A Halloween Nightmare – politicalbetting.com

Halloween. And another government F*** You to women. They come fast these days but this is the best yet: not just 2 fingers to women but a positively Trumpian approach to compliance with the law, namely, use every excuse and deceitful dodge to ignore a law you don’t like. Or are too cowardly to enforce.

The facts

1. On April 16 the Supreme Court(“SC”) ruled on the proper interpretation of the Equality Act (the “Act“). It stated that “sex” and “sexual orientation” are based on biology so that, for instance, a woman is a biological female and a lesbian is a woman sexually attracted to women. Therefore, the Act’s single sex exemptions – on spaces, services, associations, sport and schools – must be based on biology. This interpretation of the law has been one which many knowledgeable equality lawyers have stated for years is the correct one. 
2. Regrettably, a number of lobbyists have deliberately misrepresented the law for years. Inevitably, those so misled are annoyed. Strangely, their annoyance has not been directed at those misleading them but at those stating what the law is and always has been and, naturally, at those many women taking legal action to enforce their rights.
3. All organisations covered by the Act are obliged to comply with its terms. Any deliberate obfuscations or misunderstandings have now been put to rest by the judgment. Their directors are also under a personal legal duty to ensure the companies they run comply with the law. A failure to do so, particularly if done deliberately, may invalidate insurance policies. It may also call into question regulatory obligations. It will certainly undermine Mission or Values statements which invariably talk about a business’s “integrity” which, on no sensible basis, encompasses flouting the law.
4. After consultation, the EHRC drafted practical guidance to assist and sent it to the relevant Minister (Bridget Phillipson) to be laid before Parliament and approved. That guidance is not law nor can it change it. Nor does the delay in doing so justify organisations in failing to comply with the law. They can get legal advice if necessary. Rather than do so, many – including the BBC – have said they are waiting for the guidance. Others have announced that complying with the law will be too difficult and expensive, the judgment should be ignored or changed and the guidance altered to make it say what they would like. This is pathetic whining by those who seem to think that only their preferred group should have any rights and that “I don’t like the law/I can’t be bothered/It’ll cost me/Activists will make our lives a misery” are good defences to claims of non-compliance. 
5. Some free advice: they aren’t. If they think compliance with the law is costly, they should see how expensive non-compliance will be. The police, the OU, Westminster Council, Social Work England, the Scottish government (yet to pay the costs it owes to FWS some 6 months after the latter won their appeal), the Green Party and others can explain how large the legal costs and damages will be. The NHS will likely soon join them. Note, however, how many of these organisations are taxpayer-funded. Easy to spend money defying the law when it is not your money you are spending and there is no personal accountability for those DEI managers, currently busy beclowning themselves in various employment tribunals (Darlington NHS’s Head of Workplace Experience is a particularly good example of the genre).
6. Now it has “emerged” (according to this report) that the government – rather than approve the guidance – wants the EHRC to do a Regulatory Impact Assessment, a process which may take a year. As explained here and here, this is no more than an unlawful, unnecessary and deceitful stratagem to avoid making it clear that the law must be complied with now. Such assessments are done before a law is passed, not 15 years later. It is neither required nor necessary under the Act. The Minister is legally obliged to accept the guidance or reject it and give reasons for doing so. Insisting on an RIA is rejection and that decision will be judicially reviewable. More taxpayers’ money wasted. More time wasted during which women lose their rights or are forced into difficult, expensive and humiliating court cases to enforce them. But they’re only women. So who cares about them.

Too harsh a judgment? No. The very clear messages the government is sending out are: 

1. It is more scared of bullies who cannot abide the fact that they did not get their own way when the matter went to court. And bullies is the right word for them, as is violent. For example, a body called “Bash Back” vandalised the offices of the EHRC overnight, just as it did to the Brighton building where FILIA recently held its conference. It announced proudly on social media that while paint washes off, blood does not. The police seem uninterested. The local Brighton MP, Sian Berry, blamed the women organising and attending the conference for the violence aimed at them – the 2025 progressive’s version of “she was wearing a short skirt so was asking for it”. Her party leader, the eloquently vocal Mr Polanski, has been unable to find the time or voice to condemn this.
2. Women and their rights do not matter. Worse the government, led by a human rights lawyer, wishes to assess whether we can *afford* women’s rights in this country. Apparently, women can only have rights if they don’t cost anything. (There was no RIA or worry about the costs when businesses decided to ignore the rights of their women employees and customers.) If the judgment had gone the other way or been about any other group, does anyone imagine for one moment that firms would have rushed to say that they couldn’t comply, that MPs would have agreed and urged delay and/or defiance and that the government would have strained to find a way to avoid enforcing the law? But when it comes to women and lesbians, gays and bisexuals (see here for a statement by Lesbian Labour and Labour LGB), the law is optional – apparently. An Act – called the Equality Act – passed by a Labour government in 2010 consolidating anti-discrimination laws dating back to the 1960’s is, when it comes to women and others whose rights depend on sex, something that a Labour government in 2025 is unwilling to see enforced. “All equalities are equal, but some are more equal than others.” That seems to be Labour’s current mission statement. 
3. It raises the suspicion that the delay will be used to lay the groundwork for changes to the Act to remove the rights which women (and others) have under it. Stonewall – well embedded in some political parties – has been openly campaigning for this since 2015. The drip drip effect of this campaign and the endless misleading about what the law says has led to an assumption – seen in the Peggie case and the current Darlington nurses one – that women are obliged to get undressed or perform intimate bodily tasks in front of others regardless of their own wishes and can only be excused this if they can justify this by having to explain in humiliating public detail their sexual abuse or menstrual conditions. No woman is obliged to do anything intimate in the presence of anyone unless she chooses to. (No man either, come to that.) There is no human right to force your presence onto a woman against her consent. That this is apparently a controversial statement is a measure of how human rights have been so distorted and reversed as to enable, justify and demand sexual crimes against – and degrading treatment of – women at the behest of the favoured group of the day, the obliteration of a woman’s right to say “No”.
4. Why should women obey the law when the government says that the law which benefits them can be ignored? It’s even more irrational and infuriating when you realise that the Labour Party changed its own internal rules (on all women-short lists etc) to comply with the judgment and the Act. As have the Lib Dems. If they could do that without a RIA or the EHRC guidance, so can others.

Perhaps those endlessly bewailing how Trump is degrading the rule of law in the US might look more closely at what is happening here. This is indeed a culture war: a nasty war carried on by those claiming to be “progressive” on the rule of law, on democracy and on the belief that women are full human beings whose rights, as set out in our laws passed by Parliament and confirmed by the courts, are not contingent on the personal preferences of those who rather wish they did not have such rights or, indeed, any rights at all.

For those who don’t care about this topic, remember this. 

If the government gets away with behaving like this on this issue, it will do the same for those topics and laws you do care about. A government which treats laws it does not like as optional or as something to be got round, cannot be trusted on anything. If this is how a government behaves, why should anyone else comply with the law? The same applies to organisations refusing to comply. What message are they sending out to their employees and customers? What other laws do they ignore because they don’t like them?

One final point. When the government is seen as caving to those who threaten violence, the message it is sending is that violence works. Is that what it wants women to learn? The law is pointless, even when you win. But if you’re violent and/or bully us – yes, we’ll listen to you then. Is that what other groups will learn from this? Is that what the government wants them to learn? Where does it think this leads to?

Cyclefree

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