Mick Hartley

More on that Olivia Bailey meeting, here from Sonia Sodha – How is the government so useless on women’s rights?

After the Supreme Court clarified that sex means biological sex in the Equality Act 2010 – meaning men cannot identify into women-only spaces, services and sports – the sighs of relief were conditional. No one was sure how the government would respond. But within days the prime minister said he welcomed the “real clarity” of the judgment, calling it a “step forwards”. Phew.

Or so we thought. To call the government’s approach to implementing the Supreme Court judgment lackadaisical would be too kind. Phillipson has for months sat on the draft Code of Practice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that would provide businesses and service providers with accurate legal guidance on how they should implement the law as set out by the Supreme Court. Before it gets circulated, she has to lay the draft code before Parliament. Six months later, she has inexplicably failed to do so, producing varied excuses as to why not, the latest being that the EHRC should be publishing a business impact assessment of existing law that they must follow, despite the fact that’s not their job. Even worse, she has left the old 2011 Code in circulation, which gets the law wrong and puts service providers who follow it at risk of being sued for unlawful discrimination.

Second, when the Good Law Project judicially reviewed the interim guidance produced by the EHRC in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment last November, lawyers acting for Bridget Phillipson argued against the Supreme Court that female-only services could admit men who identify as women without ceasing to be single-sex in law. The High Court remarked that her submission was “not easy to follow”. Why on earth would government lawyers be attempting to undermine the Supreme Court judgment on Phillipson’s instructions, when Starmer had earlier welcomed it as a model of clarity?

.This is the context in which Wadhwa was invited in alongside other organisations to discuss hate crime with the equalities minister. You would expect the government to at least be even-handed in its decisions about which groups to meet with. At this meeting, there were no gender-critical gay and lesbian groups like LGB Alliance represented. Even the labelling of the meeting as “LGBT+” suggests that ministers have picked a side, favouring those campaigners who think men can identify as lesbians, and that same-sex attraction really means being attracted to people of the same “gender identity” regardless of their sex, a concept gender-critical gay people regard as homophobic. Incredibly, the grassroots feminist campaign For Women Scotland which took the case on the meaning of sex right up to the Supreme Court says Phillipson has never met with them.

The point, surely, it that these Labour women – Olivia Bailey, Bridget Phillipson, and the rest – are trans believers. They think trans women are women. They’ve bought the whole Stonewall line – which, when they were clawing their way to the top, was pretty much required – and don’t have the stomach or the intellectual integrity to backtrack now that the whole house of cards is falling apart.

God knows what Starmer actually thinks. I don’t suppose he knows himself.