That’s Baroness Falkner’s view of the Labour Party. She’s no longer the head of the EHRC, and is therefore free to speak her mind – which she now does in the Times:
The past five years have been, as Baroness Falkner of Margravine puts it, a white-knuckle ride. As chairwoman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, she has found herself at the centre of one of the most toxic and politically charged debates in Britain.
Falkner, 70, whose tenure at the EHRC came to an end last week, was responsible for trying to draw the line between women’s rights and trans rights.
At times, the hostility has been overwhelming. Falkner was on the receiving end of relentless abuse from trans activists, and eventually had to leave social media entirely.
Some of the messages directed at her and others were so extreme that she became afraid that she was going to be attacked on her way to work, and began changing her daily route. “You’re afraid that somebody will flip and attack you, knife you, do whatever,” she says.
But the Labour government is her main source of frustration.
She has unfinished business, however. Three months ago she submitted, with the support of the board, what she views as her legacy — statutory guidance on how public bodies, businesses and employers should interpret a seismic ruling by the Supreme Court. The ruling, on April 16, clarified that under the Equality Act 2010 the terms “women” and “sex” referred to “biological” sex, not acquired gender.
Since then, however, the guidance has gone nowhere. It is now somewhere in the bowels of the Department for Education, and there is no indication of when it will be published. The EHRC, Falkner says, has been told by the government that it is “all very complex and we need to take our time over it”.
She doesn’t buy it. “We’ve had external counsel, internal counsel, everybody’s looked at it. I mean, I’m so certain of the lawfulness of our code that I don’t think I’ve ever been so certain about anything before,” she says. “The other explanation simply is that they’re terrified of their MPs who would wish for trans self-identification or trans inclusion to prevail across all areas of society, including Section 3 of the Equality Act, and would wish for the exemptions not to exist.”
Falkner believes the party has lost touch with its fundamental values. “What really depresses me about the current state of the Labour Party is that they seem to have completely abandoned women’s rights,” she says. “The traditional party of rights, in my 40 years in this country, was the Labour Party. The party of feminism.
“I was mentored by a former, very senior, Labour woman, Shirley Williams. I was aware of women like Harriet Harman, Margaret Jay and Hilary Armstrong, Labour women who were committed to feminism in a manner which carefully asserted equality, true women’s equality. And I think they’ve lost it. This particular generation of Labour MPs have lost it.”
Coming from her, with her history, and her obvious integrity, that’s an extraordinarily damning judgement. She’s right, though.
“When you casually dismiss the reality of more than 51 per cent of your population in favour of what you think is the right way forward to protect a very, very, very small group of — albeit very vulnerable — people, then you need to do a stock take. Is that proportionate?”
Of course it’s not just the trans issue.
Labour’s failure to defend women and girls, she says, goes well beyond the debate over trans rights. The battle to get a national inquiry into grooming gangs shows the scale of the problem.
It’s a sorry record, though it has to be said that this reflects the thinking of much of the media and academic class who are now Labour’s main constituency – plus what Falkner calls “the lanyard class”, the “progressive” managerial bureaucrats running so many of our institutions.
They’re followers, not leaders, these Labour politicians: terrified of offending the wrong people,.
Mick Hartley 