Philip Hensher: Why do we ignore the bigotry of our neighbours?

These days, in England, Gay Pride has turned into a sort of general opportunity to have a big party. In most of Europe, what was once a march of protest has taken on the carnival air of a parade. The numbers who even go on the march in London have fallen since the mid-1990s, I guess. These days, the lure seems to lie in densely packing out the streets of Soho in the afternoon and ending up at some Vauxhall nightclub.

Perhaps most of the arguments we used to want to fight for have been won. The issues of employment by the military, civil partnerships, an equal age of consent and access to goods and services have been systematically addressed by government. A shift in perspective has taken place within the police service, too; there is a willingness to engage with gay people and to notice that a violent attack, say, may be a hate crime.

If, in my view, the police are still learning how to police gay behaviour in an appropriate way - and the gay drug culture and public indecency are, obviously, things which need to be policed and controlled in some degree - there is nevertheless a higher level of understanding on both sides than existed even 10 years ago.

Perhaps there are still things that need us to advertise our presence. The hatred of religious people of all shades needs to be confronted. The hatred, too, of the public media. Stonewall, the campaigning group, recently published a report about the prevalence and offensiveness of attitudes towards gay people on the BBC's output. Nothing changed.

A presenter was recently mildly reprimanded for use of the expression "a big gayer". Watching Ronni Ancona's new sketch show on Friday night - one of the most comprehensive displays of a total lack of talent ever broadcast by the BBC - I was waiting for a really offensive stereotype to surface from the mephitic depths of Miss Ancona's mind. Sure enough, there it was - to ring the changes, the gay wasn't a hairdresser or a flight attendant, but a dolphin trainer.

All the same, there are fewer things to march about, in this country at least. What urgently requires our attention, and an ability to protest, a capacity for outrage that may have grown a little rusty, is the situation in eastern Europe. Some of these countries are partners of ours in the Council of Europe; some, amazingly, in the European Union. In either case, their commitment to human rights seems shaky, to say the least.

At the weekend, Peter Tatchell, Richard Fairbrass and a small group of western European politicians and activists were in Moscow, drawing public attention to the fact that the mayor of Moscow has banned any Gay Pride march by handing over a letter. They were attacked by extreme nationalists - the film of the incident clearly shows the attacks to be unprovoked and not responded to. Astonishingly, the police took the gay rights protesters, not the perpetrators of the violence, into custody. According to one German MP, he was beaten, though the police said they had taken him into custody for his own protection.

Two other members of the delegation, Italian politicians, were arrested "for jaywalking". Nice to see the Moscow police taking crime of that order seriously. But the Alice in Wonderland spirit of the gulags is still strong in Moscow. The Interfax news agency quoted a Moscow city spokesman, Mikhail Solomentsev, as praising the "co-ordinated and polite actions of the police, who acted in strict accordance with the law." You can't break their habits straightaway, the implication was. And after all, homosexuality was only decriminalised in Russia 14 years ago, and all the evidence seems to suggest that savage physical assault on minorities may not be a crime there at all.

We don't expect very much from Russia in the way of human rights. But it is a problem across eastern Europe. Five thousand very brave people recently marched in a gay pride parade in Warsaw. Brave, because the Polish government is oppressively against sexual minorities; the president of the country, Lech Kaczynski, refused to give permits to gay pride marches when he was mayor of Warsaw.

Only a few days before the march, the education minister put forward deeply oppressive measures. It could be an imprisonable offence for a teacher, an official, or a student human rights campaigner even to mention homosexuality. These measures, this gentlemen said in the Alice-type logic so familiar from eastern European politicians, "do not discriminate against anyone. It is only to protect youth from the propagation of views that threaten marriage, threaten family, and threaten the duties of school, which are to prepare one to fulfil family duties and the duties of a citizen." This is a country in the EU, with all the human rights requirements that entails.

If we were brave enough, we would go to make the point in Russia and across eastern Europe; places with no recent history of personal liberty, which are learning respect for lives different from their own. As it is, we might start to think that not all the battles have been won even in this country - why, after all, did the BBC report the atrocious and terrifying incident in Moscow for all of 20 seconds, in pointedly neutral tones?

What we can certainly do is to maintain our own visibility; to take the trouble to phone in when a Ronni Ancona or a Catherine Tate is permitted a publicly funded display of bigotry. And, above all, to do what we wouldn't be permitted to do if we lived in Russia; on Gay Pride day this year, on 30 June, to take to the streets and march.

More from Philip Hensher