Tories Drop Conversion Therapy Ban Support, Chasing Reform UK Voters at LGBT+ Expense

Conservatives reverse a decade-long consensus on banning conversion practices. The shift tracks their rightward drift toward Reform UK positioning, not any new policy evidence.

The Conservative Party has withdrawn its support for the government's draft Conversion Practices Bill, breaking a cross-party consensus that has held since at least 2018 when Theresa May first pledged a ban. The stated reason — concerns about the bill's scope regarding gender identity — masks a deeper strategic calculation. Kemi Badenoch herself backed a ban as equalities minister in 2021, calling for people to live 'without fear or intimidation.' The reversal is not a policy evolution; it is a positioning exercise.

The bill, published in June and now in consultation, proposes up to five years' imprisonment for practices that are both abusive and cause serious harm while attempting to change someone's sexual orientation or gender identity. That dual threshold — abuse plus serious harm — is the detail the Conservative critique consistently elides. Badenoch's claim that parents would 'start getting arrested for parenting their children,' including agreeing with the premise that refusing to let a child 'identify as a cat' could trigger prosecution, has no basis in the bill's text. The intellectual scaffolding for the Tory position comes from the Policy Exchange thinktank, whose report argues that 'catgender' identities could fall within the bill's protections for non-binary people, and that existing criminal law already covers conversion abuses. The first argument is a reductio ad absurdum of a carefully scoped legal definition. The second is a familiar claim — that no new law is needed — which conversion therapy survivors and campaigners have spent years rebutting with evidence of prosecutorial gaps. Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson framed the reversal bluntly: the Conservatives are 'chasing Reform into the gutter.' This is the structural read that matters. The Tory base has fractured, with Reform UK pulling socially conservative voters away. Dropping the conversion therapy consensus is low-cost signaling to that constituency — it costs the party nothing with voters it has already lost and consolidates support among voters it is trying to retain. The Conservative spokesperson's rebuttal centred on Keira Bell, the detransitioner whose judicial review led to restrictions on puberty blockers. This is a serious case, but it concerns clinical pathways for gender-questioning minors — a genuinely contested medical question — not the practice of subjecting people to abusive interventions designed to change their sexuality. Conflating the two allows the party to appear protective of young people while withdrawing protections from a much broader population. What is actually at stake is whether the UK will join the growing list of countries that have legislated against conversion practices. Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and New Zealand have all moved on this. The bill is in consultation, not yet before Parliament, meaning the political fight will intensify over the coming months. The Tory reversal makes passage harder in a future Parliament if they regain power, and signals to socially conservative voters across parties that this issue is now a live wedge. The twenty-year question is whether this becomes a permanent fracture in the UK's approach to LGBT+ rights or a temporary electoral manoeuvre that collapses when the political incentive shifts. If the pattern holds — rights as bargaining chips in party positioning — the cost falls entirely on the people whose protections are being traded.