Johann Hari

I never thought this would happen. Normally, when I hear religious figures speak, I splutter and gibber with rage. But this weekend, the Archbishop of Canterbury - in a slow, sad sermon - condemned Western culture's "odd and unhealthy" attitudes toward the elderly. He argued that we increasingly respond to the old with "disgust", preferring to flee into the nubile arms of a "cult of youth".

He's right. Of course, his speech was filled with superstitious talk of God and the afterlife, but there is a secular truth at the core of his speech. For all the talk over the past month of "grey power" and "political bribes" for pensioners, most of the issues that bear down on the frail backs of Britain's old people are virtually ignored.

Residential care is the worry that hangs over every old person like a toxic fog - but how often have you heard the quality of old people's homes discussed in this election campaign? The politicians' stump-list of public services - schoolsnhospitalsnpolice - never quite extends to care homes, even though half a million people are living there right now. Even prisons get more face-time.

The reason? We don't want to see. I have witnessed this in my own family. Six years ago, my grandmother could no longer look after herself following an accident, and she was moved into a home.

After a lifetime of constant, grinding work and raising three kids alone, my gran was suddenly exhausted and - I can't think of another way to put it - pissed off. She would cry on the phone, and (for the first time ever) complain about her dismal surroundings. It was a totally rational response. But several of my relatives - to my astonishment - suddenly retreated from her life. They said they found witnessing this "too much", and slowly, ever-so-politely disengaged.

Sometimes I ask them why, and beneath their self-justificatory blather I always sense a low fear of their own ageing. They look at my grandmother and they see their future.

We live in a Botox-hungry culture that sees ageing as an illness that need to be cured with jabs and toxins. Joan Collins strives in her seventies to look as shapely as Britney. Is anyone surprised that a culture like this stuffs old people far from view, and rams them to the bottom of their list of priorities?

This changed my family's behaviour - and the country's - in strange ways. When I decided to move my gran to a better (and more costly) home, I asked for help with the fees. One relative who earns a big wage offered £5 a week. It was less than he spends on Sky Digital. It seemed like a metaphor for the way we treat our old people: he could find more cash for Rupert Murdoch than his ailing relative.

Care homes only ever flicker into our political debate in the most unhelpful possible way, as a proxy for something else.

Sometimes they are hijacked by the right-wing press, and spending on the old is contrasted with another vulnerable group - asylum-seekers - rather than with (say) the dismal levels of taxation on the super-rich. Why not compare their holiday homes with closing old people's homes?

On other occasions, it is implied - as it has been by the Liberal Democrats in this election - that the real problem right now is that some old people have to sell their homes to pay for long-term care. I agree this is upsetting for the people involved, but this raises £1.1bn a year to spend on care homes. Taking this money away to maintain empty houses and middle-class inheritances is no solution.

That money - and much more - is desperately needed to tackle the real problem with care homes. Every parent knows about their school's teacher-to-pupil ratios. But how many people wonder about the nurse-to-elderly-person ratio in their relatives' homes? Yet this is the root of many of their complaints, and the biggest issue confronting the most vulnerable old people. Most elderly people in care are miserable because they don't get enough attention.

The women in my gran's old home would often say, "I just want somebody to talk to." But even the best carer in the world cannot natter if she has 12 people to look after, all needing feeding and taking to the toilet and medication and washing (and all for minimum wage). My grandmother often would have a cup of tea thrust before her by a harassed nurse who rushed out the door without a word; she wouldn't see anybody again for hours. Residents would sob as they recalled waiting for half-an-hour on the toilet for a nurse to become free.

But there are no targets to improve this ratio. Indeed - to my astonishment - the Government doesn't even know the national average. Nobody's counting. And this political neglect often leads to neglect in the homes. Last month, a survey by the Community and District Nursing Association found that one-in-four district nurses has witnessed old people being neglected or physically abused in the past year.

It happened to my gran. For a long time, she had been complaining of sore legs, and - since we knew she had arthritis - she simply carried on in agony. But one morning two years ago, I arrived and she said she couldn't stand. This was totally out of character, but the "carers" told her she had to get up. She began to scream. I insisted on fetching a doctor, and - after an X-ray - it emerged that her legs had been broken in three places for at least six months. If I had not insisted on medical help, she would have been forced to continue walking on broken legs for the rest of her life. If you doubt scenes like this (and worse) are happening across Britain today, look at some of the stories that have flickered into the press - always "news in brief" - over the past year.

Some are small psychological agonies: in South Wales, a care worker was sacked after he revealed that his residential home had been routinely wheeling naked and semi-naked old people into communal areas.

Some are far more extreme: undertakers in London were called to collect an old man from a care home and found that he weighed just four stone - and had toenails that curled to two inches. They believed he might have starved to death and called in the police, who are still investigating. (If you know of an old person who is being abused, call the national helpline now on 0808 808 8141.)

If you scan through the press cuttings, there seem to be dozens of elderly Victoria Climbies like this. John Winburne is the Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party. He believes the solution to a national epidemic of elder abuse is the introduction of a militant Ofsted for old people's homes. They should, he argues, conduct "random, no-warnings spot-checks across the country".

But if we are going to build up political pressure to demand that the Government acts on smart ideas like this, we have to come out of denial. The Archbishop is right.

It's time to bin the Botox, look honestly at your wrinkles, and demand more money is spent on your local care home before it's too late.

What you want – baby, George Galloway’s got it. What you need – you know the Socialist Workers’ Party’s got it. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me, bring on the MAB. That’s the Muslim Association of Britain to the uninitiated. Yes, this is the rallying tune for – in their words – “the new left-wing force in British politics that will destroy and over-take the bosses’ Labour Party!” Welcome to the world of the RESPECT Coalition which – at this year’s general election – will be yelling about how they are “the real voice of socialism and internationalism” in a constituency near you.

Many of us woill be tempted by such a prospect. So who is the RESPECT Coalition? There are, it is true, some individuals within the organisation who are simply decent, disillusioned left-wingers who felt they could not support a party that invaded Iraq, from the film-maker Ken Loach to the novelist China Melville. But they are a small part of an organisation that – far from doing what it says on the tin, being the left-wing alternative to Labour – is in fact crammed-full of supporters of some of the worst and most reactionary tyrannies on earth.

The most obvious place to start is with Gorgeous George, the RESPECT Coalition’s most famous faces and their candidate to unseat one of parliament’s only black women, Oona King, at the looming general election. We all know the facts about Galloway: that he saluted Saddam Hussein’s “courage, strength and indefatigability” to the dictator’s face, just after Saddam had killed more Muslims in one month than Ariel Sharon and the entire Israeli occupation have in 38 years. He says he would describe himself as “a Stalinist” (Stalin’s death toll: 30 million) if that didn’t “make a rod for my own back,” and he has even described the day the Soviet Union fell as “the worst day of my life.”

Galloway – the brave left-winger – does not believe that democracy is suitable for developing countries. He lauds Fidel Castro – who has ruled Cuba without a single democratic election for 46 years and driven a quarter of the island’s population into exile – as “a great hero” and “not a dictator, not at all.” When the military staged an anti-democratic coup in Pakistan in 1999, Galloway wrote in his weekly column for the Tory newspaper the Mail on Sunday, “In poor third world countries like Pakistan, politics is too important to be left to petty squabbling politicians. Pakistan is always on the brink of breaking apart into its widely disparate components. Only the armed forces can really be counted on to hold such a country together... Democracy is a means, not an end in itself."

In line with this Stalinist belief in iron-fisted military rule, Galloway has even described Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds as “a civil war” that “involved massive violence on both sides” – language that only hardline Ba’athists would ever use. Nor is Galloway left-wing when it comes to domestic policy. He opposes abortion, which he describes as “immoral”, supports capital punishment, and says he could not live on less than £150,000 a year.

Hmmm. So where is the progressive part of the RESPECT Coalition? Perhaps it is their candidate for the recent Leicester South by-election, the former Express journalist Yvonne Ridley. When it comes to the Taliban – the most psychopathically misogynist, homophobic and racist regime in my lifetime – Ridley knew where she stood. She said of the young men who went to join the jihadist dictatorship, “One thing that struck me about these brothers was how principled they were... going on jihad for ideals almost forgotten in a selfish world corrupted by greed and power. The driving force that led them into battle in the mountains and caves of Tora Bora was no different to that which propelled 2800 men AND women from the United States to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1936.”

These “brothers” would have thrown acid in Ridley’s face if she had dared, as a woman, to show her face in public.

And then there’s the MAB. Dr Azam Tamimi, their chief spokesman, says that Arab women “ask for” domestic violence, and believes thieves should be punished by cutting off their hands – policies that make Norman Tebbit look like a pinko leftist. Their website depicts Sayyid Qutb – one of the intellectual inspirations for the fascist Al Quaeda movement – as a hero. It says that he died smiling “showing his conviction of the beautiful life to come in paradise — a life he definitely and rightfully deserved”. Qutb believed in the execution of gay people and the imprisoning of all women in their own homes. This has produced a strange policy twist for RESPECT: the Coalition opposes the government’s plans for placing a handful of Islamic fundamentalists under house arrest – as I do – but some of their members seem to sympathise with those who advocate the far greater crime of house arrest for all women, all the time.

And it gets worse. As the journalist Anthony Browne has explained, Qutb said the Jews were being punished for their “unprecedented abominations”, but “then the Jews again returned to evildoing and consequently Allah sent against them others of His servants, until the modern period. Then Allah sent Hitler to rule over them.” This the hero for a left-wing alternative to Labour? A man to the right of the BNP?

But wait. There must be somebody left-wing in this “left-wing alternative to Labour”, surely? Well, there’s the Socialist Workers’ Party, who do some valuable work defending asylum seekers and organising campaigns to undermine the BNP. But they have not expressed even a sliver of condemnation for the far-right views of their new-found friends and allies.

Indeed, they slander anybody who points them out as “Islamophobic.’

Nor is the SWP in any sense a democratic organisation. They aim to create a society modelled on Lenin’s Soviet Union – a bloodthirsty dictatorship that slaughtered democrats and liberals. They claim the Soviet Union only went awry with Stalin, and that Lenin provided a “model for the world”. Yet their hero Lenin set up Russia’s secret police and ordered countless executions and massacres. He argued that “the foundation of socialism calls for absolute and strict unity of will... How can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one." As the academic Neil Harding has written, “Leninism would have found its Stalin sooner or later.”

Nor is their hero and guiding light Leon Trotsky a democrat. He advocated “one-man management” of Russia, and damned “left-wing communists” for “turn[ing] democratic principles into a fetish. They put the right of the workers to elect their own representatives above the Party, thus challenging the Party's right to affirm its own dictatorship… We must bear in mind the historical mission of our Party. The Party is forced to maintain its dictatorship, without stopping for these vacillations, nor even the momentary falterings of the working class.”

The RESPECT Coalition might dupe some decent left-wing people, but Labour activists should not be mistaken: this is - to a significant degree - a party of the totalitarian-right.

The only sensible response comes from the Coalition’s diva Aretha Franklin, in the song they have plagiarised: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/ Find out what it means to me/ Oh, sock it to em, sock it to em, sock it to em.”

Baby religions – toddling on their first tentative steps to social acceptance – always look ridiculous. The early followers of Christ, Mohammed and the Buddha were regarded as insane (at best); now they are handled with woollen mittens across the West and treated with a misplaced sense of deference. How long until the followers of the fastest-growing religion in the West – the believers in aliens – are granted the same social cachet and the same set of group rights?

This might seem like a preposterous question, but after reading Bryan Appleyard’s strange, seductive, supremely silly book, it makes perfect sense. The age of aliens was born on June 24th 1947, when a businessman called Kenneth Arnold saw the world’s first flying saucer in the Cascade mountains of Washington State. Never mind that he was prone to ‘sightings’ and would later claim that he saw a score more alien spacecraft throughout his life. Never mind that several psychologists believed he was suffering from paranoid delusions. No founder of a religion stands up to rational scrutiny for long.

Within a few months, the alien religion had adherents across the United States, and it had even discovered its Jerusalem in Roswell, a quasi-mythical site where True Believers proclaimed an alien craft had crashed. Within five decades, 20% of Americans believe aliens have visited the earth, and there are more than 100,000 people who believe they have personally interacted with these mythical beasts. The hunger for knowledge of the aliens is ravenous: only porn gets more hits on the web. Some companies in the States now offer compensation for the trauma and possible physical injuries of an alien abduction. (Is there a no-claims bonus?)

Ah, you might ask, but isn’t there more to religion than just a sense of group delusion? Doesn’t there have to be a spiritual dimension? Here’s where Appleyard – the Sunday Times’ chief cultural commentator - comes in. He believes the aliens are a "spiritual phenomenon." We are filled with "a sense of emptiness bequeathed to us by the modern, scientific world-view" – so we look once again to the heavens.

Appleyard says we cannot cope with the idea that we live in "the Copernican universe of modern science, [a place where] we appear to be an accidental by-product". How can the world be empty? How can there be no higher meaning? He cites Blaise Pascal, who said that "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." So into this existential vacuum whirrs the flying saucer, showing us that "space must be filled with something other than a vacuum and rocks… Emptiness on such a scale is an affront."

The aliens are, you see, a backlash against the Enlightenment, a kick against the idea of a disenchanted world stripped of magical creatures and superstitious meaning. Appleyard approvingly quotes Patrick Harpur, a historian of the imagination, who argues that "the classic grey alien seems to have taken the place of the daimonic entities that have always stalked the world." Where once we saw demons and angels, now we see ET and Doctor Spock.

If this was simply an explanation for a strange sociological phenomenon – a new religion we have created to replace the ailing gods of monotheism – it would be intriguing. But Appleyard takes a step further than merely describing aliens as fevered projections of the human mind. He actually entertains the possibility that the aliens are real. He says he personally saw "a glowing oval behind some trees in Norfolk" – but then adds that he was under hypnosis in London at the time. Some people, he says, would argue this was a product of hypnosis, but others would say it is "a buried memory and that I have in fact been abducted by aliens who had tried to ensure that I would never remember what happened. Who is right?" Given what we know about hypnosis and the power of suggestion, this simply isn’t a sane question. Yet he declares, "For the purposes of this book, I would ask you to suspend your impulse to answer that question." Sadly, this is a classic example of an author being so open-minded his brain falls out.

Yet this is the book’s central problem. Appleyard doesn’t actually want to understand the aliens in an evidence-based, rational way. He concedes that the scientific Enlightenment might be "in some sense ‘true’," but adds, "it is not tolerable or even liveable." He sees the Enlightened, evidence-based world as a barren, meaningless void – and the aliens as a route out, a path towards meaning and the re-enchantment of the world. Who cares if they don’t actually exist? Can’t they be part of a mystical "third realm" that we cannot see? He explictly prefers a pre-modern sense of ‘mystery’ – but, in the real world, isn’t this just another word for ignorance and delusion? If the evidence suggests we are alone on a rock, then we have to accept this cold truth.

But Appleyard is a believer. He chooses faith over truth. He does not want to see that this shiny twenty-first century religion is – like all the others - a sweet, seductive lie.

...at the Soho Theatre in London at 9pm. Following the attacks on free speech in British theatre over the past few months, I'll be discussing the issue with Nick Cohen, Dominic Cavendish and others. If you want to come along, you can book tickets at http://www.instituteofideas.com/events/rightobeoffensive2005.html

The "war on drugs" finally flickered into the election campaign last weekend. You might expect it to be one of the biggest issues, since - along with the United States - our government is the most hawkish drug warrior in the world. Using the institutions of the United Nations as their proxy, they are trying violently to suppress a $500bn-a-year industry that makes up 8 per cent of all global trade. Whole countries - from Afghanistan to Colombia - are being destabilised as they try to "eradicate" drug supply.

But it's all worth it, according to our politicians. Back on the home front, it's VD Day, they declare - Victory over Drugs. But in the real world, drug use has never been higher. Untreated drug users commit half of all burglaries, while billions are squandered to prevent drugs crossing our borders.

The main effect of this war has been to take drugs out of the hands of doctors and pharmacists, and hand them to criminal gangs. Drugs don't go away; they melt into the black economy. That's why, wherever drug prohibition spreads, it brings armed gang warfare as dealers seize the market. As Milton Friedman, guru to the marketeering right, explains: "Al Capone epitomises our earlier attempt at alcohol prohibition; the Crips and Bloods and countless other armed gangs epitomise this one."

So when drugs were finally injected into the bloodstream of the election, were our politicians OD-ing on calls to stop the war? Did a mainstream political party argue for an end to this armed chaos? Did anybody suggest bringing drug use into a controlled, legal context, as we have with those other addictive and deadly substances, alcohol and tobacco?

Not quite. The Tories and the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, have suggested that the one, tiny act of demobbing carried out by this government - the downgrading of cannabis to Grade C - was a mistake. Michael Howard has called for it to be bumped back to Grade B, so the police would begin banging up cannabis users again. Labour have shrieked in fear and asked for a "review" of the cannabis laws, citing recent studies that tell us what we already knew: chronic cannabis use can have terrible consequences on mental health. The Liberal Democrats cower behind a feeble pledge to establish a Royal Commission on cannabis. The mood-music from all three parties? Step up the war! No slacking here, boys.

This is partly just political manoeuvring. Labour and the Lib Dems want to neutralise the Tory charge that they are "soft on drugs" by driving the issue into (if you'll excuse the pun) the long grass. But it is also a sign of how dismal the political leadership is on this issue, and how far we are from ending this 40-year trench war.

Very few people in this country now believe that drug prohibition can work. An ICM poll for the Daily Mirror last year - the most detailed study of attitudes towards prohibition we have - found that 76 per cent of Brits agree with the statement "the war on drugs is lost". Only 28 per cent believe "drugs should be illegal even if they are controlled by criminals", while 61 per cent believe "their supply should be regulated by the government". A majority were still reluctant give their beliefs the name "legalisation", but they do support bringing drugs into the legal economy.

Yet none of our politicians has been brave enough to seize on this inchoate public mood. They prefer to squander tens of billions a year clinging to the fantasy of a drug-free world. Of course cannabis is - as Charles Clarke explained in his call for a review of the law - harmful. Only a fool would say otherwise. Like every other person under 30 in this country, I have seen a small minority of cannabis users - some of them close friends - blend their brains with endless bongs.

But I have also seen a small minority of alcohol users reduced to spewing, shivering wrecks. Are we going to introduce alcohol prohibition too, and hand Malibu and Cointreau to the gangs? Or are we going to admit that once a harmful substance is used by more than 40 per cent of British people, we have no choice but to legalise it, bankrupt the criminals and shift spending from futile border-and-police action to education and rehabilitation?

Decriminalisation of cannabis possession (which the Blair strategy amounts to) leaves in place all the worst aspects of prohibition. The same gangs are selling drugs across Britain, untaxed and tooled-up. Drug supply is still contaminated and artificially expensive - and this pushes up the death and burglary rates.

The solution is not, as our politicians have moodily mooted this week, to reverse decriminalisation. It is fully to legalise - and not just cannabis, but ecstasy, LSD, heroin and cocaine. This is still taboo in political debate, but public opinion is far ahead of the politicians, and hungry for leadership. Besides, ending alcohol prohibition seemed like a wild proposal in the US in 1920. Anybody think it's crazy now?

Some prohibitionists have claimed - using anecdotal evidence - that cannabis use in Britain has increased since the law was relaxed. Surely if we fully legalised, they say, use would sky-rocket? This is a serious worry and deserves a serious answer. The figures are vigorously disputed by the police and by groups working with problematic drug users - but let's suppose, for the sake of argument, they are right.

Addiction to cannabis is as annihilating as alcoholism. But when assessing the drugs war, we cannot simply count the number of drug addicts as the only measurement of success, any more than an assessment of the First World War can focus solely on territory lost or gained.

We need to look instead at the total human cost of the fighting. Under legalisation, there might be more addicts. But that needs to be weighed against the certain peace dividend. The list of gains is long. We would send most of Britain's criminal gangs out of business. (A decade after the end of alcohol prohibition, the number of people working for criminal gangs in Chicago had fallen by 70 per cent).

The police time now dedicated to the drug trade would be freed up to catch burglars, rapists and murderers. The huge sums saved from not chasing drug users would be spent on rehab. The countries devastated by prohibition would begin to heal. In Afghanistan now, the heroin trade - which makes up two-thirds of the economy - is handed to drug-profiteering warlords, guaranteeing they will always be able to outgun the democratically elected government. If Karzai's government could claim the financial fruits of that trade from the warlords, it would be possible to build up the Afghan state. There is a huge peace dividend waiting at the end of this war.

One day soon, a smart politician will see the potential in these arguments. Ending the war on drugs could have appeal across the political spectrum. Many neo-Thatcherites dislike the idea of a market being suppressed. Many middle England mums would happily see heroin being prescribed to addicts if it halved the burglary rate, as it has in Switzerland. Many lefties loathe the impact of prohibition on the poorest people in the world. And addicts - desperate to escape the underworld - dream of a safe, regular prescription and access to rehabilitation.

But for this election, this time, it's back to the old war songs. Switch off your brain, ignore the evidence of your eyes, and sing with me: There'll be no drug smugglers over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow - just you wait and see.

Our political classes are addicted to prohibition and, boy, are they in denial.

Ahead of the looming general election, I've interviewed the three main British party leaders about their records on gay rights.

Here's the intro:

Twenty years ago, Britain was in the middle of a homophobic panic. The government was legislating to stop gay people “promoting” their “abnormal lifestyle” to children. The police were harassing gay men as a matter of course. The tabloids saw “queers” everywhere; a gay kiss (no tongues) on Eastenders was greeted with the headline “It’s Eastbenders!”. AIDS was regarded as a “gay plague”, something that happened to Them not Us. The handful of politicians who stood against this foaming tide of bigotry were routinely damned as “far left-wingers”.

If you had explained then that – within just two decades – a gay magazine would be invited to Downing Street to be wooed by the Prime Minister, it would have seemed like science fiction. If you had added that the other two party leaders would also be so hungry for gay votes that they demanded a piece of the action, you would have been greeted with a low, sad snigger.

Well, here we are. Even Michael Howard – the minister who piloted Section 28 into law – agreed to talk to Attitude to stress his pro-gay credentials. This phenomenal progress did not happen by chance. It did not happen because of invisible, inevitable historical forces too complicated for us to figure out. It happened because a brave generation of gay men and women refused to put up with homophobia any longer. It happened because they got political: they joined political parties, they marshalled coalitions with sympathetic straight people, they made sure gay people voted, and they refused to shut up.

So when you hear the monotonous hum of people over the next few months in the run-up to the general election saying, “I don’t care about politics”, think about what that means. If you don’t care about the political changes that have happened over the past seven years, you don’t care about your right to a civil partnership. You don’t care about having the right to see your boyfriend when he is in hospital, or the right to inherit his belongings. It doesn’t matter if you have the right to join the army, or to be legally protected from homophobia in the workplace. Who cares if we have a government committed to tackling homophobic bullying in schools? You don’t.

Sure – after so many successful political fights, it’s easy to become complacent and offer an apathetic shrug. It’s easy to imagine that justice for gay people has a force and momentum of its own, separate from the energy we pour into it. One of the most encouraging facts to emerge from our interviews with Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy is their belief that the advances made in the last seven years are now irreversible. They have become part of our political consensus, and it is impossible to imagine even the most crazed of right-wing Tory governments trying to reverse them. So it’s tempting to imagine we are entering a ‘post-gay’ era in British politics, when rows about homosexuality belong in the history books. Tempting, but wrong.

As Blair and Kennedy acknowledge, the gay rights agenda is not yet complete, at home or abroad. In this country, it is still legal to discriminate on the basis of sexuality in some circumstances – a situation both Labour and Liberal Democrats are pledged to reverse in the next parliament. Gay teenagers in Britain are still – incredibly – six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings. All three parties offered policies to deal with this. But the only way we can be sure they will follow through is if gay people remain politically engaged and hold them to it.

And in many other parts of the world, homophobia remains rampant and murderous. Only last year, gay rights leaders in Sierra Leone and Jamaica were hacked to death, simply because of their sexuality. Many thousands more face jail, torture or execution if they try to exercise the freedoms we take for granted. But there’s some good news – a few of these people have managed to make it to Britain’s shores in search of refuge from this tyranny. The downside? Britain is in the middle of a panic about asylum seekers just as intense as the panic about homosexuality twenty years ago. Refugees are routinely denounced as criminals, disease-carriers and worse. Some gay asylum seekers have been deported; a few have even committed suicide rather than face returning to their gay-hating homes.

Tony Blair states quite passionately in our interview that refugees who are fleeing homophobic persecution have a right to be in Britain – so it’s our job to make sure the government follows through on his words. If you want to find out you can support gay asylum seekers fleeing gay-bashing and murder – how to save gay lives – visit www.outrage.org.uk

Oh, and if after reading these interviews you still think democratic politics are irrelevant and none of it makes a difference, then you really must contact Outrage and meet up with a gay refugee. Tell a gay man who would be slaughtered by the police in Iran that you aren’t going to use your vote. Tell a lesbian who would be tortured in Egypt that democracy doesn’t matter. Go on: tell them “voting doesn’t change anything.”

Extracts from the interviews themselves can be read by clicking on the right. (Please don't e-mail to ask why I didn't challenge them on other, non-gay related issues. These interviews were pegged to the gay rights agenda.)