David Vance SubstackRead More
I though that it was really bizarre of Lib Dem leader Ed Davey to urge the Education Secretary & Women and Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson to reject the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s new Code of Practice on single-sex spaces. He wants her to deny the law and biology! Quite a two-for from our Ed!
The guidance he wants her to ignore was laid before Parliament just weeks earlier, and it simply implements the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that “woman” and “sex” under the Equality Act mean biological sex.
Davey wants Phillipson to bin it anyway. It’s clear that this a direct call to ignore judicial authority in favour of gender ideology. That’s how messed up the LibDems have become.
The Supreme Court was crystal clear: biological sex is binary and immutable for the purposes of law. The EHRC code translates that into practical rules. Female-only toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, shelters and sports can lawfully exclude biological males.
Trans-identifying people (mentally unwell men) retain full protection under the separate characteristic of gender reassignment and must be offered suitable alternative facilities. Nothing in the code strips anyone of dignity or rights. It merely restores the single-sex exceptions Parliament wrote into the 2010 Act after years of confusion and legal challenge.
Davey’s intervention is therefore not really a defence of trans people. It is an attack on the rule of law.
When a party leader publicly pressures a minister to disregard a court-backed statutory code, he signals that judicial decisions are optional when they clash with activist demands. Is he too stupid to see this?
Davey shows the same logic that has already produced chaos in our prisons, in sports and women’s refuges. Biological males have accessed women’s spaces under self-ID policies and the consequences have been all too predictable: voyeurism, assault and the erosion of female privacy.
Happily our courts have now drawn a line but renowned clown Davey wants to erase it!
Davey’s timing is spectacularly cynical. The code arrived more than a year after the Supreme Court judgment precisely because previous ministers dragged their feet. Phillipson herself did all she could to obstruct publication but eventually accepted it.
Yet instead of welcoming this legal clarity that protects half the population, Davey chooses to inflame division inside his own party and across the country. Senior Liberal Democrats have already condemned the letter. Women’s groups have called it a betrayal. They are both right. Davey is hopelessly wrong.
True liberalism defends the vulnerable from the powerful, from the predatory. It doesn’t demand that women give up their single-sex provisions to accommodate a tiny minority’s “feelings” It also does not ask ministers to treat binding court rulings as mere “suggestions”
Davey’s letter reveals a party captured by a fringe ideology that places subjective identity above objective reality and above the law itself.
Women have waited long enough for politicians to respect biological truth and judicial authority. Ed Davey has chosen the opposite path. He should withdraw the letter and apologise to the women whose safety he is happy to subordinate to political fashion. He would do well to remember that no court ruling is optional just because it disappoints activists.
The law is the law. Ignoring it is not leadership but rather contempt for the very institutions that protect everyone’s rights.
I can’t believe Lib Dem women go along with the insanity expressed by their leader. As a man, I want to make sure that women and girls are kept safe and that means keeping mentally unwell people OUT of all their facilities. The Supreme Court decision makes this abundantly clear and yet Ed Davey appears to think he knows better.
He is really quite contemptible.
