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.

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