Jamie Mulhall and Luke Robert Black: Our challenge to Zack Polanski and Mothin Ali

Jamie Mulhall is the current Chairman of the LGBT+ Conservatives. Luke Robert Black MBE is the former Chairman of the LGBT+ Conservatives.

Spend an evening on Blue Sky and you’ll be minded thinking than the UK is the worst place to be LGBT. In fact, we are told routinely by outlets like Pink News that our country is terrible for gay people. Supported often by nonsensical reports, such as the ILGA Rainbow Index, which has placed the UK lower than countries where gay marriage is still illegal, it’s yet another venue where ‘vibes politics’ thrives over detail, seriousness and reality.

This is made even more ridiculous when the scope expands beyond Europe. Sadly, many places, especially those whose regimes are actively supported by the today’s progressive left, or at least partially tolerated, are some of the worst for LGBT people.

In places like Iran and Gaza, it’s very difficult to be gay indeed. In Gaza, human rights abuses of LGBT people are well-documented and too often ignored by left-wing activists who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

In Iran, there is a similar story. Here same-sex relationships aren’t just a social taboo. They are, rather sadly, a crime written into the very DNA of the Iranian legal state. In fact, under the Islamic Penal Code of 2013, the punishment for being open gay can range to anything from a lash of a whip to the drop of gallows. This is not an exaggeration.

So, we must be precise about what this means. Article 234 of that code is very clear: for the receptive partner in a male same-sex act, the punishment is death. For the active partner, if he is married, it is also death. For women, Article 239 prescribes 100 lashes, with any subsequent breaches of the law carrying a death sentence. So, let’s stop pretending this is complicated or nuanced. This is not a rumour. It is not ‘Western propaganda’. This is the law of the land in Iran under the IRGC.

Yet, and whether illegal, or not, LGBT still people exist. And therefore, these laws are applied and exercised. So, we are not just talking about abstract figures or an archaic penal code that is seldom applied; we are talking gay men being hung from cranes. In 2024, a joint report by Iran Human Rights and the European Centre for Democracy & Human Rights recorded at least 975 executions.

This was a 17 per cent increase on the previous year and the highest recorded in nearly two decades. By late 2025, Amnesty International had also confirmed that the regime had already surpassed well over 1,000 executions of LGBT people for that calendar year. Think about that number. Over 1,000 people murdered by their own government in the space of 365 days – over three murders a day.

Around 90 per cent of these executions are never officially announced. Instead, they happen in the shadows of Iranian prisons away from the eyes of the world – but they are done so with the full authority of the Iranian State.

However, in parts of left-wing British politics, there seems to be a strange reluctance to confront that reality with the same vigour and moral clarity of say the conflict in Gaza. Even those, who often have so much to say, like Leader of the Greens Zack Polanski AM or his deputy Mothin Ali, are uncharacteristically quiet or at least very slow to react to acts of violence and murder.

Polanski, for example, was very quick off the mark to describe Western strikes on Iran as both “illegal” and “unprovoked.” He is perfectly entitled to that view – and it makes great politics in contrasting his party with Starmer’s. Also, debate about military action is always welcome, legitimate and necessary in a functioning democracy.

But there is the uncomfortable truth. When senior figures in the Green Party of England and Wales rush to condemn Western democracies but seem to really struggle to speak with the same alacrity about Tehran’s persecution of its own citizens, something is awry.

When your loudest outrage is directed at democratic governments but your language about a theocratic fascistic regime that murders LGBT people becomes cautious or drowned in “whataboutery” you are not being principled. You are being selective and selective morality is not morality at all.

You do not get to wrap yourself in the Pride flag while equivocating about a murderous regime that legally permits the execution of gay men. You do not get to claim solidarity with LGBT communities and prance about on stage in Trafalgar Square while treating the Iranian state as merely another misunderstood geopolitical actor. You do not get to posture about compassion while ignoring a legal code and framework that says some people deserve death simply for who they love.

If you cannot say plainly that such a system is indefensible without caveats, without deflection, without attending the vigil for the deceased and evil dictator Ayatollah Khomeini without immediately pivoting to “yes, but but but the West” then your progressive credentials are built on cheap rhetoric and moral quicksand.

None of this requires pretending that Western democracies are perfect. The United Kingdom is a fantastic, brilliant country – but it is imperfect. Our politics is imperfect. Our Conservative Party is imperfect. But there is a profound moral difference between a country where LGBT people can sit in Parliament, marry openly, and criticise the government without fear and a country where same-sex relationships carry a death sentence.

This difference matters – it must matter. It matters because western civilisation is quite good, actually, and we must be ready to defend it.

Thankfully, in the Conservative Party, we are. Kemi has always made it abundantly clear that numbers on immigration do matter – but the culture does too. Why? Because the Conservative Party has played a central role in embedding LGBT equality into British life, be this from delivering same-sex marriage to making it easier for lesbians to use IVF.

We therefore must be ready to defend LGBT rights when challenged by those who do not share our values of freedom, equality and liberty – even if it makes people feel uncomfortable. We either believe our way of doing things is better or not. We believe a society where Baroness Davidson gets to lead one of the country’s oldest parties in the world is a good one, and much better than one where she would face certain death for being a proud and happy lesbian woman.

If we can say this, can you Zack? Can your Deputy leader Mothin Ali? If so, say that a regime which criminalises same-sex relationships and kills them is morally indefensible. Say that there is no equivalence between liberal democracy and authoritarian theocracy. Say that LGBT lives in Iran matter just as much as they do here.

You both often have so much to say. So let’s hear it, we are all ears.