Mick Hartley

The indefatigable Baroness Falkner strikes again. From the Telegraph:

Bridget Phillipson has been accused of blocking guidance on upholding women’s right to single-sex spaces over fears that it could damage her career.

Baroness Falkner – who drew up the equality law changes – said Ms Phillipson was putting her “personal ambition” before her role as women and equalities minister over fears that pro-trans backbenchers would scupper any chance of promotion if she published the guidance.

Thursday will mark the first anniversary of the Supreme Court judgment on the definition of a woman, which ruled that trans women are not legally women for the purposes of the Equality Act.

In a devastating attack on what she described as the Government’s “cowardice”, Lady Falkner said the delay “betrayed” women who have a right to expect that trans women – biological men – are barred from female toilets and changing rooms.

The peer also accused Sir Keir Starmer of failing to uphold the law on women’s spaces despite being a lawyer himself.

Lady Falkner, who led the Equality and Human Rights Commission until November, suggested the Government risked making the same mistake over trans rights that it did with grooming gangs by failing to take action for fear of upsetting a minority group.

She’s not wrong.

Interview here.

“For some months now, we’ve been hearing speculation about whether the Prime Minister will continue to be in place, or whether there’s going to be a major reshuffle,” says Falkner. “[Phillipson] is ever ambitious, and I suspect that she doesn’t want to alienate the activist MPs in her party by showing her hand. She was set back by being defeated in her quest to be deputy leader of the party, and she is putting her personal ambition ahead of her role as the minister for women and equalities. That is a very sad and sorry state of affairs for our country in terms of the message it sends about this Government.”….

And she believes the rot goes right to the top, to Keir Starmer: “You have a Government led by a lawyer, yet he’s unable to uphold the law in its most visible form, which is statutory guidance produced by a regulator – an independent regulator – of that law.”….

“Britain is, in many ways, at a crossroads with the fragmentation of politics,” she says. “There has to be a long, deep reflection on whether we’re going to continue as a society to uphold what I call muscular liberalism: in that we balance rights, everybody’s rights, properly, and are not afraid of calling out wrongdoing because we’re intimidated by upsetting one group or another.”