Downing Street rejects Tory MP’s claim that ‘normative families’ make a ‘safe society’
Tory MP Danny Kruger told the National Conservatism conference that heterosexual families are the only basis for a ‘safe and functioning society’.(Twitter/@natcontalk)
A Downing Street spokesperson has rejected claims from a Tory MP that heterosexual families are the only way to ensure a “safe and functioning society”.
Conservative MP Danny Kruger made the comments at the 2023 National Conservatism conference on Monday (15 May), where Tory MPs Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Miriam Cates also spoke.
The annual conference is advertised as a gathering of people who “are inextricably tied to the idea of nation” and “see national conservatism as the best path forward”, including reviving “unique national traditions”.
During his speech to the conference, Kruger praised only the role of “normative” families, and stressed that mothers and fathers should stay together for the sake of the children.
On Tuesday (16 May), a spokesperson for prime minister Rishi Sunak told journalists that this is not the government’s view.
The spokesperson said that a government minister speaking at the conference did not mean the government endorsed all views expressed there, The Guardian reported.
When pressed on whether Sunak agreed with Kruger about “normative family” being the only basis for a “safe and functioning society”, the spokeperson simply replied: “No”.
They were unable to comment on whether Sunak was comfortable with a Tory MP saying such a thing.
Kruger’s thinly-veiled anti-LGBTQ+ comments weren’t the only ones made at by Conservative MPs and far-right speakers at the National Conservatism conference. Other remarks were more openly and explicitly anti-LGBTQ+.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman made an anti-trans dig during a speech, claiming that opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer could run as “Labour’s first female prime minister”, purely because he had previously stated that “trans women are women”.
In the same speech, she said it was an “unfashionable fact” that “100 per cent of women do not have a penis”. This is in contrast to Starmer, who told the Sunday Times on 2 April that “99.9 per cent of women … haven’t got a penis”.
Other right-wing speakers at the conference also made anti-LGBTQ+ comments.
A Hungarian-Canadian sociologist, Frank Furedi, baselessly claimed that in Brussels (the administrative capital of the European Union), people were “inventing a new letter to add” to the LGBTQ+ acronym “almost every single day”.
He said all “the identity of the nation” was the only one not celebrated in Brussels and that nationalist beliefs were “somehow out [of] the radar of identity politics” and that people identifying as a “nationalist” were “regarded as unacceptable company”.
