Mick Hartley

Janice Turner in the Times, on the resolution of a case that marks another victory in the war against the Stonewall-driven gender nonsense that's become dominant in the Civil Service:

At a time of fiscal black holes comes news that the civil service spent £116,749.44 (plus tax) on what it could have obtained a year ago for just £1. The settlement this week by the departments for culture, media and sport (DCMS) and science, innovation and technology (DSIT) of a case brought by Eleanor Frances, an engineer who worked for both, is a portal into the intolerance and ideological capture within Whitehall.

Frances, 39, is not just the latest in a stream of women persecuted for gender-critical beliefs who have sued their employers and won. As a grade 6 civil service manager, she belonged to a supposedly impartial workforce we pay to implement our laws and which, in myriad ways, from the police to the NHS, write the small print of our lives….

First some background: from about 2011, groups such as Stonewall secretly lobbied government departments to adopt policy stating that “gender identity” always trumps biological sex, and that all trans-identifying males must be accommodated in women’s changing rooms and bathrooms. This is contra both the 2010 Equality Act, which permits single-sex exemptions, and the 1992 health and safety regulations which require employers to provide separate men and women’s toilets (unless they are fully enclosed unisex rooms).

Meanwhile, A:gender, an LGBT staff network, was permitted by the Cabinet Office to run “inclusion workshops”. A:gender forbade recording of these sessions and after one was illicitly filmed and forwarded to me, I could see why. Among many bizarre claims, the trainer said a brain pickled in a jar “knew” if it was male or female, that sex-based rights don’t exist and that describing a woman as an “adult human female” was equivalent to antisemitism. Such unscientific, legally fallacious nonsense was drummed into thousands of public servants.

It's the same old story. Frances voiced her concerns, was side-lined, couldn't apply for a more senior job, and was eventually shuffled off to the redeployment pool. So she decided to fight back.

But first she wrote to Fiona Ryland, the government chief people officer, to say principles mattered more to her than money. If DCMS and DSIT admitted their gender guidance was illegal and offered to revise it, Frances would settle in return for a decent job reference and £1.

This was declined and the case rumbled on, until this week she received an exceptional payout of almost £117,000 net. Why did Whitehall fold? Because the case had passed from HR — which still operates under Stonewall law, as if the Forstater ruling never happened — to government lawyers who saw they would lose, and that senior civil servants would have to explain at a public tribunal what Frances calls a “politicised climate of fear”. Compelling two permanent secretaries, Susannah Storey and Sarah Munby, to make a joint statement smacks of ministerial frustration: sort this out, don’t do it again.

Because all of it is madness. Why was each department allowed to make up its own gender policy rather than adhere to one central guide based upon a clear, legal reading of the Equality Act? Why aren’t civil servants promoted on the basis of talent, not an ideological test of whether they can recite the “correct” EDI dictums? Why are some government departments, including the DCMS, still members of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme, shelling out scant public funds to win gold stars for policies that are both illegal and ridiculous, such as erasing the word “mother” from government documents on maternity rights?

This is not only a Labour problem: Eleanor Frances began her ordeal when the culture secretary was Nadine Dorries. It is about unaccountable institutions with staff who see themselves as activists, not public servants; who believe they know better than the law or the voters who pay their wages. Frances sacrificed a promising civil service career to bring this farrago into the spotlight — and she would have done it for just a quid.

Institutions like the Civil Service unfortunately attract and promote the sort of people who keep their heads down, don't make trouble, and get ahead by playing the game. As such they're ripe for exploitation by these of-the-moment social movements, like DEI in general and gender woo in particular, that the ambitious can embrace and promote with enthusiasm. Thank god then for the awkward ones.