Born in 1959, Cameron obtained an M.A. in the politics of countries that don’t exist anymore. In his desire to change the world he was a local councillor for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham from 1986-2006, being Deputy Leader between 1998-2005 and after four years in the real world was persuaded to stand again for election, which he did successfully in 2010. He is currently the local Cabinet Member for Regeneration. His hobbies include gerbil training, Barking Football Club and being amazed by the world in which he’s privileged to live.

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Of course I knew HIV was still a problem, both in this country and abroad, especially in Africa. Every now and then a passing remark would be made in the mainstream media when discussing a particular country’s national hardships about their HIV infection rate. I would inwardly gasp, but then almost immediately just assume that they must ‘get by’ somehow and continue with the main thrust of the report.

With the advances in medical treatment for HIV, life expectancy for many people who are diagnosed early on in their illness may not be that much lower than average life expectancy in an area. However not everyone is diagnosed early enough in their treatment for good medical care to be effective and that is a particular problem in our part of east London.

Nevertheless, HIV awareness campaigns are so very 1980’s and surely went out of fashion along with the ‘Frankie Says…’ tee-shirts, mullet hairstyles and Liverpool being football league champions.

When I mentioned to friends I’d been asked to write something about HIV there was universal surprise with the general attitude being, “It’s not such a problem these days, is it?”  My response to that was to be honest and admit I didn’t really know…

I had only just been elected onto my local council when the ’AIDS Epidemic!’ headlines were screaming out their warnings in newspapers, magazines, on the television and radio and via a fairly terrifying, if possibly belated, set of public information advertisements eventually produced by a Government that had originally been less worried by what was also initially dubbed a ‘gay plague’.

Every week I would glance at the job vacancies in ‘The Guardian’ and see that their ‘public appointments’ columns were dominated by ‘HIV/AIDS Advisors’. Every local council seemed to be attempting to appoint more AIDS counsellors than their neighbours.

Locally I could quote the infection rates from memory. Then as the years went by…I couldn’t.

And there’s one of the problems with politics and politicians, says I, who remain fascinated by the subject and determined still to defend those who dabble in it. Political power depends on winning elections. The latter is usually determined, as the Bill Clinton campaign team infamously concluded, by ’the economy, stupid!’

Before my political orientation became settled as a teenager I revelled in comparing the different parties’ political manifestoes – I had the Welsh Nationalists’ edition at one election, which was probably unique for a teenager in East London.  I secured the National Front’s on another occasion, which was followed by a visit by a local representative, which spooked me thoroughly! Since then, however, I have encountered only one actual voter, a local vicar, who explained that, for each election, he scrupulously gathers a fair assessment of each parties’ policies before deciding where to put his personal cross of responsibility. Usually…’it’s the economy, stupid!’

So HIV had its day in the sun, just as dangerous dogs, homelessness, looked after children and leylandi hedges did. Then the politicians move on and so does the politics.

The reason why I am so grateful to have been prompted into thinking about HIV, especially locally, for the first time in far too long after being asked to submit this article, came with the briefing I promptly received by my local council’s advisors. They still have the statistics at their fingertips. And they are still grim after all these years.

About half of the people living with HIV in England do so in London. Locally one in every two hundred people I see on my way to the town hall or civic centre is HIV positive, with many having been diagnosed later than is ideal.

The number of people living with HIV in my small part of London grew by 76% between 2004 and 2009. We have 15 children under the age of 15 affected. For those who casually dismissed the illness as ‘a gay plague’ all those years ago, it’s worth noting that the majority of the 480 people became infected after sex between a male and a female.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to remind politicians that their jobs aren’t just about winning elections and the economy. One of my colleagues once denounced our monitoring of looked after children’s dental appointments by explaining that, “No-one on the doorstep has ever asked me how good the council was at giving dental treatment to our kinds in care!” No-one’s ever asked me about how good the council or local health authority is at gathering HIV statistics either.

Perhaps you should?

Does your local MP or councillor know the number of people in their patch who have HIV? Can they name one policy that is being used locally to reduce infection? Do they know of any targets or even whether or not local infection rates are rising of falling? When was the subject last discussed in the local council chamber?

Just asking certain questions can sometimes lead to action. And action is clearly still needed.

***The following post was was originially posted on The President’s Pages hosted by The Humanitarian Forum***

Every day, new questions arise for us to answer – us, our politicians, communities, and leaders. But the unanswered questions people have been raising for the last century remain. I’m wondering who will have the courage to put the answers on the table of humanity.

Here is part 2 of a guest post by Louise McCudden. Louise blogs at Left Eye Right Eye. You can also follow her on Twitter @LouMcCudden.

Maybe it’s not for nothing that people like Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Riazat Butt and Jasvinder Sanghera; aren’t in the least fussed about stating that they know that forced marriages, for example, are wrong, while the Prime Minister and Home Secretary nervously nibble at the edges of a consultation process. The Home Office’s own impact assessment, charities like Refuge, the JAN Trust, and others, all say the main reason for not criminalising the practice is that victims would not want to criminalise their captors.

In other words, we are allowing a practice which essentially amounts to legalised rape and enslavement, criminal acts under any other circumstances, to be treated as a civil matter because the sexist culture within which it happens is so good at victim-blaming, so good at shaming women from their very birth, so good at making the practice of slavery into a cultural issue instead of a moral one, that the law is simply too hard to enforce. No matter how it’s dressed up, we are making an exception in terms of what we know to be right, because of a cultural difference.

Very few liberals, even extreme moral relativists, defend forced marriages in any serious way on grounds of “culture” – but what good is that if we don’t even challenge the culture itself that facilitates these practices, too? To respect someone else’s culture purely because it is “someone’s culture” is no more sensible that it would be to respect and defend every aspect of our own culture on the same grounds. And that would also be extraordinarily daft.

After all, it seems to be “our culture” to elect millionaires to political office, stick people on forced workfare schemes, demonise the sick and disabled, not report rapes and assaults to the tune of 80%, neglect our elderly, watch porn, eat fried chicken, pander to media moguls, make fun of fat people and start wars in volatile regions of the Middle East.  In other words, culture is merely an organised expression of the wishes and needs of the ruling forces within any society. Criticising a culture is not criticising a people when the culture serves only to oppress those people.

But this is where we get into a pickle: if we reject cultural relativism as well as moral relativism, where does that leave the liberal love affair (and I don’t say that mockingly; I really do walk around London in love) with multiculturalism?

Some critics of multiculturalism hail it the cause of moral relativism. But it’s more likely that the rights and freedoms we won in the sixties, coupled with the materialistic entitlement culture of the eighties has brought about this apathetic mess. We – liberals – need to reclaim, rather than reject, conversations about moral values.

And we have to be careful, of course. Just as faux-liberalism is constantly used as a cover for apathy, so faux-morality can be – and all too often is – used as a cover for hatred. The English Defence League love to pretend that their anger at Muslims is a based on a liberal concern for LGB rights, women’s rights, and other liberal issues. But the clue is in the label: they are not The British Humanist Society, or the National Secular Society. They choose to define themselves on grounds of ethnicity and nationality, and they believe English – and the English – need “defending.

Can you easily distinguish between genuine concern about human rights in, for example, Islamic communities around the UK, from Islamophobia and racism? It’s complex, but not as complex as the moral relativists like to pretend, because the racists give themselves away, nearly every time, when they explain what they see as the solution to the “problem.”

If you come across an argument like this: I don’t want them engaging in these practices in this country, and if they don’t like the laws we have in Britain they can go and live in Saudi Arabia” then it’s difficult to see them as caring a cherry bean for anyone’s human rights. How will the human rights abuses stop because someone moves to Saudi Arabia? They don’t care if a woman is being forced into a marriage, beaten for showing her ankle, having her genitals cut up, being beheaded for adultery or banned from driving a car – just as long as it’s happening somewhere else. And of course, it goes without saying that pretending to care about the rights of the people you want to deport as grounds for deporting them to a place where they will be treated even worse is even dafter than pretending your apathy towards their oppression is motivated by a respect for the feelings and “culture” of their oppressors.

Apathy about other people’s suffering is, of course, perfectly fine: no-one says any of us have to give a toss about each other. Not even liberals. But if we can’t poke the moral relativists with a big enough stick to make them feel, then they should at least drop the pretence that they their lazy cowardice is a concern for liberalism, and a respect for people’s freedoms. Because, as people like Sayeeda Warsi will tell them in no uncertain terms, it is, in practice, quite the opposite.