Kemi Badenoch: Diversity obsession has led to Kafkaesque madness (KB for PM?)

[IwantToRetire]

Another really straightforwarded down to earth practical commentary of where chasing the rainbow has led us. And ideas on how Government cant, without being dictatorial help solve the mess.

The root of the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Equality Act 2010, often exploited by those with a separate agenda. The Equality Act is a shield, not a sword. It is about preventing discrimination, not social engineering. There are no protected groups in the act, only protected characteristics. A white man is just as protected on the characteristics of race and sex as a black woman, yet many believe the act is there just to protect minorities, when in reality it protects us all.

Many companies’ diversity and inclusion activities are falling foul of the law; for example by confusing legal positive action and positive discrimination, which is illegal — except when selecting political candidates (a handy get-out-clause Labour devised to use all-women shortlists). Encouraging people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply for a job or go for a promotion is positive action, and legal. Restricting applications for a position to a certain group is positive discrimination and most certainly isn’t. This has led to increasing calls for the Equality Act to be scrapped. The act is 13 years old and could be improved but the issue is not the law. It’s bad actors misrepresenting it to suit their agenda.

Many of these laws were written at a time when institutions knew how to self-regulate. Someone proposing a terrible idea would be checked by colleagues in the organisation. Today, those colleagues are scared of being called bigots for disagreeing, so they say nothing. What the Farage and Sawers cases have done is show that this problem is getting worse. Long-held tenets of liberal democracy — freedom of association, freedom of conscience, the presumption of innocence — are being tossed aside in favour of dubious inclusion strategies that themselves fall foul of the law. In some cases they’re cancelling people before any wrongdoing occurs, leaving them with no way to prove their innocence.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kemi-badenoch-banking-scandal-natwest-niigel-farage-wdp3mmq0w
Also available via archive.ph

It's infuriating, isn't it? I think they spent too long being influenced by Crispin Blunt MP and his grotesque lobbying. Rising star Penny Mordaunt was on board. She fed into Theresa May. Backroom deals ... a civil service captured by Stonewall ...

But by the same token, I cannot believe that Labour are coming to be the 'rescuers'.

Most of them are a bunch of arseholes who have left me feeling politically homeless after a lifetime of activism. (I'm still reading the Morning Star though. At least there's sex class analysis there.)

What are labour doing to dismantle women's rights exactly? It looks to me like they are proposing something to make getting a GRC easier, which doesn't affect women. And keeping the EA exemptions, which protect women.

Genuinely people say this but now they have changed policy I don't see the threat?

Labour have a pledge to halve crime against women and girls. The Conservatives have......what?

Rape is effectively decriminalised under the Conservatives, the party has various members being investigated for rape/sexual assaults, there is NOTHING in the Conservative position to make me think they are protecting womens rights.

Kemi Badenoch could have used her article to talk specifically about what she/the conservatives would do for womens rights. She didn't, she talked about freedom of speech and cancel culture.

Self ID to £5 Dr note. No idea why people are reassured by that.

Indeed 🤨

The Conservatives being shit doesn't make the Labour Party not shit.

That's not a binary.

So you are proposing no protections for trans people? Repeal the GRA, sex based provision only?

Trans people have the same protections everyone else has, gender (not sex) reassignment is a protected characteristic.

Yes I do think the GRA should be repealed it is one of the most misogynistic, homophobic pieces of legislation ever enacted.

Alternative provision made available if required alongside single sex, not instead of.

The right to not be sacked/chucked out of shops/beaten up because they are different I think....

This is a right afforded to everybody surely? Are trans people routinely being chucked out of shops, sacked or beaten up? Mostly what trans people, particularly transwomen, complain about is not being given carte blanche to access single sex spaces, as per the fragrant Anne Coombes and those delightful piss protesters outside the EHRC building.

There is provision in the EA to exclude males from single sex spaces, even if they have a GRC.

There is bit businesses, services, public institutions have been cowed by activists into believing otherwise and duped by Stonewall with their inaccurate version of the EqA.

Self-Id is still a threat.

They've not changed policy. They are making it easy to get a GRC. Any 'protections' are clearly spin and in name only. They are fudging who is a woman such that although a woman is an 'adult female' any old bloke who fancies into women's spaces, for whatever motivation (including genuinely wishing they weren't a man) can now count as a woman. Kier Starmer is behaving like one of the worst examples of a smug woman hater. Cancel culture is degrading women's rights. Labour's pledges mean nothing if they pretend men are women.

The thing that would help women is changing the definition in the EqA

It’s pretty simple if you vote Labour you won’t get this, as they oppose it.

The conservatives are pretending men are women. They are in power, they could sort this out over the next year before the GE if they are really worried.

I think they are all mouth and no trousers though.

The conservatives haven't even managed to sort put promised guidance for schools, so in the meantime schoolchildren are still being forced to use "gender neutral" toilets.

Yet somehow Labour are the threat. Right ho.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66243698.amp

My children are at a school with gender neutral provision, it's a nightmare, the kids film each other, locks are broken, they use the space to hook up. None of mine use the toilet at school if they can help it.
Hospitals have trans women rapists on women's hospital wards and TW doing smears. Men are being held in womens prisons.
And who is in charge of all these services? THE CONSERVATIVES. They've done nothing helpful to actually protect women. Just lift and shift American culture wars in the hope it wins them votes.

They started a GRA review six years which after a public consultation concluded that the GRA panel must stay. About three years ago now.

And the spousal exit clause must stay.

A need for better guidance for providers was identified.

New guidance was written but without "biological" in the equality act it was still intended. EHRC have written to the government about this. It's a very long document.

This has been debated in parliament and split on party lines .

Legal challenges to the EHRC have attempted to claim they're all bigots and bullies with the intention of blocking the change through smears and lies.

Labour have committed to OBJECTING to any change.

So the conservatives are pushing forward and labour and the lib Dems are trying to stop them and confirmed this in the guardian last week.

It's going to get worse under labour, it's all very clear.

New guidance was written but without "biological" in the equality act it was still intended.

Not intended, ineffective.

It's been explained.

The attorney general is also understood to be concerned about the guidance advising teachers that they do not have to use a child's pronouns or chosen name if they do not want to, and suggesting that doctors are consulted before a child socially transitions at school.

The AG pointed out that the gender reassignment PC is not defined by age and is therefore a legal risk which has to be resolved.

This information is all in the public domain.

It's an uphill struggle against the vested interests that put the woolly law together in the first place.

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/our-work/news/clarifying-definition-%E2%80%98sex%E2%80%99-equality-act

Are we being bullshited that nothing is happening?

The entire public sector, education sector and NHS is run by LEFT WING PEOPLE.

Thanks for this. I hadn’t seen it

Sounds really promising

The last line is the telling one;

We look forward to working with the government and others to find a way forward on these important issues, but recognise that these decisions sit with the UK Government and UK Parliament.”

That is right. It must be the UK Government to outline and recommend this change, as a matter of public policy. Not the EHRC.

That means it is for Kemi Badenoch to specify her change, as a matter of policy to be made law. Not a matter of law clarified. If it were that simple, we would not be here discussing this, I think

This legal recommendation was stonewalled for quite a long time before Baroness Falkner took over from her very biased ex Stonewall predecessor.

I'm not a fan of wiki but this looks factual. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Isaac

Legally, you use their new name and pronouns.

Just picking you up on this regarding legally (enforcing) the use of pronouns @AdamRyan so you would expect a rape victim to refer to her rapist as 'she' in Court would you?

Every instance of a man wanting to be called she is a microaggression towards women.

Thanks Hepwo for your posts and taking the time to explain (yet again) what happened in the past and is happening now.

So to put it simply, for those who keep saying the Tories haven't done anything.

They had a consultation under pressure from the Women and Equalities Committee to improve provsions for LGBT.

In holding the consultation it would seem that for the first time most MPs became aware of how negatively the interlocking of the GRA and the EA was having on women.

So the Tories then didn't implement what would have amount to self id but did propose a simpler system re GRC.

But the responses (many from posters on FWR) made then bought out into the open what appeared to be the end game of TRAs with Stonewall as their public champion. Much of this was done by incorrectly briefing schools, NHS etc., on trans rights vs. women's rights.

Labour then adopted the pose that women who were making a fuss were Terfs and Dinasours and they ie Labour turned it into a them versus us battle, rather than working jointly to resolve the problem. Many Tory MPs having been alerted to the threat to women's sex based rights seemed for able to say this in public (not necessarily from a feminist analysis) which just meant Stonewall etc., could then further say GC feminists were all right wing reactionaries.

Labour started expelling GC women from the Labour Party.

Apart from various court cases, briefings from a range of GC groups 2 petitions on the Parliament web site lobbied for the EA to be changed.

There was the Westminster Hall debate, with the Government saying more time was needed to arrive at a conclusion / solution.

So (and no I am not a Tory) over this period of time the Tories have taken notice of public opinion, whilst Labour has been decidedly biased, and had they been in power would not doubt have implement self id by now.

And again, because I am not a Tory, given Brexit, Covid, war in Ukraine, cost of living crisis and can see how this issue hasn't exactly been top of their agenda.

And all we have had from Labour is about a week ago, a very feeble statement from Labour, which could be as much to do with electioneering as any real committment.

So it isn't that the right is making this part of a war against woke, it is that Labour has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to admit after 10 years or whatever it is, to indicate that there might just be a need to ensure women's sex based rights are preserved.

Labour have a pledge to halve crime against women and girls.

These kinds of pledges are not really very meaningful. How do they think they will accomplish that?

Just say they’ve done it because words create reality?

Or maybe recategorise all men who are violent against women and girls as women so that there is no more male violence against women and girls, just a lot more “female” violence.

Labour have said they think the law works as it is and are keen for there to be no change. They clearly want to avoid the meaning of the category of sex being made clearer. Stonewall has managed to convince everyone that people with a GRC have been able to use female facilities 'forever', and as such are in favour of the status quo. They now want even more people to be able to get a GRC - far more easily - and for there to be no medical gatekeeping at all.

Labour's recent announcement is simply smoke and mirrors. Permit far more people to get a GRC but pretend that having one self selected doctor sign one's transition off means they have reneged on Self ID. They haven't.