Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer backs Birmingham LGBT campaign and condemns violence
Hate crime against the LGBT community in Birmingham is “unacceptable”, says Sir Keir Starmer, as he welcomes investment into CCTV to prevent further violence.
Speaking at Tyseley Energy Park, the Labour leader said the party was taking hate crime “very seriously”.
He said: “When I was Director of Public Prosecutions, we put a real focus on hate crime, making sure it was properly recorded. We need to maintain that, and focus on whatever the form of hate crime is.
“Sometimes people have this perception that hate crime is some minor offence, but it has a real impact on people’s lives and needs to be taken very, very seriously.”
In August, two men were attacked with bottles and subjected to homophobic abuse in Birmingham’s Gay Village.
In October, John-Paul Kesseler was struck with a wine bottle and an iron bar for holding hands with another man, while Matt Brooks was punched in the face with such force he needed emergency surgery on a fractured eye socket to relieve pressure on his eyeball.
A campaign, called #HandsNotHate campaign, was launched in Birmingham, in reaction to the violence. A solidarity protest against homophobia also took place.
Birmingham City Council cabinet previously approved £745,000 capital allocation to be invested in these works on November 9 but the sum was boosted following a string of high profile attacks on visitors and members of the LGBTQ community.
In December, the council agreed to invest £845,000 on the CCTV and upgrade the network of 30 existing cameras around central Birmingham. Four of the new cameras will be in the Southside area, and will be funded by £100,000 from council’s service revenue repairs budget.
A 10-point action plan has also been devised to improve safety in specific areas of the city centre by increasing street lighting, pedestrianisation, traffic calming and more police patrols.
Councillor Ian Ward, leader of Birmingham city council, said: “We want Birmingham Gay Village to be a safer environment again,
“We are working very closely with West Midlands Police to install these cameras, and we’ll continue to put our message out there, which is this kind of behaviour from people outside of the [LGBT] community is unacceptable.”
According to Freedom of Information requests, reports of sexual orientation hate crimes recorded by UK police forces rose from an average of 1,456 a month from January to April 2021 to 2,211 on average from May to August in the same year.
From January to August in 2021, at least 14,670 homophobic hate crime offences were recorded, compared with 11,841 in the same period of 2020 and 10,817 in 2019.
During the same time period, police recorded 2,129 transphobic offences – well above the 1,606 offences in 2020 and 1,602 in 2019.
