Current Affairs

MEP candidate urges followers to offer ‘supportive message’ to pro-Section 28 UKIP councillor

May 19 2014
Written by Joseph McCormick

A candidate for the European Parliament has urged her followers to offer a “supportive message” to UKIP councillor who said it was a “tragedy” that Section 28 was repealed.

Iain McLaughlan, a UKIP member of Orton Waterville Parish Council in Peterborough, made the comments on Facebook in February, while praising Vladimir Putin for banning adoption by foreign gay couples.

English Democrat MEP candidate Julia Gasper, formerly a UKIP chair and failed Oxford city council candidate, has said PinkNews is “like a rabid dog” for revealing the comments in which he accused the Labour Government of “promoting” homosexuality, and later describing abortion as a “modern day holocaust”.

On her official Facebook page, whist claiming that supporting Mr McLaughlan would show belief in “tolerance” and “respect [for] true diversity”, Dr Gasper urges her supporters to “offer him a supportive message.”

She writes: “Shame on the homosexual bullies who are ganging up on Ian McLaughlan, UKIP candidate, and bombarding him with abuse. They trawled through his Facebook page and found that he supported Section 28 and are now trying make out that he is a criminal. They are even trying to take his job away.

“The vile Pink News is at his throat like a rabid dog. This is disgusting anti-social behaviour. If you believe in democratic rights, tolerance, respect and true diversity you can go to his page and offer him a supportive message.”

Dr Gasper previously wrote that gay people needed to stop “complaining about persecution” and start expressing “gratitude” to straight people, on whom they are reliant to be born.

According to Dr Gasper, PinkNews readers should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and used the UKIP forum to brand the gay rights movement a “lunatics charter”.

She claimed gays account for 3 percent of the population and half of child abuse, and last year failed in her second bid to win public office.

At the end of last year, she wrote a paper questioning whether gay people sent to death camps during the Holocaust were only sent there because they were also Jewish.

The English Democrats campaign for Britain to leave the EU and for an English parliament to be established.

Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 previously stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” and that schools “could not promote of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

It was later repealed under Tony Blair’s Labour government and the current Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, apologised for the policy in 2009.