or some of the very early you know glad and all you know the campaign against gays in the military all these very sort of what we think of as quite historic campaigns you know from the 70s and 80s and 90s that young people really don't identify maybe young gay people don't identify with for example but certainly are seeing that in a sort of modern day context that that sort of activism still exists and unfortunately still has to exist I think it's probably the lesson to be learned um do you do you get any um just before I open up to the audience do you get any pushback um either from pupils themselves who just come in and go oh what the s this all about we don't need to to know any of this stuff um even from teachers dare I ask and you don't need to be specific and that would be unfair um in certain geographic areas or types of schools um but even from parents and and you know obviously we know that there's there's still maybe some parents out there who are not happy that this might be might be a feature of their their child's curriculum yeah I think that's certainly a fair question to ask and um you know I think anyone who's ever worked in education or just been a young person knows that not every child or young person however what's in your classroom is going to be super excited to be there especially a few times when you know I've maybe gone in because I deliver workshops directly to young people and you know I see occasionally some people wandering in in their PE kit and go they're not going to be happy to be here they were looking forward to some football but ultimately for the most part we actually get very little in the way of pushback we um certainly we get questions like and we welcome questions we always are very open to whether that is from teachers parents or young people themselves I want young people to ask me questions that's kind of why I'm there I am that person who's able to come in as an outsider there maybe we hesitant to ask a question of their teacher if they think oh maybe I'll get into trouble for asking that if they are genuinely seeking knowledge I absolutely want them to ask me a question that I can hopefully either give them a really good answer to or at least say you know what I'm going to give some information to your teacher who's going to maybe talk to your entire class about this subject however it might be um in terms of teachers we still do um work with teachers who have actually qualified and started their teaching sorry their teaching careers under section 28 um and and I mean a handful of times in the in the thousands of teachers we work with we have actually encountered people who went oh I didn't realise you could talk about this they've actually whether it's just they've kind of forgotten or maybe they missed out on the the campaigns around repealing it they actually in some cases have never realised that this is still something they can talk about and have been able to talk about for 20 years now um but for the most part a lot of teachers are very on board a lot of teachers are trying to do this work already um and part of what LGBT inclusive education is about is bringing those efforts together to make sure that um there's a huge amount of teachers who are doing great work already there's a huge amount of teachers who are very well meaning and are doing things that maybe on the surface look really look really positive but aren't always having the impact they're hoping for so part of having this is an official um policy area with a sort of central set of um themes and and a way of doing things that is adaptable to teachers and classrooms and individual communities of schools but ultimately lead teachers in a guide them in a certain route towards proper inclusion for LGBT young people it's about making sure that that effort is um is going to work as intended and is is consistent throughout scotland in terms of parents again parents are actually overwhelmingly supportive of this um when we engage with them directly um i'd love to do like a proper survey of parents to get more information on that but we do have some research that we're doing and hoping to start in the next few months to look at teachers and young people and their experiences of LGBT inclusive education um but when we talk to parents which we do try to do as much as possible because we always want to listen and talk to engage people properly again meeting them where they are at rather than trying to haul them and go over to where we're at um a lot of parents assume that this is already happening they actually think oh i just assumed that that was standard i assumed that would be being taught um again parents might have questions they might want to for example see resources because there is a lot of misinformation especially online about what is being taught um you know what what age certain things are being taught at all this kind of thing but again that's where we just are approach that is just to be completely open because we don't we know we're not doing anything wrong so we don't have anything to hide it's a case of come look at our resources anyone in this room or on the internet could go to lgbteducation.scot right now and look at all the resources that we have up for teachers tears for example and once we find that once we have that conversation whether it's with parents or whether it's with teachers and say go look at it look at it think about how it's going to work in your classroom if you're a parent talk to your child's teacher and see what they're actually using we have i don't think we've ever had someone take a complaint sort of further than that or have further questions because once they see it in front of them and go oh this is you including tom daly on a list of Olympians that my child's looking at for their sports topic or it's talking about you know eco marriage as one of the series of events you're looking at in this discussion about legal discrimination but there's very actual there's very often not real pushback to that often any pushback that occurs is around this idea of what it could be rather than actually the reality of what it is which i i'm really glad you you raised that you know you're not going around schools giving out copies of genuine lives with eric and martin are you in a republished edition from penguin so um tim just tell me that we're obviously glad and pleased that the that that piece of legislation was repealed but it wasn't certainly without a fight there's a fairly large probably quite well funded campaign to keep that legislation um we haven't got a lot of time but in two minutes what else was that about so it was a excuse me it was a defining moment for this new scottish parliament the scottish parliament started up in may june 1999 and it was towards the end of 1999 that the labour liberal democrat scottish government announced that they would repeal section 28 uh and we the equality network thought that was great and i remember we went to the pub and uh looked at the newspaper and there was a big headline on the front page about some of the religious bodies in scotland starting a campaign to against repeal of section 28 the catholic bishops conference a conservative group within the church of scotland and so on but we kind of handled that we did some media about it that was in december 1999 and then in january 2000 brian suter who runs bus companies and is very rich popped up and said he would be spending a million pounds trying to stop the repeal of section 28 now in 2000 a million pounds then is probably worth three million pounds now in those days it was almost as much per person in scotland as a us presidential candidate spent on their election campaign in the us scottons a small country a million pounds was a lot of money there were billboards all over scotland trying to stop the repeal of section 28 homophobic billboards had a real impact on lesbian gay and bisexual peoples mental health uh so it was six months of hell really for those of us who were campaigning for the repeal of section 28 i was the media spokesperson for the equality network and i was on the radio pretty well every day talking about it but it was a defining thing for the scottish parliament this is what we kept saying to msbs is that in effect if you back down on this then from then on every socially liberal campaign every socially liberal change that you try to make in the scottish parliament the same coalition of social conservatives and religious conservatives will put the same pressure on you to try and stop it is that the way you want the new scotland to be run and the scottish parliament to be run and they decided not and the repeal of section 28 was was passed by i think it was 99 votes to 16 the 16 were all the tories unfortunately uh so yeah so we won and and once we'd won everybody forgot about it and that's what would have happened with the gender recognition reform bill that this parliament passed by almost as big a majority last december that's what would have happened if it hadn't been for the uk government deciding to block it using this never before used technical thing in the scotland act people would have been over it by now but that's that's another story if i start talking about that i'll get into more trouble i've got into enough trouble about that subject let's open up now to you the audience i don't think we can take questions from online unfortunately but certainly the conversation can continue online and i'll start right at the very back wait till the microphone arrives if sir if you have a question directed at anyone specific on the panel do that if it's just generic and you're happy for anyone to answer that's fine as well okay well thanks very much i'm neil barber i represent a group called the edinburgh secular society and i sometimes when they trust me to be on message i'm a spokesperson for the national secular society in scotland tim began to hint at my concerns there just at the end we see repeal of a so-called gay conversion therapy blocked by religions religious conversion therapy is okay we see schools being legal at faith schools being legally allowed not to have lgbt inclusive sex education classes and we see candidates for the very first ministership of scotland standing up and saying i'm not homophobic it's religious homophobia and if you're discriminating against me you're discriminating against my religious beliefs i a couple of years ago i was one of the panellists in the discussion of the hate crime bill and what comes up is this notion of protected characteristics there is a sexual orientation as a protected characteristics and religious belief as a protected characteristics now of course my question is which one is a choice but this always this is always an issue that any objection to religious homophobia is countered by cries of you're discriminating against my religion so my question is does the panel agree with me that an equality issue is a secular issue i'm going to come to you after because i want to come to you first one of the themes that has came up certainly in the last couple of years it did come up in the hate crime legislation i remember that debate quite vividly certainly came up on the last over the last 12 months on another piece of legislation qualities legislation this idea of balancing rights and it's it is tremendously difficult as lawmakers to do to respect differences of opinion and even agree to disagree as i often do with people on a wide range of issues um jim how do you how do you think that those sensitivities can be dealt with if they are heartfelt genuine views versus phobic views or illegal views how did society deal with that and how does society deal with the fact you know there are even people of faith in the LGBT community who you know who might not agree with myself for example so it's a very difficult balancing act it is and i think it's complex i think particularly around gay and lesbian issues and religion because jureo christian traditions and the islamic tradition has got a particular view about sexuality and a particular view in its in its formal viewpoint around gay and lesbian issues that does not mean that religious people are one broad mass and they all think the same thing it does not mean for instance that because the catholic bishops conference wanted to keep section 28 every catholic in scotland also wanted to keep section 28 that that is not the case what i think is important is that there must be absolute and cast iron separation of church and state that's absolutely imperative because the state is there to protect everybody everybody has a place in the state's mission consequently the gay and lesbian community is part of the state the religious community is also part of the state and the state must protect everybody's rights and everybody's viewpoints and we see those those things playing out in the united states just now where you know recent supreme court decisions are just horrendous because they could could lead to most terrible imbalances within the state but part of the problem for the united states in my view is that separation of church and state has never been properly delivered gore vidal its famous comment about the united states constitution that it's a wonderful document and it should now be implemented is something which is of interest i think to all of us um now within that you get to actually say that a religious person is not permitted to think that my life is sinful i don't really want that and i don't really need it and i've been brutally frank i just don't care um now if a religious person says i think your life is sinful jim and i don't want you employed and i don't want you to be able to buy a cake and in italy two women whose names are on the birth certificate i want one of those women's names is removed because the maloney government won't recognise the fact that a gay or lesbian families exist and can co-parent a child because that that just can't happen that's where the separation of church and state must be laser sharp in that the state is there to protect us all we can all live with each other we may have to live with disagreement this panel does not agree on a number of issues there's live debate within the gay and lesbian community about all sorts of things and long may that continue and we may have different political views we come from different you know all sorts of different backgrounds the state's there to allow us to have an event like this where we can celebrate um a step forward we can celebrate something good something that took place that removed discrimination but in the end if a religious person's sitting here and i don't know if anybody is religious who inside the head saying yeah but i still think it's morally wrong that's that's your private personal opinion what's private and personal is quite different from what's the state and what the state does and that's where the church and the mosque and any particular viewpoint has absolutely no right to dictate to or suppress the state in a sense and try to overturn the state the state exists for us all and within that there are rights for different people to have different viewpoints i'm very up for having a discussion with a religious person about whether i'm a sinful person or not i'm up for it i have no problem doing that very relaxed about it i do object strenuously to the state's siding with any discriminatory or oppressive view and then enshrining that in the state's behaviour and that's what section 28 was it was enshrining discrimination and prejudice within the apparatus of the state and that's what meloni's doing and it's what the supreme court is doing in the united states and that is extremely dangerous and rona you've still got a bit of work to do because that you know we get that the next generation must know that that is not to happen thank you jim um i can't imagine you're a sinful you seem such a nice guy i mean i'm generally shocked uh yeah not everybody thinks so tim i want to ask you specifically about legislation you've been you've been hanging around politicians for longer than i have which is all credit to you um and you have the patience of the saint in that respect but you do get into often to the great benefit of politicians the detail the actual detail what does this piece of legislation do how does it work how does it interact with other pieces of legislation and this is one of the things that we often forget passing a law a specific law that does a very specific thing may often have consequences or interactions and of course there's a very live debate about that at the moment with regards to gender recognition for example but going back to the original question is how do you ensure that when doing what i think probably most people in this room and watching with an interest in this subject want to do to improve the lives of people across all communities do that in a in a way that is meaningful but yet does not stifle people's personal objections to for example certain changes or do you think that you know this idea that there's that we are promoting one right over another and and vice versa is that just a myth or is there is there a happy place you can get to in legislation so i think that definitely is i i don't agree with the idea that equality is a zero-sum game that if you give more equality to trans people you're somehow taking equality away from women which is what some people say or if you give equality to same sex couples you're taking equality away from people of particular religious faiths it's really important that all those protected characteristics are in equality law so Neil i think it's quite right that religion is inequality law just look at the extent of anti-semitism look at the extent of islamophobia those things need to be need to be put in equality law to protect people i think the basic answer to your question is and Jim has pretty much said it already is that you know if you're a person of faith and you believe that same sex marriage is wrong don't get married to somebody of the same sex but don't tell me that i can't get married to somebody of the same sex that is it in a nutshell now when it comes to the detailed legislation that may require adjustments when we worked on the equal marriage legislation in scolton in 2014 there was actually an adjustment made to the equality act to make it absolutely clear that if you were for example a catholic priest you could not be taken to court for refusing to do a same sex marriage for refusing to solemnize the same sex marriage and the equality network supported that change to the equality act because it's in line with what i just said and it was a clarification of the law rather than a change so you can allow people to have their own religious beliefs and to practice their own religious beliefs but you should do it without impinging on other people's freedoms and in the case of the gender recognition reform bill what we expected to happen was that there would be some tweaks to the equality act made by the UK Government just as they did for the equal marriage bill to ensure that you know that the balance was maintained but unfortunately the UK Government chose not to do that they chose to make it a cultural thing and to block the bill altogether thanks it's interesting you talk about the hate crime bill i remember one of the big debates we had and i won't name the msps but it was a really lively couple of hours in the chamber and one of the discussions was about what is said in the home and private in this idea that if you say something homophobic transphobic islamophobic anti-Semitic anti-catholic whatever it is but you say in the privacy you're on home does it really hurt anyone or is it only if anyone listens to it it's sort of shorting us you know abuse if you like and there was a really wide ranging concept about what is privacy when you're allowed to have private thoughts other people are revolted by for example versus what is actually legal to say out loud whether you're in your own home in the bath or in the street or in a room like this and it's a very very complex piece of the law that we i think we tried to get to the bottom of but i'm not convinced we succeeded with that debate um do you have any other questions for the panel um just wave your hand furiously i was hoping for a bit more excitement than that but yes sir wait wait to get the microphone to you for online uh no thank you uh i'm going to go back to something that was brought up earlier i think it was eugen who talked about how section 28 was a badly written law in a sense if i correctly understood that but i wanted to ask the panel to maybe elaborate on that because from my understanding uh it being badly written could very well have some intention behind it could be very well intentional the same as maybe if you look at uh the laws that were passed in uh florida the don't say gay bills which are sometimes intentionally very vague at section 28 was to specifically scare people yeah i mean i'll start using i mean do you think that the law actually was quite specific just don't talk about LGBT people and that's it um or was it left as you say was it was it did it weasel around the issue so that it was quite hard to work out what it what it did mean for you in that environment i think it was very poorly drafted and i think it was drafted from a place of hatred and a place of anger and that's my view i was told by senior labour politician that what had happened was that David Wilshire and i've still forgotten the name of the co-sponsor who was a women conservative MP were so enraged at something they'd read in the daily mail or daily telegraph or something some day one day that one evening it was put into the local government act quite late at night they put this this clause in it's a clause of what's called clause 28 it's the 28th clause of this bill that kind of maybe says something as well they banged this thing in with the hope of stifling and preventing the advances they saw in terms of gay and lesbian equality that were taking place in other words the change in culture my view is that if they had been more serious about it they would have got legal advice they would have done proper work they would have researched it properly and they wouldn't have used expressions like pretended family relationship and promote certainly one of the issues that arose after section 28 and during their appeal discussion was what is the legal definition promotion what is it is a teacher promoting homosexuality by saying that homosexuality exists you could argue isn't it it's just you're just saying that that's what that's the way life is if you use the word promote you're gonna have to defend that and you're gonna have to evidentially prove in a court that that teacher went into that classroom to promote something rather than just describe reality um so you can almost see how the defense is quite even i'm not a lawyer i could put a defense together quite quite easily and assume more of us could do therefore uh if they've got proper advice they better get the word promote out and pretended family relationship i mean what could that possibly mean you know um uh that you're pretending to be a family will see you say i'm not i'm not i'm in a relationship but i'm you know i'm not in a family um are you then still pretending to be a family or can you be forced to be a pretended family so all sorts of of really kind of duff bits about section 28 very powerful as i said earlier on about what it did um because it made it what it did was just to follow on from the question earlier on um from uh the person there at the back it made the state part of discrimination against gay and lesbian people it made the state uh a place where we gay and lesbian people were not equal to everybody else and that's a bill at the bus company in alabama saying white people at the front back people at the back the bus company decides to do that and therefore if you want to go on the bus you're gonna have to do it in a certain way unless you're rows of parks and you decide you're just tired of being tired i think she said um uh what was her comment about it um so um that's that's my view i i don't think it was um properly structured i don't think it was intent i think it was anger and i think it was hatred luckily for us anger and hatred doesn't produce good laws um but what it did do is provide a very effective law within the education system particularly for many many years so anger and hatred sometimes plays itself out in society in strange ways um and until we get rid of it um it was still there um remember 1.2 million people in scotland voted to to keep it um uh now we uh the campaign that tim and i were part of in terms of the repeal of section 20 section 2a in scotland um we were very clear this is not a referendum because what suit are wanted was a referendum it's an opinion poll but you know 20 years on i think i can grudgingly say that privately you know privately we knew the 1.2 million people took the effort to send back those things um to say they wanted to keep section 20 that displays the extreme level of homophobia in scotland society at that point which section 28 enervated ireland went through the same process with uh uh uh marriage repeal sometimes you've got to have a really unpleasant debate um and that blows open social attitudes and it raises the question and scotland debated the question and when it came then to marriage it was that that wasn't anything like the big deal it might have been because we'd been through the section 28 before and people thought well you know we've been told this before and actually never happened um all this flooding of schools with gay and lesbian propaganda which um was implied was going to happen and i remember sitting at our meetings in in Glasgow our committee meetings i think i have the any idea what resources are lying in schools what books do they think that we've got i mean we don't have any books that are going to be sent anywhere and even if they're where how could um how could that happen i mean they don't understand education basically suit are and other people then understand how education operated um so um yeah about culture but no i don't think they did a good job if you ask me about the promoters of section 20 i think they could have done it better they could have got legal advice and created something a bit a bit a bit sharper and i guess that leads us nicely as we come to a close is some of the parallels with today i know we could probably spend another hour and a half on the events of the last 12 months i think we all definitely could but we won't we'll save that maybe for next year's festival of politics if i'm still here um so i do want to ask one sort of final question that's what what lessons can be learned we know that social attitudes do change hopefully they change for the better i my personal views i think they do change for the better i still think there's always an element of society you have hatred towards others and lack of tolerance against the whole whole bunch of folk but i do get the impression certainly now listening to some of the positive stuff that that rona and Liam Jordan talk about that things are better they're still not great and there's still a lot of work to do but they are better and my hope is that that progress continues and then it is a difficult journey especially if you're part of it especially if you're an active voice is something you guys have been for decades and it is it's a tough road to follow i do get that but why would i ask that you each of you and to be brief as well is what what do you think is the number one lesson we can learn both as legislators in this place of which arm one as political parties both as you know as organizations but as individuals within those organizations what is the number one lesson we can learn from those painful experiences of section 28 to a equal marriage age of consent all the battles that have already been fought over the last three decades that we should learn now as we go into some of these new conversations that are happening temo start with you so i would say the first thing is it takes a long time you know matt and luther king said the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice and that last part is the key part it does bend toward justice so so don't give up because it takes a long time but things will get better and if i may say one other thing it's the importance of visibility in coming out i remember people saying in the 1980s what can we do about this terrible situation we're in and the answer being everybody should come out now it's not always possible for everybody to come out but that visibility not just of individuals saying i am gay but the visibility of gay characters on tv and so on that really started to tip the scales through the 1980s and through the 1990s and you see the same thing now about trans and if you look at young people's attitudes towards trans people and if you look at shows like heart stopper and how popular they are that gives me great hope for the future because i think you're going to see the same change in attitudes towards trans people it will take a while but it will happen. I'm enormously positive to quote share it's a long and winding road and i think it's always good to quote share when share does it it moves from being a cover to being intrinsically valuable it's always important to bring share into every meeting but i i did get promoted i became an advisor and then i worked for borda negallic after that as director of education when i was an advisor an education advisor one of the things we did was school inspections basically they were they were called reviews and they were done by the local authority and a team a squad i mean 15 16 of us come in looking sharper than i'm looking today but you know suits and all the rest of it and clipboards and you you sample lessons and you create a report which was quite a big deal in schools wasn't necessarily a public report although you could get it if you wanted but it was a big deal within the profession and it graded schools really sharply in other words the authority was able to say what its schools were like one of the last ones i was on was a secondary school and i'm going to say where it was it was nice wood because it's good and i was chair i think of the team i think i was lead lead officer and what happens is the head teacher um can suggest to you examples of good practice so that they go in the report they want them in the report um you know something that's really good and the head teacher who very able and she got a very good hmi report not long after this was at me to try and we have a very sharp timetable on for a week in your you know periods seven periods eight period nine you're all kind of dotting about to make sure you get a breadth of experience and a breadth of observation and lots of meetings with different people absolutely insistent that we went to see this um piece of work that s3 are done when they'd created a powerpoint on international gay and lesbian discrimination or something and they were going to present it to s4 and it was the other way about s4 we're doing it for s3 as part of the pse programme and she wanted that as a as a piece of good practice that took place in the secondary school that would not have um years before that head teacher pressing the inspect the the the review team from the local authority to get in periods seven Thursday afternoon you've got to see it it's really superb high quality could you make sure that goes in our report that was just inconceivable when i started teaching it was inconceivable when i was a young person i was i you know started secondary school in 1969 inconceivable that anything like that would ever take place so as tim said the archiv history you know the long and winding road as sher said it does move forward and things uh you'll probably be aware of the the videos it gets better it does get better it takes time but i think it does get better i think it gets better because we push for it don't think it's better organically on its own i think it's better because people do things but it's still it gets better and because we're running out of time and if i could turn back time jim i would that's my friend show cancelled uh rona what's the big takeaway what's the big lesson that nowadays people yeah i think from what happened in the past yeah one of like one of our kind of statements that we like to use quite a lot is that um education is the most powerful tool we have to address prejudice and we talk about this quite a lot and i think ultimately that's the great harm of section 28 is that it suppressed the ability for young people for people who are obviously now more than fully grown adults to learn to have that education to have that understanding um that's what was so insidious about it is that it removed the ability for people to learn and understand others and the fact is that now that we live in a long post section 28 society the importance of education of getting to know people of talking to people um i don't think ignorance which is what drives prejudice and discrimination can survive contact with the group that is the prejudice is about getting to know people getting to talking to people understand their stories we're so big um on getting people to share their stories with each other which i guess comes back to the idea of coming out but just in general of making sure that voices of people who are often marginalised in society are heard that especially young people but frankly people of all ages get the chance to hear about people who are not like them who are different in some way um is so vital and is the one thing that can really help to address and ultimately eliminate prejudice and discrimination not just in schools but across all of society and um it's been referred to many times in various LGBT campaigns through history but the fact is with section 28 and all um types of legal discrimination that come up whether it is today or whether it is in the past we cannot go back there are people who want to take you back and we must keep pressing forward to not allow that to happen and to educate to bring people in not to push people away but to make sure that we understand as a society where do we want to go do we want to have a progressive society where everyone's included and we don't have this type of legislation and if so what work are we going to do to get us there how are we going to help educate people how are we going to bring people in and hopefully we are on a really good track at the moment with a lot of good data behind us to back it up that we are currently doing the right thing with that when it comes to LGBT inclusive education but of course there is as has been said a lot more work still to do thank you very much and good luck with that um that brings this session to a close i'm told to remind you that if you booked today through event right you will receive a survey and the Parliament would be really grateful if you completed that survey last few questions about today's event um i'd also person like to thank our panel for taking time out of their busy days and work lives to come and talk to us in the Parliament to talk to you to answer my questions and yours and more importantly i'd like to thank you for coming along i know there's a lot else going on a lot more funny topics to discuss but i'm really really grateful and pleased that you took time out of your day as well to come along and listen to our amazing panel and participate in today's festival politics event and thank you for for for supporting me and chairing that we'll be around i think we're probably getting chucked out of the room aren't we yeah there'll be another event on but we'll certainly be migrating our way out and feel free to to chat to any of us i'm sure we'll be happy to to chat to you um get home safely and have a great rest of festival and fringe thank you