Miriam Cates is MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.
How did this happen under a Conservative government?
From conversations on the doorstep to interactions on social media, this has become one of the most ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ to Conservative MPs.
And rightly so.
Since the turn of the century, the UK has been through enormous cultural upheaval. Many of the foundations of our shared national life have been shaken, and many of our institutions now seem determined to undermine our shared sense of identity rather than conserve it. Despite a Conservative government being in power for the majority of the last two decades, we have failed to ‘conserve’ some of the most basic building blocks of our culture.
Where once public sector organisations sought to serve our nation, now many seek to change it. From schools to the military, museums to hospitals, signalling obeisance to the new religion of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) seems to have become more important to some institutions than fulfilling their duties to the British public.
Woke is no joke. Some of the more absurd examples of DEI in action are rather funny, such as the nurse who asked an elderly man if he might be pregnant. But amusem*nt evaporates when we consider the destructive impact of these policies. The crisis in armed forces recruitment because young white men feel unwanted. The wasted millions spent on NHS diversity officers when demand for treatment is at record high. The increasing number of British children who say they hate their own country.
In a perfect illustration of the costs of this institutional capture, the Cass report recently found that unknown thousands of children have been set on unevidenced and irreversible medical and surgical pathways to ‘change their gender.’ This scandal was enabled because some members of the NHS – our most trusted institution – were openly allowed to pursue a radical political agenda without challenge.
Conservative MPs and ministers have welcomed the Cass report and expressed outrage at its findings. Yet voters rightly point out that this ‘happened under our watch’ and ask why we did nothing to prevent it. It is certainly true that many in power turned a blind eye, preferring the social approval of SW1 to the risks of challenging the status quo.
Yet an even more important question is ‘how did this become the status quo?’ How did we arrive at the point where Conservative ministers – who are now speaking up – are being forced to mount a rearguard action against our own public sector organisations?
Anti-Western ideologies have overtaken institutions across the whole of the anglophone developed world. The extreme adoption of the social justice agenda in Canada under a Liberal government suggests that having a Conservative administration in the UK might actually have had a protective effect.
British cultural upheaval has occurred in spite of – not because of – a Conservative government. So how did radical ideologies such as critical race theory, climate catastrophism, and gender self-identification make their way from the fringes of US academia to firmly established policies of our institutions?
Step forward Tony Blair. The former Labour Prime Minister may be widely remembered for his foreign policy failures, but on the domestic front Blair had extraordinary success, using seemingly mundane pieces of legislation to profoundly and detrimentally transform the United Kingdom.
As far back as 1998, New Labour’s Human Rights Act and judicial reforms embedded the decisions of the overbearing European Court of Human Rights in British statute. This paved the way for the weaponisation of human rights that has turned large sections of the civil service into activists.
In 2004, the Gender Recognition Act introduced the legal fiction that men can become women. Years before Stonewall brought trans rights activism to mainstream attention, the pitch had been rolled by Parliament. It’s difficult to see how, or indeed why, schools, hospitals and the police could have stood up to gender ideology when it had already been sanctioned by the law.
The cherry on the New Labour cake was the 2010 Equality Act, which turbocharged the embedding of identity politics into our public institutions, creating a culture that sees people not as individuals but as members of competing groups. Crucially, Section 149(1) of the Act – the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) – transformed public bodies into political activists.
Conservatives are appalled by employers that openly seek to discourage white job applicants, schools that teach children ‘gender is fluid’ and hospitals that require female staff to undress in front of male colleagues. But these are not examples of organisations ‘going rogue’, rather they are (perhaps misguided) attempts to adhere to the PSED.
Under the Equality Act, it is no longer enough for institutions to ensure that they don’t discriminate against someone because of their age, sex, or race. The PSED demands public bodies must proactively ‘eliminate discrimination’ and ‘advance equality’.
It’s welcome news that Government ministers are increasingly willing to call out public sector activism as both divisive and wasteful. But because of the Blairite legal framework, ministers have little power to effect change. This impotence is illustrated by the recent advice for schools on how to approach children who present with ‘gender distress’.
This guidance should have been statutory and unambiguous, requiring schools to always treat children according to their biological sex. But after two years of wrangling, the Department for Education abandoned this approach because of the risk of legal challenge.
Number 10’s lawyers argued that, under the Equality Act, such a policy would amount to ‘indirect discrimination’ against children with the ‘protected characteristic of gender reassignment’. Another victory for the Blairite revolution.
Government ministers – our elected decision-makers – now find themselves taking the role of counterinsurgents, playing ‘whack-a-mole’ against DEI policies in institutions they are supposed to direct.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it is now abundantly clear that the incoming 2010 Conservative government should have repealed Blairite equalities laws. Yet there were political reasons why this might have been difficult, and the ‘long-tail’ effects of Blair’s reforms were not immediately apparent. (Like all good grenades, the Equality Act and other Blairite reforms did not explode until the thrower was long gone.)
But what next? If we are to restore our public institutions to their proper function then the next Conservative government must implement a comprehensive program of reform to repeal the Equality Act, GRA, and HRA, replacing them with a British Bill of Rights. Such reforms should aim to return the UK to a position where every individual is equal under the law, and where institutions act as conservators of a shared national culture rather than activists against it.
Should Labour win this year’s general election, we may have even more legislation to repeal. A Keir Starmer government may introduce hate crime legislation, a ‘conversion therapy’ ban, and a new Race Equality Bill, all of which will give institutions more license to take an activist stance.
Tony Blair’s has close associations with the Labour frontbench and it seems clear that the former prime minister would have a key role to play in a Labour administration. Revealingly, Blair recently told The Times: “I came into politics because I wanted to make a difference and I still want to. Now I can do it in a different way.”
Conservatives may find ourselves be in opposition in just a few months. We cannot make the same mistake twice and fail to understand the long-term consequences of laws that undermine the integrity of our institutions.
Depending on the parliamentary arithmetic, we may not be able to prevent more Blairite cultural upheaval in the short term. But whether it is now or in five or even ten years’ time, we must be ready to take the axe to the Blairite legal knotweed that has undermined the foundations of our nation.
