Mick Hartley

Janice Turner weighs in on the Baroness Falkner/EHRC affair:

Heavily masked and dressed in black, male activists last week left a dozen litre-bottles of urine outside the entrance to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). One contained a suspicious device, causing police to perform a controlled explosion. It wasn’t the first time: in September the same group, Pissed Off Trannies, splashed urine on the doorway and over themselves. This disgusting, unhinged, menacing tactic has one aim: to drive out the EHRC chairwoman, Baroness Falkner of Margravine.

Does this count as bullying? Not, it seems, like “eye-rolling” or a curt email or, in some unspecified sense, creating a “lack of psychological safety” — all charges levelled at Falkner. When the dossier of her alleged offences was leaked to Channel 4 News, portentous music played and the presenter Cathy Newman adopted a war crimes tone. But what was the smoking gun? That in a board meeting Falkner, trying to encapsulate cruel Twitter reaction to a trans quiz contestant, used the phrase “bloke in lipstick”.

The bullying inquiry has been suspended but the taint will remain. A 68-year-old Pakistani-born Muslim woman with 35 years of public service, a Liberal Democrat with a flawless progressive voting record on gay adoption and same-sex marriage, Falkner has lost her unimpeachable good name, plus £30,000 she spent in legal fees defending it.

Why is she being hounded from outside and within? Falkner is accused of politicising the EHRC, yet in fact she is merely depoliticising her predecessor’s regime. Her first act was to withdraw the EHRC from the Stonewall Champions scheme, which had meant that under her predecessor David Isaac (ex-chairman of Stonewall) a government body whose core mission is to balance all human rights was following rules set by one lobby group alone.

David Isaac left an organisation in thrall to Stonewall – and for too many, it would seem, Stonewall remains their guiding light. That's what Falkner is up against.

Isaac disseminated what Stonewall wanted the 2010 Equality Act to say, that female-only services can’t exclude trans-identifying males (he apologised in 2018); Falkner upholds the letter of the law, with its careful, limited single-sex exemptions. Isaac gave succour to those equating sex-based rights with transphobia; Falkner intervened in the case of Maya Forstater, securing a landmark judgment that the belief that sex is binary and immutable is “worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

…the battle to bring down Falkner is not mere Gen Z iconoclasm, it is laser-targeted. Since December 2020, when she took office, Stonewall has led a coalition of LGBT groups in three attempts to have EHRC downgraded from an A-status human rights body. Three times it has failed. One by one, Stonewall’s back channels to change government policy covertly have been removed. The EHRC was its strongest redoubt, its governmental proxy, until Falkner came along.

Moreover the bullying dossier was produced at a critical moment, just before the EHRC board meeting to discuss the reply to the equality minister Kemi Badenoch’s question: is clarification needed in the Equality Act to state categorically that “sex” means biological sex? The hope was that Falkner would be suspended before the meeting, that the new commissioners she had appointed — including many more people of colour — would founder with their leader gone. Instead Falkner survived to chair the meeting that replied to Badenoch with an unequivocal “yes”.

Now there are reports that Falkner is often “close to tears” or has taken compassionate leave. Those close to her say this is nonsense. Because, like many women drawn into this most toxic battle, the fouler the tactics the more determined and angry she has grown. Her resolve is undiminished, no matter how many flimsy assaults on her character or bottles of piss.

Stonewall. Always Stonewall.