LGBT group barred from London pub
June 7th, 2010 by Kaite.Welsh
Punch Taverns are being called to apologise after The Labour Party’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transsexual Society were refused entry in one of the chain’s pubs.
After having booked the venue for their Annual General Meeting, the duty manager said that they could not display their banner and that he would not have accepted the booking had he realised they were an LGBT organisation.
The group contacted the Metropolitan Police to report a breach of the equality laws, and members posted their accounts of the ruckus on social networking site Twitter.
James Asser, the newly-elected co-chair of LGBT Labour, said: “Thanks to 13 years of a Labour government it is now illegal to be turned away from a bar because of your sexuality. The fact that our members were on the receiving end of homophobia is just wrong. “We were surprised by the shocking action of the Greencoat Boy public house management. Turning people away for being gay is outrageous - he should have been defending his customers from homophobia.”
A spokesperson for Punch Taverns said “We are currently conducting a full investigation of the incident and will report back to the Labour LGBT group with our findings.”
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