Graham Sutton 🇺🇦

m.youtube.com/watch?si=vgvKQ… This is SO great

Further to Blair. Literally every honest sensible person in all the main parties privately agrees with all these propositions: - welfare spending is too high and is throwing good people on the scrapheap - defence spending is too low - the triple lock is unsustainable - without cheap energy we cannot exploit the AI revolution - we should be investing in EVERY form of energy: renewables, nuclear and the North Sea - migration needs to be controlled to boost social cohesion and because the boats look like a huge failure of the state - any new relationship with the EU will be imposed on us until we are stronger and cannot involve the closeness some desire without freedom of movement - we are deeply embedded with America in ways which the public does not understand and cannot be told and however joyous it makes us feel to hate Trump, disengagement at the deep state level is not only wholly unrealistic but also undesirable - Whitehall needs a total overhaul so specific project expertise and political appointees can be brought in quickly Blair basically says all that. The one thing he doesn’t say and which the same group of people agree on is this and it’s something Blair left behind: - judges and quangos have too much power, are unaccountable and without redressing the balance in favour of parliament it is very difficult to do anything big fast - the bare minimum that needs to change in this regard is to reform judicial review and planning law so we can put building and economic growth ahead of newts and NIMBYs None of that above really ought to be up for discussion. It is all common sense but not one of our politicians will publicly say all of it Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement. Over to Andy and Keir and Kemi and Nigel and Zack and all the others

The full piece is here and I’m sure it will attract criticism and Blair will be dismissed by his many enemies but a lot of nails are hit on the head

I know everybody hates Blair but he is absolutely right on this.

14/ And this is why Swinney’s “victim of criminality” line will not wash. The criminality was able to happen because Sturgeon and Swinney lied about the money having gone missing. By saying “nothing to see here”, both Sturgeon and Swinney facilitated Murrell’s criminal behaviour.

Yes, I get it, you all hate Tony Blair etc you’ll find loads to disagree with here I’m sure - but the quality of analysis of our problems and what any potential leader ought to be thinking about if they want to solve them puts this essay light years ahead of what any current contender for national leadership has offered. Anyone who wants to be an effective prime minister (including the current one) should read it

On sentencing children who rape, kill and commit other horrible crimes. We all wish it would never happen. But it does. (1/10)

@owenjonesjourno @EHRC We don’t share women’s facilities with gay men, disabled men, young men, old men or any other vulnerable men. We won’t do it for trans-ID men either. It would eliminate the protection those spaces offer to us. And we fought for them. They are ours...

@owenjonesjourno @EHRC I can only suggest you sit down, stop screeching stupid, childish accusations of bigotry at women who want to hold on to their rights, their safety & dignity & in many cases their lives, and listen to what it is we need in order to do that. Actually listen. Then compromise. /end

"I once spent £400,000 of other people's money on jewellery, cosmetics and a campervan and my wife didn't know anything about it."

Labour could yet be a world beacon for women’s rights. By me for the @Telegraph (free to read): telegraph.co.uk/gift/4c719adce…

She was hailed as a wonderful competent and honest contrast to English politicians

@suffolkvicar Excluding males from single sex spaces makes women safer. Stuff your 'cis' nonsense

Say it loud, say it clear ‘Excluding trans peoples from single sex spaces will not make c!s women safer.’

The BBC’s failure to cover the GIDS scandal has been a serious dereliction of its public duty. After resigning as a governor of the Tavistock, I was involved behind the scenes in the 2019 Panorama programme on GIDS. The producer warned me I might be disappointed the programme would expose only one part of the scandal, not the whole story. That warning told me everything I needed to know about the BBC’s problem with impartiality on this issue. When Sue Evans and Keira Bell won the first judicial review, there was no serious follow-up from the BBC News, Woman’s Hour, or other major outlets. Nor was there adequate coverage of one of the most important findings of the Cass Review: the poor quality of the evidence base behind medical interventions for children and adolescents with gender distress. Instead, the BBC repeatedly broadcast positive stories about transition while failing to investigate the harms, uncertainties, and institutional failures surrounding this field. Sue and I have seen some of the casualties. Parents have been badly let down by professional bodies that lacked the courage or independence to challenge the affirmative model none of which received the scrutiny a public broadcaster exists to provide. With honourable exceptions in Newsnight and the Today programme, the BBC has failed young people, failed parents, and failed in its most basic public duty.

@stellacreasy A completely ignorant tweet.

The new EHRC guidance on how to ensure equal rights of all to access basic services falls short of being inclusive or workable in the real world - I will continue to work with other MPs who recognise this to navigate how we change that. Given how toxic discussion of trans rights has become am not going to respond to comments here because doubt will help anyone. Posting this video so residents in Walthamstow know of my concerns and actions. Also want to flag to any Walthamstow resident who wants to talk my next open public forum for political debate is on Thursday 28th May at 7pm and all welcome - email my office to rsvp for venue details.

One year on from the UKSC judgment won by @ForWomenScot against Ministers relating to the definition of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010, I sent FOI requests to all Scottish Councils asking to see exchanges on the subject between their in-house solicitors and senior management. Most hid behind legal privilege to avoid disclosure. I won’t name the Council, but one which replied fully and without omission made matters crystal clear. Other Councils citing exemptions I suspect will have received similar internal legal advice which they do not wish to share publicly for fear of backlash from radical activists accustomed to raining hellfire down on those with will not submit to their ideology. That is the reason I am not naming this Council here. If you were in any doubt as to the reality of the position following the UKSC judgment, you should read this 👇

Need to pin this very accessible explanation from the mighty @akuareindorf because, for all her brilliant legal expertise, this pretty much sums it up!

My thoughts on the @EHRC guidance laid yesterday; this is not about non-existent "rights". It is about the safety of women - mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. We men need to hear their voices. Virginia Woolf : "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". My intro on @TimesRadio yesterday: Where I live there are two different routes to and from the tube station. One, let’s call it Acacia Avenue, is quiet and residential. The other, London Road, is a busy major route with lots of traffic. At all times of the day, I automatically head for Acacia Road. It’s just much nicer. The women in my family, on the other hand, will never willingly make that walk after dark. They live with an anxiety that most men find it hard to imagine, and frankly, rarely think about unprompted. Last year 739,000 women were sexually assaulted in Britain. Virtually all such assaults - nine out of ten - are perpetrated by men. One in four women have been attacked at some time in their lives. Acacia Avenue is exactly the sort of place in which most women fear that they become vulnerable, and they are right. As the author Virginia Woolf once wrote " Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes". I think this is the right context in which to understand the furore over the guidance being laid today by the government, over the meaning of the words man and woman when it comes to providing services and facilities in workplaces. Many men think this is about a rather arcane dispute about who gets to use what loo. For their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, it isn’t. In a previous life, as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I had a hand in writing this country’s equality laws, in particular the 2010 Equality Act. It never occurred to any of us that there could be any confusion or dispute over the meaning of the words man and woman. But it has taken a decade of campaigning, a Supreme Court judgement and now hundreds of pages of guidance to settle the issue. This is not about so called trans rights, which are completely unaffected by this guidance, since no-one has ever had the right to walk into a changing room reserved for teenage girls. What it does mean is that women and girls are guaranteed the protection they deserve, and that their safety, which we spent half a decade drafting law to ensure, is protected. But the whole business illuminates some serious issues in our politics. First that many of our institutions, in spite of the fact that they always knew what the right thing to do was, decided to ignore the fears of their women customers and employees, under pressure from noisy pressure groups. Instead, the people who were supposed to be the grown ups behaved as though the law said what campaigners wanted it to say, rather than what it actually said. They settled for what they hoped would be a quiet life. In a democracy, there’s little point in Parliament deciding anything if the law is then made an ass by activists intimidating bosses in companies, schools, universities and the media into doing something different. Second, at the heart of the campaign to undermine the Equality Act is an idea that we specifically rejected in 2010, so called self-identification. That is to say, that it should be up to the individual to decide whether they have what’s called a protected characteristic - are you male or female, are you black or white. The problem is that self-ID would destroy the operation of any law against discrimination. Look, it would almost certainly have been to my advantage as a young man to self-identify as a handsome, white public schoolboy. None of those things is true of me. And at various points I am pretty sure it’s been to my disadvantage. It is certainly statistically likely to have been to my disadvantage. But according to the logic of those who say that self-ID should be the rule and that anyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, black or white or Asian, were I to complain about racial discrimination, it would be difficult for anyone prove that I’d been discriminated against because of my race since anybody to whom I’d lost out could just tell the courts that they too were black. I know that sounds like Alice in Wonderland but you can google the case where a chap, both of whose parents are white, insisted he should get money from the Arts Council because he so identified with the black struggle that he considered himself black, and everyone should accept his point of view. In the United States and Brazil exactly such outlandish claims have been made and people rewarded to the disadvantage of people actually born into minority families. I have even been told about firms who, when reporting their gender pay gaps have put men who just happen to like wearing dresses at weekends - nothing wrong with that, let me be clear - into the female column and told their women employees that they really haven’t got anything to moan about because statistically they are paid equally, and they should get back in their box. So today’s guidance isn’t just another tiresome chapter in culture wars. It is , I hope, a halt to the efforts to undermine one of the most important pieces of legislation on the statute book, by people who, for their own reasons, would prefer us to be living in the 1950s world of Mad Men.

Why Bridget Phillipson is such an ineffective & unpopular minister. In the Times, blaming Kishwer Falkner for her own reticence to lay legally accurate guidance before Parliament. In the Telegraph, implying left-wing feminists are just one “frothing” side of a culture war.

Me on @TimesRadio on the @EHRC guidance on sex and gender. Better late than never.