Quite a number of people have been asking what Caroline Nokes MP is doing in the Conservative party after her very odd appearance on Newsnight on Thursday. She was meant to be discussing the asylum status of Abdul Ezedi, the sole suspect in the horrific Clapham alkali attack which left a mother with life-altering injuries and her two daughters in hospital. His asylum status – he was granted asylum the third time he asked after claiming to have converted to Christianity and therefore to be at risk of persecution in Afghanistan – was quite an issue, given that, in 2018, he was found guilty of a sex offence. Something there for the chair of the women and equalities committee to get her teeth into, no?
Nope. She didn’t have much at all to say about Ezedi’s asylum status – and for that matter neither did the Labour MP, Bell Ribeiro-Addy. She did, however, have lots to say about herself and the micro-aggression question. Moving swiftly on from Ezedi, Nokes observed:
I think there’s a really important message here which is, with respect, the media are not interested in microaggressions, they want to hear about the most egregious offences. The stark reality is every day women will face misogyny and microaggressions. If you’re a woman of colour it will be worse, and we have to be better at understanding the culture that makes men think ‘that’s OK’. It’s not OK and you can see a pattern of behaviours that lead to really horrific crimes.
Well, I dispute that there’s a short, straight path from, say, rolling your eyes or looking at your mobile phone when a woman is talking to throwing corrosives at a defenceless mother and attacking her little daughters. One does not inexorably lead to the other, if that’s what she was trying to say. It’s possible to be dismissive of a woman, justifiably or not, without going on to a terrifying physical assault. It’s simply not true that micro-aggressions – which are a matter for dispute – will grow up into macro-aggressions like, say, trying to blind someone. The unfortunate victims should have been the focus of the discussion here and the very specific details of Ezedi’s case; anything else was beside the point.
It’s simply not true that microaggressions – which are a matter for dispute – will grow up into macro-aggressions like, say, trying to blind someone
And how Tory is it to buy into the whole micro-aggression victim culture? This week we learned that civil servants were given courses on how to identify their own micro-aggressions, at some expense to the taxpayer. Now we’ve got a notional Tory promoting this debatable concept. I’m not sure it’s what the voters of Southampton North had in mind when they elected a Conservative MP.
Then there was her frankly weird bid to shut down GB News in the wake of the Laurence Fox affair. She declared that it should be taken off air and criticised colleagues for ‘swanning off’ to present programmes on the channel. It didn’t take long for GB News to say that she herself had featured on the station nine times but, really, that’s not the point. Conservatives – at least the old model – used to be supportive of freedom of speech. Closing down media outlets is hard to square with all that.
Or there was her response to the conviction of Carla Foster, who aborted her unborn baby at between 32 and 34 weeks’ gestation by lying about how far along her pregnancy was in order to procure abortion pills. Nokes felt that the problem was that the 1861 Offences against the Person Act was ‘out of date’. Well, this is the law that also deals with murder and manslaughter – nothing out of date there. The Abortion Act was passed to create exemptions to sections 59 and 60. If Nokes wants to abolish those sections entirely to give impunity to women who abort foetuses more than six months old, she should say just how she proposes to discourage this problematic behaviour. Or maybe she doesn’t want to. Either way, there’s nothing conservative about her take on the issue.
Nor was there with her bid to deal with the trans issue by encouraging the UK government to learn from the Scottish government’s approach to the issue, which Westminster blocked. This was her observation about the Gender Recognition Act in her capacity as chair of the women and equalities Committee:
Moving closer to a system of self-declaration and away from the currently over-medicalised process of gender transition would have given transgender people the dignity and respect they deserve. I am disappointed that the government is unwilling to take simple steps – such as the removal of the requirement to live as a stereotype in an acquired gender, or the requirement for a ‘gender dysphoria’ diagnosis – to move the GRA into the modern day.
We will monitor the progress of the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill with interest. Other parts of the UK are moving forward – Westminster needs to do the same.
That comes pretty close to supporting gender self-identification, I’d say. She is, of course, at liberty to think what she likes about it, but I’m not sure she wouldn’t be more at home in, for example, the Lib Dems in putting this controversial view.
Indeed, one of the problems with the contemporary Conservative party is that there’s not much that’s terribly conservative about quite a lot of its MPs. They are unmoored from the social conservatism which used to be part of the deal – at least, so far as voters are concerned. This is not to say that Labour MPs can’t continue the grand tradition (more Methodism than Marx) of taking traditional views on social questions either; but Caroline Nokes’s views seem egregiously at odds with anything discernibly Conservative. Wouldn’t the Lib Dems be a better place for her?
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