Our Chairman Luke Robert Black MBE writes on our website today about how we will use this month to raise awareness for HIV prevention and the fight to end HIV as we know it by 2030.
This month, countries around the world will be marking Pride Month. We take it for granted, but in some places this isn’t just criticised or rejected, but it is actively dangerous - with some countries not just lacking the laws to protect LGBT+ people, but in some cases state-sanctioned or state-enacted violence and murder. People quite literally murdered for who they are.
Therefore marking a month in a country like the United Kingdom, where we are lucky to have the freedoms that so many around the world are sadly denied of, needs to matter. It needs to actually mean something - and that’s why this year we want to use this month to raise awareness for cause that’s been close to our hearts ever since we were founded in 1975 - ending HIV as we know it by 2030.
In 1975, the LGBT+ Conservatives were established by Professor Peter Walker Campbell. Little did that first generation of our members know it, but they were merely years away from a global HIV/AIDS epidemic that would unravel in the 1980s.
Around the world, but also here in the UK, hundreds of thousands of people would lose their lives. Gay and bisexual men lived in fear but also lived feeling completely powerless.
Many in this organisation lost their friends to AIDS-related illnesses. They lost their family, their colleagues, their boyfriends and perhaps their future husbands in a time which felt both hopeless but also unrelentingly scary.
This organisation played a pivotal role when the fight against HIV seemed the most desperate and the most hopeless it had ever felt.
Fast forward to 2025, and we find ourselves in a context not only seen as impossible back then but also something utopian or simply too good to be true.
In many parts of England, people are tested routinely for HIV, helping us to locate those who are living with HIV but are unaware, or who have fallen out of care. This vital testing helps not just to stop the spread of HIV but also ensures that those who have HIV are on effective antiretroviral treatment.
Because so long as you are on effective HIV treatment you cannot pass it on.
This is because antiretroviral treatments like HAART have not just made those living with HIV better and healthier, but they also reduced the viral load of those with HIV to undetectable levels. This means that they cannot not statistically (even without protection) pass it on. Breaking the chain of transmissions in ways that felt truly unachievable and impossible back then.
Treatments like this are what has stopped the virus from progressing to AIDS - and allowing those who live with HIV to live long and happy lives. Treatment has also become so clever and so sophisticated that we can even stop some exposures, through PEP (or Post-Exposure Prophylaxis) which significantly reduces the risk of contracting HIV even after a confirmed exposure.
Or even PrEP, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, which acts like a barrier to HIV, and reduces the risk of contracting HIV. Just a few pills a day, stopping you, statistically, from contracting HIV. Again, a treatment and innovation in HIV prevention which would have seemed implausible in the 1980s.
These aren’t just random medicines. They’re small revolutions. They exist because of bipartisan political will, a culture of constant self-improvement in healthcare and also pioneering research and development.
The sad reality is that so many would be alive today if they had been born maybe a decade or two later. This is, of course, unspeakably unfair. So, it is in their memory that we mark this month, and in their memory that we celebrate Pride.
As such, we, the new Executive and General Council, will all be pledging to make a donation (however big or small) to one of the foremost organisations in this fight, and long term partner of the LGBT+ Conservatives, the Terrence Higgins Trust.
Named after the much loved and adored Terry Higgins, who was the first known British person to die of an AIDS-related illness in 1982, the Terrence Higgins Trust has worked seamlessly with both Labour and Conservative governments over the last three decades to deliver some of these aforementioned revolutions in HIV prevention and care, but also in fighting stigma and raising awareness.
The work they do is so, so important, and will help us get to the shared Labour and Conservative Party goals of ending all new cases of HIV by 2030.
Just 5 years - and all new cases of HIV in England gone. Stopped. Dead in its tracks. The first country in the world to do this. Without a vaccine and without a cure. So much has happened to get us to this place, with the heaviest lifts and biggest challenges overcome. We are so close to achieving this - and the Terrence Higgins Trust has been a part of that journey from the very beginning.
But they cannot do this work without financial support. So please join me, join us, pledge to support the Terrence Higgins Trust today. Go to their website here to make a one-off donation, of any sum, and help them, help us, and yes, this Labour government, of ending HIV as we know it by 2030.
