Depending on your views towards illegal wars, the introduction of tuition fees and the expansion of PFI, things largely didn't get that much better. However, in the 13 years that Blair and Brown held office, one thing certainly did: LGBT rights. By the time the Conservatives took back the keys to Downing Street in 2010, the age of consent had been equalised, civil partnerships had been introduced and out gay men were no longer barred from serving in the British Armed Forces.
But is it too easy to look back on those years with glittery, rose-tinted glasses? Labour won in an electoral landslide and yet took years to implement legislation that protected and legally validated LGBT lives. They made no Parliamentary effort to scrap Section 28 – the legislation that banned local authorities from "teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality" – until February of 2000. It remained in place until 2003. What's more, when voters gave Brown's government the boot, equal marriage – and the scrapping of the lifetime ban on men who have sex with men (MSM) from donating blood – was yet to pass through the Commons. [...]
Blair oversaw government lawyers fighting to defend British statutes that banned gay men from serving in the military at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They tried a similar trick with equalising the age of consent. Labour wasn't in power when these cases started, but, says Tatchell, they failed to retreat. He adds that the prohibition on sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace – eventually passed in 2003 – only materialised after the European Union ordered Britain to end its lack of protection for LGBT employees. When it came to decriminalising gay sex at 16 Blair gave his MPs a free vote. The last Labour government failed to introduce LGBT-inclusive HIV and sex-and-relationship education. Blair presided over a system where queer refugees could be locked away in asylum detention centres for months on end.
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