Making more excuses:
Bridget Phillipson is delaying the release of guidance which would bar transgender women from single-sex spaces by demanding the equalities regulator calculates how much it will cost businesses.
Desperately clutching at straws. The law is the law, never mind the cost. It’s not the job of the EHRC to provide a financial breakdown.
Phillipson has been sitting on statutory guidance drafted by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to help organisations comply with the law since September. It will go live only once she lays it before parliament. She has also refused to withdraw the 2011 guidance, which now advises organisations to behave unlawfully, putting them at risk of legal action.
Phillipson disingenuously says she is waiting for an impact assessment on the guidance. But the EHRC sent this to her in October. Phillipson wants more information on the cost to business of implementing the law, which is not the EHRC’s remit. But this is all academic: organisations must implement the law as it stands. The government is giving them an excuse not to — one that would not stand up in court.
Politics is the real reason the government is dragging its feet. Cabinet ministers like Phillipson are aware a leadership contest may be imminent. Too many are focused on keeping party factions happy rather than running the country.
Extraordinarily, there remain Labour MPs, activists and union leaders who believe men should be able to identify into spaces where women undress. Labour-run Southwark council operates leisure centres that unlawfully allow men who say they are women to use the women’s changing rooms. Unison and the GMB are backing a protest to support their right to do so. The National Education Union executive committee lambasted the ruling.
The unions remain captured by trans ideology. And so, inevitably, are many in the Labour Party. Phillipson doesn’t have the bottle to confront them. Her claims to “care deeply” about women’s services are just empty words.
Mick Hartley 
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