Individual worth needs to come before group identity: this is the best foundation for justice
One thing became unmistakably clear after the Supreme Court’s recent judgment: Britain’s equality laws have long been confusing and dangerously open to misinterpretation and exploitation. Instead of protecting individuals from unfair treatment, the legal framework has been weaponised.
Lawyers now lead rival groups into battle under its banners, each armed with their preferred interpretation of “rights”. We have lost count of the trans women (that is, biological men) claiming the right to enter women-only spaces – from changing rooms to hospital wards – citing protections under the Equality Act. Sport, too, has not been spared. From football pitches to the London Marathon, biological men claiming to be women have lined up against female competitors.
Meanwhile, employees who express the apparently controversial view that a man cannot become a woman have faced dismissal and litigation. Across workplaces, courts and classrooms, Britain’s common sense is on trial – and it is losing.
It is often said that the Equality Act is a shield not a sword: a remedy for those who have suffered injustice; those fighting to protect women-only spaces even invoke the Equality Act. But today, the Act is more often wielded as a rapier. It has fuelled the rise of a new cult: that of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), where box-ticking and group identity have supplanted ability and character.
When Gordon Brown passed the Equality Act in 2010, it was hailed as a landmark moment: a great codification of 116 separate pieces of anti-discrimination legislation into one accessible whole. No Conservative prime minister – despite grumbling in government – dared reform it. That failure of nerve is a source of regret. The Act echoed, and in many cases exceeded, European Union law. It created nine protected characteristics – ranging from disability and gender reassignment to religion and sexual orientation – to supposedly ensure fairness.
But from its inception, the Act contained a fatal flaw: it elevated group identity over individual equality before the law. Rather than treating all citizens equally as individual British subjects – a principle at the very heart of our common-law tradition – it carved up the population into competing tribes. It also legitimised discrimination in the name of “positive action”; Sections 158 and 159 of the Act allow employers to prefer candidates from under-represented groups. The RAF, British intelligence agencies, NHS and several police forces have prioritised minority recruits at the expense of white, straight men. The Equality Act was designed to protect against discrimination. It has instead institutionalised new forms of it.
It has also been a source of uncertainty. The collision between the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act has created fertile ground for endless litigation. What should have been simple – the meaning of “sex”– has been left legally ambiguous for the best part of a decade.
And while the Supreme Court judgment has restored some clarity to women-only spaces, many questions remain: what of trans men (biological women)? Will they retain access to women’s facilities? Will they be permitted to conduct strip searches or intimate medical procedures on biological women? When even a unanimous Supreme Court ruling cannot fully resolve the uncertainty, the law itself is the problem.
And lastly, the Equality Act has given birth to an entire bureaucracy dedicated to enforcing DEI orthodoxy. The Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), imposed under Section 149, has become a millstone around the necks of public bodies, requiring them to demonstrate “due regard” to fostering good relations and advancing equality.
This is an unmeasurable and costly burden. Ministers and civil servants live in fear of legal challenge, so they overcompensate: the Civil Service’s “diversity champions” and the Sentencing Council’s guidelines are symptoms of this pathology.
The private sector has followed, with HR officers becoming DEI crusaders. Unconscious-bias training is standard, and identity politics is entrenched in much of corporate Britain.
What, then, is to be done? Many Conservatives have railed against political correctness. Few have seriously grappled with how deeply the problem is embedded in law itself. Britain’s equalities framework, designed to empower minorities and prevent injustice, achieved some of its aims: today’s Britain is indeed more tolerant and diverse.
But at enormous cost. Instead of equality, we have reverse discrimination. Instead of clarity, we have legal chaos. Instead of inclusion, we have exclusion – this time directed at the wrong race, sex, or political opinion. The Equality Act has outlived its usefulness, damaged our national fabric, and must be repealed. Britain must return to a nobler and simpler principle: that every citizen is equal before the law – not because of their group identity, but because of their individual worth.
