Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock in the Telegraph welcomes Kemi Badenoch's latest moves to clarify the Equality Act – but why has it taken the Tories so long?

Part of the reason must be that they were amongst its principal architects. Far from shoring up the Equality Act in favour of single-sex services where needed, Maria Miller MP set the ball rolling to dismantle them, chairing a scandalously one-sided Women and Equalities Committee inquiry into what was deemed “Transgender Equality” in 2016. This recommended that males with Gender Recognition Certificates be allowed into woman-only spaces and services without restriction, and implied that in many cases males without certificates should be granted access too.

Then, in 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May initiated the pursuit of “streamlining and demedicalising” the process for acquiring a Gender Recognition Certificate – something that was manifestly bound to cause further interference with the terms of the Equality Act in practice. Three years later, Nokes launched another inquiry into “Reform of the Gender Recognition Act”, once again recommending loosening the restrictions on who could legally change gender as an outcome.

Successive leaders after May have been utterly cowardly about facing up to her damaging legacy in this area, pretending not to notice as Stonewall-backed law became embedded into both public and private institutions on an epic scale. Within only a few years, prisons, hospital wards, swimming pools, rape crisis services, schools, universities, domestic violence shelters, and nightclubs have all rewritten their policies, permitting male strangers to get up close and personal with females as they undress, use the bathroom, or sleep.

Female complainants have been vilified for being “transphobic” – sometimes even by Conservative MPs. For the Party to address this mare’s nest only now – advertising on social media yesterday that “we know what a woman is”, in supposed contrast to Starmer’s Labour – is rich, to say the least. There is no doubt that the Conservative Party knew all along what a woman was. Whether it cared, is another matter entirely.

Yes, there's every reason to be concerned about the prospects of a Labour government, given its general capture by the gender cult and its grim record on women's rights, but it's all been happening under the Tories – and it's a little late now for them to start suddenly making the right noises.