James Kirkup James Kirkup

Can you imagine a lobbyist against women’s rights being made a peer?

This is a thought-experiment. Imagine the following scenario:

A Conservative Prime Minister is dishing out peerages. Among the people given a lifelong right to sit in the House of Lords and vote on new laws is a lobbyist who has conducted a long campaign to diminish women’s rights under the law.

The lobbyist, leading an organisation that describes itself as a ‘professional lobbying group’, has particularly targeted the Equality Act 2010 for change.

A quick primer on the law:

The Act is the basis for most equality law and practice in the UK. It says that in general, people should be treated in the same way whatever their sex, race, sexuality, age, religion, gender reassignment or disability.

It also contains some very important exemptions, exceptions that allow organisations to restrict some services solely to people of one particular sex, and to exclude people of the other sex. This is ‘discrimination’ but it’s legal; not all ‘discrimination’ is bad.

Mostly, these exemptions relate to services for women. There are a number of organisations who wish to offer services only for women and who need a legal right to exclude men. For instance, someone operating a domestic violence refuge might argue that they must exclude men from that service, because vulnerable women who have experienced abuse and violence at the hands of men should be not be asked to share such a place with other men. In the words of one expert group: ‘Single-sex exceptions to the Equality Act 2010 are generally applied in sensitive services, such as rape crisis and women’s refuges.’

In other words, these exceptions to the Act, allowing organisations to discriminate in order to provide women-only services, are quite a big deal. You might call them ‘women’s rights’.

Back to our newly-ennobled lobbyist.

In 2015, this lobbyist’s organisation submitted evidence to a Commons inquiry which called for a ‘review of the Equality Act 2010… to remove exemptions, such as access to single-sex spaces.

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