It’s the EQUALITY ACT

[Staplerandstappler]

This is a really minor point of irritation but why do some politicians constantly refer to the “Equalities Act”??? It’s the Equality Act.

Sunak did it tonight. Reform did it in their bloody manifesto.

Get it right!

Annoys me too. Maybe because it replaced a number of different equality acts and the findings of the equalities review panel fed into it? You would like to think our own government would know the name of one of the most important pieces of legislation though wouldn't you.

They also do it with The Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Historically we had first a Minister for Women, then for Women and Equality but it has subsequently been broadened conceptually and institutionally to Equalities as it's not just about women. As a result, we then got a Government Equalities Office (previously there had been a Cabinet Office equality unit) and renamed the role to Minister for Women and Equalities - still retained Women. The House of Commons select committee also has the title Women and Equalities.

These changes explain why the term has become so common and is often applied to the Act and the Commission, including by presenters at the BBC, who should know better, such as on Woman's Hour and Politics Live.

Trans activists invariably call it the Equalities Act and that has spread.
In the early days of lobbying for self-identification of gender, a lobby group went into a lot of workplaces to give training on equality, and misled people into believing that “gender” was listed as a protected characteristic instead of sex. People started saying Equalities Act instead of Equality Act. Because the lobby group got the name of the statue wrong.

It’s a tell - it shows that you have been getting your information about the legislation from transactivist lobby groups and haven’t read the statute. Women’s rights campaigners invariably get the name right.

Hopefully this is just a slip of the tongue from Sunak because “Equalities Act” is all around us now. Otherwise I’d wonder who he’d been talking to.