Sunak’s gender attack will hurt Labour

If the country has not had enough sex by now, it may have by the election. Political sex, that is – Rishi Sunak has clearly spotted an opportunity for a fully frontal attack on one of Labour’s weak spots. This morning, the Prime Minister promised that if re-elected, his government would rewrite the Equality Act to make it clear that sex means biological sex. It would be a sensible move away from the current confusion where nobody is really certain what the law means. Perhaps in 2010 the outgoing Labour government never imagined that the definition of sex would be controversial? But the text of Labour’s Equality Act – ‘a reference to a person who has a particular protected characteristic [of sex] is a reference to a man or to a woman’ – has been wide open to interpretation.

Sunak’s proposal would still leave us with difficult questions.