Today’s gay asylum seekers ruling is a good day for justice

The news that two gay asylum seekers fighting deportation have been given leave to stay in UK by the Supreme Court, is a welcome one.

The men, from Cameroon and Iran respectively, sought to challenge the previous government’s contention that they had no grounds for asylum as they could move “elsewhere” in their home states and be “discreet” about their sexuality.

The punishment for homosexuality in Iran is flogging or death and in Cameroon up to 5 years in prison.

The coalition government had rejected the stance of the previous government and Theresa May welcomed the ruling.

The reaction this provokes is two-fold. Firstly, a cautious admiration for the new Home Secretary (whose support for gay-rights has in the past been patchy). And secondly, an uncomfortable reminder of what Labour stood for as it slid into senescence.

After a promising start with the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights, it soon became clear that the Human Rights act was a nod to Labour’s past not its future. What increasingly came to characterise the administration was an openly professed illiberalism, presumably designed to suggest a hard-headed modernity.

Nowhere was this more evident than with asylum policy, where ministers seemed unable to make the imaginative leap necessary for sympathy with those fleeing persecution. The results of which- the deportation of children, the humiliating restraining techniques, and the overcrowded detention centres- continue to make front pages.

These were moral lines which no party of the left should have crossed- yet again and again they were crossed. Again and again, morality and compassion were forgotten in a mad rush to outflank those on the far-right.

The case of these two men is the apotheosis of this. To seek to compel them to suppress their sexuality and its outward manifestations amounts to little more than an attack on their fundamental identity, as the courts have recognised. No party that aspires to be compassionate, let alone “socially democratic”, should have had anything to do with such a stance.

This, then, is a good day for justice, a good day for compassion and hopefully an embarrassing one for former members of the Labour government.

Samuel Muston is a freelance journalist and former aide to Zac Goldsmith MP

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