The suffragettes were reviled by the establishment. And for good reason. They smashed windows and started fires. They preferred jail to second-class citizenship. They went on hunger strikes. Some were communists. They did not just break the law – some flouted it ostentatiously. “To say I enjoyed making fires sounds rather awful,” said Lilian Lenton. “But it was really lovely to find that you’d been successful; that the thing really had burned down and you hadn’t got caught.”

"And you can be certain that this will be the response of many to these concerns: what BAE Systems and co actually do is irrelevant, what matters is that LGBT people can be represented within them. Aside from being anathema to the foundations of Pride, this attitude is both fed by and feeds into the atomisation, individualisation and depoliticising which characterises modern capitalism. Legal ‘equality’ within a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, imperialist system which relies on the immiseration of the majority of humanity is no equality worth marching for. Rather than providing pinkwashing in return for some money, Pride should be a safe space of radical awakening. The links between LGBT liberation and wider social justice should be writ large and we should actively oppose the continued (and hypocritical) use of LGBT bodies and identity by companies which demonstrate time after time after time that their profit comes before human dignity."

"The entry of police bodies into Pride erases and excludes the bodies of those whom the police oppress; it is a continuance of that daily policing in another form, where our once-radical political tools of visibility and community are co-opted into supporting the very oppressive structures they were designed to smash. By excluding those bodies from Pride, we perpetuate a public image of LGBT people limited to those who have no conflict with the police in their daily lives, ensuring a vicious circle of erasure for the excluded.

As such 'Pride in London' will continue to support the values of the police and the establishment; the supremacy of property rights, marriage, the oppression and othering of people of colour, and racist attitudes towards foreign cultures. It is wrong to say Pride is now a depoliticised event: it is more politicised than ever. It has been turned over to the service of the dominant ideology, and so is harder to distinguish from the cruelties and injustices of everyday life. We have lost Pride. The question now is whether it’s worth reclaiming, or whether strategies that reach further than representation, pride and “coming out” are needed in the struggle for sexual self-determination."

Some of the best discussions on Novara come out when A and J disagree