No, Bridget, it's not remotely complex
The age of Labour transformation seems to have run out of steam
Labour governments of the past embarked on mighty reformist projects, schemes that changed our country for the better.
In pride of place among them, of course, was the National Health Service, which, whatever its failings today, transformed the lives of almost every citizen in post-war Britain and relieved millions of the fear of being unable to pay for essential health care. The welfare system itself saved many a household from destitution when work was unavailable or impractical. In the 1960s, Harold Wilson’s government widened the opportunity for higher education by instituting the Open University. Tony Blair gave a lifeline to every low-paid worker through the National Minimum Wage and, for good or ill, changed the UK constitution with his experiment in devolution.
This Labour government? It’s struggling with the question of who should be allowed to use men’s and women’s toilets.
Seriously.
I mean, you’d think the clue was in the question itself: “Hmm, this is a tricky one. Which toilet should I, a man, use – the men’s or the women’s?”
Twenty years ago such a dilemma would have been laughed out of every comedy club in the land. Today, ministers of the Crown take it very seriously indeed. So seriously, in fact, that they’re prepared to tolerate the continued flouting of the law – a law created by the last Labour government, no less – simply because they’re too scared to say what most people take for granted: that the physical and biological differences between men and women are definitive and that that means they need separate changing and other facilities.
Yet 186 days after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) submitted its new guidelines on single-sex services to the Women and Equalities Minister, Bridget Phillipson, nothing has been done to implement them. It is Phillipson’s job to review the guidelines and, unless she has perceived an impractical or legal objection to them, she must table them in parliament, 40 days after which they are officially adopted.
None of this process means that the Equality Act 2010 cannot be implemented in full before then; in fact the opposite is the case. The law remains the law, as it has been since 2010. Just because countless organisations were gullible enough to believe the reassurances of trans rights “charity” Stonewall – that the Act explicitly allows men who identify as women to use women’s facilities – does not mean that the law, as definitively interpreted by the Supreme Court last year, does not hold sway right now. It does.
Still, the EHRC guidelines are important because the government has basically let it be known that organisations can carry on breaking the law until the guidelines have been formally approved. This is wrong but what can you do?
Which brings us to Phillipson. It is clear that there is a substantial cohort of Labour MPs who are still smarting at the revelation that the Bill they themselves voted for in 2010 is now the main tool with which women are threatening to reclaim the rights to their own spaces and sports, rights that were taken away from them by entitled men over the last decade. Phillipson claimed to have welcomed the “clarity” of the Supreme Court ruling nearly a year ago, but her subsequent actions suggest otherwise. Recently she instructed government lawyers to intervene in a court case brought by the Good Laugh Law Project which sought to overturn the EHRC’s interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling. The government, it turned out, wants male access to women’s spaces to be decided “on a case-by-case” basis. Fortunately this legal sleight-of-hand was dismissed.
And here we are, with a government that claims the question of separate men and women’s facilities is “complex”.
It’s really not. When Phillipson says “it’s complex”, what she really means is that there are too many Labour activists, trade union leaders and various party stakeholders who have drunk the gender ideological KoolAid and she dare not cross them. So instead she’s waiting, Micawber-like, for something to turn up, a deux ex machina that will relieve her, somehow, of the responsibilities of her current office. Maybe a reshuffle? Let her successor suffer the incalculable distress of annoying Lord Cashman.
The difference between this and previous Labour governments lies not in the scale of the task before them (though no one would want to be placed in the shoes of Attlee’s ministers, having to rebuild a nation after six years of war); it lies in the ambition and personal courage of ministers. Bevan took on the powerful medical establishment. Blair took on the employers and the devolution naysayers (mea culpa). They knew, or believed they knew, what was right and they were prepared to fight for it. They were even prepared to make enemies along the way. That’s politics. That’s what happens. That’s what it does.
We should at least be grateful that today’s cohort of ministers are facing less existential challenges than those that faced previous generations. If they can’t quite come to terms with the question, “What is a woman?”, we can hardly expect them to have succeeded in developing Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent or creating Nato. “Well, yes, Mr Bevin, you might well have crated a transatlantic military alliance to curtail the ambitions of the communist bloc, but do you know which toilets men should use? Ha! Not so easy, is it?”
Welcome to Labour 2026. Makes you proud.