Mel Phillips and the great gay fisheries conspiracy

Reading Melanie’ Phillips’s latest tirade on the subject of gays I was struck by her claim that:

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has paid £100,000 for a report into how efforts to boost Britain’s coastal fish stocks would affect minority communities including the Chinese, ­homosexuals and Welsh speakers.

The entire article is an outpouring of loathing of people of whose sexuality Ms Phillips disapproves, but you can at least seen the lineaments of known facts in most of the claims made to support her case. This one, however, is so patently ludicrous that it made me wonder how of Ms Phillips’s intelligence could have got hold of it. So I went on a paper trail in search of its source.

I have to admit that I had missed the fact that this canard has been doing the rounds for two whole weeks, since the Mail on Sunday ran a report on what it called ‘Equality Madness’, making the same allegation in the words used by Ms Phillips. The story was taken up by the Daily Telegraph, and a variety of blogs in the “PC gone mad” genre.

It is, of course, a load of cod. What happened was that DEFRA drew up a consultation document on marine policy and, as in normal practice, sent it out to independent consultants to check it for unforeseen consequences.  The consultants’ brief was to ensure that it did not contravene the 2009 UK Marine Act and that its potential impact on the environment or on natural flora and fauna conformed with EU legislation. They were paid just over £111,000 for their work.

There is an EU regulation requiring public bodies to do an ‘equality impact assessment’ on any new policy, but in this case the department decided, and the consultants, that none was needed, because a policy designed to preserve fish stocks cannot discriminate against gays or any other minority. Therefore, the consultants were not hired or paid to carry out an equality assessment.

I don’t suppose that simple facts like these will penetrate the wall of prejudice that surrounds the minds of those who think they are the victims of a McCarthyite gay conspiracy, but I thought I would put them out there anyway.

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