The dangerous vacuum at the heart of Cameron's international LGBT strategy

Yesterday, David Cameron held his second reception at Downing St for the LGBT community, inviting many well-known faces working to promote equality, as well as thanking a number of volunteers and activists for their tireless work. In his speech, the biggest headlines sprang from his commitment to do more in using his position to apply moral pressure to foreign governments (notably African) to improve their records on LGBT rights. He specifically held up his commitment to retaining the 0.7% GDP spent on international aid as a concrete sign of his engagement.

In his favour, this is a positive move for someone who had a patchy record on LGBT issues before the election. I'm pleased to see he has a strategy moving forward, but I remain to be convinced by how robust this will prove to be beyond an encouraging speech. In recent years, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has built a strong record on promoting and monitoring LGBT rights in-country and even under the new coalition government, continues to improve it's support for LGBT communities.

However, the Department for International Development (DFID), whilst doing some amazing work generally, has a long way to go before it matches this record. The new Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell, has shifted much of their focus to explicitly support development outcomes amongst women and girls. In itself, this isn't a terrible thing, but it results in making LGBT people almost as invisible as heterosexual men in their work and boxes women into a particular conception of femininity. Funding for explicitly-LGBT human rights work is exceptionally rare in DFID's funding portfolio.

So, DFID needs to improve it's record on LGBT rights through the provision of aid and the conditions attached upon it. Yet we also need to remember that withholding aid to countries criminalising LGBT people gives credence to the view being pushed by our opponents in those countries that gay rights is imported cultural imperialism. We have to tread a very thin line here. Even amongst LGBT activists in western countries, in the past there has been a danger in publicly denouncing the behaviour of foreign governments in a manner that can aggravate the danger LGBT people experience in those countries. For our opponents, this strident approach is as offensive as the strategy used by fundamentalist US christian groups when they visit Africa and finance anti-gay campaigns.

More than ever before, we have to give voice to southern activists in these situations to decide their own country-specific strategies. The British Government (and LGBT activists) need to be listening and learning from their particular political contexts and letting that determine what assistance we can give. Cameron's promise to use his moral authority is one useful element in our armoury in this, but I'm concerned that he needs to back this up with concrete resources from DFID for those struggling civil society groups on the ground. Because in the end, it is authentic voices located in grass-roots communities that will create real change, not a Downing Street speech. He needs to put his 0.7% GDP where his mouth is.

Messed-up morality: Conservatives fall "Back to Basics"

It must be dreadfully frustrating for David Cameron. He spent years (and a fair proportion of Lord Ashcroft's tax-free millions) trying desperately to detoxify the Tory brand and make their policies seem more palatable and human. However, now his colleagues are back in power, an unattractive tone of moral judgement and reactionary social engineering has crept back into public discourse around women and sexuality. Even if we were able to set aside Cameron's own recent patronising display of contempt to Angela Eagle when he told her to "calm down, dear" at Prime Ministers Questions, there are many other signs that there are unmistakable signs of a regressive social agenda bubbling under the surface of many of the Coalition's policies which infantilizes women and wants to draw a firm line under the successful gay legislative programme of the Labour Government.

Ken Clarke's comments about some rapes being less serious than others was a clumsy slip under fire whilst defending a wider cost-cutting approach to justice - but it still betrayed an unbelievably dismissive attitude towards the victims of sexual violence by the Justice Secretary.

Backbencher Nadine Dorries' 10 minute bill pushing for young girls to be taught abstinence (you read correctly -girls, not boys), leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth as it puts female sexuality in the dock as the cause of all lapses in sexual morality. This is at a time of diminishing budgets for HIV prevention and the tightening of health spending around sexual health. Nonetheless, this week it was announced that the well-respected British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) has been removed from the government advisory group on sexual health and replaced by Life, a conservative organisation that takes a hard-line stance against abortion and is strenuously pushing for abstinence programmes, even though they are known to be counter-productive in fighting sexually-transmitted diseases.

You would think on the positive side, that this is the sort of issue where having a coalition Government would put the brakes on these excesses. Right now (the argument goes), keeping the Liberal Democrats onside has meant that the Conservatives are working hard to ensure this remains a series of isolated incidents and does not become a larger narrative behind Government policy. Memories on the front bench are also short enough to remember John Major's ill-fated Back to Basics campaign, which crystallized the public's views of his party's hypocrisy around morality and sex.

Within the Home Office, Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone MP represents a trusted pair of hands as the current Equalities Minister. She is interviewed in this month's issue of Total Politics and hints that she clashes at times with her Secretary of State, Theresa May, over this agenda. That said, the article gives her a fairly gentle ride as she talks about ensuring the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is supported to deliver on equalities protection. The truth however, is that the remit for the EHRC has been severely restricted so that it works on the barest minimum needed to deliver it's core aims. Unsurprisingly, this has been accompanied with a significant funding cut.

You may also remember that I posted about the Government's Red Tape Challenge, which is currently consulting on whether we should scrap every law and regulation on the statute books. The presumption is that everything is marked for abolition to "reduce bureaucracy" unless a strong enough argument is given to retain them (or sufficient people can marshall a public stink enough to stop them). After years of campaigning by minority communities, the ink was not yet dry on the Equality Act before it fell into the firing line.

Until this attack, these policies and the funding that underpinned them were in the front line of ensuring that in a country where inequality has steadily increased over the last thirty years, we had an independent voice arguing for concrete changes to close this gap. They ensured that people were able to make adult choices around their health and were treated with dignity in their dealings with the state.

Gender and sexual equality is under more sustained attack than ever before. Cameron's rebranding campaign is over. The Conservatives have learnt a lesson - they are moving back to basics, but aside from the odd slip, this time they aren't making the mistake of telling us.