I seem to remember a time in my youth, though perhaps I imagined it, when politicians were much more truthful. If they were found doing wrong, they’d apologize swiftly and, if it was bad enough, resign from government. A politician who had done this might be brought back into the fold later.
More recently, politicians who are caught out don’t immediately hold their hands up. They deny and deny and deny until the proof is so incontrovertible and the stench so awful that they are either sacked from government or resign under a huge cloud.
Government spin is all about appearance, the substance has become secondary.
So it’s inevitable that this is how this contentious issue is going to play out. Instead of holding up their hands and admitting they got it wrong, there are going to be weasel words, lies, deception and finger pointing about what they and others said.
I think this debacle is part and parcel of a wider political issue, where politicians no longer feel they represent their constituents, rather they sign up to a party and blindly follow without conscience. How many of us have written to them over and over, and been soundly chastised for doing so?
That said, I think all our letters did sway the GRA self-ID vote. So many of us wrote that they couldn’t ignore us or pretend we didn’t exist, and of course many have receipts from other correspondence, even where there was no apparent impact, so writing is not pointless, even though sometimes it feels like it.
I know I want much, much more. I want the conversion therapy laws to be thrown out and the equality and especially the hate laws rebalanced. But simply resisting self-ID is looking more and more like a huge achievement. If that holds, we are working from a much better situation than if our first step is that we had to reverse that.
I will take this as a win in the UK. This is beginning to feel like a genuine shift, even though other countries are blundering on (Sweden, Germany) or doubling down (US). The more politicians who openly turn, however lacking in grace, the lower the chance of an easy return to self-ID under a different government